In spite of endless trouble with rebellious nobles, Subhān Kulī Khān found a leisure to cultivate the Muses; and he was also the author of a book on medicine which epitomises the lore of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna, but suggests nostrums in the shape of prayers and talismans of which none of those worthies would have approved. He was now eighty years of age, and felt that a time had come when he must bid adieu to ambition. He called around him his nobles, and publicly designated his son Mukīm Khān, who ruled at Balkh, as his successor. Then he peacefully resigned his breath after a reign of twenty-four years, A.H. 1114 (1702). Mukīm Khān found an obstacle in his path in the person of his elder brother `Ubaydullah, and a civil war broke out in which the great Uzbeg nobles of Bokhārā found their account. The faithful Mohammad Bi took up the gauntlet for Mukīm, while the elder pretender’s cause was espoused by Rahīm Bi, the chief of the powerful Mangit tribe. It lasted for five years, when, thanks to his nominal vassal’s support, `Ubaydullah triumphed. He chafed under the dictation of the Mangit king-maker, and was promptly suppressed by poison; another brother named Abū-l-Fayz being elevated to the throne in his stead, A.H. 1130 (1717). The new sovereign’s character was wholly deficient in the strength of purpose so needful in one who aspires to rule his fellow-men, and he owed to his utter insignificance his recognition by the turbulent nobles who surrounded him. It is the fate of all long-lived dynasties to end miserably with a succession of _rois fainéants_; and the Astrakhanides were no exception to the rule. Not only did Abū-l-Fayz meekly submit to the dictation of Rahīm Bi; he bowed the neck to a foreign potentate, and disgraced his country in the eyes of Islām.