Kazakh Khanate

The name means fugitive

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)formation

Mirza Haydar Dughlat, writing the Tarikh-i-Rashidi in Kashmir in the 1540s, gave the Kazakhs their origin story in a paragraph, and it is one of the few foundation accounts in Inner Asia that is neither a genealogy nor a legend but a piece of plain political narrative.

Two princes leave

Abu'l-Khayr, of the house of Shiban, held full power in the Dasht-i Kipchak in the middle of the fifteenth century and had been at war with the sultans of Jochi's line. Two of them, Kerei and Janibek, fled from him into Moghulistan.

Esen Buqa, the khan there, received them with great honour and handed over to them Kozy-Bashi near the Chu, on the western limit of his country, where they dwelt in peace and content. They were useful to him: they sat on the frontier he could not garrison, and they had a quarrel with the man on the other side of it.

The horde forms

Then Abu'l-Khayr died, and the ulus of the Uzbeks fell into confusion, and constant strife arose among them. Most of the people joined the party of Kerei and Janibek.

They numbered, Mirza Haydar says, about two hundred thousand persons, and they received the name Uzbek-Kazak. The Kazak sultans began to reign in the year 870 — 1465 or 1466 — but God knows best.

Why they were called that

The historian explains the name where he first uses it, and the explanation is not flattering and not disputed. Since they had first separated themselves from the mass of their people, and for some time had been in an indigent and wandering state, they got the name of Kazak, which clung to them ever since.

The word means a man who has broken off — a free-lance, a masterless rider, a fugitive from his own prince. It was a condition before it was a people. Every steppe dynasty had produced men who lived that way for a season; what was new was a group that did it, kept doing it, took in everyone else who did it, and turned the word into a nation's name.

What kind of state it was

Not an accident of pasture. It was a Chinggisid khanate with a Jochid dynasty and a claim on the whole Kipchak, founded on the proposition that the Shibanids had usurped it. The long war with the Uzbeks that follows for the next century is not a border quarrel. Both sides held that the same country was theirs, and they had been one people until Kerei and Janibek walked out of it.

The towns on the Syr

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)expansion

A horde on open pasture can be beaten and re-form. What turns it into a state is having something it cannot move, and for the Kazakhs that was the line of walled towns along the middle Syr Darya — Sighnaq, Sauran, Otrar, Yasi — where the steppe met the caravan roads and the grain.

Burunduk

Kerei's son Burunduk became overchief, and Qasim, son of Janibek, was submissive to him as his father had been. Under them the war with Abu'l-Khayr's grandson Muhammad Shaybani ran for twenty years up and down that line.

The pattern repeats: a town changes hands, a siege is raised, a peace is made, a daughter is married. Burunduk took Mahmud, Shaybani's brother, prisoner at Sauran and lost him again on the road. He besieged Otrar, fought fiercely under its walls, agreed to a peace and went home. He allied with the khan of Moghulistan against Otrar and retired from it again. He gave a princess to Shaybani's son as brother-in-law. Then it started over.

What that produced, over a generation, was a Kazakh presence in Turkestan that could not be dislodged, and a reputation.

Qasim

By 1509 Burunduk was khan de jure and all the authority was virtually in Qasim's hands, and the Kazakhs could muster two hundred thousand men.

That winter Shaybani sent a force into their country from his quarters at Quruq. It heard a report that Qasim Khan was coming and turned back — and the panic went through the whole Uzbek army. Nothing was attended to, Mirza Haydar says. The drum beat for retreat and the army reached Samarkand broken and scattered at the end of the winter, whereupon Shaybani withdrew to Khurasan, where within months he was killed by the Safavids.

A rumour of Qasim's approach emptying a field army is the measure of where things had got to. Burunduk was eventually expelled and died in exile at Samarkand, and the throne passed to Janibek's family.

What Qasim did with it

He brought the Dasht-i Kipchak under his absolute control in a manner that no one, except Jochi Khan himself, had ever done before. His army exceeded a thousand thousand.

That figure is not a census; it is a historian saying that nobody had counted and that it was the largest force between the Volga and the Tian Shan. What is concrete is that the keys of Sayram were brought to him by its people, that he took Taraz, and that he marched on Tashkent with an army described only as countless, spent one night outside the citadel, and turned back — plundering everything around it as he went.

He did not take cities. He did not need to. He had the pasture, the herds, the men, and the ability to make a walled town's owner wonder whether it was worth keeping.

Two horses

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)peak

In 919 of the Hijra — 1513 — Sultan Said Khan of Moghulistan rode out to the Kazakh camp to ask Qasim to attack Tashkent a second time. Mirza Haydar was his cousin and heard the story from him for the rest of his life. It is the only extended portrait of a Kazakh khan from the inside, and almost nothing in it is about war.

The reception

They met at a place in Moghulistan called Jud. Qasim was nearer seventy than sixty; the khan was under thirty and in the full vigour of youth.

Qasim begged to be excused, on the plea of age, from riding out to receive his guest, and instead commanded all his sultans to go and kneel before him. Some of them were fifty and sixty years old — Janish, Sabash, Mumash, Jan Haydar, Karish and thirty or forty others, all sultans of the race of Jochi. When the two oldest bowed the khan rose; when the rest bowed he stayed seated.

Then Qasim came forward himself, with a courtesy the khan never forgot. Whenever he spoke of him afterwards he said Qasim was a most upright and worthy man, and told the story again.

What he had to give

We are men of the desert, and here there is nothing in the way of riches or formalities. Our most costly possessions are our horses, our favourite food their flesh, our most enjoyable drink their milk and the products of it. In our country are no gardens or buildings. Our chief recreation is inspecting our herds.

So they went and looked at the herds. Qasim said he had two horses worth the whole of the rest, and had them brought; the khan said in later life that he had never seen such animals. Qasim said that men of the desert depend for their lives on their horses and that he trusted no others than these two — and that since his guest was his esteemed guest, he should take whichever seemed better and leave the other.

The khan chose the one called Ughlan Turuq. Qasim picked out several more from the droves and gave him those as well.

The kumis

Then he offered a cup of kumis, saying it was one of their forms of hospitality and that he would count it a great favour. The khan had lately renounced all intoxicating drink and said so: how could he break his vow?

Qasim's answer is the whole scene in miniature. He had already explained that mare's milk and its products were their favourite drink and that this was the pleasantest of them. If his guest would not accept what he offered he was totally at a loss to know what to give in its place in performance of the duties of hospitality. Years must pass before such an honourable guest again entered the house of his humble host, and now he was incapable of entertaining him. How could he make reparation?

Then he hung his head, and sorrow appeared on his face.

The khan drank it to the dregs. They spent twenty days drinking together.

The refusal

When the talking got round to the campaign, Qasim declined it — flatly and on professional grounds. To attack the Shaybanids at this season would involve great difficulties; men of the desert do not think of winter campaigns unless ordered to; it is impossible; an expedition is not to be thought of at this time. Summer was ending and the Kazakhs were already moving to winter quarters. He dismissed his army and, with the utmost courtesy, sent his guest home.

Sultan Said went back to Andijan pleased. A learned man made a chronogram of it: Ashti-i-Kazak — Peace with the Kazakh.

An old man on the open steppe, with more horses and more men than anyone else between two mountain ranges, giving away the better half of what he owns, refusing the war he has been asked for, and sending the disappointed party home flattered. That is what the height of this khanate looked like.

Not a vestige

Drafted from Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (1895)contraction

Qasim died in 924 — 1518 — and within twenty-five years the historian who had described his court was writing that the Kazakhs had ceased to exist.

The collapse

Contests ensued among the sultans. Qasim's son Mumash succeeded and died in one of the wars, of shortness of breath. Then Tahir, son of Adik Sultan, took the khanship, and Tahir was a harsh man who practised much cruelty, so that his people — about four hundred thousand persons — suddenly deserted him and dispersed. He was left alone among the Kirghiz and died at last in misery.

About thirty thousand men gathered afterwards in Moghulistan and made Tahir's brother Bulash their khan. Then, Mirza Haydar says, the wheel of fate made such strange revolutions that for the last four years not a trace has been visible of these people.

He gives it twice, once in each of his two accounts, and the second time as an arithmetic:

In the year '30, the Kazak numbered a thousand thousand; in the year '44, not a vestige of all this host remains on the face of the earth.

What the figures mean

They are not a census and they are not a massacre. Mirza Haydar is describing a political fact in demographic language, because on the steppe the two were the same thing: a horde exists exactly as long as its people choose to camp with its khan.

Tahir's subjects did not die. They dispersed — to the Moghuls, to the Uzbeks, to the Nogai, to the Kirghiz — and the name went out of use because there was nobody left to whom it applied as a political description. The mechanism that had made the khanate in 1465, when Abu'l-Khayr's people walked over to Kerei and Janibek, ran in reverse.

Why it is worth reading carefully

Because the same historian who wrote the obituary also recorded the hospitality at Jud, and both are true, and they are twenty-five years apart.

A polity whose entire capital is the consent of mobile households can be the largest power on the steppe in one generation and untraceable in the next, without losing a battle that anyone thought decisive. Nothing was destroyed. The people simply stopped being that.

Which is also why the obituary was wrong.

The Lycurgus of the steppe

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)contraction

Mirza Haydar buried the Kazakhs in the 1540s. Within twenty years they were again the dominant power between the Syr Darya and the Irtysh, and they stayed so for a century and a half.

Haqnazar

Qasim's son Haqnazar put it back together. Haydar Razi calls him lord of the Kazakhs and the Kirghiz; the ruler of Aksu and Moghulistan fell in a struggle with him. The Uzbek court history has Abdullah Khan of Bukhara marching to the Talas to deal with the Kazakh chiefs and finding them willing to keep their treaty, receiving their envoys with robes of honour, and making over four towns in Turkestan to them as a token of good will.

He appears in the Russian archives too. An envoy sent to the Nogai in 1569 reports the Kazakh hordes of Haqnazar, Shigay and Jalim; in 1577 a Russian agent writes that the Kazakhs under Haqnazar were at war with the Nogai but wished to be on friendly terms with Moscow.

He was killed about 1580, after an attempt to seize Baba Sultan of Tashkent went wrong — the intended victim had been warned, and the valley, in the court historian's phrase, blossomed forth in tulips with the blood of the men sent to take him.

Shigay and Tevekkel

Shigay, who succeeded, was already very old — his father had died about 1503 and he was still campaigning in 1582. He met Abdullah Khan at Kara Tau on the Syr Darya, was appointed governor of Khujand, and sent his son Tevekkel off with the Uzbek army, where the young man distinguished himself at a shooting match in the khan's garden, firing at silver and gold balls hung on a pole.

Tevekkel took the title of khan himself in due course. The dynasty was back in the Syr Darya towns; Turkestan, where the khans were buried, was the seat.

Tauke

The last khan of the united Kazakhs was Tauke, and his reputation among his own people is unusual for a nomad ruler: he is remembered not for conquest but for law. Levchine calls him the Lycurgus and the Draco of the Kazakhs.

He introduced peace among them and ended the quarrels of their clans. His sagacity and equity gave him great influence. He united the weak tribes with one another and compelled the strong to respect them. He reigned at Turkestan as his ancestors had, and in 1688 the ruler of Bukhara was still sending officers to Tashkent to negotiate with him, which is a measure of where Kazakh authority reached.

It is to him that the division of the Kazakhs into three hordes is most reasonably traced. He appointed three deputies to manage their affairs — Tole for the Great Horde, Kazybek for the Middle, Aiteke for the Little. Under him these were administrative divisions and the people remained directly subject to the khan.

The war that undid it

Tauke spent his life fighting the Kalmyks, and it went badly.

In 1698 the Dzungar ruler Tsewang Rabtan wrote to the emperor of China setting out his grievances against him: that Galdan had captured Tauke's son and sent him to the Dalai Lama, that Tauke had asked him to intercede, that he had done so and sent the son home with an escort of five hundred men — and that Tauke had put them all to death along with a Dzungar grandee, his wife, children and people, and kept a hundred tents. He had also waylaid a Torghut chief's son and plundered a Russian caravan.

The war that followed was disastrous. The Kazakhs were driven out of their old quarters and largely broken up. In Tauke's later years his authority grew weaker and the three deputies he had appointed began to act on their own; Howorth dates the division of the Kazakhs into three substantive hordes, each under its own princes, from exactly this point.

In 1718 Tauke, Kaip and Abu'l-Khayr, all styling themselves khan, wrote to the governor of Siberia offering to put themselves under Russian protection. Tauke died about that year.

The white horse

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)end

In 1723 the Dzungar khan took Turkestan — the old capital of the Kazakh khans, and the place where most of them were buried — along with Tashkent and Sayram, and reduced the Great Horde and part of the Middle to obedience.

The flight

What followed is the event Kazakh memory keeps above all others. The greater part of the Middle Horde retired towards Samarkand; part of the Great Horde and a small section of the Middle went towards Khujand; the Little Horde went to Bukhara and Khiva. Famine and want pursued the fugitives.

It was not a defeat in the field so much as the loss of the ground a pastoral economy needs: winter pasture, the burial towns, the caravan line. Once those were gone the hordes had to go somewhere, and everywhere they could go belonged to somebody.

The one effort

The disasters patched up their quarrels for a while. A general assembly decided on a united effort to throw the enemy out of the old Kazakh country. Abu'l-Khayr, chief of the Little Horde, was made commander-in-chief, and a white horse was sacrificed as the pledge of mutual faith.

They advanced against the Dzungars and beat them in several encounters.

Then, afraid that the Dzungar chief would take a terrible revenge, they decided to leave the country anyway.

That sentence is the end of the khanate. Not the defeats — they had survived defeats for two hundred and sixty years — but a victory that nobody believed could be held.

Where they went

The Great Horde alone stayed behind, under the Dzungars.

The Little Horde moved west, driving the Volga Kalmyks in front of it, and settled between the Emba and the Yaik. The Middle Horde went north as far as the Or and the Ui, ejecting a large number of Bashkirs, who did not forget it: the dispossessed Bashkirs and the Cossacks of the Ural were a thorn in the Kazakhs' flank for generations afterwards.

Three hordes, on three separate frontiers, each with its own khan, its own enemies and its own reasons to look for a patron. Within a decade all three were looking at the same one.

Three hordes and an empire

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)afterlife

The submissions came one at a time, and the dismantling took a hundred and fifty years, which is why it is hard to name a year in which the Kazakh khanate ended.

Submission

Pressed between the Dzungars behind and the Bashkirs and Ural Cossacks in front, the hordes turned to Russia. Shemyaka of the Middle Horde swore the oath to the Empress Anne in 1732, which his own people resented enough to start disturbances; he then led a raid on the Bashkirs in flat breach of it and afterwards sent envoys to apologise. Patents of investiture were prepared for him in 1734 and never delivered, because he died first. The document survives: to our subject Shemyaka Khan and the elders and army of the Kirghiz Kazakhs of the Middle Horde, reciting his recent oath and his backslidings, and offering him pardon.

Abu'l-Khayr of the Little Horde, the most important of the chiefs, spent those years pressing the others to come in. In 1740 Abul Makhmet Khan and Ablai Sultan and many elders of the Middle Horde took the oath at Orenburg.

They were not conquered. They were surrounded, and they signed.

Abolition

The khanship went next, and the manner of it is worth recording.

In 1785 Baron Igelström, the new governor at Orenburg, decided to abolish the office of khan of the Little Horde altogether and replace it with three Russian administrators. He issued his summons for a general assembly not to the khan but to the sultans and elders, which by itself destroyed what influence the khan had left. When the assembly met not one sultan attended, and it was chaired by a batyr named Syrym, an enemy of the khan's, who argued that there was no need of a khan at all and that merit ought to weigh before birth — and demanded that Abu'l-Khayr's family be barred from the khanship for ever. The Russians partially agreed.

The immediate results were reported as excellent: more cattle at the frontier fairs in 1786 and 1787, fewer Russian prisoners taken, more released, and forty-five thousand Kazakh families wintering west of the Yaik without depredations.

It did not hold — rival claimants, Syrym's own revolt, a restoration, a fresh abolition. But the direction never reversed. Special tribunals called raspravas were set up to handle Kazakh affairs, with salaried officials who swore allegiance to the empress. By the 1820s Shirgazy still lived but no longer governed, and the Little Horde was three districts under sultans-regent who were, Schuyler says, either Russian creatures without influence or inclined to revolt themselves. Neither they nor the annual military expeditions from Orenburg could keep order in the steppe.

Kenesary

The last Chinggisid rising was led by Kenesary Qasimov of the Middle Horde in the late 1830s and early 1840s. For six years he kept the Russian authorities in continual alarm across the Siberian steppe, with a section of the Little Horde joining him. In 1844 he was driven into the mountains, took refuge among the Kara Kirghiz, and was killed fighting them.

Forts followed the revolt as they always did — Turgai and Irgiz in 1847, Karabutak in 1848, Raimsk on the lower Syr Darya in 1847 within reach of Khiva and Khoqand. In 1869 the last of the tribal structure went: the Little Horde was divided into the districts of Uralsk and Turgai under Russian military commanders, with only the aul elders elected. The steppe rose again for two years over it.

The prince with the French novel

In 1873 an American travelling to Turkestan shared part of the road with a Kazakh named Chingis, son of the last khan of the Bukey Horde, who on his father's death had been given the Russian title of prince. He was a good Muslim, just back from the pilgrimage to Mecca, and on his way to spend the summer on his estates in the government of Samara. Schuyler thought him a cultivated gentleman. He was deep in a French novel most of the time.

Four hundred years after two princes rode out of Abu'l-Khayr's country with nothing, and were called fugitives for it, that is where the line came to rest.