Rouran Khaganate

A fugitive smith's horde

formationDrafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)

The Chinese record traces the Rouran to a captured slave who had forgotten his own name. Seized during a raid by the people then called the Jeu-jen, he was given the name Mukkuru - "bald," for the peculiar way his hair grew - and put to work as an ironworker at the court of a Toba prince in the region of modern Shanxi. Made a free trooper for his own valor, Mukkuru fled into the desert rather than face execution for missing a military muster, gathering a few hundred vagabonds like himself around him. It was his son Cheruk, a more warlike man, who first organized anything deserving the name of a horde, and gave it the name Jeu-jen.

Luoyang Museum · Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895) · Gary Todd · CC0

A people who first enter the record by name

Distinct information about this people appears only from the year 394, by which point four generations had already passed since Cheruk's own horde first took shape - a span placing its true beginning around the year 300, during the same general collapse of Xiongnu power that scattered every steppe people into fragments competing to build something new. A descendant remembered only as the "sixth grandson" crossed north of the desert that year and conquered several Kanguly tribes, the first sign that Mukkuru's fugitive band of vagabonds had grown into something worth a Chinese chronicler's notice.

The first Khakhan

peakDrafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)

The "sixth grandson" who first led the Jeu-jen north of the desert was succeeded, a generation on, by his own grandson Zarun - a man Gibbon, misled by French translators, called Toulun. Where his ancestors had scraped together vagabonds and raided neighboring tribes, Zarun organized a formidable military system and built an empire that ran from Korea in the east to the oasis of Harashar in the west, and south to the Tuyuhun country and modern Gansu - holding every road west except the main one, his courts established near the old waystations later travelers would know from Marco Polo's own account of the Silk Road.

A title no steppe ruler had claimed before

Zarun marked his own new standing with a new title: Kudovar Khakhan, "the governing and spreading emperor" - the Chinese record's own account of the first time the word Khakhan was used by any ruler of the steppe, a title later empires from the Turks to the Mongols would all eventually claim for themselves. To the northwest of his own territory lay the scattered remnants of the once-dominant Xiongnu, and Zarun absorbed them one by one as his own power grew, until his empire stood as the unrivaled power of the eastern steppe - for the moment, at least, unchallenged by the Toba dynasty newly seated on the throne of northern China, a neighbor Zarun had not yet chosen to provoke.

A campaign that scattered everything

contractionDrafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)

Zarun's own habit of harrying the Toba frontier outlived him. His successor, his uncle or cousin Dadar, faced the consequences in the summer of 429, when the third Toba emperor led an army of more than a hundred thousand men against him. Dadar was caught completely by surprise. He set fire to his own encampment and fled into the desert without a trace, and his people's settlements scattered in every direction, leaving vast flocks and herds to wander the country uncared for. The Toba army pursued him twelve hundred miles from where the first Han emperor had once been trapped by a Xiongnu chieftain centuries before, scouring fifteen hundred miles of Mongolia from east to west. The old Kanguly enemies, seeing their chance, hunted down the fugitive Dadar themselves and killed him. The campaign left the Tobas a million captured horses and men and three hundred thousand more surrendered voluntarily.

Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895) · Dudva · CC0

Two more campaigns, and a wall to hold what was won

Dadar's grandson Tughochir fared no better. A second Toba campaign captured the whole of his tents and flocks, numbering over a million head by the Chinese record's own vague but consistent reckoning; when Tughochir's own son kept trespassing on Toba territory in the years that followed, the Toba court answered by proposing a fresh Great Wall three hundred miles long, built by soldiers idle between campaigns, and by launching a third expedition that cut off fifty thousand heads, took ten thousand prisoners, and pursued the survivors for nineteen days without pause.

An alliance no one would answer

Crushed by three successive disasters, the Jeu-jen tried what force could no longer achieve: an alliance with the rival Chinese dynasties south of the Yangtze, sending advances in succession to the Song, the Southern Qi, and the Liang courts to try to bring the all-powerful Tobas down between two fires. Nothing came of it. Distant dynasties with no army north of the river had no reason to gamble one on a steppe people's own quarrel, and the Jeu-jen were left to face the Tobas' continued dominance with whatever scattered strength three ruinous campaigns had left them.

A cousin with a Hindu name

endDrafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)

Tughochir's grandson Cheunu gave the Jeu-jen their first real recovery in generations, punishing the rebellious Kankalis to the west in 516 and raising his country once more to real power. It did not survive his own succession. His younger brother Anakwe could not take the throne without opposition, and fled for his life to the Toba court, where he was received well. In his absence a cousin bearing the striking, un-Turkic name of Brahman took charge of the horde and hunted down Anakwe's own supporters, until the Kankalis pressed him hard enough in turn that Brahman himself had to surrender to a Toba governor.

A quarrel two rival beasts were kept apart to fight

The Toba court debated what to do with two rival claimants of the same defeated people, and settled on a policy of calculated separation: quarter them far enough apart that neither could cooperate against their hosts, encourage them to weaken each other, and step in only if either became dangerous. Brahman was sent to the far west near modern Hami with a Chinese resident ostensibly to assist, in practice to watch him; he later conspired to rebel anyway, was taken to China, and died there. Anakwe was settled in the east, given the title Duke of Shuofang and formally recognized by the Tobas as king of the Jeu-jen - a position from which his own family went on to build marriage alliances with both the Toba court and the rival Tartar dynasty of Qi.

Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A vassal who stopped calling himself one

Anakwe's real opportunity came from his patron's own weakness. As the Toba Wei dynasty collapsed into anarchy, Anakwe used the chaos to consolidate a power the Chinese court could no longer check, and simply stopped calling himself a vassal. He kept Chinese literate men and eunuch clerks in his own service, built an official government on the Chinese model, and began presuming to an equality with the very dynasty that had once arbitrated his own claim to the throne.

Blacksmith slaves who asked for a bride

endDrafted from Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (1895)

The Turks had served the Jeu-jen for generations as ironworkers, subject craftsmen rather than a people anyone expected to rule themselves. In 546 their chief, Tumen, asked Anakwe for a Jeu-jen princess in marriage - a request for the kind of recognition a subject people did not typically receive. Anakwe's answer was to make war on him instead. It was a catastrophic miscalculation: Anakwe's army was utterly defeated, and the king who had spent his whole reign clawing his way from exile to something like parity with the Chinese court killed himself rather than survive the defeat.

A throne that could not survive its own founder

Anakwe's heir, Amrodjin, fled to the newly founded Qi empire and was given land in northern Shanxi, only to revolt against his own hosts soon after - a rebellion that ended with his entire horde broken up and scattered. A cousin of Anakwe was elected to succeed him, but found no better fortune: repeated defeats at Turkish hands forced him to seek refuge with a warlord who was, in practice, running the Western Wei emperor's own court from behind the throne.

A massacre outside the gates

The Turks were not content to let their former masters live on anywhere, even as refugees. Using the influence their own military power now commanded, they insisted on the wholesale butchery of the Jeu-jen who had sought asylum at the Western Wei court - a massacre carried out by, or in the presence of, the Turkish ambassador himself outside the gates of the capital at Xi'an. Only the younger males were spared, and only to be distributed as slaves into princely and ducal households. From that point on, the Jeu-jen go unmentioned in the Chinese record even as a subject tribe under their Turkish and Uyghur successors - a silence the historian reading it calls as complete a destruction as any people of the steppe ever suffered.