Samanid Empire

The Samanid Empire was a Persianate Sunni Muslim state centred on Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted from 819 to 999. Its founders were four brothers of the dehqan class, landowners of Iranian descent, whom the Abbasid caliph appointed as governors in 819; in 892 Ismail Samani united the family's lands and made the Samanids effectively independent. The dynasty ruled from Bukhara, with Samarkand as a second seat, and at its height controlled northeastern Iran and much of Central Asia. The Samanids presented themselves as heirs of the Sogdian and Bactrian past and did more than any other dynasty of the Iranian Intermezzo to revive Persian letters: under their patronage Rudaki wrote at Bukhara, the Shahnameh tradition took shape, and Avicenna and al-Biruni received their early training. Bukhara was said to rival Baghdad in splendour, with a famous library and a bureaucracy staffed by Persian scribes. The army, however, increasingly relied on Turkic slave soldiers, whose commanders became kingmakers; in the late tenth century the Karakhanids took Transoxiana and the Ghaznavids the lands south of the Oxus, and the last Samanid ruler was killed in 999.