A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand 183
In the seventeenth century, it was also the avenue of the aforementioned
raids by the Kalmyks, who at one point forced two Turkmen tribes of the
Mangyshlak peninsula to move to the northern Caucasus.
It was the Yadigarid khan Arab Muhammad I (ruled 1603–23) who
in 1619 chose Khiva as the headquarters of his rule.The city’s past went
back to pre-Islamic times (as Khivak), but this was the first time it functioned
as the capital of a realm; eventually, the khanate itself came to be
known as that of Khiva, a case of psychological oscillation between capitals
named after a country (“madinat Khwarazm” for Urgench in Ibn
Battuta’s account) and, more frequently, countries named after a city
(Bukhara, for example).Khiva came to play a minor but significant role
in the history of Central Asian civilization, displaying an individuality
that might be explained by both its geopolitical situation and its historical
roots.An especially felicitous aspect of this individuality was a
florescence of historiography in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.In
the seventeenth, two khans, Abulghazi Bahadur Khan (1643–63)
and his son and successor Anusha (1663–85), were the historians.
Abulghazi Bahadur was a man of the pen no less than of the sword; as
in the case of Zahir al-Din Babur a century and a half earlier, both his
writings and his life are valuable documents on the state of Central
Asian society and politics of the period.
Abulghazi was born in 1603, shortly after his father Arab
Muhammad I, himself newly enthroned, had repelled a raid by the
“Yayik” Cossacks, that is, Cossacks of the River Ural.This dramatic
episode symbolized the turbulent life awaiting the boy, though the
Russian danger receded for at least another century.For the time being,
the political infighting, alliances, and internecine, intertribal, and even
up to a point interethnic and religious wars were reserved chiefly for the
Inner Asian nomads themselves: the participants were Uzbeks,
Turkmens, Kazakhs, Persians, and Kalmyks; and the leaders were the
tribal chieftains, the Uzbek khans of Bukhara, the Kazakh khans of
Turkestan and Tashkent, the Kalmyk khans of the lower Volga, and the
shahs of Safavid Iran.
Abulghazi was precipitated into this whirlwind at the age of twenty
with the murder of his father by the latter’s two other sons, until personal
skill and luck brought him to the throne after his brother Isfandiyar’s
death in 1642.During the two intervening decades the young man
visited as a refugee, ally, guest, or prisoner the Uzbek khan of Bukhara,
the Kazakh khans of Turkestan – that is, the town of Turkestan – and
of Tashkent, the Kalmyk khan of the lower Volga, and the Safavid shah