Na‘l-baha, ‘price of the horseshoe'

The same ambiguity is evident in another term used for the provisioning of the army, na‘l-baha, literally, ‘the price of the horseshoe'. The term is used for two groups of cases: for the payment a city makes to a conqueror in order to avoid (unrestrained) sacking; and for a payment a city or a region makes to an army on the march.

The first instance comes from Sanjar's chancery. In a letter, a representative of a region in northern Khurasan petitions the sultan to let an army go to other places so that they can collect their na‘l-baha and other dues there.^[107] The levy is not regarded as an abuse here, rather part of the normal dues an army can ask the inhabitants of a region to deliver. In Kirman in the 1170s, the pretender Bahramshah asked for a considerable na‘l-baha, which city notables divided up and delivered to a shihna (a kind of military governor). Na‘l-baha as a term for a payment made to avoid the sacking of a town is attested from the Timurid period.^[108]

Terms such as barat and na‘l-baha thus have two aspects. In some cases, they seem to be accepted as regular forms of taking in goods and monies the army needs; in other cases, they clearly mean plunder and extortion. It is not always possible to make a clear distinction between ‘non-violent' and ‘vio­lent' forms of using such instruments of taxation. Armies until the coming of the Seljuqs tried to avoid living off the land (but did so nevertheless in a number of cases). Later, this became common practice, and objections, if ever raised, seem to have been on a quite theoretical level.