Central Asia in World History

by Peter B. Golden

  Under Toghon and his son Esen, Oirat power grew in the mid-fifteenth century. They dominated Mongolia, extending their authority into the Ulus of Chaghatay and eastward toward Manchuria and China, and even captured the Ming Emperor in 1449, whom they held prisoner for a year. As a non-Chinggisid, Esen usually placed a puppet Chinggisid at the helm, but in 1453, he proclaimed himself Great Khan. His own commanders were uneasy with this development, and a personal enemy killed him in 1455.

  To the west, only Abu’l-Khayr Khan had the potential to counter the Oirats. The two armies moved toward one another in 1446. Esen’s forces greatly outnumbered Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s troops. Nonetheless, Esen offered peace, his envoy telling the haughty Uzbek khan, “let not sweat drip from the shirts nor blood come from the bodies of our young men.”15 Abu’l-Khayr Khan refused the offer. He was defeated and took refuge in the city of Sïghnaq in the Syr Darya region. This Oirat encounter was a foretaste of things to come. In 1457, Amasanji, Esen’s successor, subjected Abu’l-Khayr Khan to a terrible drubbing.

  Other Jochids, Janïbeg and Girey, long chafing under Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s harsh rule, now challenged his authority. These “rebels” called themselves Özbek-Qazaq (Uzbek-Kazakhs) and subsequently simply Qazaq, a term denoting “free, independent man, freebooter, adventurer,” often with the sense of “rebel.”16 From 1459 to the late 1460s, the Uzbek-Kazakhs, by the thousands, fled Abu’l-Khayr and took refuge in Semirech’e, the region between Lake Balkhash and the Tianshan Mountains, in southeastern Kazakhstan. After Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s death, as Mirza Haidar Dughlat records in his history, the Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî, completed in 1546, the Uzbek state “fell into confusion, and constant strife arose among them.”17 The Uzbek-Kazakhs, today’s Kazakhs, continued to grow. By 1466 they already constituted an imposing confederation and were soon prepared to move against the Uzbeks. The modern Uzbek and Kazakh peoples are the products, in part, of what now became a permanent division.

  The situation in Moghulistan was chaotic, the result of ongoing Chaghadaid feuding and attempts by the khans to force Islam on often unwilling nomads. The Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî reports that under the Chaghadaid Muhammad Khan, “if . . . a Moghul did not wear a turban, a horseshoe nail was driven into his head.” The same source reports that a recalcitrant chief converted only after a frail Tajik holy man knocked out his pagan champion.18 By the late fifteenth century, Moghulistan was becoming Muslim. The Kyrgyz, however, remained largely shamanists or adherents of some mix of Islam and shamanism. Amidst these religious strains, the Oirats constantly threatened the whole of the old Chaghadaid realm. Uwais Khan of Moghulistan fought sixty-one battles with them; he was successful only in one. Nonetheless, he held the region more or less together. After his death in 1428, there was further political splintering.

  Changes were also occurring in Xinjiang. In the late fourteenth century, Turfan was still largely non-Muslim. By the sixteenth century, the name “Uighuristân,” long associated with Turkic Buddhist and Christian cultures, had faded from memory. The region was fully Islamic by the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century.

  The Chinggisid aura by this time was much diminished. The Qubilaid Batu Möngke, known by his title Dayan Khan, reunited the eastern Mongols, after 1483. Orphaned at the age of one, he ascended the throne at seven, marrying the formidable and politically powerful Mandukhai Qatun (termed his “step-mother” in one local chronicle), widow of Mandagul, a khan of the Chakhar Mongols who enjoyed a certain preeminence. Chakhars are today dominant in Inner Mongolia. The political initiatives probably came from Mandukhai Qatun and her camp.

  Mongol chronicles subsequently portray Dayan Khan as the true heir of Chinggis and Mandukhai Qatun as the mother of the nation. He organized the Mongols into six groupings, subdivided into left and right wings. The system, with some variations, continued into the twentieth century.19 In addition to the Chakhar, the left wing included the Khalkha, who comprise the majority of the population of the Republic of Mongolia (Outer Mongolia). Despite Dayan Khan’s successes, internecine strife always lurked under the surface, reemerging after his death. Unity remained elusive. Meanwhile, new empires were forming in the realms bordering on Central Asia, new confederations were taking shape in the steppe, and new technologies were coming to the fore.

  In the early tenth century, the Chinese had developed a gunpowder-filled tube, which was attached to a “fire lance,” an early flame-thrower. Other devices capable of spewing forth nasty bits and pieces that could tear human flesh were added. By the dawn of the Mongol era, primitive gunpowder weapons were available. The Mongols, ever alert to new military technologies, made these devices known across Eurasia. By 1300, the tubes became larger, barreled, and could now fire a missile. Temür’s arsenal included primitive flame-throwers and rockets. It seems very likely that he introduced handguns and cannons to Central Asia, having brought back artillery specialists taken in his Ottoman campaign. The Gunpowder Age had come to Central Asia and Temür contributed to the further dissemination of these new tools of war.

  Nonetheless, the nomads, overall, were slow to adopt these new weapons. Their reliability and accuracy, in this early stage, rarely equaled that of the trained archer. Initially, cannons were not very effective against rapidly moving horsemen. Ming guns proved ineffective against Esen Khan’s Oirats. It has been argued that the inability of gunpowder weapons to deal effectively with the Mongol threat retarded the development of Chinese weaponry, as the Ming came to doubt their efficacy. Such, however, was not the case in Europe.20 In time, infantry armed with increasingly accurate gunpowder weapons would prove to be superior to mounted archers. By the late fifteenth century, nomads were no longer able to take the now heavily fortified cities defended by gunpowder weapons. The technology of warfare was moving in a direction that was not favorable to the millennia-old advantages of the mobile, mounted bowman.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Age of Gunpowder and the Crush of Empires

  In the early sixteenth century, Central Asians found themselves increasingly wedged between competing empires on their borders. The Safavid Shâh, Ismâ’îl, heir to a militant Sûfî movement among the Turkish tribes of western Iran and Anatolia, conquered Iran and made Shi’ite Islam its state religion. Shi’ite Iran obstructed Sunnî Central Asia’s direct contact with the Ottoman Empire, the most powerful Sunni Muslim state. In the 1550s, Muscovy conquered the Volga Jochids, erecting further barriers between the Central Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim Turkic peoples. The Mongol adoption of Tibetan Lamaistic Buddhism, in which a supreme religious teacher, the Dalai Lama, provided spiritual (and often political) leadership, separated Buddhist Mongols from Muslim Turko-Persia, further splintering the Chinggisid realms. The rise and expansion of the Manchu empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries compounded these fissures.

  The balance of military power was shifting—to the detriment of the nomads. In the mid-1600s, there may still have been parity between the nomad’s composite bow and the matchlock musket. A century later, the flintlock rifle was becoming the superior weapon. Some nomads rejected the new technology as not suited to their traditional modes of warfare. Others were willing to use it, but largely lacked the industrial capacity to produce the new weapons or the money to buy them. Overall, they fell behind in the arms race. The heyday of the nomad-warrior had passed.1

  The Kazakh break with Abu’l-Khayr Khan was a catalyst for the restructuring of the Turkic Chinggisid world. Around 1470, the Kazakh tribes, led by Janïbeg and Girey, settled in what is today Kazakhstan, coalescing into a powerful union. Qazaq, originally a sociopolitical term, became an ethnic designation. Qâsim Khan, a son of Janïbeg, considered the most powerful ruler since Jochi, controlled much of the Qipchaq steppe with more than a million warriors.2

  Pressured by his Kazakh foes, Muhammad Shîbânî (Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s grandson) and his Uzbeks crossed into Transoxiana in 1500, driving out the remaining Timurid regimes. One of Shîbânî Khan’s principal foes was Babur, the T
imurid prince, poet, and warrior who subsequently took refuge in India. In his memoirs, the Baburnâma, Babur paints an unflattering portrait of his Uzbek nemesis. He calls him “Wormwood Khan” and says that he was an illiterate who composed “insipid poetry” and “did and said a multitude of stupid, imbecilic, audacious, and heathenish things.”3 Wormwood was used to make hallucinogenic drugs, hence Babur’s contemptuous nickname for him (a play on the similar-sounding Mongol shibagh, “wormwood”) implied that he was drug-addled as well.

  The Mongolian steppe is dotted with lamaseries, the monastic centers of Lamaistic Buddhism. In Mongolia they amassed considerable wealth through the contributions of the faithful, as did monastic orders in Christian Europe, and as a consequence played an important role in politics and the shaping of Mongol culture. Photo by Arthur Gillette © UNESCO

  In reality, Shîbânî Khan was well educated by the standards of his time, and his poetry and prose works earned him respect in the demanding literary circles of the region. He was no more given to intoxicants than Babur, who was hardly chaste in such matters. Moreover, Shîbânî Khan was a Muslim in good standing, having become closely allied with the Yasawiyya Sûfîs, who played a significant role, alongside the Naqshbandiyya, in promoting Islam among the nomads. Countering Shah Ismâ’îl’s ideological claims, Shîbânî Khan styled himself the “Imam of the Age, the Caliph of the Merciful One.”

  The Uzbeks transformed Transoxiana into “Uzbekistan.” They constituted the military and political elite, but only a minority of the population. They settled among the earlier layers of Turks and Iranians in a complex quilt of languages and cultures. It was the heavily Persianized Chaghatay Turkic, long associated with urbane, Turko-Persian, Timurid civilization, not the Qipchaq of the new conquerors, that represented Turkic in official and literary circles. The intellectual elite remained bilingual in Persian and Turkic. The culture zone of Turko-Persia stretched from India to the Ottoman Empire. Sunnî-Shi’ite hostility made cultural interaction more difficult, but the Turko-Persian symbiosis continued.

  Muhammad Shîbânî Khan was an ally of the Ottomans, his fellow Sunnî Muslims, against the Safavid Shi’ites in Iran. The inevitable war ended disastrously for Shîbânî Khan, who perished in a 1510 battle near Merv. The Safavids sent the skin of his head, filled with straw, to the Ottoman Sultan, a glaring challenge. Some Timurids, with Safavid aid, briefly returned to Transoxiana—only to lose it again to the resurgent Uzbeks in 1512.

  Babur was among the Timurids who fled in 1512, first to Kabul in Afghanistan and then to India. He defeated the Lodi Sultans of Delhi and established India’s Mughal dynasty (1526-1858). Babur and his immediate successors viewed India as a temporary refuge until they could regain Transoxiana, but their attempts to do so failed. Nonetheless, the Mughals remained culturally oriented towards their earlier homeland. Mughal rulers were still educated in Chaghatay Turkic until the early eighteenth century. As in Central Asia, Persian served as a language of government and high culture. Although Mughals and Uzbeks remained rivals, Mughal India continued to draw on the military, bureaucratic, and intellectual talent of Central Asia. It was a good place for ambitious, talented men to earn well. Some Central Asians remained; others came briefly, complained of the climate and food, made their fortunes, and departed.

  The life story of Babur’s cousin, Mirzâ Haidar Dughlat, illustrates the troubled nature of the times. When Uzbeks killed his father in Herat in 1508, Babur took him in. His protégé had “a deft hand” in Persian and Turkî poetry, painting, calligraphy, and arrow making.4 His Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî is filled with astute observations about events and the people who shaped them. In the service of another cousin, Sa’îd Khan, the ruler of the Yarkand khanate in Moghulistan, Dughlat distinguished himself as a military man and politician, highlighting the multiple talents of the Central Asian elite of that era. In 1541 he took Kashmir and founded his own, semiautonomous statelet. Harsh experience had taught him to seize opportunities when they arose.

  To the west, Muscovy was increasingly a factor in shaping the borders of Central Asia from the sixteenth century onwards. The grand princes of Moscow, legitimated by the Orthodox Church and service to the Mongols, brought the other Rus’ principalities under their control. After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Muscovite state saw itself as the last outpost of Orthodox Christianity. Expanding into the Finno-Ugric lands to their east, the Muscovites were soon contesting control over the fur-trapping northern peoples with the Kazan and Sibir khanates. This was the prelude to the Russian conquest of the Volga Tatar khanates, expansion into Siberia, and later into the Kazakh steppes.

  In 1552, Ivan IV “the Terrible” of Moscow conquered the Khanate of Kazan. Its population—Muslim Bulgharo-Tatars, Bashkir tribes in the Ural region, and Volga Finnic peoples—all became Russian subjects. Ivan IV took the Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556. The Volga-Ural zone, which had for centuries been under the control of Turkic peoples, was coming under Russian rule. Muscovy was approaching Central Asia.

  Having conquered the Volga khanates, Ivan IV, self-proclaimed tsar (emperor) since 1547, presented himself as heir of the Byzantine emperors and the Chinggisid khans, a potent ideological claim. Muscovite propagandists depicted his conquests as a crusade against Islam and called for the mass conversion of the Muslim Tatars to Christianity. Churches replaced destroyed mosques, and Islamic proselytizing was prohibited. Thereafter, Moscow’s policies, depending on conditions, alternated between Christian missionary activity (sometimes coercive) and toleration. Pagan peoples, such as the Volga Finnic populations, were converted to Orthodox Christianity, often only superficially. Extensive colonization followed. By the seventeenth century, Russians became the majority in these regions.

  Tatar nobles, encouraged to enter Muscovite service, quickly assimilated, becoming Orthodox Christians and constituting an important element of the imperial Russian aristocracy. Those that did not, often became merchants or ‘ulamâ, the Muslim equivalent of clergy. Subsequently, Volga Tatar merchants and clergy played an important role in the ongoing implementation of Islam among the Turkic-speaking nomads in the steppes.

  From 1500 to 1900, Russia, one of the most rapidly expanding states in the world, acquired approximately 50 square miles a day. In its early phase, Muscovite frontier forts were staging points for further expansion and protection from nomad slave-raids. The latter took a huge human toll. Even as late as the first half of the eighteenth century, large numbers of Russians (perhaps as many as 200,000) were being carried off into captivity. This made the Russian lands second only to Africa as a source of slaves.5

  In 1581, Ivan IV began the conquest of Siberia when a Cossack adventurer and bandit, Yermak Timofeevich, with a force of 840 men, defeated the Khan of Sibir, Küchüm, and sacked his capital, Isker. Yermak died in a Tatar ambush in 1585, but the Russians continued to pound Küchüm. He lost his family (he allegedly had one hundred wives), wealth, and realm and perished sometime after a final defeat in 1598, killed by the Noghais with whom he sought refuge.6

  Smallpox (popularly termed ‘the “Red Witch” in some parts of Siberia7) and other diseases decimated the indigenous populations, aiding the Russian advance. Moscow’s armies marched across Siberia to the Pacific, erecting strategically located forts as they went. The Russians reached the Pacific in 1638 and founded Okhotsk in the 1640s. Russian colonists followed. The Kyrgyz of the Yenisei River, alternately subjects or rivals of the Oirats for dominion over other Siberian peoples, ended up paying tribute to both the Russians and the Oirats. Russian movement forward halted only when it encountered the Manchu Qing Empire.

  The Manchu empire stemmed from the Jurchen peoples of Manchuria, who had previously produced the Jin (golden) dynasty. Although not steppe nomads, they were influenced by Central Asian political traditions. Nurhaci, a Jurchen chieftain, united many of the Jurchens. In 1616, he proclaimed himself khan, taking the name Aisin (golden) as his clan name (Aisin Gioro, “Golden Clan,” was reminiscent of
Jin and Chinggisid usages). His son and successor, Hong Taiji, subjugated the eastern Mongols and some northern Chinese.8 In 1635, he forbade the use of the name Jurchen and formally adopted the invented name Manchu as the designation of his people.9 His followers were a complex mix of Jurchens, Mongols and Chinese, many of them bicultural. The next year, he declared himself emperor and took the Chinese dynastic name Qing, which sounded like Jin.

  After defeating the Ming in 1644 and firmly establishing their rule in China, the Manchus advanced into Mongolia, Siberia, and the borderlands of Muslim Central Asia. The Russians were approaching the region from Siberia and the western steppes. The two empires met in Siberia. Russia sought trade with China; the Qing sought political stability in their northern borderlands. The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) took up the question of borders.10 Curiously, both sides decided that the official negotiating language would be Latin, which several of the Russian negotiators knew, and in which the Jesuits accompanying the Manchu delegation were fluent. Jesuit missionaries and diplomats had been active in China since the sixteenth century. Both sides used Mongol for unauthorized communications. The 1727 Treaty of Kiakhta stabilized the Russo-Qing boundaries and established Kiakhta, on the Selenge River, as the border trading city of the two empires.11

  The Russian empire had enveloped the borderlands of Muslim Central Asia from the north and west. The steppe nomads, their remaining obstacle, were politically divided. Competing Mongol factions increasingly sought Moscow’s aid against their domestic rivals and China, providing Russia an entryway into Central Asian affairs.

  Mongol divisions had multiplied. Unity was ephemeral, rising and falling with charismatic leaders. Buddhism would provide elements of cohesion. The Chinggisid Altan Khan, one of Dayan’s numerous grandsons, had again revived the eastern Mongols and warred against China, Tibet, and the Oirats, causing the latter to harry Muslim Turkic Central Asia. Altan’s attacks reached the suburbs of Beijing and worried the Ming, who undertook further fortifications, producing the Great Wall of China in the form in which it is known today.12 The peace that Altan Khan finally established with China in 1571 elevated his stature, assuring him a grudging predominance among his Chinggisid rivals. Altan Khan’s lower rank among his grandfather’s numerous descendants, and inter-Chinggisid rivalries, had prevented his formal recognition as supreme khan. He took another route: Buddhism.