Local Coinage Sparse and Crude Under the Shaybanids
WE ARE DISCUSSING Central Asia in the 16th century, from the viewpoint of the Tajiks, if not exactly Tajikistan. What is now the Republic of Tajikistan was the back country of Samarkand and Tashkent; Samarkand was the sun and Tashkent the moon, as it were, of the Tajik people even though both cities lie today in Uzbekistan.
The Timurids had had their run, their territories all broken up in little pieces ruled by petty princes. The last of them were conquered by the Shaybanids. To the west were the Safavids of Iran and to the south were the Mughals in India.
The Shaybanids traced their line back to a grandson of Chingis Khan the Great Mongol. Most of the ancestors were Turks who spoke Persian. They got their start in what is now the Tyumen region of Russia, about a thousand miles east of Moscow.
They used their lineage as a claim to legitimacy in Siberia, which was conceived then as excluding what we now think of as the Russian Far East, and to southern lands from Kazakhstan down into Iran and Afghanistan.
The first thing they did was unite the Uzbek tribes, then they confronted and overcame the Timurids, taking Samarkand, Herat, Balkh, and Bukhara in the early
