In Persia itself, the two major powers of the Buyids and the Samanids supplemented the indigenous Dailami and eastern Iranian elements of their forces with Turkish cavalrymen, and even the minor Dailami and Kurdish dynasties of the Caspian coastlands and northwestern Persia added Turks to their local and tribal followings. Numerically, these Turks in the Iranian world did not add up to a great influx - not until Saljuq, Mongol and Timurid times did mass immigrations occur which changed the ethnic complexion of certain regions - but they formed an elite class as military leaders and governors, and in western Persia at least, as owners of extensive landed estates or iqtd's. Once the hand of central government relaxed, these Turkish commanders had the means for power immediately at hand: personal entourages of slave guards, and territorial possessions to provide financial backing.
These considerations clearly play a large role in the decline and fall of the Samanid empire in the second half of the 4th/10th century, and in the rise from its ruins of two major dynasties, the Qarakhanids to the north of the Oxus and the Ghaznavids to the south of that river. Signs of weakness already appeared in the amirate of Nuh b. Nasr (331-43/943-54). Power was usurped by over-mighty subjects such as Abu Ali Chaghani, who came from a prominent Iranian family of the upper Oxus valley, and by the Simjuris, a family of Turkish ghulam origin who held Kuhistan virtually as their own private domain. The expense of dealing with rebellion and unrest in Khurasan placed the amirs in serious financial trouble, driving them to impose fresh taxation and thereby increase their unpopularity with the influential landowning and military classes. Uncertainties over the succession allowed the Turkish military leaders and prominent bureaucrats, such as the Bal'amis and 'Utbis, to act as king-makers. With centrifugal forces in the ascendant, outlying dependencies of the Samanid empire began to fall away from the control of Bukhara. Thus in Sistan, a collateral branch of the SafFarid dynasty reappeared and flourished under Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Khalaf b. Laith (311-52/923-63) and his son Khalaf (352-93/963-1003) (see Chapter 3). In Kirman, the Samanid commander Muhammad b. Ilyas founded a short-lived dynasty (320-57/ 932-68) which ruled in virtual independence until the province was conquered by the Buyid 'Adud al-Daula. In Bust and al-Rukhkhaj, in southeastern Afghanistan, the ghulam general and governor of Balkh, Qara-Tegin Isfljabi, held power in the years after 317/929. Forty years later, a further group of Turkish ghulams under one Baituz was ruling in Bust, and it is possible, though unproven, that there was some continuity here with the earlier regime of Qara-Tegin. Baituz's links with his suzerains in Bukhara had become so far relaxed that on the sole coin of his which is extant, a copper falls of 359/970, the name of the Samanid amir is not mentioned.
The Early Ghaznavids in Medieval Persia
