Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/149

 118 within the reign of the Chaghatai Khan, Buzun, and at a time when no Khan was reigning in Moghulistan. As far as can be gathered from the imperfect chronology of those times, as furnished by Mirza Haidar's history, Isán Bugha, the first Moghul Khan, was already dead, and the second, Tugbluk Timur, had not yet succeeded him. Probably Amir Bulaji, the Dughlát, was the Ulusbegi, or chief of the tribe, and he, as we are told, was a Musulman of very recent date. Whether the disappearance of the friars had any connection with the rise of Islam in the country at that time, or with the general disorder that prevailed, can only be a matter of conjecture. All that is certain is that no other European is heard of in Central Asia till the embassy of Ruy Gonzalez Clavijo from Henry III. of Spain to the Court of Timur, which reached Samarkand in 1404, or about a year before Timur's death. The narrative of this embassy, however, does not relate to the part of Central Asia now alluded to, but to the centre of the kingdoms, mentioned above, as forming a barrier against the misrule of the barbarous nomads farther east. Don Ruy's narrative therefore cannot be utilised to throw light on the obscurities of Mirza Haidar's history, for all that the Tárikh-i-Rashidi relates concerning Transoxiana is amply elucidated by other Musulman chronicles, and among them some of the best. More properly it should be said that from the middle of the fourteenth century no European is heard of in eastern Central Asia till some fifty and odd years after the death of Mirza Haidar, and when the kingdom of the Moghul Khans, having split up into a number of small States, was, to all intents and purposes, at the end of its existence.

And if there were no European spectators to review what was passing in eastern Central Asia, neither does there appear to have been any Musulman annalist contemporary, or even nearly so, with our author, who devoted attention to the Moghul Khanates during this dark period. At any rate, I have met with no writer, who has done more than allude to them casually. Perhaps the book which casts the most light on the country and the times, is the Zafar-Náma of Sharaf-ud-Din Ali, Yazdi. As one of the historians of Timur's reign, and the chronicler of his campaigns in Moghulistan, Sharaf-ud-Din has necessarily become an authority on the period ending with the date of Timur's death, although he had never set himself the special task of writing a history of Moghulistan and its