Central Asia in World History

by Golden, Peter B.

  Although the Toluids also fought among themselves, Qubilai’s steadfast opponent was an Ögödeid, Qaidu, often presented as the upholder of Mongol traditions. Qaidu sought to reestablish his family’s ulus, but not the restoration of the Ögödeid Great Qaghanate. He was never a mortal danger to Qubilai. From his base in southern Kazakhstan, Qaidu exploited intra-Chinggisid rivalries, gained control of much of Turkestan in the early 1270s, and in 1281 formed an alliance with the Chaghadaids, which lasted for two decades. He controlled territory from the Oxus River to the Altay Mountains. His state dissolved in internal conflicts after his death and his collaborators, the Chagahaid khans, subsumed it. We know little about Qaidu personally other than that he was very clever and, unlike his kinsmen, abstemious in his personal habits, shunning alcohol (which had killed his father). His beard consisted of nine gray hairs. One of his daughters, Qutulun, was a formidable fighter who accompanied her father on his campaigns. Her father gave her the right to marry a man of her own choosing. Qutulun insisted that only the man who could best her in combat would be her husband. She remained unmarried for a long time, relenting only when gossip hinted at a more intimate relationship with her father.16

  Throne and territorial struggles rippled across the empire, splintering the realm. Distinct Chinggisid states took shape: the Ulus of Jochi, the Ulus of Chaghadai and the Yuan dynasty in China and the eastern steppes. Hülegü and his heirs, centered in Iran, took the title ilkhân (ruler of a subordinate state) indicating a slightly less exalted standing. In reality, the ilkhânate (1356–1335) was an equal ulus.

  By the late thirteenth century, the Mongol Empire extended from Korea, China, and Manchuria to Ukraine and Russia. Its sphere of influence included the Balkans and the Byzantine Empire. Iran, Iraq, and Transcaucasia formed the southern border zone. Everywhere, they had faced foes that were weak or divided. Cities were destroyed and looted, populations massacred or carried off. When the conquests ended, the Mongols, aided by local and international advisors, began to rebuild. Religions were left in place. Although Mongol religious tolerance has sometimes been exaggerated, the principal obligation of the various clergies was to pray for the health and good fortune of the Khans, who were happy for spiritual support from any source. Moreover, tolerance was also a more realistic policy in a religiously diverse empire.17

  The Chinggisids were keen talent scouts. Everywhere, their agents identified subjects whose skills could benefit the regime. They, too, were the spoils of war. Linguistic ability in a polyglot empire was especially valuable. Those who knew languages were sure of employment. Qubilai, who spoke colloquial Chinese, was sufficiently concerned with the question that in 1269 he ordered ‘P’ags-pa, a Tibetan monk in his service, to devise an alphabet that could render Mongol, Chinese, and other languages of the empire. Despite the ruler’s best efforts, it never gained wide acceptance.

  The Mongols sought loyal and effective servants in the conquered lands. Chinggis and his heirs were anxious to have specialists who could read (and perhaps control) the heavens. Yelu Chucai, a Sinicized Qitan who served Chinggis and Ögödei, initially gained the favor of the Great Khan through his abilities as an astronomer and meteorologist. Rashîd ad-Dîn tells of a Qanglï Qïpchaq tribesman who was a master of the yadatash, the magical rain-stone of the Central Asian Turkic nomads. According to him, this rainmaker was able to produce a snowstorm in summer.18 Foreign specialists had a pacifying effect on some of the more destructive impulses of the early Chinggisids. It was Yelu Chucai who dissuaded Ögödei from turning much of north China into pasturages for his herds by demonstrating that herding tax-paying peasants could be more profitable.

  Skilled individuals moved around the empire as their talents and imperial needs dictated. Bolad Agha, a Mongol, saw service in China and then Iran. There he became one of the most important informants of Rashîd ad-Dîn, the great historian of the Mongol empire. Bolad’s father, Jürki, a military commander, was also a ba’urchi (cook), or more probably the man who oversaw the preparation of food, in the extended household of Börte, Chinggis Khan’s first and senior wife, the mother of his four heirs. This close and intimate contact with the ruling house gave him very high standing. Fluent in Chinese and Mongol, Bolad held many important positions under Qubilai. He also retained his father’s title of ba’urchi with the aura of easy access to the ruler that it implied. In 1285–86, he was sent to Iran on a mission, and he elected to remain there in service to the Iranian branch of the Toluids. Bolad was probably responsible for introducing paper currency (well known in China) to Iran in 1294. It failed utterly.19 The production of paper money required printing, which was also brought to Iran, where it met a similar fate.

  Rashîd ad-Dîn was a Persian Muslim of Jewish origin who became an important minister under the Ilkhânids. He also began his career in the imperial kitchen, preparing food for the Khan, and personally serving him. This close contact and his natural talents brought him to the fore. His Jâmi’ at-Tavârîkh (Collection of the Histories) covers not only the Mongols and other Central Asian peoples, but also the history of China, the Near East, and what was known about the West. This kind of broad historical vision would have been impossible without the transcontinental connections established by the Mongols. His overlord, Ghazan Khan, spoke Arabic and Persian in addition to elegant Mongol, and was also acquainted with Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Chinese, “Frankish,” and other languages.20

  Chinggisid Iran and China exchanged medical and pharmacological knowledge along with culinary arts. Rashîd ad-Dîn possessed a Chinese cookbook and was knowledgeable about Chinese cuisine, probably with Bolad’s help. West Asian foods, such as sherbet and soups with chickpeas, were known at the Yuan court. The Yinshan zhengyao, a Yuan dietary compendium dated to 1330, is sprinkled with Persian and Turkic terms.21 Similar interests are seen in a dictionary compiled in six languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Greek, and Armenian) by a mid-fourteenth-century ruler in distant Yemen, an area that was never under Mongol control. Among the entries are terms for “chopsticks” and “Chinese duck.”22 The Mongols contributed to a broader Eurasian culinary palate.

  Marco Polo is the most famous European who made his way to the Chinggisid courts—and he was a minor figure. His book about his adventures became a best seller in Europe. There were countless others in the Mongol capitals anxious to secure an audience or offer their talents to the Great Khans. William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar sent by the Papacy to the court of Möngke in the 1250s, mentions “William of Paris,” who built a contraption which had the form of a large silver tree which from various apertures spewed forth “koumiss” and other alcoholic beverages. The sharp-eyed friar also appreciated the many alcoholic concoctions prepared from rice, millet, wheat, and honey, which the Mongols borrowed from the peoples of their empire. However, he looked askance at the organized intoxication that was a part of their great feasts, decrying their competition “with one another in quaffing in a thoroughly distasteful and greedy fashion.”23

  Music accompanied the prodigious tippling required of Chinggisid court etiquette, and Rubruck noted the great variety of musical instruments in the “Tatar” camps. The Yuan court maintained an orchestra whose instruments reflected their world empire. An organ was introduced from western Asia, outfitted with a mechanical peacock, which moved in time with the music. Stringed instruments from the Turkic steppe, such as the qobïz, were found in Chinggisid courts, east and west. Ibn Battûta, the early-fourteenth-century North African Muslim traveler, attended a Mongol feast in China in which performers sang in Persian, Arabic, and Chinese. In Iran there were performances of Chinese music.24 Archery and wrestling were major forms of popular entertainment. Mongol khans gathered wrestlers from throughout their realm. One famous “Tazik” champion was exempted from his wrestling duties and commanded to sire children—future champions. Various forms of polo-like equestrian sports were extremely popular from China to the Mediterranean. The Mongols, thus, may have been the first promoters of intern
ational championship sports competitions.25

  The Chinggisids and the Mongol elite were active players in the exchange process, making their influence and tastes felt in the lands they governed and beyond. Cultural exchange went through a Mongol filter. For a time, the Mongol Empire created a space in which peaceful, secure cultural interaction could occur. The exchange of information created an awareness of wider horizons among the educated and some intrepid men of commerce, who gained a more accurate sense of the world. Chinggisid rule left a relatively small linguistic footprint. Islamic “Turko-Persia” did not become Mongolian in speech. Mongol settlers adopted local languages. The Mongol tongue remained largely limited to the Mongols themselves.

  When the Mongol regimes collapsed and trade was disrupted, western Europeans, on the periphery of this commercial interaction, were anxious to find alternate routes to the East. The Muslim Middle East fared less well. The ‘Abbâsid Caliphate, in decline since the ninth century, was swept away along with elements of classical Arabo-Islamic civilization. The domination of the Islamic heartlands by steppe peoples since the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century continued. Islam, as a powerful political-military-religious force, revived under the Ottomans in the fourteenth century. The Ottomans were, at their core, a Turkic grouping on the Chinggisid periphery, one of the many such groupings created by the Mongol whirlwind.

  The reverberations of Mongol expansionism were felt in Southeast Asia as well. The Mongol conquest of south China contributed to the movement of Tai populations into the Burmese state of Pagan. From 1283 to 1301, periodic Mongol attacks on Pagan (which was briefly taken in 1287), caused further displacements. There was also Mongol military activity, largely unsuccessful, in what is today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The Javanese kingdom of Majapahit exploited the Mongol presence to establish itself in 1293 and then drove them out. Majapahit subsequently became one of the great suppliers of spices, much in demand in western Europe.

  The Mongol Empire marked the greatest incursion of the steppe peoples into settled society. It brought the steppe, the forest zone, and many of the neighboring states (China, Iran, Medieval Rus’) into a vast world realm, the largest, contiguous, land empire in human history. It profoundly influenced global history, putting into place international networks of communications, the beginnings of an early “world system”26 in the period 1250–1350, the precursor of the modern world.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Later Chinggisids, Temür, and the Timurid Renaissance

  In the fragmenting Chinggisid world, Mongols were a privileged minority, one increasingly assimilated by their subjects. As al-’Umarî, an Arab historian from Damascus, noted, the conquered Qïpchaqs mixed with the Mongols and they became “as if they were of one stock.”1 Under Mongol rule, many remaining Iranian-speakers adopted Turkic, a process that had been in progress since the sixth century. Turko-Persian bilingualism continued to be common in cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand. Persian (Tajik) retained its status as a language of high culture and government, but increasingly it had to coexist with Turkic even in the literary domain. Turkic became the politically dominant language of Muslim Central Asia.

  The Mongols deliberately shuffled the Turkic nomads about, dispersing tribal fragments to form parts of the Chinggisids’ personal armies. When the Chinggisids declined, tribal identities or tribe-like units reemerged, some bearing the names of Chinggisid leaders or other prominent people. This reflected the new emphasis on loyalty to a member of the altan urugh rather than the traditional ties of kinship, real or invented.

  The change of language and emergence of new identities often preceded or accompanied other forms of cultural assimilation, most notably in religion. Islam radiated out from the cities of Transoxiana to the various Turko-Mongolian peoples, some newly arrived within their orbits. It made its first serious inroads in the Ulus of Jochi, which comprised several distinct “hordes”: Great, White, Gray, and Blue. From the sixteenth century onward, Russian sources began to call the now-diminished “Great Horde,” the core of the Jochid realm, the “Golden Horde,” and this became the name under which it is generally known in later sources. Batu’s brother, Berke, was the first Jochid to convert to Islam, probably before he became Khan in 1257. His religious mentor was Sayf ad-Dîn al-Bâkharzî, a Sûfî shaykh from Bukhara. Some Chinggisids and others influenced by him appear to have converted as well. But this did not lead to the proclamation of Islam as the official religion of the Ulus of Jochi. Berke’s court still followed many older customs associated with shamanist beliefs. Mamlûk ambassadors to Saray in 1263 were warned not to wash their clothes or even eat snow in keeping with old nomadic water taboos. Water reflected the heavens and Tengri, the celestial supreme god of the pagan Turkic and Mongolic peoples. It could not be sullied.2

  It is only with Özbek, who converted around 1320, that Islam gained a lasting foothold. The account of his conversion highlights the role of the Sûfîs in converting the steppe peoples. According to this tale, typical of Central Asian conversion narratives, the shamans at his court used their “magical powers” to prepare koumiss and other drinks for him. One day, the presence of Muslim holy men prevented this “miraculous” process from taking place. Özbek decided to hold a debate between the shamans and the Muslims. When neither side emerged victorious, the parties agreed that a more strenuous contest was needed. They heated up two large oven-pits, one for a shaman, one for a Sûfî, and decided that “whoever emerges without being burned, his religion will be true.” The Muslims chose Baba Tükles, a very hairy man. He put on body armor and his hair stood up and went through the eyelets of the armor. He then entered the baking oven. His opponent, the shaman, was thrown by his colleagues into the pit and immediately perished in the fire. Baba Tükles, over whose oven-pit a sheep was roasting, continued reciting his prayers. When the fully cooked sheep was removed and the oven door opened, he said “Why did you hurry?” By that time his armor was “glowing red hot,” but “by the power of God most high not a hair of the Baba’s body was burned.” The Khan and his entourage immediately became Muslims.3

  In the western Jochid steppes, Islam followed the trade routes out of the cities of Volga Bulgharia, Urgench in Khwarazm, and more distantly Bukhara. Nomadic populations further from the cities felt its impact less. Rulers, along with the Sûfîs, promoted the religion, but a shamanistic substratum persisted, sometimes up to the present, in the folk Islam that took root.4 The recently converted Turko-Mongolian shamanists viewed the wonder-working Sûfîs, much like their traditional shamans who, they believed, could shape-shift and enter the spirit world to effect medical cures. Centuries after conversion, shamans among the Kyrgyz, for example, still performed “cures” of sick people through trances and sacrifices to the spirits. Recitations from the Qur’ân usually followed, showing how the two belief systems had become intertwined. During the severe droughts of 1958 and 1965, desperate Kyrgyz performed animal sacrifices following ancient shamanic traditions—often at the tombs of Muslim holy men!5 Reverence for ancestral animals, such as the wolf, remains widespread in the folk culture of a number of Central Asian peoples. Some Kyrgyz and Uzbek women, although Muslims, still make appeals to Umay, the Old Turkic goddess of fertility, during childbirth.

  The adoption of a new religion, however, could not preserve a splintering state. Özbek’s sons and grandsons had the unfortunate habit of murdering one another. While there was near anarchy in the ruling house by 1359, Islam increasingly became the religion of the majority of the “Tatars,” the now-Turkic-speaking mix of Chinggisid-ruled Mongols and Turkic peoples.

  Eventually, Jochids from other branches took over, but domestic peace remained elusive. Tatar instability allowed Dmitrii, the subject prince of Moscow, whose predecessors had mainly distinguished themselves as tax collectors for the Khans, to attempt to assert his autonomy in the mid-1300s. Having defeated a Tatar army led by Mamai near the Don River in 1380, he took the sobriquet “Donskoi” (of the Don) in commem
oration of his victory. His failure to appear personally before his new overlord, Toqtamïsh (in Russian, Tokhtamysh), who had seized control of the Great Horde in 1381, provoked an attack on Moscow in 1382. Dmitrii fled and the Tatars looted the city. Nonetheless, Moscow, despite this humiliation, increasingly was able to set its own agenda as Tatar power continued to fragment. It remained a nominal vassal of the Khans until the reign of Ivan III (1462–1505) when the “Tatar yoke” ended.

  Toqtamïsh’s success was largely due to the assistance he received from Tamerlane, a powerful warlord in the neighboring Chaghadaid realm, an unstable region, beset by frequent succession struggles. Chaghadaid nomads closer to the cities felt the influence of Islam, while those that were further away were anti-Muslim and wary of cities. Despite periodic persecution, Islam was becoming the religion of the Chaghadaid ruling elite by the end of the first half of the fourteenth century, but the tribesmen remained overwhelmingly pagan.

  By the mid-fourteenth century, the Chaghadaid realm had split in two. The western part, corresponding approximately to Transoxiana, an old Muslim center, became known as the Ulus of Chaghatay (the Turkic form of Chaghadai). The eastern zone, comprising modern southeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang came to be called Moghulistan, “the land of the Mongols.” Ethnographically speaking, this is inaccurate. The bulk of its inhabitants were Turks and Turkicized Mongols. Muslim authors used the term “Moghul” to denote nomads who were, like the original Mongols, less touched by Islamic civilization. The westerners disparagingly referred to their eastern kinsmen as Jete (bandit, wanderer, vagabond).

  The Ulus of Chaghatay was a crazy quilt of intersecting alliances and enmities of various tribal entities and the personal armies of the Chinggisid princes. It was here that Temür, better known in Europe as Tamerlane, came to power. His name, transcribed in Arabic and Persian as Tîmûr, means “iron” in Turkic. It is a common name, still widely used in the Turkic world. “Tamerlane” derives from the Persian Tîmûr-i Lang, “Timur the Lame.” He walked with a limp in his right leg, the result of a wound, and was missing two fingers on his right hand chopped off by a foe when he was rustling sheep in one of his youthful adventures.6 He was born some 100 km (62 miles) south of Samarkand into a clan of the Barlas, a Turkicized tribe of Mongol descent.