Khan (Khagan)

Khan was the title of the supreme ruler of the steppe from the fifth century to the tenth, and Bumin took it from the Rouran in 552 together with the empire it named.^[1] Where the sources or the literature write khagan, qaghan, qaγan or kağan, the form they give stands in the list of names above and in the record of each ruler. What follows sets out where the word came from, what the Göktürks understood by it, and how the ranks beneath it were arranged.

Etymology

𐰴𐰍𐰣Old TurkicKül Tegin inscription
可汗ChineseZhou Shu 50
qaghan, qaġan, kağanEnglish
khaganEnglish

The title of the supreme ruler of the steppe from the fifth century onward is written 可汗 in the Chinese histories and 𐰴𐰍𐰣 in the Göktürk inscriptions, and is read khagan, qaghan or kagan in modern scholarship.^[2] The shorter form khan, 汗, appears in the Chinese sources beside it and is the form that survived into every later Turkic and Mongolian language. Whether the two were distinct ranks in the sixth century, the khagan supreme and the khan subordinate, or one title under two spellings, is not settled; in the Göktürk inscriptions of the eighth century only kagan occurs, and it is used of the supreme ruler alone.^[2] The distinction between a khagan and lesser khans beneath him is clear in the later steppe empires, and the literature commonly projects it back, although the sixth-century sources do not require it.

The origin of the word is unknown, and the positions are listed in The origin of the title Khan. The usual view is that it was coined among the Xianbei or the Rouran, and its predecessor among the Xiongnu was a different word. It is older than the Rouran khaganate: the title is recorded among the Xianbei in 261 and again in 278, more than a century before Shelun, so the tradition that makes Bumin’s Rouran predecessors the first to bear it cannot stand.^[3] It derives, on the best view, from an “old Hunnic” kehan, and the Rouran adoption was the taking over of a title already in use.^[4] The two datings that have been given for the word are no longer in conflict once the Xianbei evidence is counted: the Rouran founder Shelun took the title about 400, and the word itself is third-century. Whatever its source, the word does not appear to have been Turkic to begin with, and other peoples of Central Eurasia took it over; that a Hungarian source calls the ruler of the Avars kaganus does not by itself make the Avars Turks.^[5] The Bugut inscription, a Sogdian text of about 580, names titles for none of which a Turkic etymology is available.^[6]

The Rouran derivation

Gerhard Doerfer proposed that khan, khagan and khatun are Rouran words. The argument has two steps. None of the three words has a reliable etymology in any known language; and all three are first attested among the Rouran, from whom, the argument runs, the Hunnic peoples, the Avars and everyone else in the steppe and beyond took them over.^[7] It is a widely repeated derivation, and it appears in reference works that do not mention the objection.

The second step does not hold, and the first depends on it. The title is recorded among the Xianbei in 261 and again in 278, at a time when the Rouran khaganate did not yet exist.^[3] Its founder Shelun took the title about 400, more than a century later. The Rouran therefore cannot be the people among whom the word is first attested, and a word first written down among the Xianbei in the third century is not a Rouran coinage. What Shelun did in about 400 was to adopt a title already in use, as the Xianbei dates require.^[4]

With that step gone, the argument from the missing etymology falls too. It was never an argument that the word is Rouran; it was an argument that the word is not Turkic, not Mongolic and not Chinese, and that the earliest attestation should decide the rest. Applied to the earlier attestation, the same reasoning would make the word Xianbei, a conclusion no one has drawn; the argument therefore proves nothing about the origin. What remains standing is the negative finding: the origin of the word is unknown, and no language yet claims it convincingly.

Two of the three words are on better footing than khan itself. For the khatun a different derivation is on offer, and it is the best supported of the three. Turkic khatun is regarded as a word of Eastern Iranian origin, borrowed from an Early Saka form; the Sogdian xwt’w, ruler, and xwt’yn, wife of the ruler, are its attested counterparts.^[7] For khagan itself a Middle Iranian hva-kama, self-ruler, has been proposed, which would put the highest title of the steppe in the same borrowed company.^[7] An attempt to read khan and khagan as Yeniseian roots inflected with a Tabghach suffix has been made and rejected, on the ground that a hybrid formation of that kind, unattested as a whole, would let one explain any word in any language.^[7]

Before the Göktürks

The ruler of the Xiongnu had been the chanyu. His full title, as the Han history transcribes it, has been interpreted as containing the Turkic words teŋri and Kut. Read after Grousset, the whole is Teŋri Kut Tanyu, “the ruler endowed by Heaven with fortune”, and the Xiongnu ruling title would then be Turkic where the khaganal title was not. Turkic Atlas sets out this interpretation and its standing under the Xiongnu and the ethnogenesis debate. What is not in doubt is the sequence: chanyu fell out of use when the Xiongnu fell, and khagan took its place with the Rouran. What did not change with the word was the claim it carried. The Xiongnu title contains tengri, and that word is not the Chinese one; whoever formulated a heaven-given sovereignty in the steppe did it in a steppe language, before the khaganal title existed.^[8]

One structural inheritance runs with the title. The Xiongnu paired every office into a left and a right. In China such pairing was a matter of where a man stood at court; among the Xiongnu it was a territorial order, with two branches of government administering two halves of the empire. Its nearest parallel anywhere is the division of the Göktürk realm into an eastern and a western half under a senior and a junior ruler.^[8] The article on the making of the first steppe empire presents the argument in full. The Chinese continued to call the Göktürk rulers chanyu in some contexts long after the Göktürks themselves used khagan, which can be seen as a memory of continuity and may equally be a habit of the chancery.

Title among the Göktürks

Bumin took the title in 552, after the destruction of the Rouran, in the form the Zhou Shu renders 伊利可汗, conventionally read Illig Khan.^[1] Before the war he appears without a title of any kind.^[1] Modern literature commonly styles him yabgu for those years, which is plausible given the rank the Ashina leaders are said to have held, but the sources do not use it of him. The meaning of the first element is contested. Much of the literature glosses it “ruler of the land”, from Turkic el, “realm”; the translations offered in modern accounts are interpretations rather than readings, and the element is not securely explained.

The sons who followed him bore titles of the same construction, an epithet before the word khan, and in every case the epithet rather than the personal name is what the Chinese recorded: Issik, 乙息記可汗; Mukan, 木汗可汗; Taspar, 他鉢可汗.^[1] Issik is understood as a title meaning ruler of the state, as distinct from Illig as ruler of the land, and the personal name of its holder as Kulo, reconstructed as Kara; this interpretation rests on the Chinese transcription alone.

The Göktürks’ own understanding of the title is in the inscriptions. Bilge Khan opens his monument as “Bilge Khan of the Turks, like Heaven and born of Heaven”. His father, he says, was given the realm because Heaven willed it and because he had Kut, and the khan who lost the realm did so because he was ignorant and bad, and his ministers likewise.^[2] The khan held the realm, el, and set the law, törü, in order, and the two are named together every time the founders are named.^[2] The articles on Kut, Töre and Tengrism set out what that meant. It did not mean autocracy. A khan could be deposed, and the nobility assembled in a toy chose a successor when the succession was disputed, as it did in 581.^[9]

The inscriptions treat the title as a standing that a god confers and a man enters. To rule is to sit as khan, to become ruler is to become khan, and the khan says that Heaven installed him as khan.^[10]

Ranks below the khan

The khan stood at the head of a hierarchy the Göktürks had taken over from the Rouran and filled with their own kin. Beneath him the western wing was held by a yabgu: Istemi held that rank for twenty-three years, and the Chinese histories treat it as a subordinate office of the eastern court, while the Göktürk inscriptions give him the same title as his brother.^[9] On the best view, Istemi’s title was Sır Yabgu, an elevated yabgu above a mere tribal chief and below a khan, and in the inscriptions’ “Istemi Khan” the founders’ descendants legitimated the autonomy the western ruler had in fact enjoyed. The Byzantine envoys, who met Istemi in person, called him the ruler of the Göktürks without qualification.^[11] Menander calls him their leader and their king, and once, where Zemarchos is led to his camp, the Chagan.^[11]

Under Taspar the hierarchy grew a further layer. He set his nephew Ishbara over the east as Erfu Khan, 爾伏可汗, and the son of his brother Rudan Khan over the west as Buli Khan, 步離可汗. The khan now had deputies who bore the title, and this is seen as the point at which the title began to be held by more than one man at a time.^[9] The sources name several other ranks. The šad was a prince holding a military command over a wing or a people; the tegin a prince of the blood; the elteber the tributary king of a subject people; the tarkhan a commander freed from tax; the buyruk a minister. The beg was the lord of a tribe or a following, whose consent the khan needed and whose withdrawal of it undid him. Most of these appear in the Kül Tegin inscription. The yabgu and the šad are named there as offices the founders gave to the Tölis and the Tarduš, and the begs and the people as the two parties whose straightness with each other let the realm be held.^[2]

The khan’s consort was the khatun, in Chinese 可賀敦. When Bumin took the title, 號其妻為可賀敦，亦猶古之閼氏也, he called his wife khatun, as of old the yanzhi of the Xiongnu.^[1] The Han Shu writes the word 閼氏 for the consorts of the Xiongnu chanyu.^[12] Chinese writers of the fourth century and later connect it with the rouge plant and with Mount Yanzhi, the mountain whose loss, in the Xiongnu song, left their women without paint.^[13] The link rests on the sound of the two words alone.^[14] The Zhou Shu does not name her; one account names the Western Wei princess Changle as that wife.^[15]

Later history

The title outlived the polity. When the Chinese courts of the early seventh century wanted a Göktürk client they conferred the title on him, and when a Göktürk khan wanted a Chinese client he did the same: Shibi Khan gave the title to the warlord Liang Shidu and a wolf’s-head standard with it.^[16] A Göktürk khan who received his title from a Chinese emperor was, from the standpoint of the inscriptions, a khan who had given up his realm and his law to the Chinese khan; that is how the Kül Tegin inscription describes the fifty years between 630 and 682, and the reproach is aimed at the title’s holders, not at the title.^[2]

Khagan passed to the Göktürks with the Rouran realm, and from them to the Uyghurs, the Khazars, the Bulgars and the Mongols, and khan, in the shorter form, to every ruler of the Turkic and Mongol world thereafter.

The title reached Europe by a second road. The Rouran nobility that fled west after 552 took it along, and the rulers of the Avars bore it from the start, the first in Europe to do so.^[17]^[18] Menander calls Bayan the khagan of the Avars, and Theophylact says that the Avars gave their leader the title of khagan.^[19]^[20] The Göktürk khagans, to whom the title belonged by right of conquest, took the Avar use of it as an affront.^[17] In Europe the Avar use was uncontested until the Khazars adopted the title in the second half of the seventh century.^[18] For the argument over where the Avar rulers came from see the origin of the Avars.

At the Karakhanid court of 1069–1070 both forms were in use. The patron of the Kutadgu Bilig is Tavgach Ulug Bughra Khan, and the sages the book quotes include a hakan and a türk hanı, a khan of the Turks.^[21]

References

^ a b c d e Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d e f Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition
^ a b Yavuz 2025
^ Erdal 2004, p. 3
^ Erdal 2004, p. 2
^ a b c d Savelyev 2020
^ a b Cosmo 2011
^ a b c Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Erdal 2004, p. 322,364,532
^ a b Menander Protector
^ Han Shu, juan 94
^ Laufer 1919, p. 325–327
^ Laufer 1919, p. 327
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 448
^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 185
^ a b Golden 2013, p. 62–63
^ a b Pohl 2018, p. 217
^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 25.1, p. 219
^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, p. 189
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 88, 3126, 3817

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Wei Shu, juan 103
Kül Tegin inscription
Menander Protector
Theophylact Simocatta
Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 185 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu, Sui Shu and Bei Shi)
Kutadgu Bilig
Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Alexander Savelyev; Choongwon Jeong, Early Nomads of the Eastern Steppe and Their Tentative Connections in the West (2020)
Nicola Di Cosmo, Ethnogenesis, Coevolution and Political Morphology of the Earliest Steppe Empire: The Xiongnu Question Revisited (2011)
Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)
Peter B. Golden, Some Notes on the Avars and Rouran (2013)
Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822 (2018)
R. C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman: Introductory Essay, Text, Translation, and Historiographical Notes (1985)
Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)