Mohammed, enraged at this slaughter, marched to Samarkand, stormed the city, and for three days and nights his troops did naught else but slay people and plunder; then he laid siege to the fortress and captured it. Osman came out dressed in a grave shroud; a naked sword hung from his neck down in front of him. He fell before Mohammed and begged for life abjectly. The Shah would have spared him, but Osman’s wife, the Shah’s daughter, rushed in and demanded the death of her husband. He had preferred an earlier wife, the daughter of the Gurkhan, and had forced her, the Shah’s daughter, to serve at a feast that detested and inferior woman. Osman had to die, and with him died his whole family, including the daughter of the Gurkhan. Mohammed joined all Osman’s lands to the Empire, and made Samarkand a new capital. He further increased his Empire by a part of the kingdom of Gur, which extended from Herat to the sacred river of India, the Ganges. After the death, in 1205, of Shihab ud din, fourth sovereign of the Gur line, his provinces passed under officers placed there as prefects. When Mohammed took Balkh and Herat, Mahmud, nephew of Shihab, kept merely Gur the special domain of the family, and even for this he was forced to give homage to the Kwaresmian monarch. Mahmud had reigned seven years in that reduced state when he was killed in his own palace. Public opinion in this case held the Shah to be a murderer, and beyond doubt with full justice. Ali Shir, the Shah’s brother, who had proclaimed himself sovereign so hurriedly when Mohammed was returning, disguised as a slave, from his war against the Gurkhan, was now at the Gur capital; he declared himself Mahmud’s successor and begged the Shah to confirm him as vassal. Mohammed sent an officer, as it seemed, for this ceremony, but when Ali Shir was about to put on the robe of honor sent him the officer swept off his head with a sword stroke, and produced thereupon the command of his master to do so. After this revolting deed the Gur principality was joined to Mohammed’s dominion (1213). Three years later, 1216, Mohammed won Ghazni from a Turk general once a subject of Shihab ud din. This Turk had seized the province at the dissolution of Gur dominion. In the archives of Ghazni the Shah came on letters from the Kalif Nassir at Bagdad to the Gur Khans, in which he gave warning against the Kwaresmian Shahs, and incited to attack them, advising a junction with the Kara Kitans for that purpose.