Turkmenistan | Gurganj–Konye Urgench | Temür Qutlugh Minaret
Wandered out to Konye Urgench in northern Turkmenistan. In the thirteenth century the city was known as Gurganj. Then located on the lower Amu Darya (the river has since changed course), Gurganj was the original capital of the Khwarezm Empire and one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Inner Asia. It may have reached the height of its florescence during the first two decades of the thirteenth century. The well-travelled Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229), who visited the city in 1219, deemed it perhaps the richest and most highly developed city he had ever seen. Thus it was only natural that it had attracted the attention of Chingis Khan. In the summer of 1220 he dispatched his two sons Ögedei and Chagaadai to the lower Amu Darya with orders to seize Gurganj and other cities in the area, including Khiva and Gyaur Qala. His oldest son, Jochi, who was then leading his own campaign on the lower Syr Darya River, was to rendezvous with his brothers on the lower Amu Darya. The following account of the investment and fall of Gurganj is from Chingis Khan Rides West: The Mongol Invasion of Bukhara, Samarkand, and other Great Cities of the Silk Road, 1215-1221:
. . . as we have seen, Terken Khatun, the Khwarezmshah’s mother and nominal ruler of Khwarezm province, had fled Gurganj several months earlier, leaving a power vacuum in the city. It soon became clear that those who remained behind were neither the best nor the brightest. According to Juvaini, the civil administration of Gurganj was seized by an officer named Ali Durughini, (because of his propensity for lying Nasavi nicknamed him Kuli-Durughan [Mountain of Lies], a play of words on his actual name). This worthy proceeded to loot what he could from what remained in the state treasury kept in Urgench. He did not, however, make any efforts to rally the 90,000 troops who still remained in the city. Then at some time during the summer of 1220 Timur Malik, the hero of Khojend who had just escaped from Jochi’s dragnet on the lower Syr Darya, as described earlier, arrived in town. An experienced commander and obviously a charismatic leader, he rallied a contingent of troops—it’s not clear how large—and rode north to attack Jochi’s troops who were still on the Syr Darya. He actually managed to seize the city of Yanikent and kill the Mongol governor. Instead of following up on this victory, however, he soon returned to Gurganj with his troops. Apparently there was dissension between him and the military faction which still remained nominally loyal to Terken Khatun, and once again the disputing parties were unable to decide on any concerted approach to the Mongol threat.
In early winter of 1220 two officials who had been in charge of the Khwarezm treasury under Terken Khatun but who had earlier fled Gurganj arrived back in the city. They claimed that they had been in touch with the Khwarezmshah and that they were taking control of the province of Khwarezm on his behalf. The chronology is uncertain, but at this point the Khwarezmshah was probably somewhere in western Iran in headlong flight from Jochi and Sübedei. Whether these two officials were in fact speaking for the Khwarezmshah or simply acting on their own account is uncertain.
Shortly thereafter the situation took a completely different turn. The princes Jalal-ad-Din, Uzlagh Shah, and Aq Shah and an entourage of seventy men arrived in the city with the dramatic news that they had been with the Khwarezmshah when he had died on the island in the Caspian Sea and that they had overseen his burial. Whether they were actually there or not is uncertain. Nasavi implies that they were, but Juvaini does not mention them. In any case, the princes now made a joint announcement proclaiming that before his death the Sultan had altered his will, making Jalal-ad-Din his heir instead of Uzlagh Shah. Terken Khatun had earlier prevailed upon her son, the now deceased Khwarezmshah, to name Uzlagh Shah as the heir to the throne of the Khwarezmian Empire instead of his older half-brothers Jalal-ad-Din and Rukn al-Din, no doubt because Uzlagh Shah’s mother and Terken Khatun were member of the same clan of Qangli Turks. WIth Uzlagh Shah as the new head of the Khwarezmiam Empire the Turkish military faction would at long last gained ascendency over the aristocratic party of the Khwarezmshahs.
Apparently Uzlagh Shah agreed to step aside in favor of his older half-brother and was willing to accept Jalal-ad-Din as the new Khwarezmshah. He was relatively young at the time and as Juvaini notes, “not quick in his studies.” The tribal Turkish amirs who had made up the military faction under Terken Khatun could not reconcile themselves with the decision to sidestep Uzlagh Shah in favor of Jalal-ad-Din, however, and soon hatched a plot to eliminate the latter. The leader of the conspirators was one Tuji Pahlawan, who bore the title of Qutlugh Khan. He was considered the leader of the old Turkish military faction which had flourished under Terkun Khatun and had probably served as the governor of Jand and Yanikent on the lower Syr Darya before the invasion of the Mongols. He had roughly 7,000 men under his command. Now he and his co-conspirators intrigued to kill or imprison Jalal-ad-Din and put Uzlagh Shah on the throne, presumably as their puppet. Tipped off to the plot, probably by Moghol Hajib, a confederate of the prince who had earlier escaped from the debacle at Bukhara, Jalal-ad-Din and the ever-resourceful Timur Malik along with 300 loyal soldiers fled south to Khorasan. They were probably spurred on by reports that the Mongol armies under Chagaadai and Ögedei were rapidly approaching the city. Apparently the schemes of Tuji Pahlawan to enthrone Uzlagh-Shah fell on deaf ears, since three days later both Uzlagh-Shah and Aq Shah also fled the capital.
Thus at this crucial moment the dead Khwarezmshah’s sons abandoned Gurganj and gave up all pretense of leadership in defending the ancient capital of Khwarezm. According to Juvaini, Khumar Tegin, a relative of Terken Khatun’s and a leader of the army faction, had elected to remain behind in Gurganj after the princes had fled. With him were other emirs including Moghol Hajib, Er Buqa Pahlavan, Ali “Mountain of Lies” Durughini (his earlier indiscretions now apparently overlooked), and, as Juvaini disdainfully adds, “others of the same sort.” Apart from these panjandrums, “there were so many notables of the town and learned of the age as could be neither counted or computed; while the number of inhabitants exceeded that of grains of sand or pebbles.” Aware of the threat posed by the Mongols and of the need for a united front these citizens now rose up and with “one voice” declared Khumar Tegin their new Sultan and “Nauruz King” (King for Day). Thus it was Kumar Tegin who would be tasked with confronting the Mongols who soon appeared outside the wall of Gurganj.
Although all of our Persian sources comment at length on the battle of Gurganj, none of them bother to enlighten us about when the Mongols first arrived at the city walls. Nasavi says the city finally fell on April of 1221. The others say only that the siege lasted anywhere from five to seven months. From this we can conclude that the Mongols appeared before the city in the late autumn or early winter of 1220. A Mongol advance party led by Taji-Beg reached the Gurjganj first. According to Juvaini, the defenders of the city “beheld a small troop of horsemen like a puff of smoke, who arrived before the gates of the town and busied themselves with driving off cattle. Hereat some short-sighted persons became exultant thinking that they had come in so small a party out of bravado and that they had ventured on in such insolence out of sport.” Both calvary and foot soldiers rushed out the city gates to confront the Mongols. “The Mongols, like wild game, now startled, now cast a glance behind them and ran.” The Khwarezmians pursued them to a place called Bagh-i-Khurram (the Garden of Happiness, according to one rendering), about four miles from the city walls.
It was a trap. A larger contingent of Taji-Beg’s men which had been held in reserve suddenly appeared on the flanks of the Khwarezmian contingent. “They cut off the road before and behind and fell briskly upon them wolves upon a flock without a shepherd.” The fighting continued most of the day and by early evening all the Khwarezmians had been massacred. Both Juvaini and Rashid al-Din (the latter perhaps relying on the former’s account) put the death toll among the Khwarezmians at 100,000. This was certainly an exaggeration. Barthold opines that Juvaini must have meant 1,000 and that Rashid al-Din was simply repeating what Juvaini said. In any case, the Mongols, emboldened by this sudden success, proceeded to Gurganj and entered the city via the Qabilan Gate. This daring sortie must have struck terror into the hearts of the populace, but the invaders were still relatively few in number and in no position to hold the city. Fearing that they would get trapped within the city walls they withdrew as night fell. The Khwarezmians did not venture out of the city the next day. The Mongols attacked one of the city gates, but 500 men under the command of Faridun Ghuri, one of the Khwarezmshah’s chief generals, managed to repulse them.
At this juncture the main Mongol army began trickling in. Ögedei’s corps arrived first, followed by a personal division of Chingis’s under the command of Bughurji-Noyon. Last came Chagaadai’s corps, under the command of Tulun Cherbi, Ustun-Noyon, and Qadan-Noyon. The amassed Mongol army, including auxiliaries who had rallied to the Mongol cause may numbered over 100,000. The Mongol chieftains made a show of strength by circling the entire army around city and then sent in emissaries to demand its surrender and submission. As no answer was immediately forthcoming they prepared for a protracted siege. Mangonels were set up, but since there were no large rocks in the area, projectiles had to be made from sections of large mulberry trees that were hardened by soaking them in water. Meanwhile, Mongol envoys continued to cajole the city fathers with “promises and threats, inducements and menaces,” all to no avail.
Then Jochi’s corps from Jand on the lower Syr Darya arrived on the scene and with their help the Mongols were able to further tighten the noose on the city. Whether Jochi accompanied them is a matter of some dispute. Juvaini implies that he did not. Given his ongoing feud with his brother Chagaadai, he might well have wanted to keep his distance. Other Persian sources, however, say that he did accompany his troops and that he played in crucial role in deciding the ultimate fate of the city, as we shall see.
The investment of the city continued. Levies, presumably seized in Khiva and other cities that the Mongols had already taken in Khwarezm and perhaps some brought along with Jochi’s corps from the lower Syr Darya, were pushed up to the city walls and made to fill in the moat with rubbish and whatever else came to hand. This operation took ten days, according to Rashid al-Din. Then the prisoners were tasked with undermining the city walls. All the while mangonels hurled hardened chunks of mulberry trunks into the beleaguered city. Then the Mongols attacked: “loosing a yell like thunder and lightning they rained down missiles and arrows like hailstones.” Terrified by these assault, Khumar Tegin, the “counterfeit Sultan and leader of the army,” as Juvaini styles him, quickly lost heart: “The signs of the Tartar [Mongol] army's victory agreed with his secret surmise.” He left his position by one of the main city gates and personally surrendered to the Mongols. His subsequent fate is unknown.
Continuing the assault, the Mongols were soon able to plant their standards on the top of the city walls. But the fight for Gurganj was just beginning. What is now called urban warfare ensued. “The inhabitants opposed them in all the streets and quarters of the town,” according to Juvaini, “in every lane they engaged in battle and in every cul-de-sac they resisted stoutly.” The Mongols responded by torching whole quarters of the city with naphtha, a primitive form of napalm, and “sewing the people to one another with arrows”. This street-to-street fighting went on for at least two days, during which large sections of the city were completely destroyed.
At this point a rift developed in the Mongolian leadership. The whole point of attacking a city was to seize its wealth. If the entire city was burned to the ground before they had a chance to loot it, all their efforts would have come to naught. “By now,” Juvaini explains, “the greater part of the city was destroyed; the houses with their goods and treasures were but mounds of earth; and the Mongols despaired of benefitting from the stores of their wealth.” As we have seen, Juvaini maintained that Jochi was not present at the siege of Gurganj. Both Rashid al-Din and Nasavi claims that he was, however, and that he had serious objections about the scorched earth policy that was obliterating the city. Not only was he concerned about the loss of loot in the short term. Gurganj, the richest city in Khwarezm and one of the richest in Inner Asia, was to be a part of his patrimony when Chingis Khan died. If the battle for the city continued in the same fashion he would inherit nothing but a heap of ashes. According to Nasavi, Jochi himself did everything possible to halt the destruction of Gurganj, including sending numerous envoys to the town fathers seeking their peaceful surrender.
Apparently even the Khwarezmshah, in the last days of his life on the island in the Caspian Sea, had sent a letter to the leaders of Gurganj advising them not to oppose the Mongols. Many of the town fathers had advocated coming to terms with the invaders in the hope of saving what they could of their city, but according to Nasavi the “blockheads” among them refused to surrender and in the end these die-hards prevailed. Jochi’s opponent in this, as might be expected, was his younger brother (half-brother actually) and long-time nemesis Chagaadai. The feud between them, which had come to a head at the conference in 1219 when Chingis Khan has named their younger brother Ögedei to be his successor as Great Khan now flared up again. Chagaadai apparently wanted to press on and take the Gurganj by any means possible. If this meant reducing the city to ashes it meant nothing to him.
For the moment Jochi’s viewpoint prevailed. According to Juvaini, the Mongols “agreed among themselves to abandon the use of fire and rather to withhold from the people the water of the Oxus [Amu Darya], across which a bridge had been built in the town.” This is one of the Persian pen-pusher’s more perplexing passages. Clearly the Amu Darya did not run through the city. The main branch of the Amu Darya is now twenty-five miles east of Gurganj, but in the thirteenth century it apparently flowed by right to the south of the city. There were canals leading off the river, but Barthold, who has studied in some detail the layout of thirteenth century Guganj, maintains that because of a lack of space none of the ariqs, or canals, ran through the town in the thirteenth century. So where was this bridge to which Juvaini refers? Barthold does tell us that that some 300 feet from the walls of Gurganj a wooden dam had been built to deflect water of the river away from the city. Was this wooden dam the “bridge” to which Juvaini refers? Juvaini implies, however, that the “bridge” was within the city, while the wooden dam was clearly outside the city walls. In any case, the Mongols now attempted to seize the bridge or dam—wherever it might have been—apparently with the intend of destroying it and flooding the city. Here the Mongols suffered a setback. The 3,000 troops devoted to this task were quickly surrounded by the Khwarezmians and massacred.
This fleeting victory in the battle of the bridge emboldened the defenders, but it also hardened the resolve of the Mongols. According to al-Athir, Mongol causalities during the siege had already outnumbered those of the city’s defenders. Rashid al-Din claimed that hillocks made of the bones of Mongols killed during the siege were still visible in his time, more than sixty years later. The lost of 3,000 men in one skirmish appeared to weaken the hand of Jochi, who wanted to save the city from total destruction, but apparently he was not yet ready to give in to Chagaadai and the hardliners who wanted to take the city by any means possible. The dissension between the two brothers was finally reported to Chingis Khan, and he responded by putting the entire army under the command of Ögedei, in effect taking the ever-quarreling Jochi and Chagaadai out of the decision-making process. Jochi’s attempt to save what he could of the city had failed. Under Ögedei the street-by-street assault on the city resumed. Quarter after quarter of the city fell into the hands of the Mongols until only three remained untaken. The inhabitants of these quarters finally decided to send a local dignitary, Ali ad-Din Khayyati, to Jochi and have him beg for mercy. But their entreaties were too late; not even Jochi could save them now. Sometime in April of 1221 the last resistance was overcome and the city of Gurganj was completely overrun by the Mongols.
The surviving inhabitants were driven out into the surrounding fields. The artisans and others with valuable skills, said to number over 100,000, were separated from the rest and, according to Juvaini, sent off to “Eastern Lands,” presumably in China and Mongolia. Juvaini, writing in the 1260s, adds, “Today there are many places in those parts that are cultivated and peopled by the people of Khorazm” (whether the Hui, a sizable Islamic minority now found in China, are the descendants of these forcibly resettlement craftsmen is a matter of some dispute). The women and young children were enslaved and parceled out to their new masters. Some skilled men had hidden their talents, believing that instead of being sent off of the East they would be allowed to return to the city as common laborers. They were sorely disappointed. The remaining men were divided among the Mongol troops and each soldier was tasked with executing twenty-four victims.
According to al-Athir, the Mongols were not yet done with the destruction of Gurganj. After they had looted what they could from burned out ruins, they decided to flood the city: “They opened the dam which kept the waters of the Oxus away from the city, so that it was completely inundated and buildings collapsed. The site was left an expanse of water. Not one of the populace survived, although in other cities some of the people had survived; some hid, some fled, some got out and escaped and yet others threw themselves down among corpses and so were saved. However, from among the people of Khwarazm those who hid from the Tatars [Mongols] were either drowned or died under the rubble. The city became a deserted ruin.”
The number who died is uncertain. Juvaini refused to speculate: “I have heard such a quantity of slain that I did not believe the report and so have not recorded it. ‘Oh God, preserve us from the ills of this world and torments of the world to come.’”
Some structures in Gurganj did survive the Mongol onslaught, although most if not all of them were heavily damaged. Perhaps the most notable pre-Mongol invasion monument was the 196-foot Temür Qutlugh Minaret. Based on its design and the techniques used in its construction some historians have posited that it was built in the tenth or eleventh century. Most agree that it was later repaired and restored by its namesake, Temür Qutlugh (r. 1370 – 1399), a khan of the Golden Horde.
Temür Qutlugh Minaret (click on photos for enlargements)
Temür Qutlugh Minaret
Temür Qutlugh Minaret
Base of the minaret. Note that the pilgrims are circumambulating counter-clockwise, as is the custom with Islamic monuments. Buddhist monuments are circumambulated clockwise.
Top of the minaret
