Right Shad (d. 741)

The Right Shad was one of the two cousins of Bilge Khan who commanded the army of the Göktürks after his death. His murder began the fall of the Second Khaganate. The Tang history gives him no name. It gives his office, the west, and his end.^[1]

The two shads

Bilge died in 734. His sons Yiran and Tengri followed him in turn, the second a boy.^[1] The state was run by Tengri’s mother, Tonyukuk’s daughter, and her lover, a minor official named Yinsi Dagan. The people would not submit to her.^[1] The army lay elsewhere. Two paternal cousins of Tengri’s father divided the troops between them. The one in the east was called the Left Shad and the one in the west the Right Shad. All the best troops were under the two shads.^[1] The arrangement was Kapgan’s of 699: two shads under the khan. The Lesser Khan whom Kapgan had set above them was missing. Under shad, Turkic Atlas describes the office as a wing of the army and the peoples in it, held by a prince of the house.

Death (741)

In the twenty-eighth year of Kaiyuan, 740, the emperor sent the general Li Zhi with a sealed letter to invest Tengri as khan.^[1] Soon afterward Tengri and his mother lured the Western Shad to them. They beheaded him and took over all his people.^[1] The Left Shad feared the same fate. He led his troops against Tengri and killed him. Then he set himself up as Ozmish Khan.^[1] The Basmïl rose against Ozmish in turn, and the country fell into chaos. The fall has its own article.

His household outlived him and went to China. The Tang history lists those who came over in the collapse. They include “the wife and children of the Western Shad”, with a grandson of Kapgan, a daughter of Bilge, a junior wife of Yiran and a daughter of Tengri. In the eighth month of 742 they reached the capital. They were presented at the ancestral temple, received in the palace court and feasted at the Huae tower. The emperor wrote a poem on the occasion.^[1]

Assessment

The killing was the regency’s attempt to take the army back from the house. It produced the opposite. A khan too young to command and a mother the people rejected could not hold the west by beheading its commander. The east drew its own conclusion. Within a year the boy was dead. The last Ashina khan on the Orkhon was a man the people would not accept either. The Second Khaganate stopped being a state with the Right Shad’s death. It became a succession of killings.