Once
the world’s biggest city, the Silk Road metropolis of Merv in modern
Turkmenistan destroyed by Genghis Khan’s son and the Mongols in AD 1221 with an
estimated 700,000 deaths. It never fully recovered
When
George Curzon visited the ruined city of Merv in 1888, the vision of its decay
overwhelmed him. “In the midst of an absolute wilderness of crumbling brick and
clay,” the future viceroy of
India wrote, “the spectacle of walls, towers, ramparts and domes,
stretching in bewildering confusion to the horizon, reminds us that we are in
the centre of bygone greatness.”
Modern-day visitors to the site of Merv in southern Turkmenistan can
still tour its dusty, windswept remains. Like Curzon, they might struggle to
imagine the true size, density and lushness of one of the world’s greatest vanished cities.
In
its 12th-century pomp, Merv straddled the prosperous trade routes of the Silk
Road. It was a capital of the Seljuk sultanate that
extended from central Asia to the Mediterranean. According to some estimates,
Merv was the biggest city in the world in AD1200, with a population of more
than half a million people.
But
only decades later, the city was effectively razed by the armies of Genghis
Khan in a grisly conquest that resulted – if contemporary accounts are to be
believed – in 700,000 deaths.
A
trader arriving from Bukhara to the north-east or from Nishapur to the
south-west would once have been relieved at the sight of Merv. Crisscrossed by
canals and bridges, full of gardens and orchards, medieval Merv and its
surrounding oasis were green and richly cultivated, a welcome reprieve from the
bleakness of the Karakum desert.
The
city’s enclosing walls ran in an oblong circuit of five miles, interrupted by
strong towers and four main gates. Its streets were mostly narrow and winding,
crowded with closely built houses and occasional larger structures: mosques,
schools, libraries and bathhouses.
The citadel of the Seljuk
sultans – replete with a palace, gardens and administrative buildings – loomed
over the north-eastern part of Merv. Many different polities chose to make Merv
the seat from which to rule Khurasan, a region that included eastern Iran and
parts of modern-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
“For its cleanliness, its good
streets, the divisions of its buildings and quarters among the rivers … their
city [Merv] is superior to the rest of the cities of Khurasan,” wrote the
10th-century Persian geographer and traveller al-Istakhri. “Its markets are
good.”
Reaching Merv, the visiting
trader might lead his pack-animals into the open courtyard of a
two-storey caravanserai (an inn with a courtyard for
travellers), where he would jostle for space with other merchants from as far
as India, Iraq and western China. Or he could go straight to one of Merv’s
large markets, convened outside the gates of the town or sometimes near its
major mosques. The smoke of potters’ kilns and steel-making furnaces (Merv was
famous for its crucible steel) would have hung over the surrounding industrial
suburbs.
If the trader was feeling hot,
he might step inside the icehouse on the city
outskirts; a tall conical building where residents
accumulated snow during the winter and which they used like a vast mud-brick
fridge. Maybe he paid a visit to a member of the city’s elite who lived in
a koshk (a fortress-like home outside the walls removed from
the dust and noise of the city).
If he followed the route of
the Majan canal, which
ran up the middle of the city, past
the workshops of embroiderers and weavers, he would reach both Merv’s central
mosque and the adjacent monument, the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar. Built in
AD1157 to honour the long-ruling Seljuk sultan, the mausoleum was a large,
square-shaped building rung with fine arches, capped by a dome sheathed in
turquoise-glazed tile. The dome was so intensely blue that according to the
Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, who visited Merv in the 13th century, “It
could be seen from a day’s journey away.”
The city was known as
Marv-i-Shahijan or “Merv the Great”, the largest and most famous of a succession
of towns in the Merv oasis. In fact, the city sat alongside an earlier
incarnation of Merv just to the east, known as Gyaur-kala (“fortress of the
pagans”).
Gyaur-kala flourished under
the Sassanid kings of Persia from the third to the seventh centuries AD.
Archaeologists have found evidence in this older Merv of a cosmopolitan urban
society, boasting communities of Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Manicheans,
Christians and Jews. Under Muslim rule from the seventh century onwards, the
locus of urban activity shifted west across the Razik canal to what would
become Marv-i-Shahijan (also known as Sultan-kala, “fortress of the sultan”).
Many of Gyaur-kala’s structures were probably cannibalised for material in the
construction of the new Merv, and industrial workshops, kilns and furnaces
sprung up amid its ruins.
Historians trace the urban
occupation of the area as far back as the sixth century BC. Life in the Merv
oasis has always depended on the waters of the Murghab. The river flows
northward from the mountains of Afghanistan until it ends in a swampy delta in
the middle of the desert. Du Huan, a Chinese soldier who lived in captivity in
Merv for a decade in the eighth century AD, described the fertility of the
oasis: “A big river … flows into its territory, where it divides into several
hundred canals irrigating the whole area. Villages and fences touch each other
and everywhere there are trees.”
Over the centuries, Merv’s
inhabitants built and maintained a series of dams and dykes on the Murghab
river and a network of canals and reservoirs to ensure the supply of water to
the city. The position of mir-ab, or water bailiff, was an
important post in Merv: according to contemporary medieval accounts, he had a
force of 10,000 workmen under his command, including a team of 300 divers who
routinely patched up the dykes with timber. Their labour maintained the dam on
the Murghab, preventing the accumulation of silt and regulating the flow of
water into Merv’s canals in times of drought and plenty.
The second source of Merv’s
prosperity and growth was its strategic location perched on the crossroads of
transcontinental trade. Merv was famous for its exports, especially its
textiles. “From this country is derived much silk as well as cotton of a
superior quality under the name of Merv cotton, which is extremely soft,” noted
the 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi. Robes and turbans made from Merv
cloth were popular around the Islamic world.
So too were Merv’s much-loved
melons. “The fruits of Merv are finer than those of any other place,” wrote Ibn
Hawqal, a 10th-century Arab chronicler, “and in no other city are to be seen
such palaces and groves, and gardens and streams.”
Merv had such a strong
reputation for commerce and the pursuit of wealth that the 14th-century Egyptian
scribe al-Nuwayri described the city’s chief characteristic as “miserliness”.
But Merv under the Seljuks was
also a city of learning
and culture. It produced notable poets,
mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, musicians and physicists. The polymath
Umar Khayyam is known to have spent several years working at the astronomical
observatory in Merv. “Of all the countries of Iran,” al-Istakhri wrote of Merv,
“these people were noted for their talents and education.” Yaqut al-Hamawi
counted at least 10 significant libraries in the city, including one attached
to a major mosque that contained 12,000 volumes.
In its Seljuk heyday, Merv was a cultural capital, attracting the
brightest thinkers and artists from around the Islamic world. It set trends not
only in scientific and astronomical investigation, but in architecture, fashion
and music. To be marwazi (from
Merv) suggested a degree of cultivation and sophistication. Its residents
probably possessed a very broad frame of reference. Though secluded in an oasis
in the Karakum desert, Merv was a worldly city, an exemplar of the commercial
and intellectual culture that flourished along the Silk Road.
Merv was also no stranger to political upheaval and war, having fallen
under the sway of competing polities and dynasties throughout its long history.
No conquest was as traumatic as its pillage by the
Mongols in 1221. Yaqut al-Hamawi was
forced to flee the libraries of Merv as the armies of Genghis Khan’s son Tolui
advanced upon the city.
“Verily, but for the Mongols I would have stayed and lived and died
there, and hardly could I tear myself away,” he wrote sadly. The Mongols laid
siege for six days before the city surrendered, prompting one of the worst
massacres of the age.
According to the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, who based his account on
the reports of refugees from Merv: “Genghis Khan sat on a golden throne and
ordered the troops who had been seized should be brought before him. When they
were in front of him, they were executed and the people looked on and wept.
When it came to the common people, they separated men, women, children and
possessions. It was a memorable day for shrieking and weeping and wailing. They
took the wealthy people and beat them and tortured them with all sorts of
cruelties in the search for wealth … Then they set fire to the city and burned
the tomb of Sultan Sanjar and dug up his grave looking for money. They said,
‘These people have resisted us’ so they killed them all. Then Genghis Khan
ordered that the dead should be counted and there were around 700,000 corpses.”
The death toll was almost certainly exaggerated, but Merv never fully
recovered. The Mongols destroyed the dam on the Murghab river, hacking at the
life-blood of the Merv oasis. In subsequent centuries, numerous rulers
attempted to rebuild and resettle Merv, but the city never returned to the size
and stature it enjoyed in earlier years under the Seljuks.
In 1888, George Curzon saw only desolation: “Very decrepit and sorrowful
looked those wasting walls of sun-dried clay, these broken arches and tottering
towers; but there is magnificence in their very extent, and a voice in the
sorrowful squalor of their ruin.”
Kanishk Tharoor
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/12/lost-cities-merv-worlds-biggest-city-razed-turkmenistan
