Abd al-Aziz Khan

Abd al-Aziz was born in 1614 in Balkh. He belonged to the Ashtarkhanid (Janid) dynasty that ruled the Khanate of Bukhara, traced his descent to Jochi, and was the son of Nadr Muhammad Khan, the fourth khan of Bukhara.

Nadr Muhammad’s tax increases turned the population and the nobility against him, and after withdrawing to Balkh he met with defiance from his own sons. In 1645 the begs and large landholders proclaimed Abd al-Aziz khan. His father later went to Iran, to the Safavids.

Nadr Muhammad had appealed to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for help. In 1646–1647 a Mughal army led by Shah Jahan’s sons Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh briefly occupied Balkh and Badakhshan. In 1647 Abd al-Aziz attacked the Mughal forces at Balkh and drove them out of the country; Balkh was then governed by his brother Subhan Quli.

In the following years the two brothers fell out over power. From 1660 to 1680 the khanate suffered campaigns by the rulers of Khwarazm, Abu’l-Ghazi and Anusha Khan, and by the Kazakhs. During the first decade of his reign the governor of Samarkand, Yalangtush Bahadur, held great influence in the state.

Abd al-Aziz pursued an active foreign policy. In 1669 he sent an embassy under Mullah Farrukh to Tsar Alexis of Russia, and in 1670 the Russian envoys, the Pazukhin brothers, came to Bukhara. His envoys were also received at the court of Aurangzeb, in Iran and in Istanbul. His reign saw the building of the madrasa that bears his name in Bukhara and of the Tillya-Kari Madrasa in Samarkand; he put together a library of finely copied manuscripts, and his contemporaries described him as a lover of learning.

In 1680–1681 Abd al-Aziz gave up the throne in favour of his brother Subhan Quli Khan and set out on the hajj through Iran; in June 1681 he was received by the Safavid shah Suleiman. He died in 1683 during the pilgrimage, in Mecca according to most sources. He is the central figure of the poet Khurrami’s work “Al-Ashiq risalai ravzati Khurrami”, written in 1836–1837.