10 articles
Institutions and Titles
Titles, offices, customary law and the legitimation of rule.
- Atabeg Father-lord: the commander set over a Seljuk prince as guardian and tutor, who governed the province in the prince's name — an office that in several places swallowed the dynasty it was meant to serve.
- Beg The lord of a tribe or a clan, and the estate of such men: the rank that stands between the khan above and the commons below, named on every face of the Orkhon stones and still audible in the modern Turkish bey.
- Ilteber The rank of a subject ruler: the man left on his own throne under a khan who was not of his people, with a tax officer set beside him — attested from the Caucasus to Turfan, and known chiefly under a Chinese spelling whose equation with the Turkic word is disputed.
- Khan (Khagan) The title of the supreme ruler of the steppe, taken by Bumin from the Rouran in 552; the single place in this work where its forms, its history and the ranks around it are set out.
- Kut The heaven-granted fortune that made a man fit to rule: in the Xiongnu ruler's title, in the khan's own account of himself, in the name of the Ötüken forest — and in the name of the man who restored the khaganate.
- Shad minimal A military rank of the Göktürk, held by a prince of the house over a wing or a subject people; Kül Tegin was šad over the Tarduš under his uncle.
- Töre The customary law of the Göktürk: succession, punishment, marriage, burial and the limits on taking from the land — the order a ruler was held to as much as anyone.
- Toy The assembly of the Ashina nobility: it raised Bumin to yabgu in 542, met each year at the ancestral cave, and in 581 elected a khan against a dead khan's wish.
- Tuğ The standard of the steppe ruler: a pole with a metal finial and horse tails, carried before the khan, raised over the camp and at the assembly, and counted by the tail — the visible sign of the authority that Kut makes invisible.
- Yabgu minimal The title of the ruler of the western wing of the Göktürk, held by Istemi and his successors; a rank above a tribal chief and below a khan, and by the reading this work adopts the Ashina's own title before 552.