Balkh

Balkh, the ancient Bactra, lies in an oasis south of the Oxus and was once among the richest cities of Khorasan. In 1220 Genghis Khan sacked it, killed its people and razed every building that could be defended. When Ibn Battuta passed through around 1333, under the Kartid rulers, he found it dilapidated and empty, yet its mosques and colleges still showed the lapis-blue inscriptions of their builders. In 1370 Timur defeated his rival Amir Husayn at Balkh, and an assembly there acknowledged him as ruler; he later treated the city harshly again, and it never regained its former standing.

The Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybani entered Balkh in 1506, and for the next two centuries the city was fought over by Uzbek Bukhara, Safavid Persia and the Mughals. The young Babur held it for a year in 1511–1512 before Bukhara's armies forced him to retire to Kabul. In 1646 Shah Jahan's army turned Balkh into a Mughal province under his son Aurangzeb, only to lose it again in 1647. Through these wars the nine-domed mosque known as Haji Piyada, the earliest Islamic monument yet identified in Afghanistan, and the shrine of Abu Nasr Parsa remained the city's landmarks.

Nader Shah took Balkh in 1736. After his death a local Uzbek, Haji Khan, declared it independent in 1747, and by the early nineteenth century Kabul held the district in name only. Mazar-i-Sharif, nearby, slowly outgrew the old city.