Battle of Bolchu

Bolchu is the battle the Tonyukuk inscription was written to tell. Three khans had agreed to meet on the Altai and destroy the eastern khan: the Tang emperor, the khan of the Ten Arrows and the khan of the Kirghiz.^[1] Tonyukuk had already broken the northern arm of the coalition. He had crossed the Sayan in winter and killed the Kirghiz khan in his sleep.^[2] Then a fugitive came from the Türgesh: their khan had set out, the Ten Arrows had marched to the last man, and a Chinese army was with them.^[3]^[4]

Prelude

Kapgan Khan went home to bury the katun. He left the army in the Altai under Inel Khan and the Tardush Shad, with Tonyukuk to lead it.^[4] His order was: “If they come, gather the men and stand; if they do not come, stay where you are and gather word and tidings.”^[5] Three more fugitives came with the same news: the Türgesh khan meant to assemble on the Yarısh plain. Tonyukuk sent word to the khan. The khan answered: stay, do not ride out, do not be surprised. To Apa Tarkan, the army’s commander, he sent a secret message: “Bilge Tonyukuk is wilful and goes astray. If he says, ‘Let us ride out with the army,’ do not consent.”^[6]^[4] Tonyukuk, who reports the secret message on his own monument, rode out.

March and battle

“I crossed the Altun forest where there was no road; we crossed the Irtysh where there was no ford. We marched by night, and we reached Bolchu at first light.”^[4] A messenger reported a hundred thousand men gathered on the Yarısh plain. All the begs said turn back. Tonyukuk’s answer is the best-known passage on the stone. They had come over the Altai and the Irtysh, and the enemy had not noticed them. “Heaven, Umay and the holy Earth-and-Water have surely delivered them into our hands. Why should we flee? Why should we be afraid because they are many? Why should we be overcome because we are few? Let us attack!”^[7] They attacked and drove the enemy apart.^[7] On the second day the Türgesh came on “burning like fire”. They had two wings, each half again as large as the Göktürk force. The text goes on: “following the Tardush Shad we scattered them. We took their khan; their yabgu and their shad were killed there. We took some fifty men prisoner.”^[7] That night word went round to the tribes of the Ten Arrows. Their begs and people came in and submitted.^[7]

The Kül Tegin inscription tells the same day from the prince’s side. The Göktürks crossed the Altai and forded the Irtysh and fell on the Türgesh in their sleep. At Bolchu the Türgesh khan’s army came on “like fire, like a storm”.^[8] Kül Tegin, on the grey with the blaze, took the Türgesh khan’s minister, the governor of the Az, with his own hand. The text goes on: “we killed their khan there and took his realm”.^[8] The Black Türgesh submitted and were settled at Tabar.^[8] The two stones agree on the place, the crossing, the surprise and the khan’s fate. Each gives the credit to its own hero, and neither names the other’s.

Aftermath

The Göktürks went on with the army of the Ten Arrows behind them. They crossed the Pearl River, the Syr Darya, and came to the mountain called Tinsi Oglı and to the Iron Gate south of Samarkand.^[5] There the Sogdians came and submitted to Inel Khan. The army carried home gold, silver and captives.^[9] The Kül Tegin stone has Kül Tegin sent ahead with a few men against the Black Türgesh. They rose again toward Keŋeres.^[8] The Tang history, in one sentence, gives the whole to the khan: “in the Jingyun period Mochuo led troops west against Suoge and destroyed him.”^[10]

Date and location

The Tang history’s Jingyun period is 710 to 711. Kül Tegin was twenty-six in the year of the Kirghiz and Türgesh campaigns, which is 710 if he was born in 684.^[11] A second reckoning puts the acquisition of the Ten Arrows at about 711 to 712. In it the Türgesh khan Saqal, the Suoge of the Chinese, and his brother both perish.^[11] Bolchu lay beyond the Irtysh from the Altai, on the Dzungarian side. The Yarısh plain where the Türgesh had gathered lay near it. Nothing closer is secure. The fifth line of the Ulaangom inscription, cut in Uyghur letters in the style of the Orkhon texts, has the sequence boluçu öğüz(tä), which its first reader gives with a question mark.^[12] Another reader takes the words for bulun üküş, “many captives”. The sequence has not been tied to the battle.^[13] Whatever the year, the effect is not in doubt: for a generation after Bolchu the western steppe answered to Ötüken, until Sulu of the Türgesh set himself up as khan in the confusion of 716. The Türgesh article takes up the story.

References

^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 285–286
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 286–287
^ Tekin 1994, p. 13, 32
^ a b c d Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 287
^ a b Tonyukuk inscription
^ Tekin 1994, p. 14, 32
^ a b c d Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288
^ a b c d Kül Tegin inscription
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 289
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ a b Golden 1992
^ M. 1994, p. 132, 135–136
^ M. 1994, p. 134

Sources

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
E. Denison Ross (after Vilhelm Thomsen), The Orkhon Inscriptions; The Tonyukuk Inscription. Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering (1930)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
Şçerbak, Aleksandr M., Ulaangom Yazıtı Üzerine İlâve Düşünceler (1994)
Talât Tekin, Tunyukuk Yazıtı (1994)