| Kara-Khanid Khanate | ||||
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| Kara Khanid Khanate, c. 1000. | ||||
| Capital | Kashgar | |||
| Religion | Islam | |||
| Government | Monarchy | |||
| History | ||||
| - Established | 840 | |||
| - Disestablished | 1212 | |||
| Area | ||||
| - 1025 est. | 3,000,000 km2 (1,158,306 sq mi) | |||
The Kara-Khanid Khanate was a confederation of Turkic tribes ruled by a dynasty known in literature as the Karakhanids or Ilek Khanids, (Persian: قراخانيان, Qarākhānīyān or خاقانيه, Khakānīya, Chinese: 黑汗, 桃花石).[1] Both dynastic names represent titles with Kara Kağan being the most important Turkish title up till the end of the dynasty.[2] The Khanate ruled Transoxania in Central Asia from 999-1211.[3][4] Their capitals included Kashgar, Balasagun, and Uzgen.
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The history of the Karakhanids is one of the least studied periods in Central Asia.[5]
In 742CE, The Karluks, were part of an alliance led by the Basmyl and Uyghurs, which rebelled against the Kök Türk rulers.[6] In the realignment of power which followed the Karluks were elevated from a tribe led by an el teber to one led by a yabghu. Yabghu being one of the highest Turkic dignitaries implies belonging to the Ashina clan. The Karluks and Uyghurs went on to ally themselves against the Basmyl and within two years the Karluks and Uyghurs toppled the Basmyl khagan. The Uyghur yabghu became khagan and the Karluk leader yabghu. This arrangement lasted less than a year. Hostilities between the Uyghur and Karluk forced the Karluk to migrate westward into the western Türk-Türgesh lands.[7]
Karluks were one of the member of Nine-Oguze tribale union(Uyghurs).
By 766 The Karluks had forced the submission of the Western Türk-Türgesh. The Karluk confederation by now included the Chigil and Tukshi tribes who may have been Türgesh tribes incorporated into the Karluk union. By the mid 9th century the Karluk confederation now controlling the sacred lands of the Western Türks (control of these lands signalled the important mandate of heaven) and being affiliated with the Ashina clan, allowed the Khaganate to be passed on to them along with domination of the steppes.[8]
In the 9th century southern Central Asia was under the rule of the Samanids and the Central Asian steppe was dominated by Turkic nomads. The Volga-Ural region was inhabited by the Turkic Pechenegs who were in the process of being driven westwards by the Oghuz. The Oghuz tribes extended down from the lower reaches of the Syr Darya and Aral Sea region to an area where present day Shymkent is located. This was where they bordered the Karluks. The Karluks reached as far north as the Irtysh and the Kimek confederation, with encampments extending to the Chi and Ili rivers, where the Chigil and Tukshi tribes lived, and east to the Ferghana valley and beyond. South and East of the Karluks was inhabited by the Yaghma.[9]
The coming together of the Karluk confederation (including the Türgesh descended Chigil and Tukshi tribes) and the Yaghma, descendants of the Toquz-oguz kings, appear to have formed the first Karluk-Karakhanid kaghanate. The Eastern Khagan bore the title Arslan Qara Khaqan (Arslan "lion" was the totem of the Chigil) and the Western Khagan the title Bughra Qara Khaqan (Bughra "male camel" was the totem of the Yaghma). Under the Khagans were four rulers with the titles Arslan Ilig, Bughra Ilig, Arslan Tegin and Bughra Tegin.[10]
In 999 Harun (or Hasan) Bughra Khan, grandson of the paramount tribal chief of the Karluk confederation, occupied Bukhara, the Samanid capital. The Samanid domains were split up between the Ghaznavids, who gained Khorasan and Afghanistan, and the Karakhanids, who received Transoxania; the Oxus River thus became the boundary between the two rival empires. During this period the Kara-Khanids were converted to Islam.
Early in the 11th century the unity of the Kara-Khanid dynasty was fractured by constant internal warfare. In 1041 Muhammad 'Ayn ad-Dawlah (reigned 1041–52) took over the administration of the western branch of the family, centred at Bukhara. After the rise of the Seljuks at the end of the 11th century in Iran, the Kara-Khanids became nominal vassals of the Seljuks. Later they would serve the dual suzerainty of both the Kara-Khitans to the north and the Seljuks to the south.[3]
Historically influential Kara-Khanid rulers include Mahmoud Tamgach of Kashgar. After the defeat of the Khitan dynasty by the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) in Northern China, the great Khitan mandarin Yelu Dashi escaped from China with a small band of Khitan soldiers, recruited warriors from Tangut, Tibetan, Karluk, Kara-Khoja, Naiman areas and marched westward in search of asylum.
Yelu Dashi was accommodated by the hospitable Tangut Western Xia Kingdom and the Buddhist Kara-Khojas. However, he was shut out by the Muslim Kara-Khanids near Gulja and Kashgar. Enraged, he subjugated Karakhanid states one by one and set up the Kara-Khitan suzerainty in Balasagun on the Chu River. Several military commanders of Kara-Khanid lineages such as the father of Osman of Khwarezm, escaped from Kara-Khanid lands during the Kara-Khitan invasion. In 1244, upon the invitation of the Egyptian Mamluks, Osman of Khwarezm marched on Jerusalem and liberated the holy city, on behalf of Islam, from the Crusaders.
With a decline in Seljuk power, the Kara-Khanids in 1140 fell under domination of the Mongol[11] Kara-Khitan Khanate, centred in northern China.[12] Uthman (reigned 1204–11) briefly re-established the independence of the dynasty, but in 1211 the Karakhanids were defeated by the Khwarezm-Shah 'Ala' ad-Din Muhammad and the dynasty was extinguished. The Kara-Khitan Khanate, though harsh on the Muslim Turks, did not dispossess all of the Kara-Khanid domains. Instead, the Khitans (most of them were actually Naimans, Tanguts and Karluks speaking the same Turkic language as the Kara-Khanids) retreated to the northern steppes and had the Kara-Khanids act as their tax-collectors and administrators on Muslim sedentary populations (the same practice was adopted by the Golden Horde on the Russian Steppes). The Kara-Khitans even incorporated Kara-Khanid Muslim generals such as Muhammad Tai, who surrendered to the Naiman usurper Kuchlug at the end of the Kara-Khitan Dynasty. Kuchlug, the last ruler of the Kara-Khitan Dynasty, was especially harsh on the Muslim populations under his suzerainty. He went so far as to forcing conversions from Islam to Buddhism, the dominant religion of the ruling Kara-Khitans. The elite Kara-Khitans and their Naiman soldiers, on an interesting note, were very often Nestorian Christians, as suggested by the Syriac names of the Gur-Khans (Emperors), who at the same time had Confucian titles and patronized Buddhist establishments. Kuchlug's Naimans were perhaps largely Nestorian Christian. The reason for forced conversions to Buddhism was perhaps the underdevelopment of Nestorian institutions, making Nestorianism unsuitable as a tool for ruling sedentary populations.
In the early 13th century Kara-Khitan ruler Kuchlug, a sworn foe of Genghis Khan, was crushed by the advancing Mongol army along with his Kara-Khitan military state. His vassals, the Kara-Khanids, offered meager resistance to the Mongols. Kuchlug put an end to eastern part of Kara-Khanid state in 1211. Also, Khwarezmian Empire demolished western part of the Kara-Khanid state in 1212.
It is perhaps because of the similarities between Kara-Khanid and Kara-Khoja cultures that during the Yuan and Ming periods former Kara-Khoja and Xixia lands were populated by converts to Islam indistinguishable from Chagatay and Timurid lands. These Turkic Muslims under Chinese influence later adopted the Chinese language while still maintaining extensive trade relations with Turkestan. They were designated "Hui" in Chinese, obviously derived from "Huihui" or "Huihu", an archaic transliteration of "Uyghur". The Kara-Khanid culture started as a literate tradition, with a body of Muslim subjects recorded in the vertical Sogdian script of the first Uyghur Empire.
The Islamized Karluk princely clan, the Balasaghunlu Ashinalar (the Kara-Khanids) gravitated toward the Persian Islamic cultural zone after their political autonomy and suzerainty over Central Asia was secured during the 9-10th century. As they became increasingly Persianized (to the point of adopting "Afrasiab", a Shahnameh mythical figure as the ancestor of their lineage), they settled in the more Indo-Iranian sedentary centers such as Kashgar, and became detached from the nomadic traditions of fellow Karluks, many of whom retained the Nestorian-Mahayana-Manichaean religious mixture of the former Uyghur Khanate.
Kara-Khanid legacy is arguably the most enduring cultural heritage among coexisting cultures in Central Asia from the 9th to the 13th century. The Karluk-Uyghur dialect spoken by the nomadic tribes and turkified sedentary populations under Kara-Khanid rule branched out into two major branches of the Turkic language family, the Chagatay and the Kypchak. The Kara-Khanid cultural model that combined nomadic Turkic culture with Islamic, sedentary institutions spread east into former Kara-Khoja and Tangut territories and west and south into the subcontinent, Khorasan (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Northern Iran), Golden Horde territories (Tataristan) and Turkey. The Chagatay, Timurid and Uzbek states and societies inherited most of the cultures of the Kara-Khanids and the Khwarezmians without much interruption.
Western Karakhanids
Eastern Karakhanids