Chach

Chach, called Shash in Arabic sources and later Tashkent, lies in an oasis watered by the Chirchik and its canals, where the Syr Darya steppe meets the valleys of the Tian Shan. Genghis Khan destroyed the city in 1219, but it was rebuilt and lived off the Silk Road. Timur treated Tashkent as a strategic base; in the spring of 1391 he marched from it against Tokhtamysh, khan of the Golden Horde, in the Kipchak steppe, and returned to it in triumph. He is said to have ordered the Zangi-Ata mausoleum built, beside a spring where he treated an injured leg. In the later fifteenth century the city was a residence of the Moghul khan Yunus Khan.

In the sixteenth century Tashkent belonged to the Shaybanids, and Suyunch Khoja Khan gathered poets and scholars at his court there; Keldi Muhammad ruled it until 1604. Then the Kazakh khans Tauekel and Esim took over, and Bukhara, by treaty, left Tashkent, Turkestan and the Syr Darya towns to them; the city stayed in the Kazakh khanate until 1723. In the eighteenth century it split into four districts that fought each other until, in 1784, Yunus Khoja of Shaykhantaur united them into an independent state, which lasted until 1807. In 1809 Kokand annexed Tashkent, then the richest city in Central Asia with about 100,000 people, and ringed it with a moat and an adobe rampart twenty kilometres long with twelve gates.