ii. History from the Arab Conquest to the Mongols

Information on the process of the Arab conquest of Balḵ is somewhat vague. According to Balāḏorī (Fotūḥ, p. 408), Aḥnaf b. Qays raided Balḵ and Ṭoḵārestān in ʿAbd-Allāh b. ʿĀmer b. Korayzδs governorship of Khorasan during the caliphate of ʿOṯmān (32/653), but further attempts at controlling the city were not possible until Moʿāwīa had restored a measure of peace and stability to the troubled Arab empire. In 42/662-63 ʿAbd-Allāh b. ʿĀmer nominated Qays b. Hayṯam over Khorasan, who in turn sent ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān b. Samora into Khorasan and Sīstān, conquering Balḵ and, allegedly, Kabul. But the people of Balḵ renounced their peace agreement with the Arabs, and in 51/671, Rabīʿ b. Zīād had to reappear at Balḵ; it is clear that no firm or enduring Arab control over the city was ever established in the early Omayyad period. It was, however, during these raids under ʿOṯmān and Moʿāwīa that the great Buddhist shrine of Nowbahār, situated in the rabaż (suburb) of the city according to the classical Arabic geographers, was despoiled and destroyed, although it long remained a sacred site; the northern Hephthalite prince Ṭarḵān Nīzak (q.v.) went to pray there and to derive blessing when he rebelled in Gūzgān and lower Ṭoḵārestān against the Arab governor Qotayba b. Moslem Bāhelī (q.v.) in 90/709 (Ṭabarī, I, p. 1205), necessitating Qotayba’s dispatching 12,000 men to Balḵ.

From its strenuous opposition to the Arabs on various occasions, and the latter’s vengeful reprisals, Balḵ is described as being largely ruinous in the mid-Omayyad period, so that the Arabs built for themselves a new military encampment two farsaḵs away, called Barūqān, where what was normally a comparatively small Arab garrison (at least in comparison with that of Marv) was installed, until in 107/725, after an outbreak of feuding amongst the Arab troops at Barūqān (represented in such sources as Ṭabarī, perhaps misleadingly, as a tribal clash of Qays and Yaman), the governor Asad b. ʿAbd-Allāh Qasrī (q.v.) restored Balḵ on its former site, employing as his agent for this Barmak, the somewhat shadowy father of the early ʿAbbasid minister Ḵāled Barmakī (Ṭabarī, II, pp. 1490-91); Barūqān now drops out of mention. A few years later, Asad temporarily transferred the capital of Khorasan from Marv to Balḵ, giving the latter city an access of prosperity.

The last Omayyad governor in Khorasan, Naṣr b. Sayyār Kenānī (q.v.), built Balḵ up into a significant military base. In 116/734, according to Ṭabarī, II, pp. 1566-67, he had there an army of 10,000 men, composed of the Arab tribesmen of Khorasan and also probably of Syrian forces, which he used against the rebel Ḥāreṯ b. Sorayj. During the ʿAbbasid daʿwa in Khorasan led by Abū Moslem, Balḵ was strongly defended for Naṣr and the Omayyads by Zīād b. ʿAbd-Allāh Qošayrī. Abū Moslem sent against him and against other loyal government forces of Ṭoḵārestān, including the local Iranian princes, his lieutenant Abū Dāwūd Ḵāled b. Ebrāhīm Bakrī. Possession of the city oscillated between the Omayyad defenders and Abū Moslem’s commanders Abū Dāwūd and ʿOṯmān b. Kermānī, until it was secured for the revolutionaries at the third attempt (130/747-48). See for this early period of the consolidation of Arab control and of islamization, Markwart, Ērānšahr, index s.v.; J. Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, Eng. tr., Calcutta, 1927, index s.v.; P. Schwarz, “Bemerkungen zu den arabischen Nachrichten über Balkh,” in Oriental Studies in Honour of Cursetji Erachji Pavry, London, 1933, pp. 434-43; M. A. Shaban, The ʿAbbāsid Revolution, Cambridge, 1970, index s.v.

Little is heard of Balḵ during the early ʿAbbasid period, but it was a base for Hārūn al-Rašīd’s commander ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā b. Māhān in the operations against the rebel Rāfeʿ b. Layṯ b. Naṣr b. Sayyār, and the fact that Balḵ suffered from a violent earthquake in 203/818-19 is mentioned. Soon afterwards, it came within the vast governorship of the East held by the Taherid family from the ʿAbbasid caliphs. But with the seat of the Taherids’ power at Nīšāpūr, 500 miles to the west, Balḵ seems to have been left, according to the general pattern of Taherid overlordship in the east, to local princes. These were from the Abu Dawudid or Banijurid family, most probably of Iranian stock. Dāwūd b. ʿAbbās b. Hāšem b. Banījūr was governor in Balḵ from 233/847-48 onwards, in succession to his father, and was the builder of the village and castle of Nowšād or Nowšār near Balḵ. He was still there when the Saffarid Yaʿqūb b. Layṯ destroyed Nowšād and temporarily captured Balḵ before going on to Kabul (in 256/870 according to Gardīzī, ed. Nazim, p. 11, in 257/871 according to Ebn al-Aṯīr, ed. Beirut, VII, p. 247). Dāwūd fled to the Samanids in Samarqand, returning to Balḵ and retaking it soon afterwards and dying there in 259/873. His kinsman (nephew?) Abū Dāwūd Moḥammad b. Aḥmad ruled in Balḵ from 260/874, and was involved in the complex power struggle between rival condottieri for control of Khorasan after the Taherids’ loss of Nīšāpūr to the Saffarids in 259/873. Abū Dāwūd was immediately besieged in Balḵ by 5,000 troops under Abū Ḥafṣ Yaʿmar b. Šarkab, and then soon afterwards was again attacked by Abū Ḥafṣ’s brother Abū Ṭalḥa Manṣūr after the latter had been expelled from Nīšāpūr (see Ebn al-Aṯīr, VII, pp. 296, 300, giving the data for the second attack as 265/878-79 or 266/879-80). This Abū Dāwūd also controlled Andarāb and Panjhīr in Badaḵšān, where he minted coins from the local silver, and was still ruling in Balḵ in 285/898 or 286/899, when the Saffarid ʿAmr b. Layṯ summoned him and the other local potentates of northern Khorasan and Transoxania to obedience. ʿAmr’s plans of extending his control to these regions were of course speedily dashed by his defeat near Balḵ, after fortifying that city with a moat and rampart, at the hands of the Samanid Esmāʿīl b. Aḥmad (q.v.) (287/900). See for these events, Gardīzī, ed. Nazim, pp. 11-19; Naršaḵī, Tārīḵ-eBoḵārā, tr. Frye, pp. 87ff.; Markwart, Ērānšahr, pp. 301-02; Barthold, Turkestan³, pp. 77-78, 224-25; C. E. Bosworth “Banīdjūrids,” in EI², Suppl.

The late 3rd/9th- and 4th/10th-century geographers expatiate with enthusiasm on the amenities and the flourishing state of Balḵ at that time, calling it Omm al-belād “the greatest of the cities of Khorasan” from the populousness of the region (Yaʿqūbī, Boldān, p. 287; tr. Wiet, p. 100) and Balḵ al-bahīya “Splendid Balḵ” (cf. Moqaddasī, p. 302); it was equal in size to Marv and Herat, and according to Moqaddasī again, rivaled Bukhara in size. It stood on a river, the Balḵāb (or as Ebn Ḥawqal, ed. Kramers, p. 448, names it, the Dah-ās “[turning] ten mills”), which came down from the Hindu Kush but which did not, in Islamic times, actually reach the Oxus, petering out in the sands. The Balḵāb divided at the city into twelve branches to irrigate the surrounding countryside; among the products of this agricultural area are mentioned citrons, oranges, water-lilies, and grapes, in sufficient quantities for export, whilst the nearby open steppes were used for rearing an excellent strain of Bactrian camels. Outside these domains, however, lay salt marshes and deserts. The ruins of Nowbahār were apparently still impressive, and the author of the Ḥodūd al-ʿālam (372/982) mentions wall-paintings and other wonders there; by his time, construction of the original building was attributed to the Sasanian emperors. Balḵ had the usual tripartite plan of an inner citadel (qohandez), an inner city (madīna or šahrestān), and an outer city or suburb (rabaż or bīrūn). There were mud brick walls (mud brick being also the normal material for the houses of Balḵ) around both the madīna and the rabaż, with a ditch beyond the outer wall; in earlier times, there had been a wall twelve farsaḵs long, with twelve gates, enclosing both the city and adjacent villages, as a protection from nomads and other marauders, but by the 3rd/9th century this no longer existed. In the next century, the rabaż seems to have had seven gates and the madīna four, the latter a number characteristic of a number of other Persian cities. The seven rabaż gates included the Bāb Hendovān, attesting the presence nearby of a colony of Indian traders, and the Bāb al-Yahūd, showing the existence of a Jewish community also (both these groups were still of significance in Balḵ at the end of the nineteenth century, despite the complete eclipse of Balḵ as a trading center; see C. E. Yate, Northern Afghanistan or Letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission, Edinburgh and London, 1888, p. 256). The Ḥodūd al-ʿālam, indeed, describes Balḵ as the emporium (bārkaḏa) of India. The markets were mainly situated in the madīna, where stood the main Friday mosque; according to Yaʿqūbī, there were forty-seven mosques with menbars in the moderate-sized towns of the Balḵ region. See for the information of the Arab geographers, Le Strange, Lands, pp. 420-22, to which should be added the Persian Ḥodūd al-ʿālam, tr. Minorsky, p. 108; Barthold, “Istoriko-geograficheskiĭ obzor Irana,” in his Sochineniya VII, Moscow, 1971, pp. 41-44, 47-49, tr. S. Soucek, Historical-Geographical Survey of Iran, Princeton, 1983, pp. 25-26; Barthold, Turkestan³, pp. 76-79.

This commercial and economic prosperity was reflected in Balḵ’s role in nurturing ulema (ʿolamāʾ ) and other scholars, whom Samʿānī, Ansāb, ed. Hyderabad, II, pp. 303-35, describes as innumerable. In fact, these included such figures as the early Sufi Abū Esḥāq Ebrāhīm b. Adham (d. 161/778), who stemmed from Balḵ before he went westwards to Syria (cf. Ebn al-Aṯīr, VI, p. 56), the geographer and astronomer Abū Zayd Aḥmad Balḵī (d. 322/934), and the Muʿtazilite philosopher Abu’l-Qāsem ʿAbd-Allāh Balḵī (d. 319/931). Scholars like these, and especially traditionists, theologians, and religious lawyers, were surveyed and classified in the local histories and ṭabaqāt books on the notable men of Balḵ, one of which, a Ketāb fażāʾel Balḵ, was apparently written by Abū Zayd Balḵī himself (see Bibliography).

Thus under the Samanids, Balḵ was especially flourishing, although the warfare of rival military factions in the last decades of the emirate affected it on certain occasions. The Ḥājeb Fāʾeq Ḵāṣṣa was governor there during the ascendancy of the Sīmjūrīs in the 370s/980s, and in 381/991 he was besieged in Balḵ by Abu’l-Ḥasan Ṭāher b. Fażl, of the Muhtajid family of Čaḡānīān; the latter was, however, killed, and Fāʾeq was confirmed in the governorship of Balḵ and Termeḏ in 382/992 by the Qarakhanid invader of Transoxania, Boḡra Khan Hārūn. When Maḥmūd of Ḡazna and the Qarakhanids partitioned the Samanid empire between themselves, the lands north of the Oxus fell to the former, although the Qarakhanids for long coveted also northern Khorasan. Hence in 396/1006 the Ilig Khan Naṣr sent his general Čaḡritigin or Jaʿfartigin into Ṭoḵārestān. The population of Balḵ resisted fiercely, and the city was plundered before Čaḡritigin was forced to retreat to Termeḏ on Maḥmūd’s return from India, the Ilig’s ambitions here being finally quelled by Maḥmūd’s overwhelming victory at Katar, 12 miles from Balḵ, in 398/1008. It was during Čaḡritigin’s occupations of Balḵ that the Bāzār-e ʿĀšeqān or “Lovers’ market” built there by the sultan himself was destroyed; Maḥmūd later censured the people for resisting the enemy and so causing the loss of his lucrative property. We have other information about Ghaznavid constructions in the city, including mention of a fine garden laid out by Maḥmūd, whose upkeep was a burden on the local people until the sultan grudgingly transferred the onus to the local Jewish community. We also learn that the raʾīs or civic head of Balḵ, Abū Esḥāq Moḥammad b. Ḥosayn, supplied money to Maḥmūd for his campaigns when the flow of taxation revenues from Khorasan dried up after the exactions of the vizier Esfarāʾenī; doubtless these subventions were made by the Balḵ merchant community as a whole. See on this period, Barthold, Turkestan³, pp. 253-54, 259, 272, 276, 280, 288-89, 291; M. Nāẓim, The Life and Times of Sulṭān Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Cambridge, 1931, pp. 31, 39, 42-43, 48-50, 154, 166; Bosworth, Ghaznavids, index s.v. Balkh.

Although threatened by the incursions of the Saljuqs during the latter years of Masʿūd of Ḡazna’s reign, Balḵ did not, like Nīšāpūr and Marv, fall immediately into the Turkmen’s hands, even after Masʿūd’s disastrous defeat at Dandānqān in 431/1040. There seems nevertheless to have been a disaffected element in the city’s population who probably wished to reach an accommodation with the Saljuqs, for Masʿūd’s vizier reported the presence of large numbers of “corrupt persons, evil-wishers and malevolently-inclined people” there, and at one point it was in fact briefly occupied and plundered by the Turkmen. But Balḵ was a key point in the Ghaznavid defense system for northern Afghanistan, protecting the capital Ḡazna itself, and resistance there was organized against Čaḡri Beg Dāwūd by the local ṣāḥeb-e barīd Abu’l-Ḥasan Aḥmad ʿAnbarī, called Amīrak Bayhaqī.

Despite his efforts, Balḵ seems to have passed definitely to the Saljuqs early in Mawdūd of Ḡazna’s reign, for in 435/1043-44 Čaḡri Beg’s son Alp Arslān, based on Balḵ, fended off a Ghaznavid attempt to reconquer northern Afghanistan. Alp Arslān was now formally invested with the governorship of all northeastern Khorasan, including Balḵ and Ṭoḵārestān, as far as the Oxus headwaters, the day-to-day running of administration here falling to Čaḡri Beg’s vizier Abū ʿAlī Šāḏān; and on his accession in 451/1059 the sultan Ebrāhīm b. Masʿūd of Ḡazna made a peace treaty with Čaḡri Beg at last recognizing Saljuq control of these regions. During Alp Arslān’s reign, the governor here was the sultan’s son Ayāz, who was momentarily ejected from Balḵ in 456/1072 by the Qarakhanids when his father died and was soon afterwards succeeded by the new Saljuq sultan’s other brother Tekiš (466/1073-74). The allocation of this northeastern corner of the Saljuq empire to princes of the ruling family not infrequently led ambitious princes into rebellion against the sultan in distant western Iran. Thus in 490/1097 Berk-Yaruq (Barkīāroq) had to spend seven months at Balḵ suppressing the outbreak of a Saljuq claimant, Moḥammad b. Solaymān b. Čaḡri Beg, called Amīr-e Amīrān, whose father had at one time been governor of Balḵ and who had received military help from the Ghaznavids.

During the first half of the 6th/12th century, Balḵ came within the extensive sultanate of the east held by Sanjar. The city remained flourishing, not least intellectually; a Neẓāmīya madrasa had been built there, either by the great vizier Neẓām-al-Molk himself or with his encouragement, and in the later part of the century, the poet Anwarī (d. 585/1189-90?) spent his last decades there. Towards the end of Sanjar’s reign, however, Saljuq power in Khorasan was challenged by external rivals such as the Ḵᵛārazmšāhs and the Ghurids, and by the internal malcontent element of the Oghuz nomads who pastured their flocks in the upper Oxus region and who chafed under the heavy hand of Saljuq taxation and officialdom, including that of Sanjar’s governor in Balḵ, ʿEmād-al-Dīn Qamāč. In 547/1152 the Ghurid ʿAlāʾ-al-Dīn Ḥosayn occupied Balḵ for a while with Oghuz help. In the next year the Oghuz offered conciliatory terms to Qamāč, which he shortsightedly rejected; he attacked them outside Balḵ, but was routed by them and had to flee to Sanjar’s capital at Marv, leaving Balḵ to be plundered by the Oghuz, with considerable destruction of public buildings. The Oghuz now installed themselves at Balḵ, offering their obedience to Sanjar’s nephew, the Qarakhanid Maḥmūd Khan, and held the city for several years. Later, suzerainty over it passed to the Qarā Ḵetāy of Transoxania, until in 594/1198 the Ghurid Bahāʾ-al-Dīn Sām b. Moḥammad of Bāmīān occupied it when its Turkish governor, a vassal of the Qarā Ḵetāy, had died, and incorporated it briefly into the Ghurid empire. Yet within a decade, Balḵ and Termeḏ passed to the Ghurids’ rival, the Ḵᵛārazmšāh ʿAlāʾ-al-Dīn Moḥammad, who seized it in 602/1205-06 and appointed as governor there a Turkish commander, Čaḡri or Jaʿfar.

In summer of 617/1220 the Mongols first appeared at Balḵ. It seems that the city surrendered peacefully to the incomers, but in spring 618/1221 Jengiz Khan himself arrived there, and Balḵ was subjected to a frightful sacking, conceivably after a revolt of the populace against the Mongol garrison. Whether Balḵ did indeed have a population of 200,000 before the Mongol massacres, which last involved a large part of the populace, is unconfirmed, but certainly the agricultural and commercial activities on the eve of the invasion described by Yāqūt (Moʿjam al-boldān I, p. 713), when Balḵ supplied produce to Khorasan and Ḵᵛārazm, was dealt a severe blow, from which the city did not recover till Timurid times. See, for the Saljuq period and after, the standard sources for Saljuq and Mongol history (Bondārī, Rāvandī, Ebn al-Aṯīr, Jovaynī, etc.); of secondary literature are Barthold, Turkestan; Bosworth and Boyle, in Camb. Hist. Iran, V; and Bosworth, Later Ghaznavids.