The Second Göktürk Khaganate was the state that Ilterish raised in 682 out of a band of five thousand in the hills north of the Chinese frontier, fifty-two years after the Tang had taken the last khan of the first. It moved to Ötüken within his reign, became under his brother Kapgan an empire that the Tang histories thought the equal of Ilig‘s, ten thousand li across with four hundred thousand bowmen, and under his son Bilge Khan a power at peace with China and paid in silk for it; and it fell within a decade of Bilge’s death, in 744, to the peoples it had ruled.[1] It is the state that carved the Tonyukuk, Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan inscriptions, the earliest texts in a Turkic language and the only steppe empire before the Mongols that explained itself in its own words. Everything this work says about how the Göktürk understood rule, its loss and its restoration comes from these sixty years.

This article sets out the state: its name, its making, its structure, its extent, the course of its history, and the sources. The khans, the counsellor, the battle of Bolchu and the inscriptions have their own articles.

Name

The Tang histories call it what they called its predecessor, Tujue, and treat the whole from 682 to 744 as a continuation of the chapter on the eastern Göktürk.[1] The Orkhon monuments call the people türk bodun and the realm türk el, again as the first khaganate had.[2] The Tonyukuk stone alone has a name of its own: türk sir bodun, the Türk Sir people, four times, and once “the land of the Türk Sir people” as the thing that was to have no master and got one.[3] The Sir are usually identified with the Xueyantuo, the Sir Tarduš of the Chinese, who had ruled the Orkhon country between 630 and 646; if so, the restored state named itself as a union of the Göktürk with the people who had held Ötüken in their absence, which is a fact about 682 that no Chinese source records. “Second Khaganate” is the literature’s name, and this work’s.

Foundation

For fifty years after 630 the eastern Göktürk had lived under the Tang, along the frontier and in the six prefectures of the Ordos loop, governed through their own chiefs under Chinese protectorates and levied for Chinese wars; the Kül Tegin inscription’s “for fifty years they gave their toil and their strength” is the same half-century seen from Ötüken.[2] Revolts began in the late 670s. In 680 the Ashide chiefs fetched Ashina Funian, a nephew of Ilig, to Xiazhou to make him khan; Pei Xingjian broke the rising and Funian was beheaded in the market of Chang’an in 681.[1]

Gudulu, Kutluk in Turkic, a distant kinsman of Ilig and an Ashina whose grandfather had been a chieftain under the Tang governor of Yunzhong with a hereditary title, gathered Funian’s fugitives in the Zongcai mountains, lived by robbery and by raiding the herds of the Nine Surnames until he had five thousand men, and set himself up as khan, with his brother Mochuo as shad and one Duoxifu as yabgu.[1] Ashide Yuanzhen, the Chinese-trained supervisor of the surrendered tribes, went over to him and was given the army as Apa Tarkan.[1] The Tonyukuk stone gives the same beginning as seven hundred men, two-thirds mounted, under a shad, and a counsellor who made him khan; the Orkhon monuments give it as seventeen men who became seventy and then seven hundred, and Heaven raising Ilterish and his wife Il-Bilge Katun “by the crown of the head”.[3] The first seat of the state was in the hills north of the frontier, at Čogay Kuzı and Kara Kum by the stone, in the Zongcai mountains and the fortified town of Heisha, the Black Sands, by the Chinese.[4]

The move to Ötüken is told only by Tonyukuk. Warned by a spy that the new khan of the Nine Oguz was building a coalition with China and the Kıtañ against “the land of the Türk Sir people”, the counsellor persuaded the khan to strike first, crossed the Kök Öng, beat the Oguz on the Tola with two thousand men against three, and settled the khan and the people in the Ötüken land, “and the peoples of the south, of the west, of the north and of the east came to us”.[3] That march, undated but within Ilterish’s reign, is the moment the frontier rising became a steppe empire on the ground the first khaganate had held.

Government and structure

The state was the first khaganate’s, rebuilt from memory. Ilterish, the Kül Tegin inscription says, set the people in order “according to the law of my forefathers”, organised the Tölis and the Tardush, the eastern and western halves of the people, and gave them a yabgu and a shad.[2] The Tang history lists the first appointments as it saw them: the khan’s brother as shad, another man as yabgu, a Chinese-trained officer as Apa Tarkan in command of the army.[1] Beside the khan stood the counsellor, ayguči, whom the Tonyukuk stone makes the second pillar of the state: “his khan is brave, his counsellor is wise”, five times.[3]

In 699 Kapgan gave the state the form it kept: two shads, of the left and of the right, each with more than twenty thousand men; above them a Lesser Khan, his own son, with more than forty thousand men of the Ten Surnames of the west and the title “Khan Who Expands the West”; and the khan over all.[1] Bilge Khan had been shad of the Tardush at fourteen under that system; in the regency after his death the army was again divided between a Left Shad in the east and a Right Shad in the west, “and all the best troops were under the two shads”.[1] The articles on shad, yabgu and Khan and khagan treat the offices; what the second khaganate adds to them is the Lesser Khan, a viceroy over the west with a royal title.

The subject peoples paid. The Khitan and the Xi “had been subject to his levies and services since 697”; the Ten Arrows furnished the Lesser Khan’s forty thousand; the six prefectures of the Ordos, the Sogdo-Göktürk settlements the Tang handed over in 698 with seed and ploughs, gave the state back farmers and traders, and the Sogdians among them gave it its merchants and some of its officers, one of whom was the father of An Lushan.[5] The legitimating ideas, Heaven and Kut and Töre and the holy ground of Ötüken, are treated in their own articles; they are known almost entirely from this state’s monuments.

Territory

Bilge Khan’s own measure, on the south face of his brother’s monument: eastward to the plain of Shantung and within a little of the sea; southward to the Nine Ersin and within a little of Tibet; westward across the Pearl River to the Iron Gate; northward to the country of the Yir Bayırku.[2] The Tang history’s measure for Kapgan: more than ten thousand li from east to west, four hundred thousand bowmen, the Khitan and Xi tributary, “and since Ilig no one had been so powerful”.[1] Both are measures of where the armies had been, not of a bounded territory, and this work draws no line: the Ordos was held only as the six prefectures, the Ten Arrows only from Bolchu in 711 to the defections of 715, and the country beyond the Syr Darya only for the length of one campaign. The seat throughout was Ötüken, and the monuments say it is the only seat from which the realm can be held.[2]

Ilterish (682–691)

The founder’s decade was war with the Tang, every year. Weizhou in 683, where the governor of Fengzhou was killed; Shuozhou in 684; Shuozhou and Daizhou in 686, and five thousand Tang dead at Xinzhou; Changping on the plain of Hebei and Shuozhou again in 687.[1] That year the Tang general Heichi Changzhi beat the khan at Huanghuadui and drove him north of the desert, and a colonel who followed with thirteen thousand picked men to finish him lost them all.[1] Tonyukuk counts seventeen battles with the Chinese, seven with the Kıtañ and five with the Oguz; the Orkhon count is forty-seven campaigns and twenty pitched battles against every neighbour, “to the south the Chinese, to the north Baz Khan and the Nine Oguz, the Kırgız, the Kurıkan, the Thirty Tatar, the Kıtañ and the Tatabı”.[3] Ilterish died of illness between 690 and 692, leaving sons of eight and seven, and his brother took the throne.[1]

Kapgan (691–716)

Kapgan’s reign is told in his article; its shape here. The turn from raiding to empire came in 696, when Empress Wu, at war with the Khitan, took his offer to crush them in exchange for the Göktürk households that had surrendered west of the Yellow River; he broke the Khitan, took their families, and “from this time his forces grew”.[1] In 698 he extracted the six prefectures of the Ordos, forty thousand bushels of seed and three thousand implements by detaining an envoy, rejected the Wu bridegroom sent for his daughter with a speech about the Li house that the Tang history preserves, and led a hundred thousand men into Hebei, from which he withdrew with eighty or ninety thousand captives before the Tang armies moved.[1] Then the reorganisation of 699, the yearly raids, the destruction of a Tang army at Mingsha in 705 and the theft of the Longyou herds, and the Tang answer, the three Shouxiang cities built beyond the river to close the road south.[1]

In the west the three-khan coalition of the Tang, the Ten Arrows and the Kirghiz was broken by Tonyukuk’s winter crossing of the Sayan, which killed the Kirghiz khan, and by the night march over the Altai and the Irtysh to Bolchu, where the Türgesh khan was taken and the Ten Arrows submitted; the army went on across the Syr Darya to the Iron Gate, and the Sogdians came in.[3] The Tang history dates the destruction of the Türgesh khan Suoge to 710 or 711.[1] It was the widest the state ever reached, and it did not last: the Lesser Khan’s attack on Beiting failed in 714, in 715 the Ten Surnames of the west and more than ten thousand tents went over to the Tang, the Nine Surnames were beaten so hard that their leader fled to China too, and in 716 Kapgan, riding home carelessly from a victory over the Bayirku on the Tola, was beheaded in a willow wood by a straggler.[1] “When Mochuo grew old, the tribes increasingly fled and scattered.”[1]

Bilge Khan (716–734)

Kül Tegin killed the Lesser Khan, his uncle’s brothers and his uncle’s court, and set his elder brother on the throne; Bilge offered it back and was refused, and Kül Tegin took the army.[1] The one survivor of the old court, Tonyukuk, whose daughter was the new katun, was recalled as chief counsellor at over seventy.[1] The state Bilge took over was, in his own words, “a people who had no food inside them and no clothes on their backs, a wretched and broken people”; the defectors came back from the Tang side by force of arms, the Nine Oguz fought him five times in one year, and the Türgesh under Sulu made themselves a khan again in the west.[2]

Tonyukuk’s counsel set the policy: no raid on China while the state was weak, no walled towns, no temples, mobility as the ground of strength.[1] The Tang test came in 721, a three-sided attack of which only the Basmïl arrived; they were followed home, cut off from Beiting and taken whole, and Liangzhou was stripped of its herds on the way back. “From this the Little Shad’s power grew greatly, and he had the whole of Mochuo’s following.”[1] He asked for peace the same year, offering to be the emperor’s son; the sonship was accepted, the bride refused, and refused again in 725 after Bilge’s angry question to the envoy why the Tibetans, the Xi and the Khitan had princesses and the Göktürk did not.[1] In 727 he sent the Tibetan proposal for a joint invasion to Chang’an and was granted a market at the western Shouxiang city with several hundred thousand bolts of silk a year.[1] The Kül Tegin inscription’s south face is that settlement described from Ötüken: gold, silver and silk “without our having to ask”, and the warning not to go and live in the south.[2]

Kül Tegin died in 731, and the monument that carries the whole Göktürk theory of the state was finished for him in 732, with a Chinese stele beside it composed by the emperor and craftsmen sent from Chang’an.[2] In 734 a minister poisoned Bilge Khan; before he died he had the minister and his faction destroyed.[1]

Decline and fall (734–744)

His son Yiran was set up, invested by the Tang with a stele and shrine of his own, and died of illness within months; his younger son Tengri, a boy, followed, and the state was run by his mother, Tonyukuk’s daughter, and her lover, “and the people would not submit to her”.[1] The army lay with two cousins of Bilge, the Left Shad in the east and the Right Shad in the west. In 740 the Tang invested Tengri once more; soon afterward he and his mother lured the Right Shad to them and beheaded him, and the Left Shad, fearing the same, killed Tengri and set himself up as Ozmish Khan.[1] The Basmïl rose against him and beat him; “the whole country fell into chaos”; and in the eighth month of 742 the remnant of the house, the Right Shad’s widow and children, a grandson of Kapgan, a daughter of Bilge Khan, a widow of Yiran and a daughter of Tengri, arrived at Chang’an, where the emperor received them and wrote a poem about it.[1]

The chapter of the Jiu Tang Shu read for this work ends there; the lower chapter of the Xin Tang Shu carries it on. In its telling the Uyghurs, Karluk and Basmïl rose together at the start of Tianbao against a yabgu who had killed two sons of Bilge and taken the throne, killed him and raised the Basmïl chief as khan; the people set up Ozmish; in 744 the Basmïl killed Ozmish and sent his head to Chang’an, his brother Baimei was set up, the Uyghurs and Karluk killed the Basmïl khan and raised the Uyghur Guli Peiluo, and in 745 they killed Baimei too, while Bilge’s widow, the Katun Pofu, came in to the Tang with her people.[4] The story runs on to 744: a coalition of Basmïl, Karluk and Uyghurs toppled the dynasty in 742, a Basmïl khan held the Orkhon for two years, and in 744 an Uyghur-led coalition toppled him in turn, which is the birth of the Uyghur Khaganate.[6] The Uyghur chapter of the same Tang history has the Uyghur ruler “attack and conquer the Basmïl” in the third year of Tianbao, 744, and take the title Kutluk Bilge Kül Khan.[7] The Uyghurs were a people of the Nine Oguz whom every Göktürk khan since Ilterish had fought; they took the Orkhon, kept Ötüken as the centre of the realm, and repeated on their own monuments the Göktürk creed of Heaven and Earth.

Causes of the fall

The state’s own monuments give one theory. On the Kül Tegin stone the realm is lost when lords and commons are not straight with one another, when younger brother is set against elder, when the people are drawn south by sweet words and soft silk, and it is held from Ötüken and nowhere else; the speaker says he has set down “how they will go wrong and die” for the people of a later day.[2] The Tonyukuk stone gives another: a realm lasts while its khan is brave and its counsellor wise, and Tonyukuk, old, asks what misfortune it would be for a people with a khan to have worthless men at its head.[3] The Tang history gives the plainest: Kapgan “used his people cruelly” and the tribes fled him; Bilge was murdered; a regent and her lover ruled a boy; two shads with all the troops turned on the throne and on each other; and the subject peoples, Basmïl, Karluk, Uyghur, did the rest.[1] All three agree that the state broke from inside before it was struck from outside.

The record from the Mongolian lakes adds a setting. Struck and her colleagues, reading the sediments of Lake Telmen, place the Second Göktürk state within the run of good years that their record gives the steppe empires, and see central Mongolia turning drier from about 700 and staying so; what that meant for a state whose strength, by Tonyukuk’s own account, was that it followed the water and the grass is a question the article on climate and the steppe empires holds open.

Sources

The state is known from three inscriptions of its own and from two chapters of the Tang histories, and the two kinds do not overlap where one would wish. The Tonyukuk inscription covers 682 to 716 from the counsellor’s side and is independent of the royal monuments; the Kül Tegin inscription of 732 and the Bilge Khan inscription of 735 cover the same years and Bilge’s reign from the khan’s side and share their historical section word for word, so that they are one witness where they agree; the Ongi inscription, a smaller monument of the same dynasty, is treated in Ōsawa’s study. None of the three names the other’s hero, and none dates anything by a year the Chinese would recognise: the stones count by the animal cycle and by the ages of princes.

The Jiu Tang Shu’s chapter on the Göktürk, read at the text for this work from the rising of Kutluk to the reception of 742, gives the years, the raids, the embassies, the titles, the speeches of Tonyukuk and Bilge and the mechanics of the fall; the Xin Tang Shu’s upper chapter rewrites it to 716 and is not a second witness, and its lower chapter, which carries 716 to 745, supplies the end the upper chapter lacks: the yabgu’s usurpation, the Basmïl khan, the killing of Ozmish in 744 and of his brother Baimei in 745, the submission of Bilge’s widow, and the sentence that the state which had begun under the Western Wei was no more.[4] The Uyghur chapter of the Jiu Tang Shu gives 744.[7] Hirth, in 1899, was the first to set the Chinese notices beside the Tonyukuk stone, and the Chinese notices and the stone have been read together ever since.[6]

Rulers

  1. Ilterish Khan682–691
  2. Kapgan Khan691–716
  3. Inel Khan699–716
  4. Bilge Khan716–734
  5. Yiran Khan734–734
  6. Tengri Khan734–741
  7. Ozmish Khan741–744

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Kül Tegin inscription
  3. ^ a b c d e f g Tonyukuk inscription
  4. ^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  5. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; de la Vaissière 2005a
  6. ^ a b Golden 1992
  7. ^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Mackerras 1972

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Friedrich Hirth, Nachworte zur Inschrift des Tonjukuk. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ost-Türken im 7. und 8. Jahrhundert nach chinesischen Quellen (1899)
  • Wilhelm Radloff, Die alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei. Zweite Folge: Die Inschrift des Tonjukuk (1899)
  • E. Denison Ross (nach Vilhelm Thomsen), The Orkhon Inscriptions; The Tonyukuk Inscription. Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering (1930)
  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Takashi Ōsawa, Revisiting the Ongi inscription of Mongolia from the Second Turkic Qaγanate on the basis of rubbings by G. J. Ramstedt (2011)
  • 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)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)

Related

What links here21

Persons
Bilge Khan · Bumin Khan · Ilterish Khan · Kapgan Khan · Kül Tegin · Tengri Khan · Tonyukuk
Polities
First Göktürk Khaganate · Tang · Uyghur Khaganate
Places
Dzungaria · Ordos · Ötüken · Tarim Basin
Peoples
Bayirku
Lineages
Ashina
Institutions and Titles
Kut
Religions
Tengrism
Sources
Bilge Khan inscription · Kül Tegin inscription · Tonyukuk inscription

Cite this article

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

Last revised: 13 September 2026