Urgench

Urgench, Gurganj to the Persians and later called Old Urgench, was the capital of Khwarazm on the old channels of the Oxus. Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1221, killing most of its people, but trade along the road from the Golden Horde's camps on the Volga to Asia let it recover. By the 1320s it was almost independent under the Golden Horde, and the governor Qutlugh Timur built a madrasa and the tall minaret that bears his name; his wife Turabek Khanum, daughter of the Golden Horde's khan, added a mosque and a mausoleum. Ibn Battuta, who came about 1333, called it the largest, most beautiful and most important city of the Turks, with fine bazaars and broad streets and a crowd so thick he could not ride through the market.

From 1359 the Sufi dynasty, a Kungrat family, ruled Khwarazm from Urgench. When it seized Kath and Khiva from the Chagatayids, Timur demanded the towns back and attacked the city again and again. He sacked it in 1379 and, after a second revolt in 1388, razed it, massacred its people, wrecked its irrigation and had barley sown on the site, leaving one mosque standing.

The city revived slowly. The Uzbeks under Shaybani took it in 1505 after an eleven-month siege. In the seventeenth century the Darialyk channel ran short of water, the khan Abu'l-Ghazi moved what remained of the population south, and Khiva replaced Urgench as the capital.