From roughly 1500, Shaybanid Uzbeks seized Transoxiana and held its ancient oasis cities — Bukhara the Noble, Timur's Samarkand — founding the three Muslim khanates that would rule Central Asia for four centuries. As ocean trade routes shifted global commerce, regional caravan networks persisted but the khanates grew more isolated and fought one another. The Great Game drew British and Russian attention; Russia conquered them piecemeal between 1865 and 1876. The Soviets abolished them in the 1920s and redrawn boundaries created the Central Asian republics still on the map today.
For four centuries after Genghis Khan and Timur, three Muslim kingdoms ruled the old heartland of Central Asia and held the fabled caravan cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. Their kings claimed descent from Genghis Khan and ruled a land of madrasas, blue-domed shrines, and slave markets. But the world had moved on. Once the great sea routes opened around 1500, older overland trade patterns lost some of their centrality and reoriented, even as regional caravan commerce continued, and the khanates grew poorer, more isolated, and locked in war with one another. They were heirs to an old order, adapting under worsening pressure. In the nineteenth century an expanding Russia swallowed them one by one, and the Soviets erased them from the map. These were the last khans of the Silk Road.