BUKHARA

When Abdallah II died in 1598, his son and successor Abdalmumin, who had spent a number of years as governor of Balkh, managed to stay on the throne only a few months before he was ousted and killed in the disorders that followed his father's death. No other adult male son of Abdallah II had survived to take over – a curious feature in a system where a plethora of sons and grandsons born of a ruler's several wives was often the problem; it seems that in this case Abdallah II, perhaps inspired by the example of his allies the Ottomans but applying his own modified version, had suppressed all the male contenders for succession except Abdalmumin.

What Abdallah did not do, however, was to eliminate his brother-in-law Jani Muhammad, whose father Yar Muhammad had taken refuge with the Shaybanids of Bukhara after the conquest of the khanate of Astrakhan by the Russians in 1556. Jani Muhammad married the Uzbek khan's sister, and he acceded to the vacated throne in Bukhara as the first ruler of a dynasty called Janid or Ashtarkhanid; the Janids too were Juchids, but not through Shiban but through Tuqay Timur, one of Juchi's other sons (in fact, his thirteenth son), so that some historians prefer the name “Tuqay-Timurids” to the genealogically less revealing appellations Janids or Ashtarkhanids.