The Khanate of Khiva: A Short History

When the Russian army reached Khiva in the summer of 1873, the slaves had already risen.

That detail gets left out of most accounts, and it matters, because the version usually told, in which Russian troops arrive and a Russian general abolishes slavery, was extremely convenient for the people telling it. The historian Jeffrey Eden has made the case in detail that the abolition of slavery in Central Asia owed far more to the enslaved than to the empire, and that the largest slave uprising in the region's history was already under way when the Russian column arrived.

Hold that in mind while walking around Itchan Kala, because the walled city you pay to enter was built and staffed by the trade that uprising ended.

Where the khanate came from

The state dates from 1511, when Uzbek tribal groups took control of Khorezm, the old irrigated delta region of the Amu Darya, which had been a centre of civilisation for well over a thousand years before any khanate existed.

The capital moved to Khiva itself in the seventeenth century, after the Amu Darya shifted course and left the previous capital, Urgench, dry. That is worth pausing on: the entire reason the city you visit is where it is comes down to a river changing its mind.

From 1804 the Qungrat dynasty held the throne, and it is the Qungrats who built most of what survives. Almost everything inside the walls is nineteenth-century work by that family: the Kunya Ark citadel, the Tosh Hovli palace, the unfinished Kalta Minor minaret. It is Khiva looks ancient and is mostly younger than the Palace of Westminster.

The slave market

This is the part of Khiva's history that the walled city's presentation handles lightly, and it was central to how the khanate functioned.

From roughly the seventeenth century until 1873, Khiva was one of the major slave markets of Central Asia. The captives were overwhelmingly Persian, Shia Muslims whom the khanate's Sunni jurists classed as enslavable, along with Russians taken from the frontier settlements. The raiding was largely done by Turkmen horsemen operating across the Karakum, and Khiva was where the human cargo was sold.

A figure of around 29,300 Persian slaves in the khanate at the time of the Russian conquest is commonly cited. Treat any precise number from this period with some caution, but the order of magnitude is not in dispute: tens of thousands of people, in a khanate whose total population was not large.

They did the irrigation work. The canal system that made the Khorezm oasis farmable required constant, brutal digging and maintenance, and that labour is what the agricultural economy rested on, and with it the khans' revenue and the tiled madrasahs.

Why Russia came

The official justification was the Russian captives. It was not the real reason, and it had not been urgent for decades.

By the 1860s Russia had taken Tashkent, defeated Bukhara and absorbed the Zarafshan valley. Khiva sat out in the desert to the west, the last of the three Central Asian states still behaving independently, and a British empire in India was watching. An earlier Russian expedition in 1839–40 had failed catastrophically in winter conditions without reaching the city, which made the outstanding account personal as well as strategic.

The 1873 campaign ran from March to June. Columns converged on the oasis across the desert from several directions under the overall command of General Konstantin von Kaufman, with a force in the region of 13,000 men. The khan, Muhammad Rahim Khan II, fled the city.

What the Russians found on entering was a city in the middle of a slave revolt.

The terms, and the protectorate

The settlement was signed on 12 August 1873 as the Gandumyan agreement. Its seventeenth article abolished slavery permanently.

Beyond that, the khanate lost its territory on the right bank of the Amu Darya to Russia outright, paid a large indemnity, surrendered control of its foreign relations, and opened itself to Russian trade. Muhammad Rahim Khan II kept his throne and his internal authority, exactly as the emir of Bukhara had. The two arrangements were near-identical in structure, and our piece on the Great Game in Bukhara covers the other half of the story.

The khan then reigned for another thirty-seven years, and the protectorate decades turn out to be Khiva's architectural high point. Muhammad Rahim Khan II was a poet who wrote under the name Feruz, a patron of scholarship, and a serious builder. His son Isfandiyar carried it on: the Islam Khoja complex, the tallest minaret in the country, went up in the early 1910s, decades after the khanate had stopped being independent in any meaningful sense.

There is something worth noticing in that. Monumental building in Khiva accelerated after the loss of sovereignty, not before it — which is a pattern you see in a good many protectorates, where a ruler with no foreign policy left spends his remaining authority on visible legitimacy at home.

What the khanate ran on

Strip away the tilework and Khiva was a hydraulic state. Everything else followed from water.

The Khorezm oasis is desert that has been made to produce, and producing means canals: cutting them, lining them, and above all dredging the silt out of them every year, because an unmaintained canal in that landscape fills up within a season. Control the canal system and you control who eats. The khan's authority over the oasis was, in the most literal sense, control of the headworks.

Grain, cotton, melons and silk came out of that system, along with the karakul pelts from the drier margins. Khiva also sat on a caravan route, though by the nineteenth century that trade was a shadow of what it had been and the khanate's income was overwhelmingly agricultural rather than commercial.

This is the unglamorous answer to a question visitors often ask, which is how a small desert city paid for buildings on that scale. It was not Silk Road transit wealth. It was irrigated land, worked hard, much of it by people who had no choice in the matter.

1920, and the end

The Russian Revolution removed the empire the khanate had been attached to, and the khanate did not long outlast it.

Sayid Abdullah, the last Qungrat khan, abdicated on 2 February 1920. What replaced him was the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic, a nominally independent socialist state that lasted until the redrawing of Central Asian borders in 1924, when the territory was carved up between the new Uzbek and Turkmen republics.

That 1924 delimitation is why the Khorezm oasis is split across an international border today, and why Khiva sits in a corner of Uzbekistan that feels culturally distinct from Bukhara or Samarkand. The Khorezmian dialect, the food, the wooden columns, the specific blue-and-white tile palette: all of it belongs to a state that ran its own affairs for four centuries.

The khanate's own historians

One thing Khiva did unusually well was write itself down.

The court maintained a chronicle tradition across generations, and the khans employed historians whose job was to record the dynasty's reigns. The best known is Munis, who began a history of Khorezm in the early nineteenth century. After his death in 1829 his nephew Ogahi (1809–1874) took over both the chronicle and his post as mirab, the official responsible for distributing water to the fields. Court historian and water administrator were the same job, held by the same man, and that tells you something about how the state understood itself.

Their chronicle, Firdaws al-iqbal, is the principal Khivan account of the khanate's own eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yuri Bregel's English translation, published by Brill in 1999, made it the first major Chaghatai source for Central Asian history to appear in a Western language.

Ogahi was also a prolific translator, moving Persian classics into Chaghatai Turkic, the literary language of the region. So the picture of Khiva as a purely closed, brutal backwater does not survive contact with its own library: this was a state with a working scholarly apparatus, producing history and poetry, at the same time as it ran a slave market.

Both things are true at once, and the discomfort of holding them together is more honest than choosing one.

Reading the walled city with this in mind

Three things to look for while you're inside Itchan Kala.

• The dates on the buildings. Almost everything is 1800s. Khiva is not an ancient city preserved; it is a nineteenth-century royal capital that stopped developing abruptly. That is why it is so complete: nothing was built over it afterwards.
• The scale of the Kunya Ark. The citadel has a harem, a mint, a mosque, a throne room and a prison inside one compound. Everything a khanate needed to run, in about the footprint of a large school.
• The irrigation. Khiva sits in a desert. Every field you pass on the drive from Urgench exists because of a canal network maintained over centuries, much of it by forced labour.

Practical routing for the site itself is in our Khiva travel guide, and the Pakhlavan Makhmud mausoleum, where several of the Qungrat khans are buried, is the single building where the dynasty's self-image is clearest.

What to read

Eden's work is the corrective worth knowing about before you go. Cornell hosted a seminar on the Khivan slave uprising and the myth of Russian abolitionism, and the argument is straightforward: the enslaved population of Khiva acted, at scale, at the decisive moment, and an empire took the credit.

Standing in a courtyard in Itchan Kala with that in your head changes what the tilework looks like. Not less beautiful. Just less innocent, and considerably more interesting than the sanitised version on the information boards.

Featured image: Bgag (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons.