Rahimquli Khan

Rahimquli Khan was the sixth ruler of the Kungrat dynasty of the Khanate of Khiva. He was the son of Allah Quli Khan, the grandson of Muhammad Rahim Khan I and the elder brother of the next khan, Muhammad Amin. His year of birth is not known: some publications give 1804, but his father Allah Quli was born around 1794, so that date is unlikely to be right.

Before he took the throne he governed the province of Hazarasp and took part in his father’s campaigns. In Agahi’s chronicle he is named as the leader of the expedition in which the Jamshidi tribe was resettled from Khorasan to Khorezm. In the autumn of 1842, when Allah Quli marched against the Bukharan fortress of Charjuy, Rahimquli obtained his father’s leave to hurry ahead with a separate force and approach the fortress directly.

After Allah Quli’s death in November 1842, Rahimquli took the throne, on 23 November by the usual dating. On 27 December of that year he set his seal to an “obligatory act” with Russia, regarded as the first and only written agreement between the Russian Empire and the Khanate of Khiva. In May 1843 the khan’s envoy reached the court of Emperor Nicholas I in Saint Petersburg. Diplomatic contacts with the Ottoman Empire, Iran and Afghanistan were kept up as well.

His reign was marked by tense relations with Bukhara: Emir Nasrullah besieged the fortress of Hazarasp, and Khivan detachments repeatedly raided the neighbourhood of Bukhara. Campaigns were sent towards Merv to subdue the Sariq and Salor Turkmens, led by the khan’s younger brother, the inaq Muhammad Amin.

Under Rahimquli Khan the poets Rojix, Dilovar, Said Mirza Junayd and Mirza Masiho worked in Khiva. The historian Agahi went on writing the history of Khorezm and devoted a work to this reign, “Zubdat al-tawarikh” (“The Cream of Chronicles”); the chronicle runs to January 1846.

Sources differ on the year of the khan’s death, 1845 or 1846. Russian-language reference works and most surveys give his reign as 1842–1845, while the edition of Agahi’s chronicle gives 1842–1846. The throne passed to his brother, Muhammad Amin Khan.