Its towns were centres for local industry and crafts, with its textiles and other specialties exported far outside the province; it also benefited by its straddling of the long-distance trade route between Iraq and Central Asia. It was also at this time the intellectual and cultural heart of the eastern Islamic world, not only for the traditional Arabic theological, linguistic and legal sciences, but also for the cultivation of New Persian language and literature, a process which culminated in the achievement of Mahmud's contemporary and would-be protege, Firdausi of Tus. In short, the wealth of Khurasan, as much as that of India, provided the material basis for much of Mahmud's imperial achievement.
The sultan was, accordingly, concerned to guard Khurasan against threats from the Qarakhanids, for despite Mahmud's marriage to a daughter of the Ilig Nasr (390/1000), the khans did not for long relinquish their designs upon the province. Whilst Mahmud was away at Multan in India in 396/1006, a two-pronged invasion of Khurasan was launched. One Qarakhanid army occupied Balkh (where a market belonging to the Ghaznavid sultan, the Bazar-i 'Ashiqan or "Lovers' Market", was burnt down), and the other occupied Nlshapur; at this last place, a large part of the dihqans or landowners had already become disillusioned with the rapacity of the sultan's tax-collectors, and actually welcomed the invaders. With characteristic verve, Mahmud raced back across Afghanistan, and hurled the Qarakhanids back across the Oxus.
The Ilig Nasr attempted a revanche in the following year, in alliance with his second cousin Yiisuf Qadir Khan of Khotan. But a great victory by Mahmud near Balkh in 398/1008, in which a charge of the armour-plated war elephants of the Ghaznavids had a demoralizing effect on the invaders, ended the campaign; the Qarakhanid commanders had protested that "it is impossible to put up resistance against those elephants, weapons, equipment and warriors ". The Qarakhanid dominions were never ruled as a unitary state, but formed something like a loosely-linked confederation. Internal quarrels and warfare broke out within the dynasty at an early date, and over the next years, the Ghaznavid borders were not again threatened by the khans.
Once he had consolidated his power in Khurasan, Mahmud gradually brought under his own control those regions which had lain on the periphery of the Samanid empire and had been loosely tributary to Bukhara, sc. Sis tan, Gharchistan, Juzjan, Chaghaniyan, Khuttal and Khwarazm. North of the upper Harl Rud lay Gharchistan ("land of the mountains"), ruled by a line of local princes who bore the Iranian title of Shir ( < Old Persian khshathriya "ruler"). The Shir Abu Nasr Muhammad acknowledged Mahmiid's suzerainty right away in 389/999, but some years later, the sultan used the pretext of truculent behaviour on the part of the Shir's son Muhammad b. Muhammad to invade the province and incorporate it in his empire (403/1012). That the family of Shirs nevertheless survived seems possible, for they are mentioned once more in the Ghurid period.
Under its dynasty of the Farlghunids, Juzjan, the region to the north of Herat, had been an important vassal-state of the Samanids, providing military aid to the amirs against their rebellious generals. The Farlghunids had also been patrons of the arts; it was for one of the amirs that the pioneer geographical treatise in New Persian, the Hudud al-'dlam, was written towards 372/982, and the late Professor V. Minorsky suggested that the author of an Arabic encyclopaedia of the sciences called the Jawdmi' al-'ulum, one Sha'ya b. Farighun, might be a scion of this princely family. The ruler Abu Nasr Ahmad fought for Mahmud against the Qarakhanids in Khurasan and also in India, and retained his territories until his death in 401/1010-11, when Guzgan was placed under the governorship of the sultan's son Muhammad, who had married a daughter of Abu Nasr Muhammad.
Ghaznavids: the Powerful Turkish Dynasty in Medieval Persia
