Tiele

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

The Tiele were the largest Turkic-speaking population of the sixth-century steppe. They were a federation of nomadic groups, up to forty by one count, who ranged west of the Altai across Dzungaria and beyond.^[1] They stood under the Rouran as the Ashina did.^[1] They rose against the Rouran repeatedly and were beaten repeatedly. Then, in 546, Bumin intercepted their rising, and fifty thousand of them submitted to him. From that moment the Ashina were no longer a family of smiths but a power.^[2] The Göktürk state was built on Tiele manpower. The Tiele never fully accepted this role.

Names

TölisTölesTegregOld TurkicKül Tegin inscription
鐵勒ChineseSui Shu 84
高車ChineseWei Shu 103
丁零ChineseHan Shu

The Chinese histories know them under three names. The Wei Shu calls them Gaoche, “high carts”, after the tall many-spoked wagons in which they moved. It describes them as dressing in fur, eating meat, and keeping cattle and sheep exactly like the Rouran.^[1] The Sui and Tang histories call them Tiele.^[3] Both names are taken to render one Turkic original. What that original was is not settled. The reconstruction Tegreg has been proposed, with the observation that the Mongolian word for a cart, telegen, lies close to it.^[4] Behind both names stands a third. Chinese texts of the Han period place a people called Dingling north of the Xiongnu from the third century BC. The descent of the Tiele from the Dingling is generally accepted. The Wei Shu goes further and derives them from the Red Di of the Zhou period, which would carry their history back to the seventh century BC. This is a Chinese genealogical claim, not a finding.^[1] The Sui Shu in turn counts the ancestors of the Tiele among the descendants of the Xiongnu.^[3] Some scholars identify the Tiele with old Hunnic tribes and with the whole Turkic population of Central Asia.^[5] The debate on the Göktürks and the Xiongnu treats the label.

The Göktürks had their own word. The Orkhon inscriptions of the eighth century name a people called Tölis. The founders “organised” the Tölis together with the Tarduš and gave them a yabgu and a šad.^[6] Töles and Tiele are one name for one people. Vilhelm Thomsen, who deciphered the inscriptions in 1893, was the first to put the two together. The sixth-century events are transmitted under the Chinese form Tiele. Töles is the form of the inscriptions.

By the eighth century the name had a second and narrower use. Töles and Tarduš were the two wings of the restored khaganate, eastern and western. The inscription establishes the offices in the same breath as the peoples that fill them.^[6] The wings were made out of the tribes whose names they carried.

Character and range

The Tiele were full nomads, without the fixed base in the Altai that the Ashina had. Their range shifted over the centuries from east to west. By the early sixth century it lay definitely west of the Altai, in Dzungaria and the country beyond. The Sui Shu lists about fifty Tiele groups by region.^[3]^[5] Among the places it names are the country north of Lake Baikal and north of the Tola, the northern foot of the Tian Shan, the south-west of the Altai and the banks of the Syr Darya.^[3]^[5] They spoke Turkic and worshipped Tengri, as the Ashina did. What distinguished them from the Ashina was scale and structure. The Tiele were many and loose: a federation of groups that had to assemble before they could act. The Ashina were few and they were one.

That difference decided everything in 546. A federation dispersed across a wide belt of steppe cannot strike without first gathering. While it gathers, it can be seen.

Under the Rouran

The Tiele were the subject tribes of the Rouran in the country west of the Gobi. The Rouran khans spent a good part of their strength holding them down.^[4] The Rouran subdued the Töles in 460 and held them with difficulty.^[4] The Tiele rose more than once and failed more than once, a sub-group called Fufuluo among them.^[1] The Fufuluo chief Afuzhiluo led more than a hundred thousand tents out of the khaganate in 487 and founded a kingdom north-west of Gaochang. The secession has its own article.^[1] In 508 they rose successfully. The Rouran khan Tahan beat them once. In a second battle their leader Mietu beat and killed him. For a decade the Tiele were free.^[1] They used the decade to push into Rouran country. Then Anagui came out of the Rouran civil war, mobilised, marched west, and beat them decisively in Dzungaria. In the Wei Shu the blow falls earlier and from another hand. Chounu crushed the Gaoche in 516 and killed their king Mietu.^[1] Yifu, restored by the Hephthalites, beat the Rouran once and was beaten in turn before his brother killed him.^[1] The Ashina, their neighbours, took no part on either side.

Tiele stood on both sides in the war of the Six Garrisons. In 525 Mieliehe, chief of the western Tiele, went over to the Wei commander Yuan Shen with more than thirty thousand households. Poliuhan Baling fell on them and took them. A Wei ambush won them back.^[7] In 526 Hulü Luoyang, of the western Chile, rose at Sanggan and joined the herdsmen west of the Yellow River. Erzhu Rong defeated him.^[8] The peoples of the central steppe were not isolated from one another. The Tiele, like the Ashina, had by the 540s a precise picture of their overlord.

Submission to Bumin (546)

In 546 the Tiele prepared to move against the Rouran.^[2] By one count it was the third time. Bumin sent an envoy to the Rouran court with word of the movement. While the envoy was still on the road, Bumin marched from the Altai into Dzungaria and fell on the Tiele before they had assembled. He defeated them, and more than fifty thousand submitted to him.^[2] The figure counts households or tents. Conversions into a total population are modern extrapolations that vary by a factor of five.

Bumin took no Tiele territory and displaced no Tiele leader. They submitted to him personally, and their followings were added to his own. He had put down a rising against his overlord unasked and kept the participants. The Zhou Shu does not say why they submitted rather than dispersing. The best-supported view is that it was a matter of choice. Bumin’s plan and the Tiele’s had been the same plan. A leader who had beaten them and then asked them to follow him against the Rouran offered them what they had risen for. Six years later they were in his army when it destroyed the Rouran. The khaganate he founded took most of the Tiele country west to Lake Alaköl with them.

In the Göktürk Khaganate

The Tiele had submitted to Bumin, not to the Ashina. When he died within the year, the tie lapsed. Istemi needed two years to reach the Seven Rivers in 553–555. Those years were most likely spent bringing the western Tiele under Ashina rule again, group by group. That was the pattern for the next eighty years. The Tiele were the military backbone of the western wing and its most restive subjects. Every weakness at the top was their opportunity. They rose against Tardush during the Sui war of 583, at the moment the Göktürk army stood before Chang’an, and forced him back west. They rose again when he tried to hold the whole khaganate after 587. Their rising drove him into exile in 603.^[3] Around 605 they rose against his successor in the west. A new taxation and the execution of several hundred of their chiefs at a single meeting had provoked them. They set up a khan of their own from the Qibi.^[3] The rising drove the Göktürk ruler out of Dzungaria into the Ili valley.^[4]

In the east one Tiele group became the instrument of the khaganate’s end. The Xueyantuo, in Turkic Sır Tarduš, broke from the Göktürks in 628 with the encouragement of the Tang. They declared themselves a khaganate. After the fall of the eastern court in 630 they ruled its former territory for a decade, until the Tang destroyed them in turn.

Later history

The later history of the steppe was largely the history of Tiele groups. The Tokuz Oguz of the inscriptions, the Nine Oguz, were Tiele. Out of them came the Uyghurs, who took the Orkhon from the last Göktürk khan in 744 and founded the Uyghur Khaganate. The Kül Tegin inscription lists the peoples who came to mourn the founders and the enemies who stood on every side of the restored state. It names the Nine Oguz among the enemies and calls them, in the same breath, “my own people”.^[6] The inscription thus describes the Tiele both as enemies and as the Göktürks’ own people.

According to one theory, Turkic-speaking tribes, in general the Tele, as that theory calls the Tiele, brought the runiform script west to the Volga, the Don and the Danube.^[9] The Bulgar article gives the inscriptions.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i Wei Shu, juan 103
^ a b c Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d e f Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b c d Yavuz 2025
^ a b c Kayra 1996, p. 150
^ a b c Kül Tegin inscription
^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 150
^ Wei Shu, juan 9
^ Vasilʼev 1993, p. 65–66

Sources

Wei Shu, juan 9, 103
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Kül Tegin inscription
Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)
Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 150 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu, Sui Shu and Bei Shi)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Osman Kemal Kayra, Orhun Anıtlarında Sıfatlar, Sıfat Tamlamaları ve Bunlara İlişkin Bazı Açıklamalar (1996)
D. D. Vasilʼev, Göktürk Yazı Kültürünün Asya’nın Merkezinden Doğu Avrupa’ya Yolu (1993)