132

The Chaghatayids, Descendants of Chaghatay

624–764/1227–1363

Transoxania, Mogholistan including Semirechye, and eastern Turkestan

After Chingiz’s death, Chaghatay had great prestige as the oldest surviving son and as an acknowledged expert on the Mongol tribal law, the Yasa; he was, indeed, strongly anti-Muslim and insisted on enforcing those prescriptions of the Yasa which ran counter to the Muslim Sharī‘, for example over the slaughtering of animals for meat and over ablutions in running water. Chaghatay’s appanage straddled the T’ien Shan mountains from the Uyghur lands in the east to Soghdia in the west, but the Chaghatay khanate was not really founded until after Chaghatay’s own death. His sons and grandsons quarrelled among themselves and conspired against the Great Khān Möngke, and according to William of Rubruck, the Flemish friar who travelled to the Mongol court at Qaraqorum, the whole Mongol empire was divided c. 1250 between Möngke and Batu, son of Jochi. The real founder of the Chaghatay khanate was Chaghatay’s grandson Alughu, who took advantage of the civil war between Möngke’s sons Qubilay and Arïgh Böke to seize Khwārazm, western Turkestan and Afghanistan, nominally for Arïgh Böke but in fact for himself. These territories became the nucleus of the khanate, which continued now in a slightly reduced form, nominally subject to the Great Khāns but in fact until the end of the thirteenth century sharing influence in Central Asia with Qaydu, the grandson of Ögedey, until the latter’s death in 702/1303.

From their geographical position, the Chaghatayids were less directly under the influence of Islam than their relatives in Persia, the 1l Khānids (see below, no. 133), and preserved their tribal and nomadic ways much longer. These facts may have contributed to the general decline of urban life and agriculture in Central Asia outside the oases of Transoxania and Eastern Turkestan. The short-reigned Mubārak Shāh (664/1266) was the first Chaghatay id definitely to adopt Islam, but from c. 681/c. 1282 Du’a and his descendants were fiercely pagan and resided in the eastern territories of the khanate. Kebek was the first to return to Transoxania, where he built a palace at Nakhshab or Qarshi (< Mongol ‘palace’). Tarmashīrīn (whose name in this Persianised form enshrines a Buddhist Sanskrit one like Dharmasila ‘Having the habit of the Dharma or Buddhist law’) became a Muslim, but the strongly anti-Islamic nomadic Mongols of the eastern part of the khanate rose against him and killed him in 734/1334.

The unity of the Chaghatayids began to disintegrate soon after this, as Tīmūr Lang rose to power in Transoxania. Various Chaghatayids were placed on the throne in Transoxania by the Turkish amīrs, and then after 764/1363 some descendants of Ögedey were set up by Tīmūr. The Chaghatayids nevertheless survived, and after Tīmūr’s death their fortunes revived in Mogholistan and endured there until the mid-fifteenth century under Esen Buqa II b. Uways Khān (r. 833–67/1429–62), a dangerous enemy of the later Tīmūrids; but the Chaghatayids’ Transoxanian territories fell to the Shïbānids (see below, no. 153) by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Only the eastern branch persisted in Semirechye, with its capital at first at Almalïgh in the upper Ili region, and in the Tarim basin, where it expanded towards Turfan and shared power in Kāshghar with the Dughlat tribe of Turks until the final extinction of the Chaghatayids in 1089/1678 and their replacement in Eastern Turkestan by a line of local Naqshbandī religious leaders, the Khōjas.

Lane-Poole, 241–2; Sachau, 30 no. 77; Zambaur, 248–50; Album, 43–4.

EI² ‘Čaghatay Khān’, ‘Čaghatay Khānate’ (W. Barthold and J. A. Boyle); Eir ‘Chaghatayid dynasty’ (P. Jackson).

L. Hambis, Le chapitre CVII du Yuan Che, 56–64.

J. A. Boyle, The Successors of Genghis Khan, with a genealogical table at p. 345.