Uncover the history of Afghanistan’s forgotten medieval kingdom, written about in a 14th-century chronicle but lost to time. Learn how this kingdom, ruled by a Kurdish dynasty, resisted Mongol dominance before fading from the historical record.
By Timur Khan
In history, our sources paint a picture of the world at any given time. Even if we try hard to read critically, we are always guided by what we read, whether words in a manuscript or molecules on an artifact. And there are always huge gaps in what posterity has left to us. Sometimes, a new source is found or incorporated, changing how we view the pictures already formed for us. We might discover a new perspective, a new angle – or even a whole society, a whole kingdom, previously unknown.
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In medieval Central and South Asia, large dynasties and empires tend to dominate the maps we make. The spaces in between are sometimes left blank, as if no one (or no one worth taking seriously) even lived there, or they are filled unthinkingly, making neat borders. But beneath these large imperial realms, there was usually an array of smaller polities of all kinds, which are often forgotten in history written from a dynastic perspective. See, for example, this map of the Mongol kingdom known as the Ilkhanate (1256-1335), overlaid on modern national borders:
Map of the Ilkhanate. Wikimedia Commons.
In the southeastern section of the map, covering the south of modern Pakistan, the blue of the Ilkhanate encompasses a large chunk of territory. But this tells us nothing about how the Ilkhans (rulers of the Ilkhanate) actually governed that territory. In fact, they did not govern it directly. A vassal dynasty of theirs, the Karts of Herat, campaigned in part of this territory in the 1260s but did not seem to set up any administration there. The Kart ruler Shams al-Din marched on the region, which a chronicle known as the Tarikh-nama-yi Herat (“Book of History of Herat”) (c. 1321) calls ‘Afghanistan’ – the earliest known use of that word. Shams al-Din came up against a rival kingdom: one which features on no maps and has mostly been forgotten.
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The 13th-Century Kingdom of Afghanistan
Afghanistan, as outlined in this chronicle, does not match up with the modern country. The Tarikh-nama does not provide a detailed breakdown of its geography, but it evidently encompassed part of the north of today’s Balochistan province in Pakistan. Its chief city at this time was Mastung, still a district of Balochistan near the capital, Quetta. Another location identified in the Tarikh-nama is Duki, a town over two hundred kilometers east of Mastung. Based on some readings of other place names given in the text, parts of today’s southeastern Afghanistan may also have been part of the ‘Afghanistan’ of the 13th and 14th centuries.
From the Mongol rulers’ perspective, this land of Afghanistan, along with its neighboring regions, was part of their rightful sovereignty. However, they also recognized that it was not truly under their control, and so the Great Khan Möngke (r. 1251-9) and his regional military commander Arghun Aqa issued edicts conferring it and other territories onto their subject, Shams al-Din Kart. As could be the case in medieval Europe, the grant of a domain was less a direct transfer of administration and more like a license to conquer, if possible.
According to the Tarikh-nama’s author, Sayf al-Harawi, Shams al-Din began his takeover by sending an embassy with a letter addressed to Afghanistan’s rulers and local chiefs, particularly one Malik Shahanshah of Mastung. Malik Shahanshah, his son Malik Bahramshah, and his son-in-law Malik Miranshah are framed in the text as the primary rulers or kings of the country: “Under [their] control were all the lands of Afghanistan.” It was their authority that underpinned the political landscape of local governors who came out to greet Shams al-Din’s envoys “in every district they arrived in.” They maintained a court of “lords, porters, and generals” at Mastung. They are also referred to as “Sayyid and Kurd,” meaning they were descended from the Prophet Muhammad and presumably Kurdish, though what exactly that means in this time and place is unclear.
Shams al-Din’s letter explained his right to rule the country and warned of an invasion in case of any resistance. However, he was rebuffed, since he was a servant of the non-Muslim Mongols, and Malik Shahanshah made it clear he had never paid them tribute. From the purported reply of Malik Shahanshah, it is possible, though not fully clear, that the Kurd dynasty had been in place for at least two generations. Questioning Shams al-Din’s role as a servant of the non-Muslim Mongols, he is said to have told the Kart envoy: “Before this date, Malik Wafa was ruler of this land for several years, and after him Malik Fakhr al-Din Kajuran.”
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A view of Herat in 1879. Wikimedia Commons
Dynasties are families, and family relationships can be thorny. One member of the ruling family of ‘Afghanistan’, Malik Taj al-Din, had ongoing trouble with his brother Miranshah, who “had around fifty farsang [perhaps three times as many miles] of Afghanistan in his control [and] gave less than one-sixth [of his revenues?] to his own brother Malik Taj al-Din.” As a result, Taj al-Din was slow and obstinate in obeying commands given by Miranshah.
The Kurd family also apparently exercised power through frequent campaigning. Miranshah is singled out for his particular efforts, having “campaigned in Afghanistan and the boundaries of Hindustan for seventeen years and seized several fortresses and castles.”
The Afghans of ‘Afghanistan’
References to Miranshah’s conquests indicate that just as there were numerous small polities under the Ilkhanate, there were also various local leaders or autonomous communities who didn’t fit into the ideal structure of the Kurd rulers of Afghanistan. Often these were peopled by the actual Afghans. Today, ‘Afghan’ refers ideally to a citizen of the country of Afghanistan, regardless of ethnic background. Historically, it generally (but not always straightforwardly) referred to people we would now normally call Pashtuns. Whether the Afghans of the 13th century considered themselves Pashtun, we do not know. But if not, they were the forerunners of what became the Pashtun community.
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The Tarikh-nama suggests that the Afghans were seen as distinct and even looked down upon by the medieval Kurd rulers. Malik Shahanshah reportedly told Shams al-Din’s envoy that sending an army to his country:
would have no result but damage and harm, since the Afghans are fearless, vagabonds, thieves, turbulent and cunning in craft, especially the champions in my service. Each one […] shall, like Rustam, make a hundred [men] drunk by the goblet of the ox-headed mace’s blade.
This way of disparaging Afghans and Pashtuns can be found easily today. On the one hand, they are praised as brave and compared to the quintessential ancient Iranian hero, Rustam. On the other hand, the Afghans’ military power comes from their alleged chaotic and wicked nature. The Karts and their chronicle certainly shared this vision of the Afghans as rebellious and savage. When Shams al-Din conquered some of the Afghan fortresses, he behaved brutally. In the case of one adversary named Almar, he:
ordered that Almar be cut in two; that from among the attendants and intimates of his court, fifty people be blinded; that fifty lose their hands and feet; that fifty have their ears and noses cut off; that three hundred people be bastinadoed; and the rest were granted to [an ally of Shams al-Din].
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Afghan leaders and communities apparently used fortresses and difficult terrain in the mountains to resist conquest or subjugation. Al-Harawi’s record of Shams al-Din’s conquests tells us that each fortress took between seven and sixty days for the Kart army to capture. One fort was even attacked with catapults and flasks of flaming oil launched by “flask-throwers.” The Tarikh-nama further tells us that a band of seven hundred to two thousand Afghan “robbers” had been raiding trade caravans with India for a hundred years before being defeated by Shams al-Din. This timeline is almost certainly exaggerated, but it shows the limitations of central control from Mastung at this time.
The region of Mustang today. Photo by Najamuddin Shahwani / Wikimedia Commons
Fall of the Kurd Rulers
In the end, Shams al-Din’s arrival marked the downfall of the Kurd dynasty in Afghanistan. His first victims, in 1254/5, were Malik Shahanshah and his son Malik Bahramshah. Shams al-Din probably took advantage of local divisions, including the enmity between Taj al-Din and his brother Miranshah. As a result, he was able to enter Mastung without a fight, welcomed by the local elite and Taj al-Din. Malik Shahanshah and his son took five thousand men and holed up in the fortress of Khasak. Leaving Taj al-Din and a garrison of one hundred men in Mastung, Shams al-Din laid siege to Khasak. The siege lasted six and a half months and involved seven separate battles, but eventually, the Kart army won the day.
Once again, Shams al-Din was vicious in victory. Ninety lords and nobles were executed on his orders. Malik Shahanshah and Bahramshah were decapitated, and their heads were sent to all “the directions and sides of Afghanistan” as a message. The energetic campaigner Malik Miranshah and his son Salar were also eventually killed by the Kart ruler, putting an end to the Kurd family in Afghanistan, except perhaps for Taj al-Din. Although he initially sided with Shams al-Din, Taj al-Din later rebelled during a major civil war among the Mongols after Möngke’s death in 1259. Taj al-Din sided with the Mongol commander Neguder, and in 1260, staved off Kart forces pursuing his Mongol ally. What happened to Taj al-Din afterward is unknown.
For all this violence, Shams al-Din and his successors did not appear to stay or establish an administration in Afghanistan. As Lawrence G. Potter describes, “Most of the areas Shams al-Din conquered did not remain part of the Kart state; they were probably too far from Herat to administer and not worth the effort.” We do not know what filled the vacuum left by his destruction of the Kurd kingdom in Afghanistan. But by its destruction, that kingdom would be largely forgotten, its last traces preserved in the victorious chronicle of its enemies.
Timur Khan is a PhD student based in Leiden, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the early modern and colonial history of Afghanistan and South Asia, particularly the 18th and 19th century Durrani empire. His work can be found on his Academia page.
Further Readings:
The edition of the Tarikh-nama I primarily used is that edited by Ghulam Reza Tabatabai Majd in 2005/6. A more readily accessible edition is that edited by Muhammad Zubair Siddiqi in 1944.
Top Image: Ptolemy’s 9th Asian Map (Tabula Asiae IX), featuring Aria, Arachosia, Drangiana, and Gedrosia. Created in 1467, it roughly corresponds to today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Uncover the history of Afghanistan’s forgotten medieval kingdom, written about in a 14th-century chronicle but lost to time. Learn how this kingdom, ruled by a Kurdish dynasty, resisted Mongol dominance before fading from the historical record.
By Timur Khan
In history, our sources paint a picture of the world at any given time. Even if we try hard to read critically, we are always guided by what we read, whether words in a manuscript or molecules on an artifact. And there are always huge gaps in what posterity has left to us. Sometimes, a new source is found or incorporated, changing how we view the pictures already formed for us. We might discover a new perspective, a new angle – or even a whole society, a whole kingdom, previously unknown.
In medieval Central and South Asia, large dynasties and empires tend to dominate the maps we make. The spaces in between are sometimes left blank, as if no one (or no one worth taking seriously) even lived there, or they are filled unthinkingly, making neat borders. But beneath these large imperial realms, there was usually an array of smaller polities of all kinds, which are often forgotten in history written from a dynastic perspective. See, for example, this map of the Mongol kingdom known as the Ilkhanate (1256-1335), overlaid on modern national borders:
In the southeastern section of the map, covering the south of modern Pakistan, the blue of the Ilkhanate encompasses a large chunk of territory. But this tells us nothing about how the Ilkhans (rulers of the Ilkhanate) actually governed that territory. In fact, they did not govern it directly. A vassal dynasty of theirs, the Karts of Herat, campaigned in part of this territory in the 1260s but did not seem to set up any administration there. The Kart ruler Shams al-Din marched on the region, which a chronicle known as the Tarikh-nama-yi Herat (“Book of History of Herat”) (c. 1321) calls ‘Afghanistan’ – the earliest known use of that word. Shams al-Din came up against a rival kingdom: one which features on no maps and has mostly been forgotten.
The 13th-Century Kingdom of Afghanistan
Afghanistan, as outlined in this chronicle, does not match up with the modern country. The Tarikh-nama does not provide a detailed breakdown of its geography, but it evidently encompassed part of the north of today’s Balochistan province in Pakistan. Its chief city at this time was Mastung, still a district of Balochistan near the capital, Quetta. Another location identified in the Tarikh-nama is Duki, a town over two hundred kilometers east of Mastung. Based on some readings of other place names given in the text, parts of today’s southeastern Afghanistan may also have been part of the ‘Afghanistan’ of the 13th and 14th centuries.
From the Mongol rulers’ perspective, this land of Afghanistan, along with its neighboring regions, was part of their rightful sovereignty. However, they also recognized that it was not truly under their control, and so the Great Khan Möngke (r. 1251-9) and his regional military commander Arghun Aqa issued edicts conferring it and other territories onto their subject, Shams al-Din Kart. As could be the case in medieval Europe, the grant of a domain was less a direct transfer of administration and more like a license to conquer, if possible.
According to the Tarikh-nama’s author, Sayf al-Harawi, Shams al-Din began his takeover by sending an embassy with a letter addressed to Afghanistan’s rulers and local chiefs, particularly one Malik Shahanshah of Mastung. Malik Shahanshah, his son Malik Bahramshah, and his son-in-law Malik Miranshah are framed in the text as the primary rulers or kings of the country: “Under [their] control were all the lands of Afghanistan.” It was their authority that underpinned the political landscape of local governors who came out to greet Shams al-Din’s envoys “in every district they arrived in.” They maintained a court of “lords, porters, and generals” at Mastung. They are also referred to as “Sayyid and Kurd,” meaning they were descended from the Prophet Muhammad and presumably Kurdish, though what exactly that means in this time and place is unclear.
Shams al-Din’s letter explained his right to rule the country and warned of an invasion in case of any resistance. However, he was rebuffed, since he was a servant of the non-Muslim Mongols, and Malik Shahanshah made it clear he had never paid them tribute. From the purported reply of Malik Shahanshah, it is possible, though not fully clear, that the Kurd dynasty had been in place for at least two generations. Questioning Shams al-Din’s role as a servant of the non-Muslim Mongols, he is said to have told the Kart envoy: “Before this date, Malik Wafa was ruler of this land for several years, and after him Malik Fakhr al-Din Kajuran.”
Dynasties are families, and family relationships can be thorny. One member of the ruling family of ‘Afghanistan’, Malik Taj al-Din, had ongoing trouble with his brother Miranshah, who “had around fifty farsang [perhaps three times as many miles] of Afghanistan in his control [and] gave less than one-sixth [of his revenues?] to his own brother Malik Taj al-Din.” As a result, Taj al-Din was slow and obstinate in obeying commands given by Miranshah.
The Kurd family also apparently exercised power through frequent campaigning. Miranshah is singled out for his particular efforts, having “campaigned in Afghanistan and the boundaries of Hindustan for seventeen years and seized several fortresses and castles.”
The Afghans of ‘Afghanistan’
References to Miranshah’s conquests indicate that just as there were numerous small polities under the Ilkhanate, there were also various local leaders or autonomous communities who didn’t fit into the ideal structure of the Kurd rulers of Afghanistan. Often these were peopled by the actual Afghans. Today, ‘Afghan’ refers ideally to a citizen of the country of Afghanistan, regardless of ethnic background. Historically, it generally (but not always straightforwardly) referred to people we would now normally call Pashtuns. Whether the Afghans of the 13th century considered themselves Pashtun, we do not know. But if not, they were the forerunners of what became the Pashtun community.
The Tarikh-nama suggests that the Afghans were seen as distinct and even looked down upon by the medieval Kurd rulers. Malik Shahanshah reportedly told Shams al-Din’s envoy that sending an army to his country:
would have no result but damage and harm, since the Afghans are fearless, vagabonds, thieves, turbulent and cunning in craft, especially the champions in my service. Each one […] shall, like Rustam, make a hundred [men] drunk by the goblet of the ox-headed mace’s blade.
This way of disparaging Afghans and Pashtuns can be found easily today. On the one hand, they are praised as brave and compared to the quintessential ancient Iranian hero, Rustam. On the other hand, the Afghans’ military power comes from their alleged chaotic and wicked nature. The Karts and their chronicle certainly shared this vision of the Afghans as rebellious and savage. When Shams al-Din conquered some of the Afghan fortresses, he behaved brutally. In the case of one adversary named Almar, he:
ordered that Almar be cut in two; that from among the attendants and intimates of his court, fifty people be blinded; that fifty lose their hands and feet; that fifty have their ears and noses cut off; that three hundred people be bastinadoed; and the rest were granted to [an ally of Shams al-Din].
Afghan leaders and communities apparently used fortresses and difficult terrain in the mountains to resist conquest or subjugation. Al-Harawi’s record of Shams al-Din’s conquests tells us that each fortress took between seven and sixty days for the Kart army to capture. One fort was even attacked with catapults and flasks of flaming oil launched by “flask-throwers.” The Tarikh-nama further tells us that a band of seven hundred to two thousand Afghan “robbers” had been raiding trade caravans with India for a hundred years before being defeated by Shams al-Din. This timeline is almost certainly exaggerated, but it shows the limitations of central control from Mastung at this time.
Fall of the Kurd Rulers
In the end, Shams al-Din’s arrival marked the downfall of the Kurd dynasty in Afghanistan. His first victims, in 1254/5, were Malik Shahanshah and his son Malik Bahramshah. Shams al-Din probably took advantage of local divisions, including the enmity between Taj al-Din and his brother Miranshah. As a result, he was able to enter Mastung without a fight, welcomed by the local elite and Taj al-Din. Malik Shahanshah and his son took five thousand men and holed up in the fortress of Khasak. Leaving Taj al-Din and a garrison of one hundred men in Mastung, Shams al-Din laid siege to Khasak. The siege lasted six and a half months and involved seven separate battles, but eventually, the Kart army won the day.
Once again, Shams al-Din was vicious in victory. Ninety lords and nobles were executed on his orders. Malik Shahanshah and Bahramshah were decapitated, and their heads were sent to all “the directions and sides of Afghanistan” as a message. The energetic campaigner Malik Miranshah and his son Salar were also eventually killed by the Kart ruler, putting an end to the Kurd family in Afghanistan, except perhaps for Taj al-Din. Although he initially sided with Shams al-Din, Taj al-Din later rebelled during a major civil war among the Mongols after Möngke’s death in 1259. Taj al-Din sided with the Mongol commander Neguder, and in 1260, staved off Kart forces pursuing his Mongol ally. What happened to Taj al-Din afterward is unknown.
For all this violence, Shams al-Din and his successors did not appear to stay or establish an administration in Afghanistan. As Lawrence G. Potter describes, “Most of the areas Shams al-Din conquered did not remain part of the Kart state; they were probably too far from Herat to administer and not worth the effort.” We do not know what filled the vacuum left by his destruction of the Kurd kingdom in Afghanistan. But by its destruction, that kingdom would be largely forgotten, its last traces preserved in the victorious chronicle of its enemies.
Timur Khan is a PhD student based in Leiden, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the early modern and colonial history of Afghanistan and South Asia, particularly the 18th and 19th century Durrani empire. His work can be found on his Academia page.
Further Readings:
The edition of the Tarikh-nama I primarily used is that edited by Ghulam Reza Tabatabai Majd in 2005/6. A more readily accessible edition is that edited by Muhammad Zubair Siddiqi in 1944.
Yousaf, “The ‘savage’ Pathan (Pashtun) and the postcolonial burden,” Critical Studies on Security 9.1 (2021), pp. 36-39.
G.E. Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance, London, Routledge, 2003.
H.F. Schurmann, The Mongols of Afghanistan, ‘S-Gravenhage, Mouton & Co, 1962
L.G. Potter, “The Kart dynasty of Herat: Religion and politics in medieval Iran,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1992
Mahendrarajah. A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
S. Nejatie, “Reflections on the prehistory of the Abdali Afghans,” Central Asian Survey, 38.4 (2014), pp. 548-569.
Top Image: Ptolemy’s 9th Asian Map (Tabula Asiae IX), featuring Aria, Arachosia, Drangiana, and Gedrosia. Created in 1467, it roughly corresponds to today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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