The First Göktürk Khaganate was the state that Bumin founded in the spring of 552, when he destroyed the Rouran, entered Ötüken and took the title of khan.[1] Within a decade it reached from the Khingan mountains to the Oxus; within two it touched the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Persian frontier, and its envoys were sworn friends of the emperor in Constantinople. It was the first state to hold the whole Eurasian steppe from one centre, and the first to be ruled by a people who called themselves Göktürk. It was ruled throughout by one family, the Ashina, and it was broken by that family’s quarrels: divided by civil war after 584 into an eastern and a western khaganate, the eastern half fell to the Tang in 630 and the western in the 650s, and fifty years passed before a second Göktürk state was raised on the same ground.

This article sets out the state: its name, its making, its structure, its extent, the course of its history, and the sources from which all of this is known. The rulers, the peoples, the institutions and the events each have their own articles.

Name

The Göktürk called their state el, the realm, and themselves türk bodun, the Göktürk people; the inscriptions of the eighth century have no other name for it.[2] One passage on the Kül Tegin monument, describing the founders’ realm between the Kadırkan forest and the Iron Gate, says that between the two “the Blue Türk”, kök türk, dwelt; the compound occurs there and nowhere else, its meaning is argued, and from it the modern Turkish name Göktürk and the literature’s Göktürk Khaganate derive. The Chinese called the people Tujue and the state by the people’s name.[1] Türük El, the realm of the Göktürk, is the other name, and the Ashina appeared under the single name Göktürk in every source from 542 onward; only the Orkhon inscriptions added the prefix.[3] This work writes Göktürk, and calls the state the First Göktürk Khaganate to distinguish it from the second.

Foundation

The war that made it dates from 546 and not earlier, by a rule of this work: Bumin’s raid on the Western Wei frontier in 542 was a young leader’s probe, the break with the Rouran came in 546 with the intercepted Tiele rising and Anagui’s refusal of a princess, and the two battles of 552 ended it. The War of Independence has its own article. What the Göktürk took at the end of it was not a territory but a state. Bumin did not dismantle the Rouran khaganate; he took it over, with its title, its hierarchy, its Orkhon seat and its claim to the whole steppe, and put his own house at the head of it. The Rouran state was the first bureaucratically ordered steppe empire and the Göktürk state the second, with a different dynasty and a new ethnic identity at the top; the Göktürk and the Rouran had been alike in most other things, half-nomads who prayed to Tengri and kept an ordered, tolerant and heavily militarised society.[3]

At its founding the khaganate held, by the estimate this work adopts, some two million square kilometres, from the east of present-day Mongolia to the Altai and west to Lake Alaköl, and the greater part of its people were the Tiele that Bumin had brought under him in 546. The Kirghiz in the north, the Khitan in the east and the Rouran remnant in the south had slipped out of its reach at Anagui’s death, and the first decade was spent bringing them in.

Government and structure

The khaganate had two heads from the beginning, and how that came about is disputed. Bumin’s son Issik succeeded him as khan at Ötüken; Bumin’s brother Istemi held the west, and the Chinese histories style him yabgu and treat the western command as a subordinate office of the eastern court, while the Göktürk inscriptions give him the same title as his brother.[4] Whether this amounted to a division of the polity at Bumin’s death, or was a standing structure that only became visible afterward, remains disputed. This work reads it as Bumin’s own arrangement, made so that he could attend to the east while his brother expanded westward, and reads Istemi’s title as Sır Yabgu, the second man in the state. The boundary between the wings ran from the Altai down through Dzungaria to the Dzungarian Gate.

Beneath the khan and the yabgu stood a hierarchy of Ashina princes and non-Ashina lords: šads holding military command over a wing or a people, tegins of the blood, eltebers ruling subject peoples as tributary kings, tarkhans, buyruks, and the begs whose consent the khan needed and whose withdrawal of it undid him. The Kül Tegin inscription names the yabgu and the šad as offices the founders gave to the Tölis and the Tarduš, the two wings, and names the begs and the people as the two parties whose straightness with each other let the realm be held.[2] Under Taspar the hierarchy grew a further layer: his nephew Ishbara over the east as Erfu Khan and a son of his brother Rudan Khan over the west as Buli Khan, deputies who bore the title.[4] Sogdian merchants settled at Ötüken and in the Altai in the 550s and took up administrative work for the khan, became the Göktürk’s intermediaries with China, and in the west lent them a script. This work credits Bumin with a meritocracy within the house, “let the better man advance”, and notes in the same breath that dynastic succession made nepotism and quarrel almost inevitable.

The rule of the state was the törü, the customary law that the inscriptions pair with the realm every time they name the founders; the khan held the realm and set the law in order, was chosen by Heaven and possessed Kut, and could nonetheless be deposed by the nobility assembled in a toy.[2] The articles on the title, on Töre, on the assembly and on Tengrism set out what is known of each.

The seat was Ötüken, the forested upland of the Orkhon country that the inscriptions call sacred and name as the one place from which the realm can be held; every year the khan led the nobility to sacrifice at the cave of the ancestors, and in the fifth month to a river to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven.[1] The western seat was the Altai under Istemi and, from about 576, Suyab on the Chu, which the Göktürk called Ordukent, the city of the army.

Territory

The inscriptions set the founders’ realm between the Kadırkan forest in the east, near the Khingan range, and the Iron Gate in the west, the pass between Balkh and Samarkand, and say that the peoples of all four quarters were made to submit.[2] This work puts the figure at five to seven million square kilometres after Mukan’s conquests and six to seven million in Taspar’s time, the largest state the world had yet seen and larger than the Ottoman empire a millennium later; the figures are estimates, and this work adds that much of the area was empty steppe. Within it lived Sogdians, Khitan, Kirghiz and Alans, peoples that differed in language, religion and appearance, and the judgement that no one before the Göktürk had brought such peoples under one authority, and no one after them until the Mongols, is a valuation, not a finding. The Göktürk did not govern their settled subjects; they took tribute and left rulers in place, in the Tarim, in Sogdiana and in Bactria alike.

Founding generation (552–572)

Bumin died in 552 and Issik followed him, long enough to break Dengshuzi’s Rouran at Mount Mulai north of Woye, on the Ordos edge;[1] the Rouran remnant in the Northern Qi destroyed itself against its hosts, and the last Göktürk victory over it is dated to January 554. Mukan, the next brother, reigned from 553 to 572 and took the Kirghiz on the Yenisei and the Khitan in the east between 554 and 560, so that the eastern wing reached the Khingan and the gold of the Yenisei flowed to Ötüken. Istemi, meanwhile, marched west in 553, reached the Seven Rivers by 555, took the Tarim through the Dzungarian Gate, destroyed the Hephthalites in concert with the Sasanian king Khosrow I at Bukhara in 557 or 560, divided their lands along the Oxus, took the trade of Sogdiana, and in 568, when Persia shut its markets, sent the Sogdian Maniakh to Constantinople and received the embassy of Zemarchos in return.[5] By his death in 576 the western wing reached the Volga and the northern Caucasus.

The Chinese alliance held throughout. The Western Wei that had given Bumin a princess gave way to the Northern Zhou in 557, and the alliance passed with it; in 563 and 564 a Göktürk and Zhou army attacked Taiyuan in Northern Qi territory, and Mukan’s daughter, Empress Ashina, married the Zhou emperor.[1] The Qi, who had sheltered the Rouran, built a wall against the Göktürk and got no help from it.

Taspar (572–581)

Taspar, the youngest brother, reigned from 572 to 581 over the khaganate at its greatest extent; he called the two Chinese emperors his sons,[1] and set lesser khans over the east and west of his domain.[4] When the Zhou conquered the Qi in 577 he took up the Qi resistance in secret, sheltered the Qi prince Gao Shaoyi, raided the Zhou in 578, and surrendered Shaoyi in 580 for a Zhou princess and a peace.[6] Under him a Chinese monk converted the khan to Buddhism; the Göktürk did not follow, and the Bugut inscription, the earliest monument of the khaganate, set up about 584 in Sogdian script, is held to have been made for Taspar.[7] This work reckons the years 552 to 581 as thirty years without a rising of subject peoples, an economic crisis or a social conflict on record; that is a summary, and a fair one.

Succession war and division (581–603)

Taspar’s death opened the crisis. He had wished the throne to go to Mukan’s son Töremen; the assembly at Ötüken, under the threat of revolt from the lesser khan Ishbara, chose Taspar’s son Amrak instead; Amrak abdicated within the year in Ishbara’s favour; Töremen, as Apa Khan, went to war against Ishbara, and Istemi’s son Tardush, yabgu in the west since 576, took his side.[4] At the same moment the Zhou fell to their general Yang Jian, who founded the Sui in 581 and, as emperor of a united northern China, declined to defer to the khan.[4]

In 583 Ishbara, Apa, Tardush and Ishbara’s brother Bagha invaded China together and for the first time held a broad strip of the north; a Tiele rising in the west drew Tardush off, a Sui surprise attack in June 583 near Baidao broke the Göktürk army, disease followed the retreat, Chinese agents set the commanders against each other, and Ishbara drove Apa west into Tardush’s arms. This work dates the civil war from 584 and reads its cause in four princes raised to rule who could not all rule, with the Sui, a state that fought the Göktürk with agents rather than soldiers, working every division. Ishbara, isolated, with perhaps thirty or forty thousand men against Tardush’s hundred thousand, submitted to the Sui emperor in return for protection; in September 585 the western army marched on Ötüken and Ishbara fled to China; Ishbara and Apa both died in 587.[4] The state was now two.

Ishbara’s successor Tulan tried to restore the khaganate’s independence of China and was killed by his own followers in 603, after Ishbara’s son Yami had gone over to the Sui, been given a Chinese princess and the title of khan, and marched into Ötüken with Sui troops.[4] Tardush, who had tried to take the whole state after 587, was driven into exile by a Tiele rising and died in 603.[4] This work takes 603 as the final division of the realm into two. In the west, the same years saw the first Göktürk war with Persia, when Bagha crossed the Oxus in 588, took Balkh and Herat, and was beaten and killed by Bahram Chobin at the Hyrcanian rock; the Persian epic is the only source for it.

Eastern khaganate (603–630)

The last three decades of the eastern state were spent in the orbit of China. Yami, 603 to 609, was a Sui client who fought the Khitan for his overlord and adopted Chinese ways at his court until the Chinese themselves discouraged it.[4] Shibi, 609 to 619, reversed the policy, rebuilt the army, reduced the Chinese advisers at Ötüken, supported the peasant risings that ended the Sui, besieged the Sui emperor himself at Yanmen in September 615, and armed the warlords of the interregnum, among them Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang, to whom he sent two thousand horses and five hundred riders.[4] This work credits Shibi with restoring Göktürk power and charges him with having, unwittingly, brought the Tang to the throne that would destroy it. His brother Chula reigned briefly and died, perhaps poisoned by a Chinese official at his court.

Ilig Khan, from 620, fought the Tang almost yearly, took Yanmen, won five battles, and in 626, eighteen days after Li Shimin had killed his brothers and taken the throne as Taizong, stood with a great army before Chang’an; Taizong met him with a display of composure and force, and Ilig withdrew.[8] Then the state came apart from inside: the Tatabï rose, Ilig tortured the nephew who failed to put them down and the nephew fled to China, the Nine Oguz killed a šad, and in 628 the Xueyantuo broke away as a khaganate with Tang encouragement. In December 629 Tang cavalry struck in winter, in March 630 Taizong reached the Iron Mountain, the Göktürk front collapsed, and Ilig was handed to the Chinese by his own uncle. The Jiu Tang Shu has him flee to the Iron Mountain, offer submission, and ride alone to the camp of his kinsman Shaboluo, where Zhang Baoxiang took him in the third month of 630 and sent him to the capital.[8] He died a guest at the Tang court; his people went under Chinese governors or under the Xueyantuo; and the Kül Tegin inscription, a century later, describes the fifty years that followed as the years in which the Göktürk begs gave up their names and took Chinese ones, and the sons of the people became slaves and its daughters concubines.[2]

Western khaganate

The western khaganate outlived the eastern. Under Tong Yabgu, 618 to 628, it reunited the west, recovered Bactria, renewed the Roman alliance and sent an army under his nephew Börü through Derbent into the Caucasus in 627, where it took Tiflis with Heraclius and laid the ground for the Khazar state; its court at Suyab, described by the pilgrim Xuanzang in 629, was a place of silk, gold, music and envoys from every direction. This work dates the end of the western khaganate to 657, when the Tang broke its last independent khan; the article on the western wing sets out the reckonings, which run from the 650s to the 740s depending on what is counted.

Causes of the fall

The inscription gives the Göktürk’s own theory: the younger brothers were not like the elder, the sons not like the fathers; ignorant and bad khans took the throne; the begs and the people were not straight with each other; and the Chinese, cunning and deceitful, set brother against brother and lord against people, so that the Göktürk lost their realm and their khan.[2] Four causes are internal and one external, and the external one works by exploiting the rest. This work adds the climate, a run of extreme years in 536–545 and again in 581–583 that it reads behind both the slow start of Bumin’s rising and the outbreak of the civil war, and the structural weakness of a nomad state that could lay up no reserves and depended on trade with the settled neighbours it fought. It also weighs the presence at Ötüken of Chinese princesses, Chinese advisers and a Chinese religion, and calls the accumulation of non-Tengrist foreigners at the sacred centre a fatal error; that is a judgement, and this work records it as one.

The weather of the khaganate’s century is measured: the eruptions of 536 and 540, the cold decade that followed, the Late Antique Little Ice Age of 536 to about 660 in the Altai, the good grass to about 600 and the hard winters after it in the Khangai, the eruption of 626 and the cold summer of 627 before the fall. Who has argued what from those measurements is set out in the article on climate and the steppe empires.

Sources

Everything above rests on a narrow body of texts, and the dependencies among them decide how much weight their agreement can bear. The Zhou Shu, compiled in 636, is the principal and earliest account and the source for the founding generation; the Sui Shu covers the division, the western wing and Sui diplomacy; the Bei Shi draws on both and is not an independent witness; the Zizhi tongjian compiles from all three in the eleventh century and is the natural place for chronology. All are Chinese, all were written for states that fought the Göktürk, and where three of them say the same thing that is one line of transmission.

Menander Protector is contemporary and independent, and the only source for the west after 568. The Persian tradition, preserved in the epic, is the only source for the wars on the Oxus. The Bugut inscription is the only monument of the khaganate itself, in Sogdian. The Kül Tegin inscription is the only Turkic-language account, carved two centuries later for a dynasty that needed the founders to have been what it said they were, and it is evidence for eighth-century memory first. None of the Chinese works has been checked at the text in this work, and the status marks throughout say so.

Rulers

  1. Bumin Khan552–552
  2. Issik Khan552–553
  3. Mukan Khan553–572
  4. Taspar Khan572–581
  5. Amrak581–582
  6. Ishbara Khan582–587
  7. Tulan Khan587–603
  8. Yami Khan603–609
  9. Shibi Khan609–619
  10. Chula Khan619–620
  11. Ilig Khan620–630

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  2. ^ a b c d e f Kül Tegin inscription
  3. ^ a b Yavuz 2025
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  5. ^ Menander Protector
  6. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 173
  7. ^ Bugut inscription
  8. ^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Ulf Büntgen; Vladimir S. Myglan; Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist; Michael McCormick; Nicola Di Cosmo u. a., Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD (2016)
  • Julian Struck; Marcel Bliedtner; Paul Strobel; William Taylor u. a., Central Mongolian lake sediments reveal new insights on climate change and equestrian empires in the Eastern Steppes (2022)

Related

What links here21

Persons
Bagha Khan · Ilig Khan · Issik Khan · Mukan Khan · Tulan Khan · Yami Khan
Polities
Northern Wei · Rouran Khaganate · Second Göktürk Khaganate
Conflicts
Civil war, 584–603 · The Turkic War of Independence
Battles & Events
Battle of Huaihuang, 552 · Succession crisis of 581
Peoples
Tiele
Lineages
Ashina · Yujiulü
Institutions and Titles
Toy
Religions
Tengrism
Sources
Bugut inscription
Historiography
Climate and the steppe empires · Making of the first steppe empire

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “First Göktürk Khaganate.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/first-turkic-khaganate/

Last revised: 13 September 2026