THE TRAVELS of the EARLY GHAZNAVID SULTANS Minoru I

The Travels of the Early Ghaznavid Sultans 75

CHAPTER TWO

SEDENTARY RULERS ON THE MOVE: THE TRAVELS OF THE EARLY GHAZNAVID SULTANS

Minoru Inaba

The Ghaznavid dynasty, which was once the most powerful state in the Muslim East, has its origin in the turmoil that marked the decline and fall of the Samanids (873-999). Around 962, the Turkish general Alp Tegin, defeated in the political strife over the succession to the throne in Bukhara, crossed the Hindu Kush with his army and settled in Ghazni, a city then of considerable importance in the eastern part of present-day Afghanistan. He was succeeded by his son, then, one after the other, by two Turkish ghulāms (military slave) with the rank of general, and finally by Sebük Tegin, another of his former ghulāms, who took control of Ghazni and thereafter conquered most of Khurasan. It is well known that Sebük Tegin and his descendants, the Ghaznavid sultans, were Turks, as was the back- bone of the army that enabled them to conquer large parts of India and Iran. This being said, the Ghaznavid model of kingship is usually described as being derived from the Samanid’s. In other words, the Ghaznavids are portrayed as Iranized Turks, propagating Iranian culture, and owing little to Inner Asian traditions.1 For example, the members of the royal family seem not to have held any fief, at least in the early period, in contrast to what was customary among the royal families of the later Turko-Mongol dynasties.2 This chapter aims to illustrate the nature of the Ghaznavid state by focussing on the way the rulers occupied and moved within their ter- ritories. Some scholars have explained the frequent travels of the later Turko-Mongol rulers in the Muslim East as being related to their nomadic background and tradition.3 However, as Charles Melville has highlighted in his article on the Ilkhan Öljeitü, itinerancy is a feature of various models of kingship and cannot be considered as a marker peculiar to ‘nomadic’

1 See Bosworth 1975, 180-1; Meisami 1999, 50-1. I use the expression “Inner Asian tradi�- tions” rather loosely. On this point, see Di Cosmo 1999, 7. 2 See Bosworth 1973, 125. 3 See e.g. Honda 1991, 357 ff. 76 Minoru Inaba

Fig. 1. The territory of the early Ghaznavids ca. 1030. traditions.4 The issue is worth detailed investigation. In what follows, I will analyse first the travels of the early Ghaznavid rulers Maḥmūd and his son Masʿūd, as well as the role played by their capital Ghazni. In the second part, the reasons why the rulers travelled are examined, paying attention to the mode of contact between the rulers and the cities they visited. In the last part, these results are compared with other itinerant royal courts.

Description of the Sultans’ Travels

Clifford Edmund Bosworth, the most eminent scholar on Ghaznavid history, has divided the history of the dynasty into two periods: the Early Ghaznavids from 977 to 1040, and the Later Ghaznavids from 1040 to 1187, the date of the dynasty’s downfall.5 Here, the royal tours of the Early

4 Melville 1990, 55. 5 Bosworth 1975, 196.