Djend, north of Bokhara, where, with all his followers,'
he embraced Islamism. Seldjuk acquired some amount
of influence by protecting the peaceable inhabitants of
the neighbourhood from his heathen kinsmen. He
also took the part of the later Samanids, and gradually
obtained the position of one- of the independent
princes of Transoxiana. His successors, forced to
quit Turkistan in 1030, conquered Merv five years
later, and Khorasan also ; after which the power of the
Seldjuks continued till the second quarter of the twelfth
century.
The last of the Seldjuks was overthrown by the
Uigur Khurkan from the district north-east of Kho-
kand, and Bokhara now became an apple of discord
between the Uigur Khurkan in the east, and the
princes o f Kharezm, or what is now Khiva, in the
west. So things continued for nearly a hundred years,
when the greatest of Asiatic conquerors arose in the
east, born as Temuchin in 1155.
The prpgress of Temuchin in subduing the nomads
of Gobi was, up to 1206, comparatively slow. A t this
date he assumed the new title of Jinghis (or Chingis,
Genghis, or Jenghiz) Khan, and soon afterwards subdued
all eastern Mongolia, and the country south to
the Chinese wall, and the frontier of Tibet. In 1218,
this Mongol conqueror set off on a campaign against
Transoxiana. He was accompanied by his three sons,
Jagatai, Oktai, and Djudji, with 600,000 men. Jinghiz
himself, with the élite of his army, marched direct on
Bokhara. Entering the Friday mosque, he went up
the steps o f the pulpit, and said to his soldiers, “ The
hay is cut, give your horses fodder.” The Mongols
plundered the town, and afterwards set it on fire, so
that only a few mosques and palaces o f brick remained.
Th e garrison, however, in the citadel continued to hold
out. nor was it till the moat was literally choked with
the corpses of men and animals that the stronghold
was taken and its defenders put to death. More than
30,000 men were executed, and the remainder reduced
to slavery. Samarkand shared a similar fate, and, in
1220, Merv was sacked by the Mongols, and 100,000
people slain. This Mongolian invasion put an end,
for the time, to the. intellectual life of Central Asia,
and Bokhara and Samarkand never regained their
former position. Jinghiz, in 1224, divided his immense
empire, stretching all across Asia, between his three
sons ; Turkistan and Transoxiana falling to the share
of Jagatai, whose descendants ruled the country for
nearly 150 years, towards the end of which time the
Turks, who had come west with' the Mongols and
served them so long as they were powerful, gradually
usurped the place of their masters, and the empire of
the Djengezids gave way to that of the Timur ids.
The house of Berlas planted the flag o f independence
at Kesh, where, as I have said before, the great
Tamerlane was born in 1333, and though he made
Samarkand his capital, he often went to Bokhara.
Th e sway of the,Timurids lasted barely a hundred
years. During that time, however, Bokhara and
Samarkand again rose, as I have shown in a previous
chapter, to considerable civilization and culture, but
with the last of the Timurids in 1506, Central Asia
began to gravitate towards the slough of ignorance
and barbarism, from which it has never yet recovered
itself.
A nèw dynasty w'as now arising among the descendants
of some of the Turko-Mongol tribes, living in
the north-west country between the Volga and Aral.