The battle of the Talas, 751

In 751 a Tang army and an Abbasid army met on the Talas river, in the country between the Syr Darya and the Tian Shan. The Karluk contingent that had come with the Tang changed sides during the fighting. The Tang force was destroyed.

Causes

The Göktürk khaganate had fallen in 744. The Türgesh power that held the western steppe had broken up before it. Into that space came the Tang from the east and the caliphate from the south-west. The cities of Sogdiana chose between them city by city.

The Talas was the point where the two advances touched. Neither empire had planned a decisive battle on that river. The quarrels of the local rulers they were protecting had drawn both there.

The battle

The two lines stood for several days. The Karluks then decided the fighting: they left the Tang side and fell on it. The Tang commander escaped with a remnant.

Consequences

Tang power never returned west of the Pamirs. The battle was not the only cause. Four years later the An Lushan rebellion pulled the empire’s armies back to defend the capitals, and the western garrisons were abandoned. Which of the two mattered more is disputed. Some scholars give the battle no part in the retreat at all. The defeat was bitter, but it did not stop the Chinese from returning to the region two years later. The rebellion of An Lushan from 755 ended the Chinese presence in Central Asia for a thousand years and left Göktürk, Sogdian and Arab armies facing one another.^[1]

For the steppe, the middle ground between the two settled empires passed to Turkic powers that answered to neither. Islam began to spread among them from the south, rather than being carried to them by conquest from the west.

The claim that paper-making reached the Islamic world through prisoners taken in this battle is old and much repeated. It rests on a late report and is not demonstrated. Chinese paper was no novelty at Samarkand in 751, since it is said to have been imported there already in 650 to 651 and again in 707.^[2] The story of the prisoners claims the craft and not the material.

References

^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 266
^ Laufer 1919, p. 559

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)