Kapgan's western war, 709–713

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

This campaign carried the Second Khaganate as far as it ever reached. It is also the campaign with the best sources: the man who planned it wrote it down himself.^[1]

The coalition

The war began as a response to a coalition that was forming against the khaganate. Three khans had agreed to meet on the Altai and destroy the eastern khan. They were the Chinese emperor, the khan of the Ten Arrows and the khan of the Kirghiz.^[2]^[3] Tonyukuk is the only witness to that agreement. His inscription records what it cost him. When he heard of it, sleep did not come to him at night, nor rest by day.^[4]

He decided to strike the northern arm first. He would do it in winter, before the three could join.^[4] Everything that follows rests on that one choice.

The winter crossing

There was only one road over the Kögmen, and snow had closed it.^[4] Tonyukuk asked for a guide and found a man of the Az. The man said that his own country was Az, that there was a halting-place, and that a single horse could pass along the Anı.^[4]

Tonyukuk set the army in motion and had the men mount. They crossed the Ak Termil and so gained time.^[5] Earlier translations have the army gather beyond the Ak Termil instead.^[6] The men climbed on foot. They led the horses and held on to the trees, and the men in front trampled the snow down for those behind. They crossed a wooded summit and came down with difficulty.^[7] Earlier interpretations take the words for the wooded summit as the name of a pass, Ibar.^[8] For ten nights they worked their way along the mountainside.^[1] The guide led them the wrong way. He was cut down for it.^[4]^[9] When they were in want, the khan named the river below them as the Anı. They rode down along it by day and by night at the gallop.^[1]

They fell on the Kirghiz as they slept. One translation has the Göktürks break the Kirghiz sleep with their lances. In the older translation they opened a way with their lances.^[10] The Kirghiz khan gathered his army and fought, and he lost. He was killed, and his people submitted.^[11] The army came back over the Kögmen by the way it had gone.^[11]

The account is the most detailed description of a steppe operation anywhere in the runiform corpus. It is so detailed because the man who planned the operation is the man who had it carved.

Bolchu

The second arm was the Türgesh. A fugitive brought word that their khan had set out.^[12] The Ten Arrows, he said, had marched to the last man, and a Chinese army was with them.^[11]

Kapgan was not with the army. He had gone home to bury the katun. He had left the army in the Altai under Inel Khan and the Tardush Shad, with Tonyukuk to lead it. His order was to stand if the enemy came and otherwise to stay where they were and gather word.^[11] He sent a second message in secret to the army’s commander. It said that Tonyukuk was wilful and went astray, and that the commander was not to consent if Tonyukuk proposed to ride out.^[11] Tonyukuk reports that secret message on his own monument. He then records that he rode out.^[11]

The march and the fighting belong to the battle of Bolchu, which has its own article. The army crossed the Altai where there was no road and the Irtysh where there was no ford. It marched by night and attacked at first light an army reported at a hundred thousand.^[13]^[14] The Türgesh khan was taken, and his yabgu and his shad were killed. That night the begs and people of the Ten Arrows came in and submitted.^[15] Kül Tegin fought there. The stone raised for him tells the same day from his side.^[16]

The Iron Gate

The column did not stop at the Türgesh. It went on with the army of the Ten Arrows behind it, across the Pearl River and over the Syr Darya, to the mountain called Tinsi Oglı and as far as the Iron Gate south of Samarkand. The Iron Gate is the pass on the road to Balkh that the inscriptions use as the western end of the world.^[17] There the Sogdians came in and submitted to Inel Khan. The army carried gold, silver and captives home.^[18]^[19] The inscription adds that the Göktürk people had never before come as far as the Iron Gate and the mountains called Tinsi Oglı, “son of heaven”.^[20] These mountains have been identified with the Tian Shan and given the Turkic name Ak Tag, the Ektag where Istemi received the Roman envoy in 569.^[21]

This is the furthest west that a Göktürk army of the Second Khaganate is recorded. It is also about as far from the Orkhon as the Second Khaganate ever operated in any direction.

The date

The Tang history ascribes the whole campaign to the khan in a single sentence. It dates the campaign by the Jingyun period, which is 710 to 711.^[22] Scholars calculate the date in three ways. The first keeps that date and adds a check. Kül Tegin was twenty-six in the year of the Kirghiz and Türgesh campaigns, which is 710 if he was born in 684.^[23] The second puts the acquisition of the Ten Arrows at about 711 to 712. It identifies the Türgesh khan as Saqal, who perished there with his brother.^[23] The third follows the Bilge inscription. It puts the campaign of Bilge against the Kirghiz and the Chik in 709, and the crossing of the Kögmen and the battle in the Songa forest in 710. In the same year it has the army cross the Altai and the Irtysh and kill the Türgesh khan, the yabgu and the shad at Bolchu.^[24] It is therefore not settled which Türgesh khan fell at Bolchu.

Consequences

Little of it lasted. Within a few years the subject peoples were rising at Beiting and in the Nine Surnames country. The army that had gone to the Iron Gate was needed at home.^[22] In the confusion of 716 Sulu set himself up as khan of the Türgesh. The western steppe stopped answering to Ötüken.

The Kül Tegin inscription looks back on the whole of Kapgan’s reign from twenty years later. It records the campaigns as achievements and the reign as a catastrophe. It does not explain how both can be true.^[16] The western war is the clearest case. It was a complete military success at the end of a supply line that the state could not hold, and Kapgan undertook it while his own people were leaving him.

References

^ a b c Tonyukuk inscription
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 285
^ Tekin 1994, p. 9–11
^ a b c d e Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 286
^ Tekin 1994, p. 11, 40
^ Tekin 1994, p. 40
^ Tekin 1994, p. 12, 41
^ Tekin 1994, p. 41
^ Tekin 1994, p. 12–13
^ Tekin 1994, p. 12, 42–43
^ a b c d e f Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 287
^ Tekin 1994, p. 13, 32
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 287–288
^ Tekin 1994, p. 17
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288
^ a b Kül Tegin inscription
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288–289, 381, 403
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 289
^ Tekin 1994, p. 19, 49
^ Tekin 1994, p. 19, 48
^ Tekin 1994, p. 47
^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ a b Golden 1992
^ Taşağıl 2004, p. 38

Sources

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Wilhelm Radloff, Die alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei. Zweite Folge: Die Inschrift des Tonjukuk (1899)
E. Denison Ross (after Vilhelm Thomsen), The Orkhon Inscriptions; The Tonyukuk Inscription. Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering (1930)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
Talât Tekin, Tunyukuk Yazıtı (1994)
Ahmet Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, Bd. III (2004)