Recruitment

Armies in medieval Iran and Central Asia were not always professional forces. Levies from the population played an important role at all times. Whereas a part of these levies may have been volunteers, others probably were pressed into service, but the evidence for this is meagre.

Some regions, in particular in the east, were known to be home to warlike populations. Tenth-century ‘Arab geographers' describe villages and rural regions in Khurasan and Transoxiana yielding thousands of warriors, in most cases probably peasants. But we do not know how the actual recruitment of peasants into the army was organised, and thus the extent of intimidation and coercion cannot be assessed. However, the civilian settled population was trained in the use of arms to a certain degree, and, in general, troops recruited from the general populace seem to have obeyed their commanders.

The general populace was also mobilised to fight internal enemies. This is mentioned in the reports about the wars against the Prophet Muqanna‘ in the oasis of Bukhara (778). Not only warriors but also men operating siege machinery or digging moats were recruited.

General mobilisation was necessary when such enemies as the steppe Turks came close to the Samanid domains. Inversely, when the Samanids (a dynasty ruling over eastern Iran and Transoxiana in the ninth and tenth ^[86] centuries) were about to conquer Sistan in south-eastern Iran, the regional rulers mobilised everybody, including the rural levies. The Ghaznavids (who ruled in Khurasan c. 990-1040) used general mobilisation as well; they called on the local lords to join them in their campaigns together with their troops.^[87] The same terms are used for the general mobilisation of nomad warriors, which was the rule after the coming of the Qarakhanids (a Turkish dynasty who ruled in Transoxiana from around 1000 to the early thirteenth century) and the Seljuqs (1030s, to rule over much of Iran and other regions until the mid or late twelfth century) to the Iranian world. That military service was a duty for every able-bodied Turk is formulated explicitly by Yusuf Khass Hajib in his Wisdom of Royal Glory. The Seljuqs do not seem to have made a difference between their followers and their warriors.^[88]

The Mongols, for their part, not only mobilised their own people and all other steppe dwellers, but recruited Iranians as soldiers and workers early on. In many cases, locals were used as ‘cannon fodder' to fill moats with their bodies, as, for example, at the citadels in Bukhara and Samarkand. Later, Iranians were employed as warriors, and service in the Mongol army appears as one of the basic duties of the conquered population, on the same basis as paying taxes. The terms hashar and bigar occur, both of which refer to forms of corvee.

Another term for the recruitment of people into the Mongol and later Timurid armies is nambardar, and there was a troop called the nambardar levy (charik-i nambardar).^[90] This concerned mostly Iranians, and sometimes scholars and fiscal administrators were also recruited. Nambardar was used to increase the numbers of warriors for large campaigns; the troops were recruited regionally, and they had to bring their own equipment. Timur used Khurasanian nambardar troops to hold the city of Tiflis, which he had conquered.^[91] The right to recruit people was based on the claim that the (Mongol) ruler had the right to decide where people would be living; a large­scale relocation of persons also appears as nambardar. In the later Timurid period, nambardar appears as a fiscal duty, which was apparently collected from the population in exceptional situations.

Recruitment of the general populace thus went from volunteers to forced conscripts. Service in the army was seen by the Mongols as one form of the general obligation of conquered peoples to serve, and military service comes close to corvee. But all the same, the level of violence used in recruiting warriors, auxiliaries or workers for the armies is nowhere stated. It can be inferred, however, from the fact that some people tried to bribe recruiters in order not to serve.