Bagha was the brother of Ishbara, a son of Issik, and a lesser khan of the khaganate in the years of the civil war.[1] He rode into China with Ishbara, Apa and Tardush in 583 and held the front with his brother after Tardush withdrew; the Sui broke the army near Baidao in June, and Chinese agents then set even Bagha against the khan. Of the four princes who made the war he is the one this work credits with the most honourable end, free of fratricide and treachery; the end itself is disputed.

War of 588

The account this work follows is this. In 588, driven by the disastrous state of the khaganate and possibly by drought, Bagha, as a lesser khan, led a great Göktürk and Hunnic army across the Oxus into Iran, took Balkh, Herat, Talakan and Badghis, the cities of Bactria, and advanced into Hyrcania on the Caspian, where a second Göktürk army was also moving; the Sasanian king Hormizd IV sent Bahram Chobin against him, and in April 588, at the Hyrcanian rock, Bahram defeated the Göktürk decisively, pursued them to the Oxus, and, by the Persian epic, killed Bagha with an arrow.[2] This work calls the arrow a typical topos of Persian storytelling, notes that the epic’s numbers, twelve thousand Persians against three hundred thousand Göktürk, are exaggerated, and observes that the Göktürk left no record of the war. The war has its own article.

The other account differs on the leader and the year.[3] The army destroyed by Bahram was, in his reading, Tardush‘s, led by Tardush’s son, the Šāba whom the Perso-Islamic tradition calls the greatest king of the Turks, and the defeat was at Herat in 589; he reports Gumilev’s identification of Šāba with a younger son of the Göktürk ruler of the Bukharan tradition and with a figure of the Chinese sources, and says it cannot be established. The identification of the Chinese Baga Khan with the Persian Šāba, on which the account followed here rests, is old; this work records it as a hypothesis and gives Bagha his article on its strength.

Names

The Chinese histories give the personal name Chuluohou and the title Mohe, read Baga, an old Turkic honorific from an Iranian word for the divine, one of the borrowed titles of the Göktürk.[3] This work writes Bagha and counts him one of the four great princes who fought the Persian empire in 588, took Balkh, Herat and Talakan, and fell at the Hyrcanian rock.[4] The Persian name Šāba, if it is his, is the only name a non-Chinese source gives any Göktürk of the civil war.

References

  1. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  2. ^ Shahnameh
  3. ^ a b Golden 1992
  4. ^ Yavuz 2025

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)

Related

What links here9

Persons
Bahram Chobin · Ishbara Khan · Tardush · Töremen Apa
Polities
Sasanian Persia · Western Göktürk Khaganate
Conflicts
Civil war, 584–603 · Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589
Places
Herat

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Bagha Khan.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/persons/bagha-khan/

Last revised: 13 September 2026