Slavery and South Asian History

3. Turkish Slaves on Islam’s Indian Frontier

3 Turkish Slaves on Islam’s Indian Frontier Peter Jackson In his TaAbbasid caliphs had first recruited Turks from Central Asia as an elite guard corps in their successive capitals, Baghdad and Samarra. To what extent these were technically slaves has been questioned, and it has been proposed that the men who appear in the sources are often free in status and belong more to the tradition of the comitatus, the warband .4 Whatever the individual case, some were certainly ghulams, and the use of slave-soldiers became increasingly widespread. As the >Abbasid empire disintegrated and real power passed into the hands of hereditary provincial governors, they in turn buttressed their illegitimate rule by recruiting Turkish slave-contingents of their own.A few of these upstarts were themselves ghulams. Both Alptegin, who carved out a quasi-independent principality at Ghazni around 962, and Sebuktegin, the effective founder of the Yaminid or Ghaznawid dynasty (977–1186), which would carry Muslim arms deep into the Panjab, were Turkish slave-officers (see map 1). The Ghaznawids’ nemesis, the Shansabanid or Ghurid dynasty (early twelfth century to 1215–16), also maintained Turkish slaves by the beginning of the reign of Ghiyas al-Din Muhammad b. Sam (1163–1203).5 His brother and successor, Mu>izz al-Din Muhammad (d. 1206), is said to have been especially keen to acquire them.6 As the subjugation of the JamunaGanges doab gathered pace in the mid-1190s, he largely entrusted his new conquests to his slave-officers, rather than to Ghuris, Tajiks, or other Turks of free status.7 It was one of these, Qutb al-Din Aybak (d. 1210), who was to lay the foundations of an independent Muslim state in India, and Aybak’s own ghulam, Shams al-Din Iltutmish (d. 1236), who would be the real architect of the Delhi Sultanate. Functions By the eleventh century, then, Turkish slave-regiments formed the nucleus of most armies in the eastern Islamic world. Even Turkish dynasties whose power was initially based on a mass nomadic following,like the Qarakhanids (tenth–early thirteenth centuries) in Transoxiana and Turkestan and the Seljuks (1040–1194) in Iran and the Near East, employed them.8 Ghulam officers might be favored as an instrument of despotism—as a highly disciplined counterweight to an indigenous aristocracy or to tribal leaders for whom a monarch was simply primus inter pares.9 In addition to holding high rank in the military,such as that of military chamberlain (hajib, amir-hajib), favored Turkish ghulams filled ceremonial positions at court. Under the Ghaznawids and the early Delhi sultans, we find them serving as cupbearer (tasht-dar), holder of the royal parasol (chatr-dar), intendant of the royal stable (amir-i akhur), and so on. It is true that the Turkish general Ahmad Inaltegin is described as treasurer (khazin) to Mahmud of Ghazni.10 This office was usually entrusted to members of the Persian bureaucratic class,but from a hint by the Ghaznawid historian Bayhaqi that Mahmud was possiblyAhmad Inaltegin’s father,there is reason to doubt that he was a firstgeneration ghulam.11 Ahmad’s mother may have been the child of a Turkish slave, or he himself may have been a free-status Turkish immigrant. The impulse to purchase Turkish ghulams in significant numbers was sometimes clearly a matter of military exigency. The Ghurids, whose own 64 | PETER JACKSON subjects were a people of the uplands (jibal) accustomed to infantry combat , presumably bought Turks in order to develop a strong cavalry arm, and in particular to amass a corps of mounted archers.12 There is no solid evidence regarding the training of Ghaznawid ghulams,13 or indeed of any other slave-troops outside the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and such meager information as the Delhi historian Juzjani (c.1260) supplies about the training of the sultanate’s Turkish slave-commanders amounts to no more than vague allusions to archery (tir-andazi) and horsemanship (sawari).14 Yet we should note, at this juncture, that the ghulams’ value to their employers did not reside in the celebrated skills of the light-cavalry archer. The tradition of fighting as heavy cavalry also existed in certain regions of the steppe, and Turkish slave-troops were trained to fight in this manner, with weapons like the mace (gurz), rather than as lightly armed mounted bowmen.15 It is generally accepted that under the...