Moghulistan

• 1. Introduction

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  Moghulistan arose north of the Tengri Tagh mountains in the 14th century. Its name comes from the Persian for Land of the Mongols. The khanate was formally independent from around 1347 until the early 1700s. Today its territory falls across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and China's northwest Xinjiang. Nearly everything historians know about this khanate comes from a single chronicle: the Tarikh-i-Rashidi. That book stands as the only primary source for the entire region, in sharp contrast to the well-documented Timurid Empire to the west. How did a nomadic confederacy survive for so long between the Ming dynasty, the Timurid Empire, and a succession of rival Mongol powers? Their own name for themselves was Mongghul Uls, meaning the Mongol Nation.

• 2. The Last of the Mongols

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  Ming dynasty Mandarins called the Moghuls the Mongol tribes in Beshbalik. Soviet historians used the name Moghulistan, while Chinese scholars mostly preferred East Chagatai Khanate. The Timurids to the west had their own word for the khanate: Ulus-i Jatah.

  Turkic tribes from Jetisu, including the Üysün and Dughlat, formed a core part of the confederacy. Turkic peoples from Desht-Kipchak, among them the Qipchaq and Qangli, also contributed. Mongolian plateau peoples, including the Arlat, Barin, Barlas, Besüd, Kongirat, and Sudus, belonged to it as well. Non-Mongolic peoples from Mongolia, such as the Jalayir, Kereyit, Merkit, and Naiman, completed the mix. Over time, the confederation adopted Turkic as its working language, which developed into what scholars call Chagatai Turkic. According to the scholar Vasily Bartold, there were some indications that certain Moghuls still spoke Mongolian into the early 16th century.

  In the Persian Ilkhanate, the Mongol khans adopted Islam and Persian culture within less than half a century. The rulers of the Yuan dynasty in China were just as quick to embrace Chinese court customs. The Moghuls, rooted in the original steppe heartland of Mongolia, took a different path. They stayed nomadic for generations and were among the last of the Mongols anywhere to convert to Islam. By the mid-15th century the population was considered largely Muslim, but the process had been slow. The khans converted first, and ordinary Moghuls followed later. In time, Moghul rulers set aside the traditional Mongol law code, the Yassa, and adopted Islamic sharia in its place.

  Yunus Khan was described in the sources as having the looks of a Tajik rather than a Mongol. That cultural blending had roots going back centuries. Even in the 14th century, Moghul chieftains used Turkic titles like Mirza, Bek, and Amir.

• 3. Steppe, Desert, Oasis

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  The Ili region sat at the heart of Moghulistan, bounded on the west by the province of Shash and the Karatau Mountains. To the north, the southern shore of Lake Balkhash marked the limit of Moghul influence. From there the border sloped southeast until it reached the eastern Tian Shan, which formed the khanate's southern boundary. Because the Moghuls were nomads, the towns within their territory tended to fall into decline or simply empty out during their rule.

  Nanjiang, the southern Xinjiang region covering the Tarim Basin, was nearly all desert. The Moghuls generally stayed out of it and drew little military manpower from there. Dughlat amirs and leaders of the Naqshbandi Islamic order administered the oasis towns of Nanjiang in the name of the Moghul khans until 1514. When the Moghuls later lost their steppe heartland, they governed Nanjiang more directly; Yarkand or Kashgar usually served as the capital.

  The Turfan area in the northeast had a different character. It was home to a Buddhist kingdom whose people were identified as Uyghurs in the aftermath of the region's Islamic invasions. The Uyghur khans had voluntarily submitted to Genghis Khan and in exchange kept their territories. Their power declined under Mongol rule, and the last independent Uyghur kingdom was extinguished before the end of the 14th century. After the 15th century, the area came under direct Moghul rule.

  A much later Turki word, Altishahr, meaning Six Cities, came into use during the 19th century under the warlord Yaqub Beg. Shoqan Walikhanov identified those six cities as Yarkand, Kashgar, Hotan, Aksu, Uch-Turpan, and Yangi Hisar. That oasis belt had clearer borders than the steppe homeland; its northern edge was the Tian Shan, the Pamirs lay to the west, and the Kunlun Shan ran along the south. Once Hami came under Turfan's sphere, the Moghuls became direct neighbors of Ming China, a development that shaped both trade and conflict.

• 4. The First Khan

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  In 1347, the Dughlat tribe, the most powerful in the region, raised a Chagatayid prince named Tughlugh Timur to the throne. That act made him the head of a tribal confederacy governing both the Tarim Basin and the steppe of Moghulistan. He was a strong ruler, unlike the series of puppet khans who simultaneously sat on the Chagatai throne in Transoxiana.

  In 1354, Tughlugh Timur converted to Islam alongside 160,000 followers. That conversion was not purely spiritual; it served political purposes as well. Islamic concepts of the ummah and of holy war, known as ghazat, fueled his territorial ambitions into Transoxiana. He also branded the dissenting princes he killed as heathens and idolaters, using their rejection of Islam to justify their deaths.

  In 1360, Tughlugh Timur invaded Transoxiana, taking advantage of disorder there and his legitimacy as a descendant of Chagatai Khan. He briefly reunited the eastern and western halves of the Chagatai realm. A second invasion followed in 1361, and he appointed his son Ilyas Khoja as ruler of Transoxiana. The hold did not last. Amir Husayn and Timur expelled the Moghuls from the region, then turned on each other for control of it. Ilyas Khoja's fate after returning to Moghulistan would trigger the most severe internal crisis the khanate had yet seen.

• 5. Timur and the Ming

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  Ilyas Khoja was likely killed in 1368 by the Dughlat Amir Qamar-ud-Din, who also killed several other Chagatayid princes. The tribal chiefs refused to accept a commoner on the throne. Opposition arose even within Qamar-ud-Din's own Dughlat tribe, as Mirza Abu Bakr Dughlat seized Kashgar. What followed was near-constant civil war.

  Timur sent at least five victorious expeditions into Moghulistan over the years that followed. The Moghuls could not hold a fixed defense; the nomadic forces were constantly on the move. They appealed to the Hongwu Emperor of China for help, arguing that Transoxiana was rightfully theirs. No military alliance resulted, but the Ming dynasty opened caravan trade to Moghulistan. Moghul rulers collected zakat, a form of tax, on the Silk Road commerce passing through their lands. That income brought an era of economic and cultural exchange with China.

  A Chagatayid restoration came in the 1380s when the Dughlats placed the surviving heir Khizr Khoja on the throne. The Dughlats maintained their powerful position: over the next forty years they installed several khans of their own choosing. Khizr Khoja himself married his sister to Amir Timur. He then led a holy war against the Uyghur polity in Turfan and Qocho, forcibly converting those populations to Islam. That campaign brought the Uyghur kingdom to an end.

  Uwais Khan, who ruled from 1418 to 1428, fought constantly against the Oirat leader Esen Tayishi. He was captured by Esen Tayishi twice but secured his release both times. His successor Esen Buqa, ruling from 1428 to 1462, shifted his focus westward and repeatedly raided the Timurid Empire. Esen Buqa's death in 1462 triggered a succession dispute that would split the khanate permanently in two.

• 6. Division and Exile

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  Dost Muhammad was seventeen years old when his father died. The Dughlat amirs could not agree on whether to back him or his uncle Yunus Khan. The Timurids resolved the question by backing Yunus Khan themselves, aiming to use him against their rivals. After Dost Muhammad died in 1469, Yunus Khan reunited the khanate, defeated the Uzbeks, and kept good relations with both the Kazakhs and the Timurids. In the 1480s he captured Tashkent from the Timurids. The western Tarim Basin, meanwhile, was lost to a revolt by the Dughlat amirs. Toward the end of his reign, his son Ahmad Alaq founded a breakaway eastern khanate centered on Turpan.

  When Yunus Khan died, his territories were divided between his two sons. Ahmad Alaq, ruling eastern Moghulistan from Turpan from 1487 to 1503, fought a series of wars against the Oirats and raided Chinese territory. Mahmud Khan, ruling the western portion from Tashkent from 1487 to 1508, faced a growing Uzbek threat. In 1503, Ahmad Alaq traveled west to help Mahmud Khan against the Uzbek leader Muhammad Shaybani. Both brothers were defeated and captured; they were released, but Tashkent passed to the Uzbeks. Mahmud Khan never recovered his authority and eventually submitted to Muhammad Shaybani, who had him executed.

  Kyrgyz tribes led by Tagai Biy drove the Moghuls out of the territory of modern Kyrgyzstan; by 1510-11, the Moghuls had effectively lost the region. Mansur Khan, who succeeded Ahmad Alaq in 1503, captured Hami from Kara Del, a Mongol dependency of Ming China, in 1513.

  In 1514, Mansur Khan's brother Sultan Said Khan conquered the western Tarim Basin from Mirza Abu Bakr Dughlat. He established himself in Kashgar, forming what became known as the Yarkent Khanate. The two halves of Moghulistan were now permanently divided, though Sultan Said Khan nominally recognized Mansur Khan's suzerainty in Turpan. Sultan Said Khan died in 1533 from high altitude edema during a failed attack on Tibet. His successor Abdurashid Khan began his reign by executing a member of the Dughlat family. A nephew of the dead Dughlat, Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, fled to the Mughal Empire in India. He eventually conquered Kashmir and compiled a history of the Moghuls while governing there. The Yarkent Khanate he left behind would outlast Mansur Khan's line in Turpan, but power within it was already shifting away from the khans.

• 7. Sect, Schism, Conquest

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  The Yarkent Khanate, which lasted from 1514 to 1705, entered a period of fragmentation in its final century. Subkhanates formed around Kashgar, Yarkand, Aksu, and Khotan as central authority weakened. Into that vacuum stepped the khojas, influential Sufi religious leaders of the Naqshbandi order who had wielded power since the 16th century. By the 17th century the khojas had effectively become the governing power in Kashgaria, as the khans handed over more and more of their secular authority.

  The khojas split into two rival factions: the Aq Taghlik and the Kara Taghlik. That rivalry persisted until the 1670s, when the Moghul khans attempted to reassert their authority by expelling the Aq Taghlik leader.

  In 1677, Khoja Afaq of the Aq Taghlik fled to Tibet and approached the 5th Dalai Lama for military assistance. The Dalai Lama arranged for the Dzungar Khanate, a Buddhist power controlling the lands north of the Yarkent Khanate, to invade in 1680. The Dzungars set up puppet rulers in Yarkent and restored Khoja Afaq's faction to power.

  In 1705, the Yarkent Khanate finally fell when Kashgar begs and Kyrgyz forces staged a revolt and seized Akbash Khan during an assault on Yarkand. The Yarkand begs called on the Dzungars to intervene; the Dzungars defeated the Kyrgyz and installed the Aq Taghlik in Kashgar, ending Chagatayid rule. The Moghul kingdom of Turpan and Hami was conquered by the Zunghars shortly after, though the Zunghars were later expelled by Qing China. The Tarim Basin passed to the Manchu emperors of China in the mid-18th century. Chagatayid descendants submitted to the Qing and governed the Kumul Khanate as vassals from 1696 to 1930. Maqsud Shah was the last of that line, dying in 1930. Four years later, the Chinese Nationalist leader Sheng Shicai applied the term Uyghur to a Muslim population in the region, following a Soviet suggestion. The label Sheng Shicai introduced in 1934 thus outlasted every khanate in that geography, carrying a name from one world into a very different one.