Esma‘il Samani

Bosworth says Esma‘il left a reputation for justice, piety and faithful service to the caliph, preserved in later historical and adab literature, where he is called Amir-e Mazi and Amir-e ‘Adel. Most stories of his justice come from Narshakhi’s History of Bukhara and Nezam al-Molk’s Siyasat-nama, written later.

Biruni traces the Samanids to Bahram Chobin, the Sasanian general, and Gardizi back to Gayomarth, the first man. Bosworth says this link, “whatever its truth”, was generally accepted at the time. We treat it as a legendary, unproven pedigree. We also read the stories of his justice as mirror-for-princes literature, not daily record.

The family’s real ancestor, Saman-khoda, was in Bosworth’s words a local landowner (dehqān) of the village of Saman near Balkh.

1. Born 849 CE; son of Ahmad b. Asad, who with his brothers had been appointed to towns of Transoxania by the caliph’s governor.

2. Governor of Bukhara for his brother Nasr from 874 to 892.

3. He twice withheld the 500,000-dirham tribute, and Nasr attacked Bukhara in 885 and 888.

4. In August 892, on Nasr’s death, he became amir of all Transoxania and made Bukhara the capital.

The brothers’ war shows that tribute was the real bond between governor and ruler: by keeping the money, Esma‘il tested his independence.

From his time Bukhara was the Samanid centre and, Yarshater says, a centre of Arabic and Persian culture.

The caliph had granted Ray, eastern Persia and Transoxania to ‘Amr b. Layth, which meant deposing Esma‘il. ‘Amr invaded the upper Oxus provinces but was defeated and captured near Balkh, probably in March 900. The caliph then appointed Esma‘il governor of Khorasan, Sistan, Ray, Tabarestan and Isfahan.

Bosworth says this victory brought Esma‘il his greatest renown among contemporaries, and relieved the caliphs of Saffarid pressure. The caliph used one eastern ruler to check another.

Bosworth says Esma‘il’s successors kept permanent control only of Khorasan and Transoxania; the caliph’s grant on paper was larger than real power.

Esma‘il named the caliph in the Friday sermon and on his coins. Bosworth says his distance from Iraq and his new prestige let him act as an independent sovereign, and that “there is no evidence” he ever sent regular tribute or tax to Baghdad.

Ya‘qub b. Layth openly scorned the caliph; Esma‘il kept the outward respect and kept the money. These were two ways of breaking free of the caliphate.

Naming a distant authority while sending it nothing was a common form of independence in that age.

Yarshater writes in Iranica that at the Samanid court and with their encouragement Persian was revived as a vehicle for poetry, scholarship and history: Rudaki, Shahid of Balkh, Daqiqi, and Ferdowsi’s Shahnama, conceived under the Samanids. The Persian versions of Tabari’s history and commentary also date from this period.

This flowering belongs mostly to the reigns of Nasr II and Mansur I, not to Esma‘il himself. The sources we read do not show a personal role for Esma‘il in the revival; some sources even say his son Ahmad switched the language of the chancery from Persian to Arabic.

Esma‘il built the state in which this culture grew; crediting him with the flowering itself is a claim our sources do not support.

Esma‘il fought his brother over 500,000 dirhams of tribute. In 893 he brought back from Taraz an immense booty of animals and Turkish slaves. Yarshater says the Samanids took large numbers of Turkish captives in their Central Asian campaigns and set them to work in the army and the palace.

This is our reading: Esma‘il’s reputation for justice sat beside a state built on slave-taking. People were themselves counted as “booty”. And these Turkish slaves, Yarshater says, eventually became commanders and then the Samanids’ successors; Sebüktegin, father of Mahmud of Ghazna, was one of them. A state that took other people’s property and freedom was in the end taken over by that “property”.

Justice for those inside the state and slavery for those outside it: the property question is always whose rights count.

A brick tomb in Bukhara has been identified as Esma‘il’s (Schroeder). Sheila Blair, in her study of early Islamic monumental inscriptions, dates it to the later Samanid period (Bosworth, Iranica).

This dating is disputed. We call the building “the Samanid mausoleum” and do not attribute it to Esma‘il with confidence.

The building that now symbolises Esma‘il may belong to his descendants; historical memory and evidence are not always the same.