8 articles
Battles & Events
A single engagement or a single day: battles and skirmishes, embassies, treaties, successions.
- Battle of Bolchu The night march over the Altai and the Irtysh and the dawn attack, about 711, in which Tonyukuk, against his khan's order, fell on the army of the Türgesh at Bolchu, took their khan and broke the western Göktürk as an independent power for a generation.
- Battle of Bukhara The decisive engagement of the Göktürk–Hephthalite war, about 560: Istemi's army broke the Hephthalite king and the greater part of his army while Khosrow I closed from the south-west, and the victors divided the Hephthalite lands along the Oxus. Tabari names the killed king and no place; the battle is set at Bukhara after seven days and nights, and a reconstruction from the Persian tradition puts it in the hills at Nasaf.
- Battle of Dzungaria, 552 The first of the two engagements of 552: a Rouran force sent west to stop Bumin was beaten in Dzungaria in the opening weeks of the year.
- Battle of Huaihuang, 552 The second engagement of 552, north of Huaihuang near the Chinese frontier, in which the main Rouran army was destroyed; Anagui was dead within weeks and Bumin was khan.
- Defeat of the Tiele, 546 Bumin's interception of the Tiele rising against the Rouran: some ten thousand Ashina riders against a host several times their number, after which more than fifty thousand Tiele tents — about a quarter of a million people — passed into his domain and the Ashina became a power.
- Göktürk raid of 542 The first recorded act of the Göktürk on their own account: a winter raid across a frozen river into Western Wei territory that ended without a battle.
- Succession crisis of 581 The assembly at Ötüken after Taspar's death, at which the nobility overrode the dead khan's wish, chose Amrak, saw him abdicate for Ishbara, and set the Ashina princes on the road to civil war and the division of the khaganate.
- Western Wei embassy of 545 The mission that the Western Wei chancellor Yuwen Tai sent to the Göktürk under the Sogdian An Nuopantuo: the first time a Chinese state addressed the Ashina as a party in their own right.