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History of Central Asia

The Middle Ages

During the last decades of the 4th century CE, a new, powerful empire emerged in
Mongolia, the political heartland of Central Asia. The Juan-juan (Rouran) had stepped into
the place vacated by the Xiongnu. Chinese descriptions barely distinguish them from their
predecessors. Their history is an incessant series of campaigns against their neighbours,
especially the Chinese.

The Turks

In 552 the Juan-juan empire was destroyed by a

revolution of considerable consequences for world
history. The tribe of the Turks (Tujue in Chinese

zoom_in transcription), living within the Juan-juan empire and

Central Asia in the Middle Ages.
apparently specializing in metallurgy, revolted and
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
seized power. It established an empire that for about
two centuries remained a dominant force in Asia. The Turks are the first people in history
known to have spoken a Turkic language and the first Central Asian people to have left a
written record. Inscribed funerary stelae still standing in Mongolia, mostly near the Orhon
River, are invaluable from both a linguistic and a historical point of view. These Orhon
inscriptions provide insights into the internal stresses of a pastoral nomad state that, at the
height of its power, stretched from the borders of China to those of Byzantium.

Division of the empire

The founder of the Turk empire, Bumin—who bore the title of khagan, or great khan—died
shortly after his victory. Soon afterward the empire split into two halves. The eastern part,
ruled by Bumin’s son Muhan (ruled 553–572), was centred on Mongolia. The seat of the
western part, ruled by Bumin’s brother Ishtemi (553–573?), lay in Ektagh, an unidentified
place, possibly in either the Ili or Chu river valley.

In alliance with the Sāsānians, the Turks attacked and destroyed the Hephthalite empire
(560), thereby gaining control over an important portion of the Silk Road leading from

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China to Byzantium. Under Ishtemi’s successor, Tardu (573–603), the western Turk empire
continued to thrive and, in its westward expansion, reached the borders of Byzantium. By
that time the eastern Turk empire was facing grave difficulties caused partly by internal
strife and partly by the vigorous Central Asian policies of the Chinese Sui dynasty. While
the weakening of the eastern Turks gave preponderance to the western Turks, basic
solidarity between the two parts of the Turk empire apparently was maintained. They both
fell victim to Chinese attacks. In 630 the Tang emperor Taizong occupied Mongolia, and in
659 Chinese forces under Gaozong, penetrating as far west as Bukhara and Samarkand,
subdued the western Turks.

Reunification

In 683 the Turks revolted. The Turk empire was reborn and reunified under the khagan
Elterish (683–692). Temporary setbacks notwithstanding, the Turk empire was now centred
on Mongolia, and it prospered under the rule of Kapghan (Mochuo; c. 692–716) and Bilge
(Pijia; 716–734) but disintegrated soon afterward. In spite of the relatively short duration of
their state, the historical role of the Turks is considerable. They linked China, Iran, India,
and Byzantium and gave their name to all the Turkic-speaking peoples. The solidarity that
exists between these peoples to this day goes back to the Turks.

The Uighurs

The replacement of the Turks by the Uighurs in 744 was little else than a coup d’état. There
was virtually no difference between the Turk and Uighur languages, and the bulk of the
Turks, although no longer the ruling stratum, probably remained within the boundaries of
the newly formed Uighur state.

The Uighur empire

This new empire comprised many tribes and seems to have been headed by a smaller tribal
confederation standing under Uighur leadership. This federation is referred to in Chinese
sources as the Nine Clans (Jiuxing), whereas Islamic sources and the Orhon inscriptions
call it the Tokuz Oğuz. There are some indications that the Uighur empire stood under dual
leadership, the khagan belonging to one tribe and the prime minister, in whose hands much
of the effective power rested, to another.

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Relations with China were the dominant factor in Uighur foreign affairs. The Uighurs
proved somewhat less threatening for the Chinese than had the Xiongnu or the Turks. Their
help to the Chinese, plagued by the rebellion of An Lushan (755) and by repeated Tibetan
incursions, was appreciated and paid for through trade conducted on terms unfavourable to
China. In exchange for Uighur horses, often of dubious quality, the Chinese were expected
to provide the Uighurs with much-coveted riches. The third Uighur khagan—Mouyu by his
Chinese name (759–780)—visited Luoyang in China, where he was converted to an Iranian
religion, Manichaeism. Its adoption brought to the Uighur land many Sogdians, whose
growing influence on state affairs was resented by the Turkic Uighurs and led to Mouyu’s
assassination.

The Uighur empire was governed from a city on the Orhon River, Karabalghasun, the
foundations of which were probably laid by the Turks and can still be seen. A Muslim
traveler, Tamīm ibn Baḥr, who visited the city about 821, speaks in admiring terms of this
fortified town lying in a cultivated country—a far cry from the traditional picture of the
pastoral nomad existence.

The Kyrgyz invasion

In 840 another Turkic people, the Kyrgyz, put an abrupt end to Uighur rule in Mongolia.
Coming from the upper reaches of the Yenisey River in north-central Siberia, the Kyrgyz
represented a lower degree of civilization than the rather sophisticated Uighurs. Their
political ambitions did not lead them into campaigns against China, and thus virtually no
records exist concerning their activities. Content to stay in the backwaters of history, the
Kyrgyz were among the very few peoples to survive the Mongol tide that was to come in
the 13th century.

The Uighur kingdom

The Kyrgyz invasion, while putting an end to Uighur power, did not annihilate the people.
Fleeing Uighur groups settled on the Chinese border in what is now Gansu province and in
East Turkistan in the Turfan (Tulufan) region, which had been an Uighur protectorate since
the end of the 8th century. Falling back now on the Turfan oases and setting up their capital
city in Kucha (Kuqa), the fugitive Uighurs created a remarkably stable and prosperous
kingdom that lasted four centuries (c. 850–1250). Because of the dry climate of the region,
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many buildings, wall paintings, and manuscripts written in a variety of languages have been
preserved. They reveal a complex, refined civilization in which Buddhism, Manichaeism,
and Christianity existed side by side, practiced by Turks as well as by Tokharians,
Sogdians, and other Iranian peoples in the region.

When the time of the Mongol conquests came, the Uighurs lived up to their best cultural
traditions. Realizing that resistance would be vain and would lead only to the destruction of
his country, Barchuk, the ruler of the Uighurs of Kucha, of his own free will submitted to
the Mongols. Uighur officials and scribes were the first “civil servants” of the Mongol
empire and exerted a beneficial civilizing influence on the conquerors. The Sogdian script
used by the Uighurs was adopted by the Mongols, who in turn passed it on to the Manchus.
Side by side with the Cyrillic alphabet, it is still in use in Mongolia.

The Khitans

The first people known to have spoken a Mongol language were the Khitans. Mentioned
from the 5th century CE, this people, living in the forests of Manchuria, had contacts with
the Turks as well as with the Uighurs. In 924 their leader, Abaoji, defeated the Kyrgyz and
offered the Uighurs the possibility of a resettlement in their former country. The Khitans
conquered northern China, which they ruled under the dynastic name Liao (907–1125) until
they were ousted by the Juchen, also originating in Manchuria, who founded the Jin
(Juchen) dynasty (1115–1234) of northern China, which was in turn replaced by that of yet
another Altaic people, the Mongols. Cathay, an early Western denomination of China,
derives from the name Khitan (Khitai). The spread of this name, still used in Russian for
China, is but one sign of the Khitans’ extraordinary impact on history.

Driven from China by the Juchen, in 1124 some Khitans moved westward under Yelü
Dashi’s leadership and created the Karakhitan (Black Khitai, or Western Liao) state. Its
centre lay in the Semirechye and the Chu valley, where the city of Balāsaghūn was located.
Founded by the Sogdians, Balāsaghūn was by then occupied by the Muslim Karakhanids
(Qarakhanids), a Turkish people closely related to the Uighurs and whose ruling house was
probably descended from the Karluks. The Karakhanids, who became Muslims during the
mid-10th century, ruled over both the Semirechye and the Tarim Basin south of the Tien
Shan. While Balāsaghūn remained the residence of their principal ruler, Kashgar seems to

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have served as a religious and cultural metropolis. In 992 they occupied Bukhara,
previously the capital of the Iranian Sāmānid dynasty (819–1005), under whose benign rule
the cities of Transoxania had become celebrated centres of Islamic culture and learning.

The Karakhanids maintained the tribal traditions of the steppe world to a much greater
extent than did other Muslim Turkish dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids or the Seljuqs, but
they proved no less accomplished at combining native Turkish and Irano-Islamic culture.
The earliest surviving work of Turkish literature shaped by Islamic values, the Kutudgu
bilig (“Knowledge Which Leads to Happiness”; Eng. trans. The Wisdom of Royal Glory),
was written by Yusuf Khass Hajib of Balāsaghūn in the style of contemporary Irano-Islamic
“mirrors for princes” and was completed in Kashgar in 1069–1070. Almost contemporary
with it was the Dīwān lughat al-Turk (1072–74; Compendium of the Turkic Dialects), an
Arabic dictionary of Khakani, the Middle Turkish dialect spoken by the Karakhanids and
written by Maḥmūd al-Kāshgarī.

From the late 11th century the Karakhanids in Transoxania became vassals of the Seljuqs,
who by this time were already masters of much of the Middle East. Nevertheless, the
Karakhitans had set their hearts on acquiring the Seljuqs’ loosely controlled eastern
provinces. In 1137 Yelü Dashi had obtained the submission of the Karakhanid ruler
Maḥmūd II, and in 1141, in a battle fought near Samarkand, he decisively defeated the last
“Great Seljuq” sultan, Sanjar. The territories under Karakhitan hegemony now extended
across Central Asia as far as the northern bank of the Amu Darya and threatened
Khwārezm, located in the Amu Darya delta. However, their hold on this vast domain was
finally shattered in 1211, through the combined actions of the Khwārezm-Shah ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
Muḥammad (1200–20) and Küchlüg Khan, a fugitive Naiman chieftain in flight from
Genghis Khan’s Mongols.

The Mongol epoch

The creation of the Mongol empire by Genghis Khan was a great feat of political and
military skill that left a lasting imprint on the destinies of both Asia and Europe. The
geographic basis of Genghis’s power, the northwestern parts of which later became known
as Mongolia, had been the centre of such Turkic empires as those of the Turks and Uighurs.

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There are no indications of the time and the manner in which the Mongols took over this
region.

Creation of the Mongol empire

It is probable that Turks were incorporated in the nascent Mongol empire. In a series of
tribal wars that led to the defeat of the Merkits and the Naimans, his most dangerous rivals,
Genghis gained sufficient strength to assume, in 1206, the title of khan. Acting in the
tradition of previous nomad empires of the region, Genghis directed his aggressive policies
primarily against China, then ruled in the north by the Jin dynasty. His western campaigns
were set in motion quite accidentally by a senseless attack on Mongol forces by the fugitive
Naiman prince Küchlüg, and they maintained their momentum through the pursuit of ʿAlāʾ
al-Dīn Muḥammad of Khwārezm, who in 1218 ordered the execution of Mongol envoys
seeking to establish trade relations.

As a result, many of the flourishing cities of Khwārezm, Khorāsān, and Afghanistan were
destroyed, and, by 1223, Mongol armies had crossed the Caucasus. Although an important
Russo-Kipchak force was defeated on May 31, 1223, at the battle of the Kalka, the Mongols
did not make a definite thrust into eastern Europe until the winter of 1236–37. The fall of
Kiev in December 1240—with incalculable consequences for Russian history—was
followed by a Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241–42. Although victorious against the
forces of King Béla IV, the Mongols evacuated Hungary and withdrew to southern and
central Russia. Ruled by Batu (d. c. 1255), the Mongols of eastern Europe (the so-called
Golden Horde) became a major factor in that region and exerted a decisive influence on the
development of the Russian states.

Simultaneously with these western campaigns, Genghis’s successor Ögödei (ruled 1229–
41) intensified Mongol pressure in China. Korea was occupied in 1231, and in 1234 the Jin
dynasty succumbed to Mongol attacks. The establishment of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in
China (1260–1368) was accomplished by the great khan Kublai (1260–94), a grandson of
Genghis.

Mongol rule

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The great khan Möngke (1251–59), who had sent his brother Kublai to conquer China,
entrusted another of his brothers, Hülegü, with the task of consolidating the Mongol hold on
Iran. In 1258 Hülegü occupied Baghdad and put an end to the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. He laid
the foundations of a Mongol state in Iran, known as the Il-Khanate (because the il-khan was
subordinate to the great khan in faraway Mongolia or China), which embraced, in addition
to the Iranian plateau, much of Iraq, northern Syria, and eastern and central Anatolia and
which, under Abaqha (1265–82), Arghun (1284–91), Ghāzān (1295–1304), and Öljeitü
(1304–17), became both powerful and highly civilized. Although practically independent,
the il-khans of Iran (Persia) remained loyal to Möngke and Kublai, but, with the passing of
Kublai, the drift toward full independence grew stronger. With Maḥmūd Ghāzān’s decision
to make Islam the state religion—a gesture intended to gain the confidence of the majority
of his subjects—a big step toward integration in the purely Iranian (as opposed to Mongol)
tradition was taken. A lengthy conflict that pitted the il-khans against the Mamlūks of Egypt
was not resolved until 1323, when a peace was concluded between the sultan al-Malik al-
Nāṣir and Abū Saʿīd (1316–35), the last effective il-khan. After Abū Saʿīd’s death the Il-
Khanate, no longer held together by Mongol efficiency, disintegrated.

In Iran and China the Mongol rulers, who increasingly linked their destinies with those of
their sedentary subjects, inevitably began to lose their Mongol identity. But in the Central
Asian heartland the descendants of Chagatai and Ögödei, sons of Genghis, maintained
traditional steppe polities geared to the interests of their nomad followers and increasingly
opposed to the policies of the great khan in China and his ally, the il-khan, in Iran. After
Möngke’s death in 1259 there was a struggle between his two younger brothers, Kublai and
Arigböge. The steppe candidate, Arigböge, lost in his bid for supreme power to the older
Kublai, and further attempts to reestablish the centre of Mongol power in the Central Asian
heartland also were unsuccessful.

The most active and successful proponent of this policy was Kaidu, a grandson of Ögödei,
who made several attempts to carve out an empire for himself in the heartland from lands
ruled by other Mongol princes. In the course of time, he extended his control over most of
the Semirechye, Kashgaria, and Transoxania, and in 1269 he even assumed the title of great
khan. Chagatai’s descendants, enfeoffed with the territories stretching from Bishbaliq in the
Dzungarian Basin westward to Samarkand, were to some extent victims of Kaidu’s

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ambitions but for lack of better alternatives lent him their support. After Kaidu’s death in
1301, however, the Chagataid khan Duwa hastened to make peace with his Mongol kin in
both Iran and China.

Thereafter the Chagataid khanate, coterminous with the Central Asian heartland, enjoyed a
checkered fortune. For the next 30 years it remained united, but during the 1330s and ’40s it
split into a western and an eastern khanate, the former consisting of the area between the
Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, together with much of what is today Afghanistan, while the
latter comprised the Semirechye and Kashgaria.

The Chagataid khans who ruled in the western khanate, where they usually resided in
Bukhara, openly espoused Islam and a Muslim lifestyle, as did perhaps the majority of their
followers. Northeast of the Syr Darya, the Chagataid rulers of the eastern khanate
endeavoured to maintain the nomadic traditions of their ancestors—descendants of Genghis
Khan—with a considerable degree of success. They continued to locate their headquarters
in the Ili or Chu valley, while emirs of the important Mongol Dughlat clan, with whom the
Chagataids were closely linked through marriage alliances, ruled the Tarim Basin on their
behalf from Kashgar. To the inhabitants of Transoxania and Iran, the eastern Chagataid
khanate was known as Mughulistān (literally, “Land of the Mongols”) and its inhabitants,
unflatteringly, as Jats (literally, “Robbers”).

During the last third of the 14th century, the western Chagataid khanate passed under the
control of the Barlas Turk Timur (d. 1405; known in the West as Tamerlane), while the
eastern khanate went through a protracted period of political instability but also gradual
Islamization. Under a succession of vigorous 15th-century rulers—Esen Buga, Yunus, and
Ahmad—the eastern khanate held its own, ringed as it was by Oirat foes in Dzungaria, the
Kyrgyz in the Tien Shan, and the Kazakhs in the Semirechye. But decline did set in,
temporarily postponed during the reign of Ahmad’s able son Sultan Saʿīd Khān (1514–33),
who ruled from Kashgar. By the beginning of the 17th century, however, the Chagataid
khans in the east had become mere figureheads, with the towns under the quasi-theocratic
rule of a family of Khwājahs originating from Bukhara, while the countryside was
dominated by rival Kyrgyz confederacies. The line seems to have died out obscurely before
the end of the century.

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Developments within the most enduring Mongol successor state, that of the Golden Horde,
with its headquarters at Sarai on the lower Volga River, followed a rather different course.
Its Islamization, begun under Batu’s brother Berke (1257–67), led to tensions with the il-
khans but resulted in the forging of strong links with the Mamlūks of Egypt. The Mamlūks
were themselves Kipchak Turks from the Kipchak steppes of southern Russia over which
the khans of the Golden Horde ruled.

The prosperity of the Golden Horde under Ghiyath al-Dīn Muḥammad Öz Beg (Uzbek)
between about 1312 and about 1341 stands in sharp contrast to the disintegrating Il-Khanate
and Chagataid khanate, yet it had its own problems, both internal and external. From
within, the growing and unavoidable antagonism between the Turko-Mongol ruling class,
Turkish-speaking and now Muslim, and their Christian Russian subjects was exacerbated
by the ceaseless dissensions among the members of the ruling house and the military elite,
increasingly referred to by their Slav neighbours as Tatars. In foreign policy, the peace
concluded in 1323 between the il-khans and the Mamlūks weakened the Golden Horde’s
influence in Egypt, while the establishment of the Ottomans on the Dardanelles (1354) put a
virtual end to commercial relations between the Volga and Nile valleys. Perhaps the gravest
political mistake of the rulers of the Golden Horde was their failure to recognize that the
West—with which, through the Russians, they had excellent links—offered a more fertile
ground for further expansion than the sunbaked deserts of Turkistan. The khans of the
Golden Horde, instead of controlling the Russian and Lithuanian princes, increasingly
relied upon their help in internal and dynastic struggles that were rending the khanate.
While their attention was drawn southward and eastward, they overlooked the rise of
dangerous Russian and Lithuanian enemies in their rear.

The policies of the khan Tokhtamysh (1376–95) differed from those of his predecessors.
Hereditary ruler of the White Horde, its pastures located in western Siberia and extending
to the lower reaches of the Syr Darya, Tokhtamysh was able to enlarge his power base by
uniting its resources with those of the Golden Horde, of which he eventually made himself
master. He thus introduced fresh “steppe power” into the Golden Horde at a time when it
was no longer the force it had once been (in 1380 the Muscovites had inflicted a crushing, if
temporary, defeat on the horde at Kulikovo Pole). Furthermore, instead of seeking the

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assistance of petty eastern European princes, Tokhtamysh hitched his wagon to the rising
star of Timur, with whose support he reasserted Mongol supremacy in Russia.

After Tokhtamysh’s death the Golden Horde survived under the aegis of an able usurper,
Edigü, but after Edigü’s death in 1419 a process of disintegration set in. The core territories
of the former Golden Horde, centred on the Volga-Don steppes, became known as the
“Great Horde,” while outlying regions seceded to form independent khanates based on
Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga, Crimea, western Siberia, and the Nogay steppe east of
the lower Volga. All eventually fell victim to dynastic feuds, internecine rivalry, and
Muscovite expansionism. Thus, in the case of the Kazan khanate, its founder Ulugh
Muḥammad (c. 1437–45) bequeathed the throne to his able son Maḥmud (or Maḥmutek),
who reigned with conspicuous success between 1445 and 1462. Maḥmud’s brothers,
however, fled for sanctuary to Vasily II of Moscow, who set up a puppet khanate for one of
them (Kasim) at Gorodets-on-the-Oka (thereafter renamed Kasimov). The khanate of
Kasimov was to be a thorn in Kazan’s flesh until the latter’s extinction in 1552. Kasimov
itself survived as a political fiction until about 1681, by which time the last khans had
abandoned Islam for Christianity.

In 1502 the Great Horde was extinguished and its lands annexed by the khan of Crimea,
Mengli Girai, who had already placed himself under Ottoman suzerainty in 1475. Kazan
fell to the troops of Ivan IV the Terrible of Moscow in 1552, and Astrakhan was annexed
two years later. The khanate of Sibir (western Siberia), after a stubborn resistance,
submitted to Boris Godunov, the regent for Ivan’s son Fyodor I (1584–98). Only the
khanate of Crimea was left, separated from Muscovy by the still-unconquered Ukrainian
steppe and enjoying some protection because of its status as an Ottoman vassal. It survived
for two more centuries, until Catherine the Great’s conquest in 1783. Its capital,
Bakhchisaray, long a centre of Tatar culture, was to take on a new life in the late 19th
century as the home of the Tatar national revival associated with the name of Ismail Bey
Gasprinski.

Timur

While the Golden Horde was beginning to enter its long decline in the late 14th century, the
demise of Chagataid rule in the area between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya was taking

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place as a result of the rise of Timur. Under Timur’s leadership the Turko-Mongol tribes
located in the basins of the two rivers were first united. With the assistance of these tribes
he expanded into the neighbouring regions of Khorāsān, Sīstān, Khwārezm, and
Mughulistān before embarking upon extensive campaigning in what are now Iran and Iraq,
eastern Turkey, and the Caucasus region. In addition, he launched two successful attacks on
his erstwhile protégé, Tokhtamysh, ruler of the Golden Horde. In 1398–99 Timur invaded
northern India and sacked Delhi, and between 1399 and 1402 he turned westward again to
harry the Egyptian Mamlūks in Syria and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, whom he captured
in battle near Ankara. At the time of his death at Otrar on the Syr Darya in 1405, Timur was
leading his forces on an invasion of China.

Timur never assumed openly the full attributes of sovereignty, contenting himself with the
title of emir while upholding the fictional authority of a series of puppet khans of the line of
Chagatai, to whom he claimed kinship by marriage; in consequence he styled himself
güregen, meaning “son-in-law” (i.e., of the Chagataid khan). He seems to have lacked the
innate administrative capacity or the foresight of Genghis Khan, and after Timur’s death his
conquests were disputed among his numerous progeny. In the ensuing struggles his fourth
son, Shāh Rukh (1407–47), emerged victorious. He abandoned his father’s capital of
Samarkand for Herāt in Khorāsān (now in western Afghanistan), where he ruled in great
splendour, leaving his son, Ulūgh Beg, as his deputy in the former capital. Ulūgh Beg’s rule
in Samarkand between 1409 and 1447 probably brought a considerable measure of
tranquility to the long-troubled region. An enthusiastic astronomer and the builder of a
celebrated observatory, Ulūgh Beg ensured that during his lifetime Samarkand would be a
major centre of scientific learning, especially in astronomy and mathematics. He was killed
on the orders of his son, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, in 1449.

Throughout the second half of the 15th century, the western part of Central Asia was
divided into a number of rival principalities ruled by descendants of Timur, among which
Bukhara and Samarkand were the most important. The courts of these rulers witnessed an
extraordinary cultural florescence in literature, the arts, and architecture, with Chagatai
Turkish, a dialect derived partly from Khakani, the language spoken at the Karakhanid
court (and a precursor of modern Uzbek), emerging as a flexible vehicle for sophisticated
literary expression. These Timurid epigones, however, were locked in unceasing rivalry

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with each other and were unable to combine against intruders from beyond their frontiers.
By the close of the century, therefore, all the Timurid possessions in Central Asia had
passed into the hands of the Uzbeks.

The Uzbeks

The early history of the Uzbek people (whose rulers were descendants of a younger brother
of Batu, khan of the Golden Horde) is wrapped in obscurity, but by the mid-15th century
they had migrated from their original homeland, east of the Ural Mountains, southeast
toward the lower Syr Darya, whence, under their leader, Abūʾl-Khayr Khan, they began to
threaten the Timurids across the river. However, before Abūʾl-Khayr could undertake a full-
scale invasion, he was killed in battle in 1468 by two rebellious kinsmen who, refusing to
recognize his assertion of paramountcy, had defected, together with their tribal followers,
and placed themselves under the nominal suzerainty of the Chagataid khan of Mughulistān.
Their descendants were to become the Kazakh hordes of later centuries.

With the death of Abūʾl-Khayr, the fortunes of the Uzbeks temporarily declined, only to be
revived under the leadership of his grandson, Muḥammad Shaybānī, who by 1500 had
made himself master of Samarkand as well as of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya basins and
was advancing into Khorāsān (Herāt fell to him in 1507) when he was defeated and killed
in 1510 by Shah Ismāʿil Ṣafavi. He had, however, changed the course of Central Asian
history. By the time of his death, all the lands between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya were
in Uzbek hands, and so they were to remain. Throughout the 16th century, Muḥammad
Shaybānī’s kinsmen ruled over a powerful and aggressive khanate from Bukhara. They
continued Muḥammad Shaybānī’s feud with the Iranian Ṣafavids, articulated along Shīʿite-
versus-Sunni lines, and with the Mughal dynasty in India, whose founder, the Timurid
Babur, had been driven out of Central Asia by Shaybānī. In contrast, friendly, if sporadic,
ties with the Ottomans were maintained by way of the Volga-Don steppes. Unlike the
Ottomans, Ṣafavids, and Mughals, however, the Uzbeks had only limited access to firearms,
which placed them at a considerable disadvantage with their rivals.

During Shaybanid rule, and even more under the Ashtarkhanids (also known as
Astrakhanids, Tuquy-Timurids, or Janids) who succeeded them during the 1600s, Central
Asia experienced a decline in prosperity compared with the preceding Timurid period, in

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part because of a marked reduction in the transcontinental caravan trade following the
opening of new oceanic trade routes. In the 1700s the basins of the Amu Darya and Syr
Darya passed under the control of three Uzbek khanates claiming legitimacy in their
descent from Genghis Khan. These were, from west to east, the Qungrāts based on Khiva in
Khwārezm (1717–1920), the Mangits in Bukhara (1753–1920), and the Mings in Kokand
(c. 1710–1876), in the upper valley of the Syr Darya. During this same period, east of the
Pamirs, Kashgaria was torn apart by the rivalries of Khwājahs and Kyrgyz; in the
Semirechye the Kazakhs were locked in conflict with the Mongol Oirat and Dzungars;
while between the Aral and Caspian seas the Turkmen roamed the northern borders of Iran,
enslaving the sedentary peoples there and transporting them to Bukhara to labour in the
oases. The time was ripe for Russian intervention, made easier by the intruders’ possession
of cannon and firearms.

Citation Information
Article Title:
History of Central Asia
Website Name:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published:
16 June 2017
URL:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Central-Asia-102306
Access Date:
June 28, 2021

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