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The Khwarezem was a region along the lower Oxus River, the modern Amu Darya, in what is now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It lay above the Aral Sea and along the path of the Silk Road. Its people were also known as the Khwarezem.

Though their identity and that of the region dated back to the Bronze Age, the people of the Khwarezem underwent a series of cultural and linguistic transitions during the second half of the first millenium A.D. By the founding of the Kwarezmid Empire in the late 11th century, Islamicization was complete, Turkicization was well in process, and the ancient East Iranian Khwarezem language was on the way to its extinction in the 14th century.

The Khwarezmid Empire did not represent a resurgence of the Khwarezem people, but was the name taken by the dynasty of its Turkic rulers whose rise began with being made governors of Khwarezem for defeating the Kara Khitan in 1073. They were, in fact, the descendants of a Seljuk mamluk, probably of Kipchak origin, and were foreign overlords.

The Kwarezmid emerged the victors of a century-long three-way struggle with the Seljuks and the Kara Khitan that resulted the destruction of the Seljuk Empire and, by about 1200, the extension of Kwarezmid control over Transoxiana and much of what is now modern Iran. Their power, though, was widely resented and did not survive the arrival of the Mongols, its destruction being completed in 1220. The son of the last Kwarezmid shah, Jalal al-Din, claimed only the title sultan and was murdered in 1231 after years of resistance to the Mongols. The remnants of his forces became mercenaries and were responsible for the final expulsion of the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1244.