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Updated: June 20, 2025
The greatest military success were the campaigns of General Li Kuang-li to Ferghana in 104 and 102 B.C. The result of the campaigns was to bring under tribute all the small states in the Tarim basin and some of the states of western Turkestan.
Succeeding to the throne of Ferghana at the age of twelve the great conqueror's youth was full of romantic vicissitudes, of sharp reverses and brilliant achievements. He was only four and twenty when he succeeded in making himself master of Cabul. He was forty-four, when with a force of twelve thousand men he shattered the huge armies of Ibrahim at Panipat and made himself master of Delhi.
These latter advanced to Ferghana and the Jaxartes; and the Yue-chi not long afterwards retreating from the Usiun, another nomadic race, passed the 'Su' on the north and occupied the tracts between the Oxus and the Caspian. The Su were thus in the vicinity of the Bactrian Greeks; the Yue-chi in the neighborhood of the Parthians.
I must pass lightly over the proceedings of the next seven years, eventful though they were. In those years, from 1507 to 1514, Bábar marching northwards, recovered Fergháná, defeated the Uzbeks, and took Bokhára and Samarkand. But the Uzbeks, returning, defeated Bábar at Kulmalik, and forced him to abandon those two cities.
To the third of these, Umershaikh Mirzá, was assigned the province of Fergháná, known also, from the name of its capital, as Khokand. Umershaikh was the father of Bábar. He was an ambitious man, bent on increasing his dominions.
Bábar, indeed, had been accustomed to a system even more autocratic. Whether in Fergháná, in Samarkand, or in Kábul, he had not only been the supreme lord in the capital, but also the feudal lord of the governors of provinces appointed by himself. Those governors, those chiefs of districts or of jaghírs, did indeed exercise an authority almost absolute within their respective domains.
It was not only the proud capital of the caliphate: it was, besides, the great market for the trade of the East, the meeting-place of many nations, where caravans from China and Thibet, from India, and from Ferghana in the modern Turkestan, met throngs of merchants from Armenia and Constantinople, from Egypt and Arabia.
Then, troubles having arisen in Samarkand, he made a dash at that city, then the most important in Central Asia. He held on, however, until the news that Fergháná was invaded compelled him to quit his hold. On the eve of his departure he was prostrated by a severe illness, and when at length he reached Fergháná it was to hear that his capital had surrendered to his enemies.
He was, in fact, a king without a kingdom. 'To save Andijan, he wrote, 'I had given up Samarkand: and now I found that I had lost the one without preserving the other. He persevered, however, recovered Fergháná, though a Fergháná somewhat shorn of its proportions, and once more made a dash at Samarkand.
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