A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

chapter ten
The last Timurids and the first Uzbeks
Abu Said was succeeded by two of his sons, the aforementioned Ahmad
(ruled 1469–94) and Mahmud (ruled 1494–95), and by the latter’s son
Ali (ruled 1495–1500), pale personalities whose long years of rule may
have been helped – or may have received a special reprieve – by a
contrasting set of circumstances south and north of Transoxania.To the
south of the Amu Darya ruled their pacific relative Sultan Husayn
Bayqara; to the north of the Syr Darya the nomadic Uzbeks, Kazakhs,
Moghuls, and Kalmyks were still too busy fighting each other or consolidating
their newly formed positions to challenge the Timurids beyond
frequent but transitory raids.
We have already mentioned the Uzbek khan Abulkhayr (1412–68;
khan from 1428), who in 1451 helped Abu Said gain the throne in
Samarkand.Abulkhayr had a Genghisid genealogy going back to the
conqueror’s eldest son Juchi, as did most other Genghisids of the Dashti
Kipchak.He traced his descent, however, not through Batu of the
Golden Horde or Orda of the White Horde, but through a younger
brother of theirs, Juchi’s fifth son Shiban.Shiban too had received an
ulus, but farther north, near the southern outcroppings of the Ural
Mountains.His descendants benefited from events which had set the
khans of the White and Golden Hordes – the Ordaids and Batuids –
against each other and which had also provoked Timur’s devastating
intervention in the last years of the fourteenth century, for the
Shaybanids managed to penetrate into what we might call a power
vacuum in the territories of the White Horde all the way to the Syr
Darya.By then the dynasty of the Shaybanids was an extended family
whose various scions were vying for power, with little effect on their
neighbors; but this changed when in 1428 the sixteen-year-old
Abulkhayr was proclaimed khan.
Abulkhayr, despite his illustrious Genghisid ancestry, was a Muslim
and, linguistically and culturally, a Turk, like most Turco-Mongol
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