Qutayba ibn Muslim

Between 705 and 715 Qutayba ibn Muslim took the cities of Sogdiana for the caliphate one after another: Paikent, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khorezm, Chach and Ferghana beyond them.^[1] The conquest ended the independence of the Sogdian city-states. It took the Arabs thirty more years to hold what he had taken.^[1]

Paikent

Paikent was a merchant town, and it resisted. One of its principal men, a specialist in the China trade, had organised the resistance. He had also made contact with the Göktürks. When the town fell, he offered five thousand pieces of raw Chinese silk for his life, reckoned at a million dirhams.^[2] Qutayba had him killed.^[2]

The figure shows what one merchant of one Sogdian town could put on the table. It says more about the wealth of the silk road than any general statement about it.

In the History of Bukhara Qutayba crossed the Oxus in 706. Baikand, as it calls Paikent, held out against him for fifty days.^[3] He broke in through a tunnel under a tower and a breach in the wall. The people asked for quarter, and he made peace and fixed the tribute.^[4] When he turned towards Bukhara, the town rose and killed the amir he had left. Qutayba came back. He killed every man who could fight and took the rest into captivity.^[4] One modern account questions that anecdote. The governor it has killed appears alive in 720–1 in another source.^[5] The people of Paikent were merchants. Most of them were away on a trading expedition to Chin and elsewhere. When they returned, they ransomed their wives and children from the Arabs and rebuilt the town as before.^[6] Whether Chin means China is left open.^[5] Qutayba also bought a granddaughter of Yazdgird III, the last Sasanian king, in Sogdiana, perhaps in the sack of Paikent. He sent her to Iraq. She became a wife of the caliph al-Walid and the mother of the caliph Yazid ibn al-Walid.^[7]

Samarkand and Khorezm

Qutayba took Samarkand by a ruse in 712.^[1] The treaty of surrender bound the city to a large ransom, three thousand slaves and a yearly tribute. Qutayba broke it. He stayed in the town and drove out its people.^[8] In Bukhara he made the people give half of their houses and fields to the Arabs.^[9] The measure has been understood as the expulsion of half of the inhabitants.^[10] Little more is known of the clergy of Khorezm than that he massacred it.^[11]

The steppe at his back

The Sogdian cities did not fight alone. They appealed north. The Göktürks under Kapgan came south as far as the Iron Gate in 711. Later the Türgesh under Sulu made the reconquest of Transoxiana a twenty-year business.^[12] How far the steppe intervened during Qutayba’s own campaigns is argued. In the same history the lords of Bukhara and Sughd gather against him with Kur Maghanun, a Turk who has come with forty thousand hired men.^[13] The alliance breaks up when Haiyan al-Nabati tells the lord of Sughd that the Turks will keep Sughd for themselves once the Arabs have gone. Kur Maghanun withdraws with the rest.^[14] Kur Maghanun has been identified with the man whom Tabari calls Kūr-i Baghānūn the Turk, a sister’s son of the emperor of China. He is also taken to be a Türgesh.^[15] The text gives him no people.^[13] After his death the Sogdian nobles allied with the Türgesh. They drove the Arabs out of the whole country and carried the war across the Oxus into Bactria.^[1]

Death

Qutayba was killed in 715 by his own troops. The caliph who had backed him had died, and Qutayba tried to hold Khurasan against the new one. To win his troops for the revolt, he reminded them how poor they had been before the war in Sogdiana.^[16] That history puts his grave in Ferghana, at the village of Kakh near the ribat of the general. It says that he was fifty-five years old. The army that killed him was one that Haiyan al-Nabati had settled in Ferghana.^[17] The conquest he had made held. The loyalty he had commanded did not outlast his patron.

Place in the sources

The Göktürk khaganate and the caliphate touched in Sogdiana. Qutayba is the man on the other side of that contact. What happened to the Sogdian cities under him also ended the Sogdian trade network. The khaganates had drawn on it for their writing, their envoys and their silk.

References

^ a b c d de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 266
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 268
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 43-44
^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 44
^ a b Frye 1954, p. 133
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 44-45
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 270
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 276
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 48
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 278
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 286
^ Tonyukuk inscription
^ a b Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 45
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 46-47
^ Frye 1954, p. 133-134
^ Tabari; de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 269
^ Narshakhī, History of Bukhara; Frye 1954, p. 58-59

Sources

Literature

Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Richard N. Frye (trans.), The History of Bukhara. Translated from a Persian Abridgment of the Arabic Original by Narshakhi (1954)