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.
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, 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 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. 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.