The sources for the steppe empires mention a woman where she touched a court. A Chinese historian writes of a consort when she acted at a moment of crisis, of a princess when she was sent north, and of a mother when she stood in a line of succession. The Göktürks’ own stones, the Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan inscriptions, name the khan’s mother, his sisters and his daughters-in-law as members of the royal house.[1] One eyewitness describes how women lived on the steppe. He is the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan, who crossed the Oghuz country in 921 and reached the Volga Bulgars.[2]

Witnesses and their reasons

Each kind of witness has its own reason to name a woman. The Chinese annals are written from outside, for a court that wanted to know whom to bargain with. The inscriptions are monuments to khans and speak of women inside the khan’s household. Ibn Fadlan wrote as a Muslim envoy and set down what struck him.[3] The sources therefore report courts and customs. The daily life of women who never came near a court is not recorded.

The Xiongnu

The yanzhi

The Xiongnu called the consort of the chanyu yanzhi, written 閼氏 in Chinese.[4] The Shiji uses the word for the favoured wife of Duman, for the woman who spoke to Bagatur at Baideng, and for the Han princess sent north under Emperor Gaozu.[4] Many centuries later the Zhou Shu matched the Göktürk katun to it. The title of the khan’s wife, it says, was “like the yanzhi of old”.[5]

A chanyu had several yanzhi at once, and they were ranked. Huhanye favoured two daughters of the Huyan king.[6] The elder became the Zhuanqu Yanzhi and bore two sons. The younger became the Great Yanzhi and bore four. Other yanzhi gave him more than ten further sons.[6] The Han Shu also counts yanzhi by number. When Wuzhuliu took the throne, it says, he made Le, the son of the “second yanzhi”, Left Worthy King, and Yu, the son of the “fifth yanzhi”, Right Worthy King.[6] A new chanyu could also change the order. In 68 BC Xuluquanqu made the daughter of the Right Great General his Great Yanzhi. He set aside the Zhuanqu Yanzhi, whom his predecessor had favoured.[6]

The mother of a chanyu was also a yanzhi. The Han Shu calls her the “mother yanzhi”.[6]

Women and the succession

The sources show women acting at the moments when a reign ended. Bagatur’s own rise began with a yanzhi. Duman had a favoured yanzhi who bore him a younger son. He wanted that son to succeed and sent Bagatur as a hostage to the Yuezhi.[4] Bagatur came back, killed his father and put to death his stepmother, his brother and the ministers who would not follow him.[4] The Shiji adds two acts of Bagatur’s that concern wives. He trained his riders to shoot at whatever his whistling arrow struck. Once he shot his favourite wife with it, and he beheaded those who did not dare to shoot.[4] When the Donghu asked for one of the chanyu’s yanzhi, he gave her to them.[4]

At Baideng a yanzhi turned the siege. Bagatur held the Han emperor Gaozu in the ring for seven days.[4] The siege falls in the winter of 200 BC. Gaozu sent a rich gift in secret to the chanyu’s yanzhi. She told Bagatur that two rulers should not press each other. Even if he took the Han lands, she said, he could not live in them, and the Han king had divine protection.[4] Bagatur doubted the Han generals who were to join him and had not come. He took the yanzhi’s advice as well and opened one corner of the ring.[4] The Shiji does not give her name.[4]

Two later successions show the same pattern. In 85 BC Hulugu named his brother, the Right Guli King, as heir. When Hulugu died, the Zhuanqu Yanzhi and the Han defector Wei Lü hid the death and forged the chanyu’s order. They drank the covenant with the nobles and set up Hulugu’s son as Huyandi.[6] The same chanyu’s mother had earlier had a rival killed. His half-brother, the Left Great Commandant, was able and well liked. The chanyu’s mother feared that her son would pass over his own son in his favour, and she had him killed in secret.[6] Of Huyandi, who was young when he took the throne, the Han Shu says that his mother yanzhi “was not upright” and that the realm fell into discord.[6] The Han Shu is a hostile witness, and the verdict is its own.

The Zhuanqu Yanzhi, set aside in 68 BC, appears again when Xuluquanqu died after nine years on the throne. The Han Shu says she had become the lover of the Right Worthy King. When the Right Worthy King came to the assembly at Longcheng, she told him that the chanyu was gravely ill and that he should not go far. A few days later the chanyu died. She and her brother Du Longqi then set up the Right Worthy King as Woyanqudi.[6] Whether this is the woman of 85 BC the Han Shu does not say.[6]

In 31 BC a yanzhi argued the succession in the chanyu’s hearing. Huhanye, who was dying, wanted to name Qiemoche, the son of the Zhuanqu Yanzhi. She asked him to name Diaotao Mogao, the son of the Great Yanzhi. The Xiongnu had been in turmoil for over ten years, she said, and Qiemoche was young and the people not yet attached to him. She and the Great Yanzhi, she added, were one family and shared their sons. The Great Yanzhi replied that the ministers were holding the state together and that passing over the highborn son for the other would bring disorder. The chanyu followed the Zhuanqu Yanzhi. He set up Diaotao Mogao, who became Fuzhulei, and arranged that the throne would go to his brother after him.[6]

Marriage, gifts and captives

The Xiongnu gave and took women as part of their dealings with others. A chanyu gave his elder sister to the Han defector Zhao Xin as a wife and made him a king.[6] Another gave his daughter to Li Ling and made him king.[7] Women also stood among the spoils. After the Han officer had told the Wuhuan to stop paying the Xiongnu tax in hides and cloth, the chanyu’s envoys came to collect it as before. Men and women who wanted to trade went with them.[6] The brothers of the Wuhuan chiefs killed the envoys and their staff and took the women, horses and cattle. The chanyu then sent troops, who killed many and drove away nearly a thousand women and children. He told the Wuhuan to bring horses, livestock, hides and cloth to ransom them. More than two thousand relatives came with goods. The Xiongnu took the goods and kept the captives.[6]

The Han court sent women to the chanyu in the heqin settlements, which the treaties record. After Baideng, Liu Jing was sent to arrange a marriage, and a woman of the imperial house became a chanyu’s yanzhi.[4] Under Wendi a second princess went to Laoshang Chanyu with the eunuch Zhonghang Yue as her tutor. He did not want to go, and once there he entered the chanyu’s service.[4] Wang Zhaojun, given to Huhanye, took the title Ninghu Yanzhi and bore him a son.[6]

The Shiji sets down the rule of widows. When a father dies, a man takes his stepmother. When brothers die, the survivors take their wives.[4] Zhonghang Yue defended it before a Han envoy. In his words, the Xiongnu took the wives of father and brother because they would not see a lineage lost, and so they always set up a member of the clan, even in disorder.[4] The rule is the levirate. When Fuzhulei succeeded his father, he took Wang Zhaojun in turn, and she bore him two daughters.[6]

The daughters of the chanyu

The Han Shu gives both daughters of Wang Zhaojun the title juci, 居次. The elder, Yun, was the Xubu Juci, and the younger the Dangyu Juci.[6] Yun’s husband was Xubu Dang, a leading minister of the chanyu.[6] While Wang Mang ruled for the child emperor Ping, he had the chanyu send Yun to serve the grand empress dowager at the Han court.[6] Yun wanted peace with China. When Wuzhuliu died in AD 13, she and Dang passed over his brother Yu and set up another brother, Xian, as chanyu, because Wang Mang had repeatedly honoured Xian.[6] Later Wang Mang’s envoys met Yun and Dang at a frontier fort and pressed them with troops to come to Chang’an. Their younger son escaped and went back to the Xiongnu. Dang reached Chang’an, where Wang Mang named him Xubu Chanyu.[6] Yun died when the Han forces killed Wang Mang.[6]

The Wuhuan, the Xianbei and the Rouran

The Wuhuan and the Xianbei

The Han histories give the Wuhuan, who lived beside the Xiongnu, a rule about the mother. A Wuhuan man might kill his father or his brother in anger, but he never harmed his mother. The reason given is that the mother has a kin group of her own, whereas father and brothers do not take revenge on one another.[8]

Marriage began with an abduction or an elopement. After half a year or a hundred days the man sent cattle, horses and sheep as the betrothal gift. He then went home with his wife and worked for her family for one or two years. Her family sent her off with a generous outfit.[9] Both histories add that in planning the Wuhuan followed the counsel of women, and that only in matters of fighting did the men decide for themselves.[8] A Wuhuan woman let her hair grow only when she married. She then wore it in a topknot under a headdress set with gold and green stones.[9] Women embroidered on leather and wove woollen cloth. Men made bows and saddles and forged iron weapons.[9] The Wuhuan also married their stepmothers and their widowed sisters-in-law.[9] The Gaoche, who lived beside the Rouran, paid the betrothal gift in cattle and horses. At their wedding the bride’s kin took horses out of a pen of the groom’s carts, and afterwards the groom’s people took the best horses from the bride’s herd.[10]

A quotation from the Wei Shu in the commentary to the Sanguozhi says that the Xianbei shared the language and customs of the Wuhuan.[11] Every late spring they held a great assembly beside a river, with music. Daughters were given in marriage and wives taken there, and heads were shaved for the feast.[11] The gathering is the spring assembly.

The mother stands behind the best-known Xianbei ruler. Tanshihuai was born while his father was away for three years with the Xiongnu army. The father wanted to kill the child. His wife told him a story about a hailstone that had flown into her mouth, and when he did not listen she secretly had her family take the child and raise him.[9] At fourteen or fifteen he rode alone after men of another tribe who had driven off the cattle of his mother’s family.[9]

The Rouran

The Wei Shu names two women who stood close to the khan of the Rouran. The first is Houlüling, the mother of Chounu. When Doulun died, Nagai became khan, and Nagai’s son Futu took Doulun’s widow Houlüling. She bore Chounu, Anagui and four others.[10] The second is Diwan. When one of Chounu’s sons vanished, a young woman named Diwan, a physician and sorceress, said that the boy was in heaven and that she could call him back. After a seven-day fast and prayer the boy appeared in a tent. Chounu and his mother were delighted. A great assembly proclaimed Diwan a Holy Woman, and Chounu made her khatun, 可賀敦. He gave her husband rank and three thousand head of cattle, horses and sheep.[10] When the boy was grown, he told his own mother that he had lived in Diwan’s house and had never been in heaven. His mother told Chounu, and Chounu answered that Diwan saw distant things and should be trusted. Diwan then slandered the boy, and Chounu had him killed in secret.[10] In 520 Chounu’s mother had Diwan strangled.[10] Chounu was killed by his mother and his ministers when he came back from a defeat, and Anagui was set up.[10] Ten days later a kinsman, Shifa, attacked Anagui. Shifa killed Anagui’s mother Houlüling and two of his brothers.[10]

Anagui’s daughters and nieces appear in the records of the Chinese courts. In 538 his eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen by Chinese count, became empress of the Western Wei.[12] She arrived with seven hundred carts, ten thousand horses and a thousand camels, and her tents and mats all faced east, because the Rouran honoured the east. At the Black Salt Lake the Wei escort asked her to face south. She answered: “I have not yet seen the lord of Wei, and so I am still a Rouran woman. The Wei guard faces south; I face east.”[12] The empress Yujiulü died in childbirth two years later.[12] In 541 Anagui sent a thousand horses as the betrothal gift for a princess of the Eastern Wei.[13] In 546 he refused a bride to Bumin and called him his smith slave.[5] Bumin killed the envoy and broke with him.[5] The refusal sent Bumin to the Western Wei for a wife.[5]

The Göktürks

The katun and the khan’s house

The wife of the khan was the katun, written 可敦 or 可賀敦 in Chinese.[14] According to the Zhou Shu, the title came into use in 552, when Bumin took the rank of khan and called his wife katun.[5] One study ranks the katun as the khan’s chief wife and kunçuy as the next rank at court.[15] The origin of the word is disputed. One explanation derives it from Sogdian huwtınh, “queen”.[16] A second finds the same title among the Xianbei and the Tuyuhun, in the Nan Qi Shu as kasun for the Tuoba empress, and in the Wei Shu as katsun for the Tuyuhun khan’s wife in 514.[17] That explanation takes both for Xianbei forms of the later katun.[18]

Women also stand at the beginning of the Göktürk origin stories. The Zhou Shu tells of Nidushi, who was born of a wolf. He took two wives, who were said to be the daughters of the spirit of summer and the spirit of winter. They bore him four sons.[5] In another story Nadulu had ten wives, and his sons took their surnames from their mothers’ clans. Ashina was the son of the youngest wife.[5]

The women of the inscriptions

The Orkhon inscriptions name the khan’s mother with his father in the formula of rule. Heaven raised up İlteriš Khan and İlbilge Katun, taking them by the crown of the head, so that the people should not perish.[19][20] The Kül Tegin inscription links the katun with the goddess Umay in the boyhood of Kül Tegin. When his father died, the boy was seven, and by the Kut of his mother the katun, who is “like Umay”, he got a man’s name.[21] Umay is the only female divine figure in the corpus.[22]

The same inscription names the women of the royal house in the lament for the dead prince. Bilge Khan recalls the attack on the royal camp, the ordu, which Kül Tegin held. His mother the katun, his stepmothers, his elder sisters, his daughters-in-law and his princesses, he says, would have become slave-women, and the dead would have lain unburied in the camp or on the road.[1][23] Here the women are the people the khan and his brother were protecting. The women do not speak.

The inscriptions record women as given in marriage. The khan says that the Göktürks gave the Kirghiz Bars Beg the title of khan and Bilge’s younger sister as his princess.[24] Bars Beg then went wrong, the inscription says, and was killed, and his people became slaves. It does not say what became of the princess.[25] Bilge Khan also says that he gave his daughter to the Türgesh khan and took the Türgesh khan’s daughter for his son, each time “with very great ceremony”.[26] The text is damaged at this point, and the translation supplies part of the wording.[27]

The Tonyukuk inscription mentions a katun only in passing. A spy brought word that the Türgesh khan had marched out. The khan said that he would go home in peace, because the katun had died and he would hold her funeral. He told the army to go on to the Altun forest, under İnel Khan and Tardush Shad.[28] Its author Tonyukuk also invokes Heaven, Umay and the sacred Earth-and-Water as the powers that gave victory.[29]

Law, marriage and funerals

The Chinese histories set down the Göktürk rules that touch women, always from outside. The Zhou Shu names four crimes that were punished with death: rebellion, murder, intercourse with another man’s wife and the theft of a hobbled horse. A man who had intercourse with another man’s daughter paid heavily in goods and was then given the daughter as his wife.[5] The Sui Shu words the penalty for adultery more harshly. The offender was castrated and cut in two at the waist.[30] The Sui Shu adds that a man who put out another’s eye paid with a daughter. If he had none, it says, he paid “woman’s goods”, 婦財, a term the text does not explain.[30]

Marriage was arranged by the families. The Zhou Shu says that at a burial the men and women came to the grave in their best clothes. A man who liked a woman there sent to her family when he went home, and her parents usually did not refuse.[5] A widow passed to the men of her husband’s family. The Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu give the rule of the levirate, and the Zhou Shu closes it with a clause that readers have taken in different ways.[31] These rules belong to the customary law of the Göktürks.

Women took part in the funeral. After a death the sons, grandsons and relatives, “men and women”, killed sheep and horses before the tent. They rode round the tent seven times and cut their faces with knives while they wept, until blood and tears ran together.[5] This is the face-cutting. The ceremony was repeated on the day of burial.[5] The dead man and the horse he had ridden were burned, and the ashes were buried in their season.[5] The rest of the rite belongs to burial. The Sui Shu says the same of the dead man’s family and relatives.[30]

Princesses sent to the khans

The Chinese courts sent princesses north from the beginning of the first khaganate. When Anagui refused Bumin, the Western Wei court gave him the princess Changle in 551.[5] The traffic then ran in both directions. In 568 Empress Ashina, a daughter of Mukan Khan, arrived at the Northern Zhou court.[32] Mukan first agreed to give her and then regretted it. The Zhou envoys waited at his camp for years, until a storm that blew down his tents made him send her.[32]

The Sui reign shows what a princess could do at the khan’s side. Qianjin, a princess of the Zhou house, was sent to Taspar and passed to his nephew Ishbara.[31] She grieved that the sacrifices of her family had been cut off and urged him day and night to take revenge on the Sui.[30] Later she wrote to the Sui court and asked to be treated as one of the emperor’s children.[30] After Ishbara’s submission the emperor gave her the surname Yang and the title Princess Dayi.[30] She also spoke privately to a Sui envoy and warned him that the khan had “the nature of a jackal and a wolf”, and would bite if he were pressed too hard.[30] After the fall of the Chen she wrote a poem on a screen the emperor had sent her, and the Sui disliked it.[30] When Yami asked for a bride, the Sui answered that he must first kill Princess Dayi. Yami slandered her to Tulan, and Tulan killed her in his tent.[30] The princess Anyi was sent to Yami in 597 and had died by 599.[30]

The Sui princess Yicheng married Qimin Khan after Anyi’s death. In 607 she came with him to the emperor’s travelling palace, and the empress visited her tent.[33] In 615 Shibi, Qimin’s son, besieged the emperor at Yanmen.[30] The Zizhi Tongjian says that Yicheng had first sent word of the coming attack.[34] A minister of the court argued that among the Göktürks the katun takes part in military counsel, and that a messenger should be sent to her.[34] The emperor sent a secret messenger, and Yicheng told Shibi that the northern frontier was in danger. Relief armies came up, and Shibi withdrew.[34]

Yicheng became the wife of Shibi’s brother Chula, and after Chula’s death she decided the succession. She judged Chula’s son Aoshe Shad weak, set him aside and had Chula’s brother Duobi made khan, as Ilig Khan.[35] Ilig then took her as his wife.[36] At the siege of Mayi, Ilig asked the Tang for a marriage, and the emperor answered that he must first lift the siege. Ilig was inclined to withdraw, and Yicheng urged him to press the attack.[37] In 630 the Tang general Li Jing killed her and took her son Dieluoshi.[38] She had been the wife of four khans of one house in turn.[39] Other Sui princesses and women show the same use of marriage. The Huainan princess was married to Töles, Shibi’s son.[36] Princess Xinyi was married in 614 to Heshana Khan of the western Göktürks.[40] Lady Xiang, the Chinese-born wife of Niri Khan, was the mother of Heshana, and the Sui used her to bring him to submission.[41] Lady Poshi, the mother of Ilig Khan, is named through the retainer who raised her son.[36]

The Second Khaganate

In the Second Khaganate a katun saved her father’s life. When Kapgan died in 716, Kül Tegin killed his ministers.[42] Tonyukuk alone escaped, because his daughter Pofu was the katun of the new khan.[42] When the Tang envoy Yuan Zhen came to Bilge Khan in 725, the khan received him at a feast in his tent.[36] Bilge, his wife, Kül Tegin and Tonyukuk sat in a ring.[43]

After Bilge’s death his son Tengri Khan was a child. The Xin Tang Shu says that his mother, Pofu Katun, and a minor official named Yinsi Dagan took part in government, and that the tribes were not in harmony. The khan and his mother lured the Western Shad to them and killed him. The Left Shad then attacked and killed the young khan.[42] A katun named Pofu, the wife of a Bilge Khan, later came over to the Tang with her people. The emperor held a banquet for his court at the Huaye tower and wrote poems on the event, and she was made a lady of the state of Bin with a yearly allowance.[42] Most likely, she is the same woman.

The Utigurs and the Türgesh

A woman ruled a people under Göktürk overlordship in the west. In 576 the Roman envoy Valentinos, on the embassy to the Göktürk camp, rode through the land of Akkagas.[44] Menander writes that Akkagas was the name of the woman who ruled the Scythians there, appointed by Anagai, the chief of the Utigurs.[44] One note to the translation places her land east of the Taman peninsula, on the lower Kuban.[45] One study finds the rank name qaghan in her name.[46]

The Xin Tang Shu says that Tibet and the Göktürks both gave daughters to Suluk, the khan of the Türgesh, and that he made the women of three states katuns.[42] The Jiu Tang Shu records that the Tang gave him Princess Jinhe, a daughter of Shi Huaidao.[36] It also tells how a princess of his sent her own household officers with a thousand horses to trade at the Tang garrison of Anxi. The governor Du Xian beat her envoy and kept him, and the horses died in the cold. Du Xian asked whether the daughter of an Ashina had the right to give instructions to a military governor. Suluk then attacked the four garrisons.[36] The text does not make clear which of his wives it means.[36]

The Uyghurs

The Uyghur khans took Tang princesses as katuns, and the records of their arrival give the fullest picture of how a katun was installed. In 758 the Tang gave Bayanchur Khan its emperor’s youngest daughter as Princess Ningguo.[47] The Tang envoy told the khan, who was receiving the edict seated, that she was the emperor’s true daughter and that a son-in-law owed ceremony. The khan rose, and the next day she was made katun. The Uyghur chiefs said with delight that the Tang emperor was a great ruler, for he had sent a true daughter.[47]

When Bayanchur died in 759, his officials wished to bury Ningguo with him.[47] She answered that by Tang law a widow mourns for three years, and that if the Uyghurs meant to follow their own law, there was no reason to marry so far from home. Yet she cut her face and wept as the Uyghurs did. She was childless and was allowed to return.[47] The new khan, Bögü, took as his wife a daughter of Pugu Huai’en, and she was made katun. When she died in 768 the Tang gave her younger sister to the khan as her successor.[48]

In 788 the Uyghur khan sent his chancellors and 56 wives and concubines of the great chiefs to fetch Princess Xian’an.[47] More than a thousand people went with them, and the betrothal gift was 2,000 horses by the Jiu Tang Shu’s count.[47] The Xin Tang Shu records the death of an Uyghur khan by poison. His young katun, called Princess Ye, was a granddaughter of Pugu Huai’en. The khan’s brother seized the throne, and the officials killed him and set up the dead khan’s young son.[48] The khan is probably Tun Bagha, who died in 789.[48]

The envoys who took Princess Taihe north reported in 822 how she was made katun, and both Tang histories keep the account.[49] The khan sat first in the tower facing east, and a felt tent was put up for the princess below it. The Uyghurs had her taught their rite. She changed her Tang dress for Uyghur dress and came out before the tower, attended by one old woman, and bowed to the west. She went back into the tent and put on the katun’s robe, a long red gown with a gold-adorned hat that rose to points. She came out again and bowed to the khan. She was carried round the court nine times on a litter by the ministers of the nine tribes, and then sat with the khan in the tower, facing east. From that day the khan’s subjects bowed to the katun as well. She had her own camp, and two ministers went in and out of her tent.[49] When the Tang escort left, she gave them a great banquet in her tent and wept at the parting.[49]

Women of the Uyghur upper class bore names made of titles and fortune words. A Manichaean text of the Uyghur period has Kut-hatun and Tüzün Bilgä qunçuy.[50]

The Kirghiz

The Xin Tang Shu describes the Kirghiz of the ninth century with some words on women. It says that women outnumbered men, that they pierced their ears with rings, and that a married woman tattooed her neck.[48] The clothing of the women was woollen cloth, brocade and silk, which the Kirghiz got by trade from Anxi, Beiting and the Arabs.[48] The Chinese author adds a judgement on their morals, which is the voice of an outside observer and not a finding.[48] The khan of the Kirghiz, Are, had a Türgesh mother, who held the title “mother katun”, and a wife who was a daughter of the Karluk yabgu and was herself katun.[48]

The Khazars, the Volga Bulgars and the Oghuz

The Oghuz road

Ibn Fadlan met the Oghuz in 921.[51] He reports that their women did not veil before their men or before strangers. One day the envoys stopped at an Oghuz house, and the host’s wife uncovered her private parts and scratched herself. The envoys covered their faces and invoked God’s forgiveness. Her husband laughed and told the interpreter that she showed it where it could be seen and yet kept it out of reach, which was better than covering it and letting it be taken.[3] Adultery, he writes, was unknown among the Oghuz. If one was discovered, the offender was split in two between bent trees.[52]

For marriage a man agreed a price with the woman’s guardian. It was paid in garments of Khwarezm, in camels, in horses or in other goods. The man then took the woman in the presence of her father, mother and brothers.[53] When a man died and left a wife and children, the eldest son took her as his wife, unless she was his mother.[54] Ibn Fadlan met this at the camp of the commander Etrek. Etrek’s wife had been his father’s wife. She took meat, milk and a part of the envoys’ gifts out to the open land, buried them in a pit and spoke words. The interpreter said that she was giving them as a present from the Arabs to Qataghan, Etrek’s father.[55]

The Volga Bulgars

At the Bulgar king’s court Ibn Fadlan handed over the caliph’s gifts of perfume, cloth and pearls to the king and then to his wife. He gave her a robe of honour. She sat beside the king, and Ibn Fadlan notes that this is their custom. The king’s attendants scattered dirhams over the king, and women scattered them over her.[56] Among the Bulgars, men and women went down to the river together and bathed naked, and neither hid from the other. The envoy tried again and again to make the women veil before the men and could not.[57] Fornication was punished by splitting the offender, man or woman, in two with an axe.[57]

At a death, women did not weep over the body. The men came on the day itself and wept at the tent door, and then the slaves beat their flanks with plaited straps. The mourning lasted two years. After the feast that ended it, a widow could marry again.[58]

Ibn Fadlan also tells of the daughters of the Bulgar king. The king of the Khazars asked for the daughter of the Bulgar king, whom Ibn Fadlan calls the king of the Saqaliba, in marriage. The Bulgar king refused, and the Khazar king sent troops and took her by force. She was Muslim and he a Jew, Ibn Fadlan writes, and she died in his house. The Khazar then asked for another daughter, and the Bulgar king hurried to marry her to the prince Eskel, who was subject to him, for fear that she too would be taken.[59] The Bulgar king wrote to the caliph and asked him to build a fortress.[59]

The Khazars

What Ibn Fadlan tells of the Khazar court is what he was told, since the embassy did not go to Atil. The king of the Khazars, he says, has twenty-five wives, each the daughter of a neighbouring king, whom he takes willingly or by force. He has sixty concubines besides. Each woman lives in a pavilion in an enclosed castle, and each has a eunuch who keeps her out of sight and brings her to the king when he sends for her.[60]

The Byzantine histories show Khazar women outside the khaganate. The khagan gave his sister Theodora in marriage to the exiled Justinian II, who lived with her at Phanagoria. When the khagan, pressed by the usurper in Constantinople, planned to hand Justinian over, a servant of the khagan told Theodora, and she told her husband. After he regained the throne, he fetched her and their son from Khazaria and had them crowned.[61] In 731 or 732 the emperor Leo betrothed his son Constantine to a daughter of the khagan, Tzitzak, who was baptised and named Irene.[62]

Limits of the sources

The sources are partial in four ways. It names the women of rulers and gives almost nothing on the women of the herders. A few customs are set down by outsiders, among them the Wuhuan hair and embroidery, the Göktürk funeral and the Oghuz and Bulgar manners at the river and in the tent, and none of them reports how a woman saw her own life. The women the sources name are mostly those who crossed a frontier, and the Chinese princesses are better recorded than the steppe women who received them. The Chinese chapters are written for a court that wanted to judge the steppe, and some of what they say about women, such as the verdict on Huyandi’s mother or on Kirghiz morals, is the author’s verdict.

References

  1. ^ a b Kül Tegin inscription; Ross 1930, p. 870
  2. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 68–70
  3. ^ a b Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 68–69
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Shiji, juan 110
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v Han Shu, juan 94
  7. ^ Han Shu, juan 54
  8. ^ a b Hou Han Shu, juan 90; Sanguozhi, juan 30
  9. ^ a b c d e f Hou Han Shu, juan 90
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Wei Shu, juan 103
  11. ^ a b Sanguozhi, juan 30
  12. ^ a b c Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 13
  13. ^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98
  14. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  15. ^ Tokyürek 2013, p. 127
  16. ^ Rásonyi 1963, p. 77
  17. ^ Nan Qi Shu; Kurakichi 1926, p. 35
  18. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 35–37
  19. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 335, 342
  20. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Ross 1930, p. 865
  21. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Ross 1930, p. 868
  22. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription
  23. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  24. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Ross 1930, p. 866
  25. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  26. ^ Bilge Khan inscription; Ross 1930, p. 872
  27. ^ Ross 1930, p. 872
  28. ^ Tonyukuk inscription; Ross 1930, p. 41
  29. ^ Tonyukuk inscription; Ross 1930, p. 42
  30. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  31. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  32. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 9
  33. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 180
  34. ^ a b c Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 182
  35. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 188
  36. ^ a b c d e f g Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  37. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 190
  38. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 193
  39. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  40. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
  41. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 181
  42. ^ a b c d e Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  43. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  44. ^ a b Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 19.1, p. 173
  45. ^ Blockley 1985, fr. 19.1, n. 220
  46. ^ Rásonyi 1963, p. 78
  47. ^ a b c d e f Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  48. ^ a b c d e f g Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  49. ^ a b c Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  50. ^ Rásonyi 1963, p. 80
  51. ^ Ibn Fadlan
  52. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 69
  53. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 69–70
  54. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 70
  55. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 77
  56. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 87–88
  57. ^ a b Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 106
  58. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 114–115
  59. ^ a b Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 115
  60. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 138
  61. ^ Nikephoros; Mango 1990, ch. 42
  62. ^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 567

Sources

Literature

  • E. Denison Ross (after Vilhelm Thomsen), The Orkhon Inscriptions; The Tonyukuk Inscription. Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering (1930)
  • R. C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman: Introductory Essay, Text, Translation, and Historiographical Notes (1985)
  • M. Canard, La relation du voyage d'Ibn Fadlān chez les Bulgares de la Volga (1958)
  • Cyril Mango (ed., trans.), Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople: Short History (1990)
  • Cyril Mango, Roger Scott (trans.), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (1997)
  • Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
  • Shiratori Kurakichi, A Study on the Titles Kaghan and Katun (1926)
  • László Rásonyi, Türklükte Kadın Adları (1963)
  • Hacer Tokyürek, Runik Türk Yazıtlarında ve Eski Uygur Metinlerinde Kadın Hiyerarşisi (2013)

Related

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Women among the Turkic Peoples.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/institutions/women-among-the-turkic-peoples/

Last revised: 8 November 2026