10 articles
Conflicts
Wars, civil wars and the great campaigns — the whole struggle, not a day of it.
- Civil war, 584–603 The twenty years in which four Ashina princes fought for the khaganate, the Sui set them against one another, and the state that Bumin founded became two.
- Fall of the Second Khaganate, 741–744 Three years in which the Göktürk state destroyed itself and three subject peoples finished it: a boy khan murdered by his own shad, a khan whose people would not follow him, and a coalition of Basmïl, Uyghurs and Karluk that sent two Ashina heads to Chang'an and then turned on each other.
- Gaoche secession (487) The departure of more than a hundred thousand tents of Gaoche under Afuzhiluo and Qiongqi from the Rouran khaganate to the north-west of Gaochang in 487, where they founded a kingdom of their own; Tulun Khan pursued them, was beaten repeatedly, and was killed by his own people in 492.
- Göktürk war of restoration, 679–687 Two risings and a decade of raiding by which the Göktürk of the Ordos threw off fifty years of Tang administration: the first, under an Ashina fetched from the frontier, was crushed and its khan beheaded in the market of Chang'an; the second, begun by a chieftain with a few hundred men in the hills, became the Second Khaganate.
- Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589 The first war between the Göktürk and Sasanian Persia: a Göktürk army crossed the Oxus, took Balkh and Herat, and was destroyed by Bahram Chobin, who then retook Herat and reached Bukhara before turning on his own king.
- Hegemony Wars in Northern China The editor's name for the century of wars that followed the break-up of the Northern Wei in 534 — two Weis, Qi against Zhou, Sui against Chen and the Göktürk, and the wars that made the Tang — in which the Göktürk fought on every side and ended as captives of the victor.
- Rouran civil war (520–521) The year of four rulers after the murder of Chounu: Anagui, khan for ten days, driven south to the Wei by his cousin Shifa; Shifa destroyed by Poluomen and killed by the Didouyu; Poluomen, khan for months, driven to Liangzhou by the Gaoche; and Anagui, restored by the Wei with a train of gifts and settled north of Huaishuo.
- Taiwu's campaign against the Rouran (429) The Northern Wei emperor Taiwu's crossing of the Gobi in the fifth month of 429, against the counsel of his ministers and astrologers: Datan's people were scattered at the Li river, more than three hundred thousand surrendered, and the Rouran, in the Wei Shu's words, were left weak and far away.
- Tang conquest of the eastern Khaganate, 626–630 The four years in which the Göktürk went from standing on the Wei river within sight of Chang'an to having no khan at all: a rising of the subject peoples, a winter of snow that killed the herds, the defection of Ilig's own nephew, and a Tang column that struck while the surrender was being negotiated.
- The Turkic War of Independence The six-year war by which Bumin's Ashina broke the Rouran overlordship: from the intercepted Tiele rising and the refused princess of 546 to the two battles of 552 and the taking of Ötüken.