The Xiongnu collapse had sent the first wave of nomads westward. Europe’s first close encounter with Central Asian nomads left a lasting memory and a legend far out of proportion to its actual impact. The Huns became symbols of the unbridled barbarian. Despite their ferocious reputations, the Huns, east and west, were never a threat to the existence of China or the Roman Empire.
CHAPTER THREE
Heavenly Qaghans: The Türks and Their Successors
After a period of political instability following the collapse of the Xiongnu and Han, three important states emerged: the Tabghach (Chinese: Tuoba) in northern China, the Asian Avars (Chinese: Hua and Rouran) in Mongolia, and more distantly the Hephthalites in the Kushan lands. The Tabghach, who took the Chinese dynastic name Northern Wei (386–534), controlled all of China north of the Yellow River, Xinjiang, and part of the steppe zone by 439. Their capital, Pingcheng (near modern Datong), was within reach of the steppes, the primary source of their 100,000 soldiers and reputedly one million horses.
The Wei elite, perhaps 20 percent of whom were Tabghach, comprised 119 clans and tribal groups as well as Chinese, the majority of their subjects. A governing minority, the Tabghach employed older Xianbei models of separate administrations for Chinese and tribal peoples. Nonetheless, the attractions of Chinese culture proved irresistible to the elite, who adopted Chinese speech, clothing, food, and court culture. In the late fifth century, the half-Chinese emperor Xiao Wen-ti banned the Tabghach language,1 personal names, and clothing at court. He took a new Chinese family name, Yuan, and moved the capital to Luoyang in the southern, more Chinese part of their state.
The Tabghach maintained some distinctions through religion, actively promoting Buddhism, then a foreign faith in China, which had come to Han China from the Kushans via the Silk Road. Tabghach interest in Buddhism grew as their commercial relations with Central Asia deepened by the last quarter of the fifth century.
Asian Avar affiliations remains obscure. According to the Wei dynastic annals, their ruling house descended from an early fourth-century Wei slave. His master called him Mugulü, “head has become bald,” an ironic reference to his hair-line which began at his eyebrows. Mugulü fled to the steppe, where he gathered a band of some 100 fellow escapees and desperados. His son, Juluhui, completed the transformation of what was probably little more than a robber band into a people, acknowledged Wei overlordship, and sent an annual tribute of horses, cattle, and furs. This gained him access to Chinese markets. With Juluhui a pattern of political confederation emerges: the development of a people, often very rapidly, from a band of warriors led by a charismatic chieftain. The fifth-century Avar ruler Shelun took the Xianbei title Qaghan, a term of unknown origin, which denoted “emperor” in the steppe.
Juluhui adopted the sobriquet Rouran, which Chinese accounts transferred to his followers, later mockingly changing it to Ruanruan (wriggling insects). The Rouran called themselves Abar or Avar. A formidable military power, their conquests produced a realm extending from the Gobi Desert to Lake Baikal, and from Xinjiang to Manchuria and the borders of modern Korea. Chinese accounts credited Avar shamans with the ability to summon snowstorms to conceal their retreats following a defeat. Weather magic was attributed to many Turko-Mongolian peoples.
The Hephthalites emerged in the old Kushan lands out of various “Hunnic” groupings that left the Altai around 350–370. In the mid-fifth century, they came under the leadership of the Hephthal dynasty.2 Controlling Sogdia, much of Xinjiang, and northern India, these troublesome “Huns” of the Persian borderlands figured in Sasanid affairs, saving or ending the careers of several shahs. They built on Graeco-Bactrian and Kushan traditions, adopted the Bactrian language, and developed an interest in Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and various Indo-Iranian gods. To this mix, they added Christianity and Manichaeism, a new arrival in Central Asia. Its Iranian founder, Mani (216–277), came from Mesopotamia, an area rich in religious ideas. He saw himself as the culmination of the prophetic traditions of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus.
Manichaeism combined aspects of all of these religions, everywhere adjusting its profile to suit local sensibilities. Nonetheless, most governments distrusted its otherworldliness and persecuted its followers. Manichaeans viewed the world as engulfed in a conflict between Evil, represented by matter and Good, a spiritual plane represented by light. Their purpose was to release the light/spirit from matter, by leading ascetic lives and avoiding as much as possible material-physical temptations. The clergy or “elect,” fully initiated into the mysteries of the faith, led lives of poverty and chastity. The mass of believers, the “listeners,” supported them.
Hephthalite customs struck outsiders as unusual. Brothers shared a common wife. Wives placed horns on their headdress to indicate the number of their husbands. The head-binding of infants produced deformed, elongated skulls. Deliberate cranial deformation was widespread among some steppe peoples. The practice may have produced seizures in some individuals, which were akin to the hallucinatory trances of shamans.
These three states sent ripple effects across Eurasia. Avar-Wei wars drove tribes westward. These and earlier migrations transformed the steppes from what had been an area of Iranian speech into one that was increasingly Turkic. Among the peoples who came to the Black Sea steppes, around 460, were Oghur Turkic tribes,3 part of a loose union called Tiele in Chinese, which sprawled across Eurasia. The Avar qaghan, Anagui (520–552), facing eastern Tiele unrest and internal foes, turned to the Wei for help, but they had split into rival eastern and western branches. These political crises provided the backdrop to the rise of the Türk4 Empire.
Little is really known about the origins of the Türks. Their ruling clan bore the name Ashina, probably an eastern Iranian or Tokharian word (ashsheina or ashna) meaning “blue,”5 which can denote the east in the Turkic system, borrowed from China, of associating colors with compass points. According to Chinese renderings of Türk legends, the Ashina Türks descended from the mating of a she-wolf and the sole survivor of a tribe annihilated by enemies.6 The theme of a ruling clan born of a wolf or suckled by a wolf is widespread across Eurasia.7 The Chinese accounts place the Ashina in Gansu and Xinjiang, areas associated with Iranian and Tokhharian peoples. This legacy may account for important eastern Iranian elements in the early Türk union. From this region they migrated in the fifth century to the Altai Mountains, with its Turkic-speaking inhabitants, where they became subject ironsmiths of the Avars.
The ambitious ruler of the Türks, Bumïn, after helping his overlord to suppress a Tiele revolt in 546, requested an Avar bride in 551. The Avars haughtily refused. The western Wei, with whom Bumïn had drawn close, immediately granted Bumïn a royal princess and he destroyed the Avar Empire in 552. Anagui committed suicide, and by 555 the Avars ceased to be a factor in the eastern steppes.
Bumïn, whose name, like those of many early Türk rulers, is not Turkic, assumed the title of Qaghan, but soon died. His sons Keluo and Mughan and his brother Ishtemi subjugated the tribes and statelets north of China and forged an empire from Manchuria to the Black Sea. This was the first trans-Eurasian state directly linking Europe with East Asia. The eastern European-western Central Asian conquests were the work of Ishtemi, also known as the Sir Yabghu Qaghan (a title just below that of the Qaghan). Sir derives from Sanskrit Śrî (fortunate, auspicious), and Yabghu may be Iranian. These titles show the wide range of non-Turkic influences in the shaping of Türk imperial culture.
Allied with Sasanid Iran, Ishtemi crushed the Hephthalites, most probably between 557 and 563. The Türks, having taken Transoxiana (the land beyond the Oxus River), including Sogdia, burst into the Black Sea steppes, seeking their fugitive “slaves,” the Avars. By the 560s, the Byzantines report contact with a people migrating from the east who called themselves Avars, but whom some Byzantines considered “Pseudo-Avars.”8 Whether they were the remnants of the Asian Avars or some people who used their name remains a matter of controversy. Whatever their origins,
they were soon caught up in the conflicting political and commercial interests of the Türk, Sasanid, and Byzantine empires.
In Central Asia, silk played a key role in diplomacy and functioned as an international currency. The extraction of silk from China not only brought wealth, but also legitimated a ruler’s sovereignty. Silk was big business and had political consequences. The Sasanids and Sogdians were the principal middlemen in moving the cargoes of the Silk Road from Central Asia to the Mediterranean world. Sogdian colonies along the Silk Road extended to Inner Mongolia and China. Coached by their Sogdian vassals, the skilled money managers and traders of East-West commerce, the Türks, had become major traffickers in silk. Chinese accounts attributed Türk success to their Sogdian advisers, whom they viewed as “malicious and crafty.”9 Given the close Türko-Sogdian cooperation, a Türk-Sasanid alliance was untenable.
In 568, a major Türk embassy, mainly staffed by Sogdians, came to Constantinople seeking to establish ongoing commercial relations and to end Byzantine “appeasement” of their fugitive “slaves,” the Avars. According to Byzantine accounts, Ishtemi was determined that the Avars, who, he declared, were neither birds who can fly nor fish who can “hide in the depths of the sea,” would not escape Türk swords.10 Meanwhile, the “European Avars” retreated to Pannonia (modern Hungary), Attila’s earlier base. From the Hungarian steppes, they caused considerable turmoil in the Balkans, raiding (often together with the Slavs) and extorting hefty tributes from the Byzantines until the Franks of Charlemagne destroyed their state in the last decade of the eighth century.
The Türks offered Constantinople an alliance against Iran, silk, and even iron. Byzantium agreed, but remained cautious about war with Iran and preferred to buy off the Avars. Byzantine emissaries traveled across Central Asia (perhaps as far as present day Kyrgyzstan) for audiences with Türk rulers. In the first Byzantine embassy, after 568, the ambassador Zemarchus was bedazzled by Ishtemi, living in silk-bedecked tents, perched alternately upon a golden throne mounted on two wheels (so that it could be moved by horse), and various gold couches, including one resting on four golden peacocks. Relations were uneasy. At a subsequent embassy in 576, Tardu, Ishtemi’s successor, greeted Valentinus, the Byzantine ambassador, in anger, venting his rage at Constantinople’s failure to attack Iran and berating the Byzantines for “speaking with ten tongues” and lying with all of them.11
Internal Türk politics were complex. The qaghanate was administratively divided into eastern and western halves, each ruled by an Ashina qaghan. The eastern qaghan was politically senior. This dual kingship, while providing flexibility in managing local affairs, also produced rivalries. Ishtemi’s successors occasionally tried to seize power in the east. Such attempts were “legal” because, as in most Central Asian nomadic states, any member of the royal clan had the right to claim supreme power. Seeking to forestall family strife, the Türks created a system of succession in which younger brothers were to succeed older brothers and then sons of the oldest brother would succeed the youngest uncle and so on. Many were impatient, resulting in throne struggles that sapped the strength of the state. Attempts to create workable succession systems bedeviled virtually all Central Asian nomadic states.
While Ishtemi was establishing Türk power in the west, the eastern Türks were exploiting the rivalries of China’s Northern Qi (550–577) and Northern Zhou (557–581) dynasties, acquiring royal brides and silk in exchange for peace. Tatpar Qaghan, while professing surprise that his “two loyal sons to the south”12 were feuding, manipulated a divided China to enrich his realm.
The Sui dynasty (581–618) seized power and reunited China. The Sui, ethnically Chinese, had intimate familiarity with the northern non-Chinese regimes and the steppe. They immediately set about strengthening their northern defenses while Chinese operatives such as Zhengsun Sheng carefully cultivated agents at the Türk court and encouraged strife among the Ashina. While fissures among the eastern Türks deepened, the western Türk qaghan, Tardu, made a bid for power over east and west, achieving his goal for a few years until a revolt of the Tiele, perhaps encouraged by the Sui, ended his imperial dreams in 603.
Tong Yabghu (618–630) restored western Türk qaghanal authority, extended his rule to southern Afghanistan, and played a major role in Byzantium’s 628 victory over Sasanid Iran in a war that enveloped the Middle East and Transcaucasia. At home, however, his harsh rule led to his assassination and civil war. The western Türks emerged from the chaos divided into two tribal unions, collectively termed the On Oq (Ten Arrows), each led by its own qaghan.
Around 630, the Chinese Buddhist monk/traveler Xuanzang, on his way to India visited Tong Yabghu’s court at Suyâb. His report confirms the picture of spectacular wealth noted in the Byzantine accounts. The qaghan “was covered with a robe of green satin” and bound his loose hair “with a silken band some ten feet in length.” The “200 officers” of his entourage were attired in “brocade stuff,” and accompanying “troops” were “clothed in furs and fine spun hair garments.” Astride their camels and horses, they were armed with “lances and bows and standards. The eye could not estimate their number.”13 The qaghan’s tent was “adorned with golden flower ornaments which blind the eye with their glitter.” His “officers,” all “clad in shining garments of embroidered silk,” sat on long mats, in two rows before him while his guard corps “stood behind them.” Xuanzang was impressed that this “ruler of a wandering horde” had a “certain dignified arrangement about his surroundings.”14 The qaghan ordered wine and music for his guests to accompany a sumptuous meal of mutton and chicken. Among the things that particularly struck Xuanzang was a nature preserve that the qaghan kept to the west of Suyâb which held herds of deer, each wearing bells and accustomed to human contact. Anyone who dared to kill these deer would be executed.15
Meanwhile, momentous changes occurred in the east. China’s attempts to conquer Vietnam and Koguryo, a state straddling Korea and Manchuria, were costly and produced rebellions. The eastern Türks aided the rebels. The Tang (618–907) toppled the fading Sui and ushered in one of China’s most brilliant periods. Facing continual raids from the eastern Türk qaghan, Xieli, the Tang bought him off with goods, while covertly promoting intra-Ashina feuding and rebellions. Even the elements seemed to be conspiring against Xieli; several years of severe snows and frosts had produced famine in the steppe. People fled his harsh taxes and bad luck. The Tang captured him and he died in captivity in 630.
The eastern qaghanate had fallen and perhaps as many as one million bedraggled nomads surrendered. They were settled on China’s northern frontiers. Türk chieftains received Chinese titles and offices. The higher aristocracy came to the Tang court where a number of them went on to successful military careers. According to Chinese accounts, the various chieftains of the northern tribes asked the Tang Emperor Taizong to take the title of Tian Kehan (Turkic: Tengri Qaghan), “Heavenly Qaghan,” in imitation of a steppe ruler. Taizong declared that he alone “loved” the nomads, and as a consequence they followed him “like a father or mother.”16 It was an extraordinary claim by the Tang, made all the more extraordinary by the apparent willingness of the northern nomads to accept it.
China now fully asserted its power in Central Asia. In 640, Taizong conquered Kocho, a city on the Silk Road in Xinjiang in the western Türk orbit with a long history of close ties to China. Other city-states soon submitted. The cultural impact of these sophisticated trading cities on the already cosmopolitan Tang court was considerable. Central Asian music (rulers often sent “gifts” of musicians), instruments, dance, along with performers from the “Western Regions,” especially Sogdia and Kucha, artists, and art styles all became fashionable in the Chinese capital. The emperor Xuanzong, who kept 30,000 musicians, even learned to play the Kuchean “wether drum,” and his infamous concubine, Yang Guifei, loved Sogdian dances which were famous for their leaps and whirls. Some court officials were offended by the Sogdian dance “Sprinkling Cold Water on the Barbar
ian” which, apparently, involved nude performers and the splashing around of mud and water. It was banned in 713.
Nonetheless, Sogdian entertainers, including dancers, jugglers, and acrobats, remained popular along with clothing fashions and various fabrics from Central Asia. All of this came to Chang’an and Luoyang, the Tang capitals, together with foodstuffs, exotic plants, animals (such as peacocks), wines, utensils, precious stones, and works of art. This commercial web extended far to the west and included goods from Iran and Byzantium. Central Asian cities were not only intermediaries in this trade, but also active producers, especially of textiles and exporters of special foods such as melons and the “golden peaches of Samarkand.”
By 659, the fragmented western Türks had submitted to an advancing China. For a time, Chinese hegemony extended to parts of Afghanistan and the borders of Iran. The costs of empire were expensive and not without competition. The Tibetans had begun to make their presence felt in Xinjiang in the 660s and 670s, driving the Chinese from some of their holdings in the Tarim Basin. They held much of the region for several decades and for a time threatened to become the dominant power.17
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