Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu

Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu was born around 1199 in Gurganj, the capital of the Khwarazmian state (today Köneürgenç in Turkmenistan). He was the eldest son of the Khwarazmshah Ala ad-Din Muhammad II; his mother, Ay-Chichek, was of Turkmen origin. Sources give his year of birth as 1198 or 1199, and the spelling and meaning of his Turkic byname are read in several ways.

At first his father named not him but his younger half-brother Uzlagh-Shah as heir, at the insistence of Terken Khatun, Jalal ad-Din’s grandmother and a powerful figure at court. Jalal ad-Din was given Ghazna and the neighbouring provinces, in what is now Afghanistan, as his appanage. In 1219–1220 the armies of Genghis Khan invaded Transoxiana and took Bukhara and Samarkand. Muhammad II, in retreat, died at the end of 1220 on an island in the Caspian Sea, having passed the throne to his eldest son.

Fearing a plot among the emirs of Gurganj, Jalal ad-Din left the capital, defeated a Mongol detachment near Nasa and reached Ghazna. With the army he gathered there he routed the corps of Shigi Qutuqu at Parwan, north of Kabul, in 1221 — one of the heaviest defeats the Mongols suffered during Genghis Khan’s western campaign. Soon afterwards his allied emirs quarrelled over the spoils and withdrew their troops, and at the end of the same year the Khwarazmshah was beaten by Genghis Khan himself on the Indus. According to tradition, he leapt on horseback from the high bank into the river and swam across; his family perished.

With some four thousand men Jalal ad-Din spent about three years fighting local rulers in the Punjab and Sind; Iltutmish, the Sultan of Delhi, refused him refuge. In 1224 he returned to Iran and brought under his rule Kerman, Fars and Persian Iraq, where his brother Ghiyath ad-Din Pir-Shah had been ruling. In 1225 he took Tabriz, the capital of the Eldiguzids, and made it his seat.

In August of that year he defeated a Georgian army at Garni, and in 1226 he captured Tbilisi. In 1227–1228 he fought a hard battle against the Mongols outside Isfahan. His constant wars, however, united his neighbours against him: in 1230, after taking Akhlat following a long siege, he was defeated that August at Yassıçemen near Erzincan by an alliance of the Seljuk sultan Kayqubad I and the Ayyubid al-Ashraf.

In 1231 a new Mongol army under Chormaqan invaded Azerbaijan. Left almost without troops, Jalal ad-Din withdrew into the mountains near Diyarbakır, where he was killed by a Kurd in August of that year. His death ended the rule of the Khwarazmshah dynasty.

Most of what is known about him comes from the biography written by his secretary, Shihab ad-Din al-Nasawi, and from the histories of Juvayni and Juzjani. In Uzbekistan he is honoured as a national hero: the 800th anniversary of his birth was marked in 1999, when a memorial complex opened in Urgench, and in 2000 the military Order of Jaloliddin Manguberdi was established. He is also remembered in Turkmenistan and Turkey.