Shaybanids

The trellis-walled yurt of Muhammad Shaybani Khan.

The Shaybanids (Persian: سلسله شیبانیان‎) were a Persianized^[1] dynasty of Mongolian and Turkic origin in central Asia. They were the patrilineal descendants of Shiban, the fifth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan. Until the mid-14th century, they acknowledged the authority of the descendants of Batu Khan and Orda Khan, such as Uzbeg Khan. The Shaybanid horde was converted to Islam in 1282 and gradually assumed the name of Uzbeks. At its height, the khanate included parts of modern day Persia, Afghanistan and parts of central Asia.

As the lineages of Batu and Orda died out in the course of the great civil wars of the 14th century, the Shaybanids under Abu'l-Khayr Khan declared themselves the only legitimate successors to Jochi and put forward claims to the whole of his enormous ulus, which included parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their rivals were the Timurids, who claimed descent from Jochi's thirteenth son by a concubine. Several decades of strife left the Timurids in control of the Great Horde and its successor states in Europe, namely, the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea.

Shaybanid dynasty

The battle between Shah Ismail I and the Borjigin Abu'l-Khayr Khan.

Under Abu'l-Khayr Khan (who led the Shaybanids from 1428 to 1468), the dynasty began consolidating disparate Uzbek tribes, first in the area around Tyumen and the Tura River and then down into the Syr Darya region. His grandson Muhammad Shaybani (ruled 1500-10), who gave his name to the Shaybanid dynasty, wrested Samarkand, Herat (for a time) and Bukhara from Babur's control and established the short-lived Shaybanid Empire. After his death at the hands of Shah Ismail I, he was followed successively by an uncle, a cousin, and a brother, whose Shaybanid descendants would rule the Khanate of Bukhara from 1505 until 1598 and the Khanate of Khwarezm (Khiva) from 1511 until 1695.

In 1506 Sheibani Khan captured Balkh. On 28 May 1507 Sheibani Khan took Herat and the power of Tamerlane was overthrown. He managed to capture most of the Maurya and Khorasan and to create a unified state. In Herat artist Behzad painted his portrait, which has been preserved to this day. Now it is stored in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1508 Sheibani Khan subjugated other cities of Khorasan: Damghan, Astrabad, Mashhad, etc. By 1508, the Sheibani Khan became the supreme ruler of a vast area stretching from the shores of the Syr Darya in the north to Kandahar in the south and the Caspian Sea in the west to the borders of China to the east.

Another state ruled by the Shaybanids was the Khanate of Sibir, seizing the throne in 1563. Its last khan, Kuchum, was deposed by the Russians in 1598. He escaped to Bukhara, but his sons and grandsons were taken by the Tsar to Moscow, where they eventually assumed the surname of Sibirsky. Apart from this famous branch, several other noble families from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan (e.g., Princes Valikhanov) petitioned the Russian imperial authorities to recognise their Shaybanid roots, but mostly in vain.

Khans of Shaybanid dynasty of Khanate of Bukhara

• • Blue Row Signifies progenitor chief.
    • Khans of significance highlighted in Bold.

References

• Bartold, Vasily (1964) The Shaybanids. Collected Works, vol. 2, part 2. Moscow, 1964.
• Grousset, René (1970) The Empire of the Steppes: a history of central Asia Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, (translated by Naomi Walford from the French edition, published by Payot in 1970), pp. 478–490 et passim, ISBN 0-8135-0627-1
• Bosworth, C.E. (1996) The new Islamic dynasties: a chronological and genealogical manual Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 288–9, ISBN 0-231-10714-5
• Soucek, Svatopluk (2000) A History of Inner Asia Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 149–157, ISBN 0-521-65169-7
• Erkinov A. “The Poetry of the Nomads and Shaybani Rulers of Transition to a Settled Society”. In: Central Asia on Display: Proceedings of the VII. Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (27–30 September 2000). G.Rasuly-Paleczek, J. Katsching (eds). Vienna, 2005. P.145-150.