Moghulistan

Overview

Moghulistan — the "Land of the Moghuls" (Persian for "Mongols"), also called the Moghul Khanate or, in Chinese historiography, the Eastern Chagatai Khanate — was a Turco-Mongol Muslim breakaway khanate of the Chagatai Khanate. It existed as a unified state from 1347 to 1462 and in divided successor forms (the Yarkent and Turpan khanates) into the 17th–18th centuries. At its widest extent — roughly 1.4 million square kilometres — it embraced the Ili River region (its steppe core), modern Dzungaria, the Tarim Basin, and at times Tashkent, Ferghana, and parts of Badakhshan; its capital was Almaliq.

The khanate arose when the eastern nomadic tribes of the Chagatai ulus — resentful of the sedentarizing, Islamizing policies of khans like Tarmashirin — became effectively independent in the 1340s. In 1347 the powerful Dughlat tribe raised the Chagatai prince Tughlugh Timur (r. 1347–1363) as khan of a tribal confederacy governing the Tarim Basin and the steppe. Tughlugh Timur converted to Islam in 1354 (reportedly with 160,000 followers), an event marking the Islamization of Moghulistan, and twice invaded Transoxiana (1360–61), temporarily reuniting the two Chagatai halves before Amir Husayn and Timur expelled the Moghuls. Timurid authors pejoratively called the eastern khanate "Ulus-i Jatah" ("land of worthless people").

After Tughlugh Timur's son Ilyas Khoja was killed in 1368, the Dughlat amir Qamar-ud-Din seized power — a usurpation by a "commoner" that provoked near-constant civil war and repeated Timurid invasions. The Ming dynasty, by contrast, opened caravan trade with Moghulistan, greatly enriching its rulers through taxation of Silk Road traffic. The Dughlats restored a Chagatai heir, Khizr Khoja, in the 1380s–90s; he married his sister to Timur and led the forcible conversion of Turfan and Qocho. Fifteenth-century rulers included Uwais Khan (1418–1429), twice captured by the Oirat Esen Taishi, and Esen Buqa II (1429–1462), who raided the Timurids. During this century the Moghul elite became increasingly Turkified — Yunus Khan was described as looking like a Tajik rather than a Mongol — adopted Chagatai Turkic, and replaced the Mongol Yassa with Islamic sharia.

On Esen Buqa's death in 1462, Yunus Khan (1462–1487), raised to the throne with Timurid backing, reunited the khanate, took Tashkent from the Timurids (1482/84), and maintained good relations with the Kazakhs. After his death the realm split: his son Ahmad Alaq ruled the eastern (Turpan) khanate, while Mahmud Khan ruled the west from Tashkent; both were defeated and captured by the Shaybanid Uzbeks in 1503, and Mahmud was eventually executed. Western Moghulistan was gradually lost to Kyrgyz tribes (by 1510–11) and to the expanding Kazakh Khanate. Sultan Said Khan conquered the western Tarim in 1514, founding the Yarkent Khanate (1514–1705), nominally a vassal of Mansur Khan's Turpan Khanate. From the late 16th century secular power in these states passed to Naqshbandi Sufi khojas, divided into Aq Taghlik and Kara Taghlik factions. A khoja appeal to the 5th Dalai Lama brought a Dzungar invasion in 1680; the Yarkent Khanate was extinguished in 1705 and Turpan absorbed by the Dzungars, ending Chagatai rule in Central Asia — though a collateral line ruled the Kumul Khanate as Qing vassals until 1930. Moghulistan's chief primary source, the Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, remains a monument of Chagatai historiography.