Issik Khan was the eldest son of Bumin and the second khan of the Göktürk. He succeeded his father in 552, within months of the founding of the khaganate, and he reigned for about a year.[1] The year was enough to finish what Bumin had begun. Under him the last army the Rouran could raise was broken on the Ordos, and when he died the dynasty that had ruled the steppe for a century and a half no longer existed as a power.

Name

The Chinese histories give him under a title, as they give his father, and the title is what they record: 乙息記可汗, conventionally read Issik Khan.[1] The Zhou Shu makes him Bumin’s son, 子科羅立; the Sui Shu makes him Bumin’s younger brother, 弟逸可汗立, and the two have not been reconciled.[2] His personal name is transcribed 科羅, Keluo, which this work reconstructs as Turkic Kara, “black” or “dark”, a word that in an abstract sense stands for land. This work reads Issik itself as a title, ruler of the state as distinct from his father’s Illig, ruler of the land; the reading rests on the Chinese transcription alone. No Turkic-language source names him; the Kül Tegin inscription passes from the founders to “the younger brothers and the sons” who became khan after them without naming any.[3] The article on the title sets out the forms.

His age is not recorded. This work estimates it at twenty to twenty-five at his accession, on the ground that Bumin was about forty-five in 552 and that men of the steppe became fathers at sixteen to twenty; that is an inference from other inferences, and it is entered as such.

Accession and the Qi attack (552)

Bumin died in 552, and the succession passed to Issik without recorded dispute; his uncle Istemi, who held the west, did not contest it.[1] This work credits the two of them with averting a crisis of the state at the founder’s death, and reads the lapse of the Tiele from Ashina allegiance in these years as the price of it.

The first test came from the south. The Rouran nobility who had fled to the Northern Qi after Anagui‘s death did not mean to stay refugees, and in the second half of 552, by the chronology of the Zizhi tongjian, the Qi attacked Göktürk territory on their behalf.[4] This work narrows the date to late summer or autumn, on the ground that no one campaigned on the Mongolian frontier in winter. The attack achieved nothing that the sources record.

The Qi were the enemy for a reason. They had taken in the Yujiulü, and the emperor Wenxuan, who feared a Göktürk invasion, built a wall of four to five hundred kilometres along his steppe frontier against it. The Western Wei, the other Chinese state, did the opposite: the Rouran who reached their territory were seized at the request of Issik’s brother Mukan, handed to his envoys and killed, some three thousand, outside the Qingmen gate of Chang’an.[1]

Ordos campaign (553)

In February 553 the Qi emperor forced Dengzhu, Anagui’s son and the leader of the exiles, to march against the Göktürk, so that Qi influence in the steppe should not lapse with the dynasty it had sheltered. Dengzhu set out late in the spring, was pushed west by Göktürk resistance, and was caught. Issik overtook his army and destroyed it on the Ordos, the steppe within the great bend of the Yellow River from which every Chinese wall could be turned. This work notes the oddity that the Rouran, steppe people themselves, were the first in centuries to try the passage from China into the steppe rather than the reverse, and that they failed at it with Qi supplies and Qi backing behind them; the failure was the Qi’s as much as theirs.

The remnant turned on its hosts. Anlouchen, the last of Anagui’s sons, took the title of khan under Qi patronage, understood that he was being used, and rose against the Qi themselves in September 553 with fifty thousand men; he was beaten, beaten again in the winter, and thirty thousand of his people were taken. The last Göktürk victory over the Rouran is dated to 20 January 554. Whether Issik lived to see it is not certain; he died in 553, of an illness according to the Sui Shu, which adds that he passed over his son Ishbara for his brother, and nothing more is recorded of the death.[2]

Khaganate under Issik

The year was not only a war. In April 553 the Göktürk sent the Western Wei some fifty thousand horses and received several hundred thousand bolts of silk in return, a volume of exchange the Rouran had never commanded and one that shows the khaganate as an economic weight in the first year of its existence. The alliance with the Wei that Bumin had made was kept, and this work reads the Wei’s surrender of the Rouran refugees as its price.

Issik’s son was Ishbara, who would take the throne in 581 over the objections that made the succession war; Ishbara’s claim in that quarrel was that of the eldest line of Bumin’s house.[2]

Assessment

The sources give Issik one year and two facts: he beat the Rouran and he died. This work credits him with securing the frontier with the two Chinese states and preventing the return of the former overlords to the steppe, and the credit is fair. His brother Mukan, who followed him, took a state whose southern flank was closed, and could turn north and east.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  2. ^ a b c Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  3. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  4. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 164

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)

Related

What links here17

Persons
Anagui · Anluochen · Bagha Khan · Bumin Khan · Dengzhu · Ishbara Khan · Istemi · Mukan Khan
Polities
First Göktürk Khaganate · Northern Qi · Rouran Khaganate
Conflicts
Hegemony Wars in Northern China
Battles & Events
Succession crisis of 581
Places
Ordos
Lineages
Ashina
Institutions and Titles
Khan (Khagan) · Töre

Cite this article

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

Last revised: 13 September 2026