His son `Abdullah was universally recognised as the successor to Amīr Kazghan’s peculiar office of Prime Minister. The residence of the Khāns--in fact the capital of the western branch of Chaghatāys--had lately been Sālī Sarāy, but was transferred to Samarkand, owing, we are told, to `Abdullah’s great love for that town. Thither he carried his puppet, Bayān Kulī; but, falling in love with the Khān’s wife, he put the ill-starred husband to death, and set up in his stead Tīmūr Shāh Oghlān, A.H. 759 (1357). The nobles were deeply incensed at this arbitrary and cruel deed, and, with the intent of avenging their prince’s death, one of their number, named Bayān Seldūz, raised an army and marched on Samarkand. On his way thither he was joined by Hāji Birlās[397] in Kesh,[398] and the united forces administered a crushing defeat to `Abdullah, who fled across the Oxus to Andarāb, where he remained in obscurity till his death. The family and partisans of Amīr Kazghan were now scattered far and wide, and the government of Transoxiana passed into the hands of Bayān Seldūz[399] and Hāji Birlās. The former, however, was a hopeless drunkard, and utterly unfit to rule in times so charged with storm. The western Chaghatāy states were parcelled out among a host of prominent nobles, whose rivalries plunged the country into the throes of civil war; and the town of Kesh, with its immediate dependencies, was all that Hāji Birlās could call his own. At this period the chief of Jatah, or Moghūlistan, was Tūghluk Tīmūr Khān.[400] Perceiving the state of disruption into which the kingdom of Transoxiana had lapsed, he resolved to take up the fallen sceptre. Gathering round him a large army, he set out from Kāshghar for the Khojend River, A.H. 761 (1360). After crossing it he was joined by Amīr Bāyazīd Jalā´ir, and they proceeded together in the direction of Shahr-i-Sabz. Hāji Birlās, hearing of the Khān’s approach, attempted to organise resistance; but, at the last moment, he deemed discretion the better part of valour, and fled towards Khorāsān ere the two armies had come into conflict. The darkest period of a country’s annals is often illumined by the light of a better time to come. Transoxiana, torn by civil war, and a prey to the worst form of tyranny, that of a horde of greedy and imperious nobles, sighed not in vain for a deliverer. Rarely in history do we find a state of society readier to deliver itself into the hands of a man of destiny than was the shattered empire of the Chaghatāy Khāns in the middle of the fifteenth century.[401]