15 articles

Polities

Khaganates, empires and confederations.

Byzantium The eastern Roman empire, which received Maniakh in 568, sent Zemarchos to Istemi in 569 and Valentinos to Turxanthos in 576, kept a hundred Göktürk at Constantinople, lost Bosporos to the Göktürk in 579, and under Heraclius in 627 made the alliance with Tong Yabgu that brought the Göktürk through Derbent to Tiflis; thereafter the ally and the in-law of the Khazars.
First Göktürk Khaganate The steppe empire founded by Bumin in 552 on the ruins of the Rouran state, ruled by the Ashina from Ötüken and from the west, divided by civil war after 584, and destroyed in the east by the Tang in 630.
Khazar Khaganate The steppe empire of the lower Volga and the northern Caucasus, from the middle of the seventh century to 965: the western successor of the Göktürk, ruled by a sacred khagan who did not govern, and the one steppe state whose court took up Judaism.
Northern Qi The eastern half of divided northern China, 550 to 577, which sheltered the beaten Rouran, bid against its western rival for Göktürk favour, and whose last emperor tried to flee to the khan.
Northern Wei The Tuoba (Tabgach) state that ruled northern China from 386 to 534, fought the Rouran across the whole steppe frontier for a century, resettled the Gaoche inside its borders, destroyed the Northern Liang in 439 and so drove the Ashina into the Altai, and split in 534 into the Eastern and Western Wei whose rivalry the Göktürk would exploit.
Northern Zhou The state of Yuwen Tai's sons at Chang'an, 557 to 581, the Göktürk's ally for a generation: it fought the Qi beside Mukan in 563 and 564, received his daughter as empress in 568, paid Taspar a hundred thousand pieces of silk a year, conquered the Qi in 577, lost its emperor on the march against Taspar in 578, and fell to its own general Yang Jian, whose Sui the Göktürk fought for the sake of a Zhou princess.
Rouran Khaganate The steppe empire that ruled from the Khingan to the Seven Rivers for a century and a half, held the Ashina as subjects, and fell to Bumin in 552.
Sasanian Persia The Persian empire of the Sasanian house, 224 to 651: tributary of the Hephthalites for decades, Istemi's partner in destroying them and his neighbour along the Oxus, the power that walled the gate of Sul against Sinjibu and burned the Sogdians' silk, the enemy of the Göktürk in the wars of 588 and 606, and the victim of the pincer that Heraclius and Tong Yabgu closed on it in 627; its drachms were the currency of Central Asia and its Persians were among the mourners at Kül Tegin's funeral.
Second Göktürk Khaganate The Göktürk state restored by Ilterish in 682 after fifty years under the Tang, ruled from Ötüken by the Ashina through Kapgan and Bilge Khan, at its widest from the plain of Hebei to the Iron Gate south of Samarkand, and destroyed in 744 by the Basmïl, Karluk and Uyghurs; the state that carved the Orkhon and Tola inscriptions.
Sui The dynasty of Yang Jian that reunited China in 581 and 589 and broke the Göktürk without a decisive battle: it turned the succession quarrel into the division of the khaganate by agents and princesses, made clients of Ishbara and Yami, gave Yami a walled town and a ditch, refused him Chinese dress, lost its emperor's nerve to Shibi at Yanmen in 615, and fell in 618 to the warlords Shibi had armed.
Suo The country north of the Xiongnu from which the Zhou Shu's second origin story brings the Ashina: a state of seventeen brothers, destroyed, whose survivors are placed on the upper Yenisei and in the Sayan, and whose eldest is given the name Türk.
Tang minimal The dynasty that replaced the Sui in 618, destroyed the eastern Göktürk khaganate in 630 and the western in the 650s, and ruled the steppe through Ashina clients until 682.
Uyghur Khaganate The steppe empire of the Uyghurs, a Tiele people of the Nine Oguz, which overthrew the last Göktürk khan in 744 and ruled from the Orkhon until the Kirghiz took Karabalghasun in 840.
Western Göktürk Khaganate The western wing of the Göktürk state, founded by Istemi as a yabgu's command under the khan at Ötüken, independent after the civil war, at its height under Tong Yabgu, dissolved into the Ten Arrows after 630 and taken by the Tang in 657.
Western Wei The western half of the divided Northern Wei, 535 to 557, ruled from Chang'an by Yuwen Tai in the name of Tuoba emperors: it sent the first Chinese embassy to Bumin in 545, gave him a princess in 551, delivered the Rouran fugitives to Mukan in 553, and gave way to the Northern Zhou of Yuwen Tai's sons.