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Kazakhstan, which has recently become a hot topic in the news, is an interesting country. More than a decade ago, there was a multinational co-production of the Mongol King, about the first half of the life of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire, and one of the partners of this film was Kazakhstan, a country with almost no Mongol inhabitants. More interestingly, the Kazakhs did not regard Genghis Khan as an "outsider" in their own national history.
Poster of the Mongol King. Source/Douban Movie
The subjects of the Golden Horde
Why is that? It goes back eight centuries.
After the First Mongol Expedition (1219-1225), most of the territory of the original Central Asian power of Khwarazm fell into the pockets of Genghis Khan. According to the custom of the nomadic people, Genghis Khan divided the vast areas he conquered during his lifetime among the four sons born to his wife Bo Erti (Shuchi, Chagatai, Wokoutai, and Tuolei). According to Genghis Khan, "The regions of Qayaligh and Khwarazm stretched to the borders of Sapsin and Bulghar, and in that direction reached the hooves of the Tartar horses, and he gave the eldest son, Shuchi." This means that the Chincha steppe west of the Irtysh River up to the Volga River, including a large part of present-day Kazakhstan, became "ulus" (meaning fiefdom, state).
Although He was the son of Genghis Khan, he died earlier than his father. His Ullath was passed on to his son Batu. In 1235, the Mongol Empire held the "Kuriletai" and decided to go to the countries north of the Caspian Sea and Europe for the second Mongol expedition to the west. Because most of the generals of this western expedition are the eldest sons of the kings of various lineages, it is also called the "firstborn western expedition". Batu had the highest status in the third generation of Genghis Khan, and naturally became the commander of the Western Expedition.
Battus film and television image. Screenshot of the TV series The Legend of Kublai Khan
The results of the Second Mongol Expedition were astonishing. Mongol armies swept through the Rus' states of Eastern Europe, and even Kiev (the capital of present-day Ukraine), known as the "mother of the Rus' cities," fell in the winter of 1240. The vanguard of the Mongol army reached the Danube Valley and left a long shadow in the hearts of Europeans.
On the other hand, this western expedition started from the territory of Batu, and he became the main beneficiary of the western expedition. By the end of the Western Expedition in 1242, the newly conquered lands had been incorporated into the Uluth of Batu —and even the center of his rule had shifted to the lower Volga. Since Battus and his successors always lived in golden tents according to the customs of the steppe peoples, this Uluth was also customarily called the "Golden Horde".
In addition, in order to govern such a vast territory, Batu decided to divide the area northeast of the Aral Sea up to the Irtysh River according to the size of his merits, and called it the White Horde. The area north and east of the Aral Sea was also divided among his brothers, The Baan, known as the Blue Horde. The White and Blue Hordes are nominally subordinate to the Golden Horde, but have relative independence.
Schematic map of the location of the Golden Horde in the 14th century. Source/Map Nest
The Golden Horde (also known as the Khanate of Chincha) was effectively separated from the Great Khan and became an independent state during the reign of Battu's younger brother Belgo (1257-1266). It is often seen as one of the "Four Great Mongol Khanates", but it is also one of the least "Mongolian" – for the simple reason that there are not enough Mongols in the true sense.
In the branch family behind Genghis Khan, only 4,000 Mongol troops were obtained, so that the Mongol army that accompanied Battus on the Western Expedition was only about 4,000, plus their accompanying family members were at most tens of thousands, and to gather more than 100,000 troops of the Western Expedition, it was necessary to recruit troops from the Chincha steppe under his rule, and these Chincha who spoke Turkic languages instead constituted the main body of the Western Expeditionary Army--except that the commander was Mongols, and Fadu was Genghis Khan's "Zaza".
It is conceivable that after the establishment of the Golden Horde, a few Mongol rulers and Chincha subjects lived and intermarried with each other, and "the land overcame their racial and natural endowments, and they all became Chincha people." By the 14th century, the literary language that began to form in the Golden Horde was not Mongolian but Turkic, with a distinctly Chincha component (now Kazakh belongs to the Chincha branch of the Turkic language family).
In the 15th century, the official edicts of the Khans of the Golden Horde were also written in Turkic languages. The famous medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta himself visited the tooth tent of the Moon Bekhan(Uzbek Khan), where he heard only Turkic, and even the names "queen" and "father" were Turkic.
But it cannot be said that the Golden Horde was "de-Mongolized" at the same time as "Turkification". Long before Genghis Khan unified the steppes, the Turkic tribes and the Mongolian tribes could not clean up the relationship between the chaotic. The Collected Histories, a historical work written in the early 14th century, is full of statements such as "the Mongols, who were originally Turkic." Even the Krebu and Naimanbu, the two great enemies of Genghis Khan, were considered to be of the Turkic system.
Because the lives of the Turks and Mongols are closely linked, there is a claim that the two are of the same origin (in fact, the Mongols are regarded as a Branch of the Turks). For example, the Persian geographical document Chronicle of the World, written in the 10th century, explicitly mentions that "tatars are also a type of Oghuz with nine surnames." Thus, for the Turks of Central Asia, the Mongols were by no means a completely unrelated group. So during the First Mongol Expedition to the West, the Chincha Turks would believe the Mongols' saying, "We are from the same tribe as you, from the same clan."
The infighting of the Golden Family
The Golden Horde established by the Mongols was regarded as their own by the later Turkic-speaking peoples. For example, the famous Kazakh heroic epic "Song of forty Warriors", which describes the heroic deeds of 40 "Baturu", most of them historical figures from the Golden Horde period, such as the protagonist of the long poem "Urak and Mamai" who is the actual ruler of the khanate from 1361. Not even an inch of land ever belonged to the Turkish Republic of the Golden Horde joined in the fun, recognizing the Golden Horde as one of the 16 "ancestors" of its own history.
As for the long-standing idea among the Mongols that "only the descendants of the Golden Family can be protected by the Mandate of Heaven to rule the world", and that only the direct descendants of Genghis Khan are qualified to be called "Khans", they have also been recognized by the Turkic peoples.
A typical example of this is timur, another conqueror after Genghis Khan, the "cripple". Although he was a martial artist, he was not a direct male descendant of Genghis Khan, so throughout his life he only adopted the title "Emir", which was one level lower than that of Khan, and the descendants of Chhatai, the second son of Genghis Khan, as the nominal master. Similarly, even the upper echelons of the Fourteenth-century Golden Horde were deeply Turkicized, and Mamai, who was not from the Genghis Khan clan, did not dare to call himself "Khan" throughout his life, and could only manipulate power by supporting one puppet khan after another.
Statue of Timur. Photography /shochanksd, source/figureworm creative
However, the reverence for the bloodline of the "Golden Family" did not preserve the Golden Horde. Part of the reason for this may be that the descendants of the Shuchi clan, Zong Wangren, are prosperous, but the Khan's position is limited, and there are too many members of the "Golden Family" who are qualified to compete for khan.
In the short twenty years from 1360 to 1380, the Golden Horde fell into chaos and replaced 14 Great Khans. By the beginning of the next century, the kings and nobles of the Jurchens had their own territories and armies, and it was difficult to strengthen the centralization of power, and the Golden Horde finally declined and disintegrated.
Beginning in the 1620s, the Siberian Khanate, the Kazan Khanate (1445-1552), the Crimean Khanate (1443-1783), and the Astrakhan Khanate (1460-1566) successively broke away from the Golden Horde – and were annexed by Tsarist Russia one by one.
At the same time, the situation in the Blue Horde, the Golden Horde's small partner in the east, also changed. Since the middle of the 14th century, the tribes of the descendants of the Shapan have taken the name "Uzbekistan" (or "Moon Or Moon) – probably in honor of the Moon Bekhan who created the heyday of the Golden Horde.
At a time when the regimes of the descendants of Shuchi were in decline, the Uzbek Khanate rose against the trend. In 1428, Abuhair (1412-1468), a descendant of the 17-year-old Xiban, was proclaimed Khan. He soon seized the entire Lands of the Blue Horde, east of the Ural Mountains and north of the Syr Darya River, from other Descendants of the Jurchens. This emerging steppe power headed south to the "middle of the river" between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, posing a great threat to the local Timurid descendants.
Interestingly, there seems to be a chain of contempt between the many forces in inland Asia from east to west. The Turkic-Mongolian nomads of the steppes of Lake Balkhash were feared by the inhabitants of the river, but they themselves were beaten by the Wala (Weyrat) people, who were also nomadic. In the mid-15th century, the Wallachians launched a surprise attack to the west, and the invincible Abuhair sent troops to resist, but they were defeated.
Lake Balkhash. Photography / Maxim Petrichuk, source / Figureworm Creative
The steppe peoples most revered martial arts, and this great defeat greatly shook the authority of the Great Khan of Abuhair. The two kings of the same lineage, Kre khan and Janibek Khan, stood on their own. In the years that followed, most of the nomadic people who had been Abuhair also left him to seek out Krehan and Janibek Khan in order to live an independent life with their descendants. Even Abuhair himself died in 1468 in a campaign against these rebels.
As far as the Genghis Khan family is concerned, the conflict between Janibek Khan and Klie Khan and Abuhair Khan is just a common "roommate" between the descendants of the "Golden Family"—Janibek is a descendant of the 13th son of Shuchi, Bald Temuel, and has already had five clothes with Abuhair. But for the history of Central Asia, the split between Krehan and Janibek Khan was an important historical event. It was Janibek Khan and Kre khan who established the Kazakh Khanate.
Free "Kazakh"
What does the word "Kazakh" mean?
In ancient Turkic languages, Kazakh meant "detachment" and "migration.". As the ancient texts say, "[The two Khans] Janibek and Kreli have become stronger." Because they were first separated from their own masses of the people and lived in poverty for some time, they were called Kazakhs, as they were called (henceforth) ".
Similar to the meaning of "Kazakh" is "Cossack". The word is also of Turkic origin, meaning "free man", "adventurer", etc., which was used in the 15th and 17th centuries for some serfs or urban poor people exiled from the central region of Tsarist Russia to the frontier, and later also used to refer to the Cossacks in the Tsarist Terek, Don and Kuban rivers.
Obviously, the two words are cognate, and the origin and basic meaning of the Cossack name also confirm the origin of the name "Kazakh".
shepherd. Photography /Landscape Hunter, Source/Figureworm Creative
Although this new Kazakh khanate was separated from the Uzbek khanate, at first this political division did not represent the separation of the nation. The Kazakh Khanate and the Uzbek Khanate actually shared a religion (Islam), shared a written language (Chagatai), and shared historical memories of the "Golden Family" – many Kazakh nobles were also bloodied descendants of Genghis Khan.
Babur, who later established the Mughal dynasty in the South Asian subcontinent, was a descendant of Timur, a status that doomed him to envy and hate the members of the true "Golden Family". In his famous memoirs, however, he mentioned two Kazakh chiefs (Sultan Adik and Hasmu Khan) and explicitly acknowledged them as descendants of Shuchi. In this regard, it is also certain that the rulers of the Kazakh Khanate must claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan and use this to gain legitimacy in power – later, Kyrgyz rulers who were close to the Kazakhs in terms of race were despised by the Kazakhs as "black" Kyrgyz because they could not trace their bloodline to Genghis Khan like the Kazakh rulers – in the Central Asian conception of color, white corresponded to royalty, nobility, wealth, etc., and black referred to commoners, the poor.
From another point of view, the division of the Uzbek Khanate in the mid-15th century bore some resemblance to the civil war between the Wokoutai-Chagatai patriarchs (led by Haidu) against Kublai Khan three centuries earlier. The rulers of the Uzbek Khanate had a tendency to aspire to a settled civilization in the cities (similar to Kublai Khan's adoption of the "Han Law"), and the Kazakh Khanate that split from it also adhered to a purely nomadic life – no different from Haidu.
The opposition between the nomadic and agrarian lifestyles divided the Chagatai Khanate in the 14th century. Two centuries later, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan finally parted ways. On the one hand, Muhammad Shaybani Khan of Uzbekistan marched south to the river region, successively capturing the two famous cities of Bukhara and Samarkand; in 1503, he captured Fergana and completely occupied the entire "river in the river" agricultural belt between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers. Shaybany himself also showed a high degree of cultural accomplishment. He was a "rather excellent poet who was well versed in Persian and Arabic, written in Turkic, and treated poets and artists with generosity".
What about the Kazakh Khanate? Jasin, the son of Janibek Khan (reigned circa 1509-1518), is arguably typical of a pure nomadic. It is said that he once described his life this way: "We are the people of the steppe, our property is all made up of horses, horse meat is our best food, and horse milk is our best drink." We don't have a house. Our main amusement is to patrol our herds and the lower foals of the horses."
shepherd. Photography/Silent Light and Shadow, Source/Figureworm Creative
Soviet scholars therefore argue that "by the beginning of the 16th century, the economic life of Uzbeks and Kazakhs was different. Uzbeks have transitioned to settlement and agriculture, while Kazakhs remain nomadic herders". The Uzbeks, who followed Shaybani Khan south, have since remained in the oasis agricultural area of the river. The Kazakhs quickly filled the gap north of the Syr Darya River and the Chincha steppe. By the 1520s, Hasmu Khan had unified the Kazakh steppe. The territory of the Kazakh Khanate at that time stretched from the Seven Rivers Valley in the southeast to the Urals in the west; from Tashkent in the south to near Lake Balkhash in the north. During this period, the population of the Kazakh Khanate also increased significantly, reaching 1 million people.
In this way, Kazakhstan was completely divided from Uzbekistan and a new people was formed: "The Kazakhs became the general name of the Seven Rivers Valley and The Kpuchak (Chincha), and the word Uzbek became the general name of the tribes after Muhammad Shaybani moved into the river region". A new Kazakh nation has finally taken shape on the basis of the "ulus" of Juchi. They established the Kazakh Khanate and claimed to be descendants of the "Golden Family", and still regard Genghis Khan as an ancestor and hero.
END
Author | Guo Yemin
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Proofreading | Yan Wen Zhang Bin
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