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The Qarakhānids

382–609/992–1212

Transoxania, Farghāna, Semirechye and eastern Turkestan

1. The Great Qaghans of the united kingdom

2. The Great Qaghans of the western kingdom (Transoxania, including Bukhara and Samarkand, and Farghāna at times), with its centre at Samarkand

3. The Great Qaghans of the eastern kingdom (Īlāq, Talas, Shāsh, at times Farghāna, Semirechye, Kāshghar and Khotan), with its centre at Balāsāghūn, later Kāshghar

4. The Qaghans in Farghāna, with their centre in Uzgend

The Turkish dynasty of the Qarakhānids acquired this name from European orientalists because of the frequency of the word qara ‘black’ > ‘northern’ (the basic orientation of the early Turks) > ‘powerful’ in their Turkish titulature; they have also been called the Ilek (properly Ilig) Khāns, again from one of the terms in the hierarchy of this titulature, and Āl-i Afrāsiyāb ‘House of Afrāsiyāb’ because of a fancied connection with the ruler of Tūrān in Firdawsī’s Shāh-nāma. It has been suggested by a leading authority on the dynasty, Omeljan Pritsak, that the Qarakhānids sprang from the Qarluq, a tribal group which had been formerly connected with the Uyghur confederation and as such had played an important role in earlier steppe history; another scholar, Elena Davidovich, has suggested a connection with the Yaghma or Chigil tribes, which were in any case components of the Qarluq.

The Qarakhānids became Muslim in the middle years of the tenth century, and their then head Satuq Bughra Khān assumed the Islamic name of ‘Abd al-Karim. His grandson Hārūn or Ḥasan Bughra Khān was attracted southwards by the unsettled condition of Transoxania caused by the decline there of the Sāmānids, and in 392/992 temporarily occupied Bukhara. A few years later, the Ilig Khān Naṣr and Maḥmūd of Ghazna finally extinguished the authority of the Sāmānids and divided their lands. The Oxus became the boundary between the two empires, and for the next two centuries the territories of the Qarakhānids stretched from Bukhara and the lower Syr Darya in the west to Semirechye and Kashgharia in the east. The Qarakhānids formed a loose confederation rather than a monolithic, unitary state, with various members of the family holding appanages which, if they held more than one, were not necessarily contiguous. Internal quarrels soon appeared, and after c. 432/c. 1041 there were two main parts of the Qarakhānid dominions, a western Khānate centred on Samarkand in Transoxania and at times including Farghāna, while an eastern one included the lands of the middle Syr Darya valley, at times Farghāna, Semirechye, and Kashgharia in eastern Turkestan, with a military capital, the Khāns’ ordu or encampment, near Balāsāghūn, but with Kāshghar as its religious and cultural centre. Farghāna was a substantial appanage which often had its own hereditary branch of subordinate Khāns. In general, the descendants of the Great Qaghan ‘Alī b. Mūsā (the‘Alid branch, in Pritsak’s convenient terminology) ruled in the west, while those of his cousin Hārūn or Ḥasan Bughra Khān b. Sulaymān (the Ḥasanid branch) ruled in the east. The boundary between these was not hard and fast, and members of each might rule in the other parts of the Qarakhānid lands; in the later twelfth century, the Ḥasanids were ruling in Samarkand. The western Khānate flourished under such rulers as Ibrāhīm Tamghach or Tabghach Khān, but in the later eleventh century fell under the suzerainty of the Seljuqs. However, after Sanjar’s disastrous defeat in the Qaṭwān Steppe in 536/1141, control over the whole of Turkestan west of the T’ien Shan mountains passed to the Buddhist Qara Khitay or Western Liao from northern China. The last western QaraKhānids continued as vassals of the Qara Khitay but failed to maintain their position against the Khwārazm Shāh‘Alā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad (see above, no. 89, 4), who in 609/1212 killed the last ruler there, ‘Uthmān, while the eastern Khānate fell to the Mongol Küchlüg just before Chingiz Khān’s hordes arrived in Central Asia.

Whereas the originally Turkish Ghaznawid sultans built up a strongly centralised state on the familiar Perso-Islamic pattern, the QaraKhānids remained closer to their tribal and steppe past and had a more diffused system of authority, with members of the ruling family allocated their own appanages and the greater part of their tribesmen remaining probably nomadic. Within the ruling family there prevailed the system, common among other Altaic peoples, of Great Qaghans and co-Qaghans, with lesser Khāns beneath them, each with his own suitable Turkish title, often combined with a totemistic title taken from the names of animals, birds, etc., for example aislan ‘lion’, bughia ‘camel’, toghrïl and chaghrï ‘falcon, hawk’, etc. Since members of the family were continually moving up in the hierarchy of power and acquiring new names and titles, the task of elucidating the genealogy and chronology of the QaraKhānids is exceedingly difficult; the historical sources are not numerous, and, while large numbers of Qarakhānid coins are extant, these last also present a bewildering array of names and titles. As remarked in the Introduction, Zambaur noted over seventy years ago that this was the only major Islamic dynasty whose genealogy remained obscure, and confessed that his own attempts at constructing a genealogy were necessarily sketchy; many obscurities still remain despite much recent research and many coin finds within Central Asia, the contents of which are increasingly ending up in the West. The tables given above follow the researches of Pritsak supplemented by those more recent ones of Elena Davidovich.

Zambaur, 206–7; Album, 34.

EI² ‘Ilek Khans’ (C. E. Bosworth).

O. Pritsak, ‘Karachanidische Streitfragen ’l-4’, Oiiens, 3 (1950), 209–28.

O. Pritsak, ‘Die Karachaniden’, Der Islam, 31 (1954), 17–68.

Reşat Genç, Kaiahanh devlet teşkilati (XL yüzyil) (Türk hâkimiyet anlayisi ve Karahanhlai), Istanbul 1981.

Elena A. Davidovich, ‘The QaraKhānids’, in History of the Civilisations of Central Asia, IV/1, The Age of Achievement, UNESCO, Paris 1997, ch. 6.