The nomadic horse people of Central Asia

by Stephen W. Richey

VI. IRANIANS, 2nd Wave

Saffarids: They were Islamic. They were an upstart non-noble dynasty whose
founder, Yaqub, was a copper smith! In 873 AD, he led his local band of warriors in a
successful war of independence from the Islamic Abbasid Arabs. (The Abbasids
retained complete control of their core area around Baghdad.) This emergent Saffarid
state comprised a large region north of the Persian Gulf and east of the Caspian Sea.
Yaqub was succeeded by his brother, Amr. Amr improved the legitimacy of the
Saffarid state by accepting an appointment as the Abbasid's viceroy over the area he
controlled. The Saffarids were conquered by, and the northern part of their lands taken
over by, the Samanids in 900 AD. The Abbasids reestablished their control over the
southern part of what had been the Saffarid realm. The Samanids sent Amr to the
Abbasid capital in Baghdad where he was executed 2 years later.

Samanids: They were Islamic. They were a well-developed settled culture with a
strong military capability, not a true nomad culture. The Samanid family consisted of
local notables who served as cooperative vassals of the Islamic Arab Abbasid Empire.
They governed the region east of the Aral Sea in the name of the Abbasids. Isma'il
Samanid was named governor of the region by the Abbasids in 893 AD. Under
Isma'il, the Samanids acted with much greater independence than their official status
implied. Led by Isma'il, they made a hugely successful booty and livestock raid on the
still-pagan Karluk Turks of the Talas region starting in 893 AD. They conquered
the Saffarids and took over the northern part of their lands in 900 AD. Isma'il was
assassinated by treasonous palace guardsmen of Turkic ethnicity in 914 AD. In
accordance with what became established practice in the Islamic world, the soldiers of
the Samanid army were mostly slaves; they were bought in the slave markets and then
trained to be soldiers subservient to the ruler. These slave soldiers were called
"ghulams" which means "boys." Ghulam slave soldiers who performed well could
achieve upward mobility in government service, even rising to governorships over
provinces. It was a system that may seem peculiar to people of modern Western
culture. It was a system which worked well as long as the state employing it was
expanding through conquest and scooping up the booty it needed to buy the loyalty of
its slave soldiers. Today, the Samanids are mostly famous for the high level of
refinement and sophistication of their art and culture. They had a large urban
population among whom scientists, mathematicians, poets, and book authors thrived.
They were a major mercantile economic power. They were chiefly responsible for the
successful spread of Islam over central Asia. The Sunni Moslem Samanids were
weakened by a protracted and inconclusive war with the Shia Moslem Buyid
Persians in the 940s and 950s AD. Ever-worsening internal disputes doomed the
Samanids. In 992 AD, a rebellious Samanid noble asked for help from the Karakhanid
Turks. A Karakhanid army granted the request and temporarily occupied the Samanid
capital city of Bukhara. The king of the Samanids asked the Ghaznavid Turks for help
in suppressing the rebellion. The Ghaznavids granted the request but claimed a
peripheral slice of the Samanid realm as their reward. Inviting foreign intervention in
their internal dispute was a fatal mistake for the Samanids. The fact that the
Karakhanid and Ghaznavid Turks had by this time embraced Islam conferred upon the
Turks a political legitimacy they had lacked when they were pagans. In 999 AD, the
Samanid state vanished when the Karakhanid Turks seized the northern part and the
Ghaznavid Turks led by Mahmud of Ghazni seized the southern part of their lands.