A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

150 A history of Inner Asia
they would eventually have an impact on Central and indeed on much
of Inner Asia.To begin with, the transcontinental Silk Road, whose
principal lines passed through Sinkiang and Transoxania, now had a
European rival in the long-distance maritime route.At its most extreme,
the effect of this change could be viewed as one that transformed a once
busy crossroads of world trade into a landlocked backwater.How much
and how soon this new competition began to affect the economic and
cultural climate of Inner Asia is a matter of debate, and the traditionally
held view that it was responsible for the decline of this part of the
world may have to be modified.The decline did happen, but unevenly,
gradually, or later, and it was a protracted process caused by complex
factors among which the enhanced importance of maritime trading
routes may have played only a marginal role.On the economic level, sixteenth-
and even seventeenth-century Central Asia in fact seems to have
experienced a period of prosperity and growth, due to the internal dynamism
of its agricultural and mercantile population, to the policies of
such rulers as the Shaybanid khan Abdallah II, and to the rise of such
trading partners as Mughal India and imperial Russia.Nevertheless,
some of the seeds of the eventual transformation were sown in the sixteenth
century, but they may be better understood if we substitute the
concept of a decline of the East with that of a rise of the West.On the
one hand, Europe, including Russia, began to undergo a technological
and economic revolution – to be later followed by an industrial and military
revolution – that would dramatically increase its strength but that
was completely missed by the rest of the world; and on the other, a newly
created ideological antagonism between Central Asia and Persia would
gradually contribute to the landlocked region’s cultural provincialism or
atrophy, again a phenomenon that under the Shaybanids was
camouflaged by the influx of luminaries fleeing Safavid persecution.
In 1501, the same year in which Muhammad Shaybani had vanquished
the Timurids and become the sovereign of Transoxania, Shah
Ismail, having overcome the Aqqoyunlu Turcomans in western Iran,
founded a new dynasty, that of the Safavids; their first capital was the
city of Tabriz.Both Muhammad Shaybani and Shah Ismail were Turks,
at least on the linguistic level; and Ismail, like most rulers of Iran since
the Seljukids, based his military strength on Turkic tribal elites and manpower.Both
men claimed Iran as their legitimate prize for a variety of
reasons, one of which was a sense of mission: the Safavids were Shii
Muslims, whereas the Shaybanids were staunchly Sunni, and both sides
claimed to be fighting for a sacred cause.