A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Shaybanids 153
Chaghatay, especially by modern Turcologists.As we can see from the
quoted passage, Turki was the more common term still in Babur’s time,
and only gradually did it become reserved for the everyday spoken language,
whereas Chaghatay was reserved for the literary idiom.A century
after Babur, another Central Asian prince, Abulghazi Bahadur Khan,
incisively commented on the difference (see below, p.185–86).Babur’s
remark that Navai wrote in Turki, “although he was born and bred in
Herat,” is also significant.This Khurasanian city lay in a Persian-speaking
area, but in Navai’s time it was the capital of the Timurids, whose
court language was primarily that of the Turco-Mongol elite of the time
– Turki.Babur eventually passes to what we could call a “prosopography”
of the Turco-Mongol elite of his time.He appropriately starts with
his father:
[Umar Shaykh Mirza] was born in 860 [1456] at Samarkand.He was Sultan
Abu Said Mirza’s fourth son ...He was a Hanafite, a devout believer, and would
not skip any of the five daily prayers, and throughout his life he made up those
he had missed. He frequently recited the Koran, and was devoted to His
Eminence the Khwaja Ubaydallah [Ahrar].He felt greatly honored by engaging
in discussions with him, and his Eminence the Khwaja in turn addressed
him as “[My] son.” He was fully literate, used to read the two Khamsas1 and the
Masnavi, 2 [but] most of all the Shahname. 3 He had poetic talent, but no ambition
to compose poetry.His sense of justice reached such a degree that [once] when
he received a report that a snowstorm in the foothills to the east of Andijan had
decimated a one-thousand-tents strong caravan coming from China with only
two individuals surviving, he sent tax collectors to record all the assets of the
caravan; although there were no heirs present, he of necessity kept [these
goods] for a year or two, after which he invited them to come and reclaim their
property.
Nevertheless, the sixteenth century was in Central Asia a Shaybanid
century, despite Babur’s valiant efforts to stem the tide.We have suggested
that continuity with the Timurid fifteenth century was stronger
than the innovations introduced by the change of dynasties and by a
renewed influx of nomadic Turkic tribes.After the vain hopes that
Muhammad Shaybani had cherished to found an empire still more legit-
1 The first Khamsa, in Persian, was by the poet Nizami (1141–1209); the second was the aforementioned
Turki version by Navai.
2 Masnavi-i Manavi, a long Sufi poem in Persian composed by Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73).
Nizami was born and spent his whole life in Azerbaijan; Rumi, although born in Balkh, lived
mainly in Anatolia (Rum), then ruled by a local branch of the aforementioned Seljukid dynasty.
3 Firdawsi’s magnum opus.Babur’s remarks illustrate the by then refined, chiefly Persian culture of
the Turco-Mongol elite.