Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/97

 66 other than Alti-Shahr. Mirza Haidar nowhere specifies the races which furnished the rank and file of these forces. When entering on the conquest of Kashghar, in 1514, he gives an analysis of the chiefs of Sultan Said's army, nearly all of whom were Moghuls of various clans, or members of tribes who had long previously thrown in their lot with the Moghuls, and the number of tribal followers that each chief brought with him is specified in each case. If the figures given are correct—and as they are not mere round numbers, they appear as if intended to be exact—it is evident that the tribal following which each chief could muster was a mere handful, for the total of the tribesmen mentioned does not approach that of the entire army of 4700 men, as he states it. The remainder must have been mercenaries and adventurers who were, no doubt, to be found in abundance all over Central Asia in those times, in the persons of Kipcháks, Turkomans, Afghans, Kárluks and what not. On this occasion, too, a great effort was being made and a prize worth winning was at stake; the army was raised, moreover, in Farghána and Moghulistan, and not in peaceful Alti-Shahr. Thus it was probably a much more numerous one than those afterwards employed on distant expeditions beyond the mountains, though it may be fairly conjectured that the composition was very similar in all cases. In the expedition of Sultan Said against Ladak, Kashmir and Tibet in 1532, the author puts the total of the army at the round figure of 5000 men, but in this instance he gives none of the minute particulars that he records with regard to the 4700 and their supports, who invaded Kashghar. The round number is likely, therefore, to be one of the many similar exaggerations in which his book abounds; for it is improbable that as large a force would have been thought necessary for this enterprise as for the wresting of Kashghar and the whole of Alti-Shahr from so formidable an enemy as Mirza Abá Bakr. He tells us, it is true, that Ladak was incapable of supporting the Khan’s army, but this might have been the case with even half 5000 men and their complement of horses.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this land of the Six Cities, and the one that has chiefly struck the imagination of