The Western Göktürk Khaganate was the western half of the state that Bumin founded, and for a century it was the larger, richer and better-connected half. Istemi made it in the 550s as a yabgu’s command under the khan at Ötüken; it reached the Oxus, the Volga and the Crimea in his lifetime; it broke away in the civil war that followed 581, when his son Tardush tried to take the whole khaganate and lost even his own half; it rose again under Tong Yabgu, whose armies stood in Afghanistan and in the Caucasus in the same decade and whose ally was the emperor of the Romans; and after his murder in 630 it dissolved into the Ten Arrows, a confederation with khans but without a state, which the Tang took over in 657 and which faded under the Türgeš and the Karluks in the eighth century. When Göktürk power declined in the west, statehood faded with it, where in the east and the far west, in Mongolia and Khazaria, the state survived.[1]

The Chinese histories, above all the Sui Shu and the Tang histories, carry the political narrative; Menander and Theophylact Simocatta carry the western wing’s dealings with Byzantium and Persia; the Persian tradition carries the wars on the Oxus; and the Kül Tegin inscription, from the eastern side and a century later, carries the Göktürk’s own view of the Ten Arrows.

Origins as the western wing

The khaganate had two heads from the beginning, and the western one was the junior. Bumin’s brother Istemi held the west as yabgu, and the Chinese histories treat the western command as a subordinate office of the eastern court, while the Göktürk inscriptions give Istemi the same title as his brother.[2] This is the bipartite principle: an eastern and a western ruler with supreme power residing in the senior khan of the east, and it recurs in later Turkic states; the temptation built into it is plain, since distances and the notion of the ruling clan’s collective sovereignty invited a western ruler to make his command an appanage, or an independent polity, or to reach for the senior khaganate itself.[1] Istemi did none of these. His son did all three.

When the western wing became a polity of its own is disputed: some date it to Istemi’s era, some to about 583 and the struggle for the supreme khaganate that began then, and the literature is divided on the point. This work dates the division of the realm to 603, when Tardush fell, and treats the wing before that as a wing. This article follows that dating and tells the western wing’s history under Istemi in his article; here begins with its structure and takes up the narrative at his death.

Government and structure

The nature of Göktürk rule in the west differed from that in the east.[1] In Inner Asia the Göktürk dominated the population; in Central Asia they were the masters of a large tribal confederation, with Turkic tribes stationed at strategic points from which to strike at rebellious elements, but they did not dominate ethnically. Beneath the Turkic tribes were Iranian nomads, in time absorbed, and a substantial urban population of Sogdians, Khwarezmians and Bactrians with whom the ruling stratum was in close contact; the ruling structure was staffed from the outset with skilled and literate people from the conquered oasis cities, and the Sogdians, ubiquitous in Göktürk commercial and diplomatic initiatives everywhere, were here in their own heartland. The article on the Sogdians sets out what they were to the Göktürk.

The wing was itself divided. Menander’s account of Valentinos’s embassy of 576 has the western Göktürk territory split into eight sections, each under a ruler, with a senior ruler over them; the envoys of 568 had described four administrative units.[3] A yabgu ruled the whole; beneath him were šads over the sections, and beneath them the tarkhans and the begs of the tribes; over conquered peoples stood eltebers, and under Tong Yabgu tuduns, tax officials, were sent to supervise them. The seat moved. Istemi received Zemarchos at Ektag, the White Mountain that Menander renders Golden Mountain, which has been placed in the Altai and in the Yulduz valley; Tardush sat at Suyab on the Chu, which the Göktürk called Ordukent, the city of the army; Tong Yabgu’s capital was the Thousand Springs east of the Talas, and the Sui Shu calls him master of the ancient territory of the Wusun, the Ili valley.[1]

Tardush (576–603)

Istemi died in 576, and Tardush, his son, succeeded him as yabgu.[3] Valentinos, arriving from Constantinople in the year of the death, was received first by Göktürk-shad, a son of Istemi who administered one of the eight sections, who accused the Romans of speaking with ten tongues and lying with all of them, threatened to kill the envoy, catalogued Roman perfidies, announced that the Alans and Onogurs were now numbered among the Göktürk’s slaves, and, softened by mourning, required the Romans only to slash their faces at the funeral, at which four Hunnic captives and horses were sacrificed; he then sent Valentinos on to Tardush with the threat of an attack on Bosporus in the Crimea, which was already under way and which fell about 579.[3] The Göktürk had reached the Black Sea. The article on Istemi tells the embassy; the point here is what the west was in 576: a realm that could threaten Byzantium and expect to be obeyed by the Alans.

Tardush harboured great political ambitions, and his revolt against the eastern khan began about 582, aimed at nothing less than the complete takeover of the eastern and western khaganates.[1] He took Apa Khan‘s side against Ishbara in the succession quarrel, received the refugees Ishbara drove out, and in 585 pressed Ishbara so hard that the eastern khan declared himself a vassal of the Sui.[2] The civil war has its own article. Its western chapter is the war with Persia: a Göktürk army crossed the Oxus in 588, took Balkh and Herat, and was destroyed by Bahram Chobin; the Persian tradition names its leader Šāba, “the greatest king of the Turks”, one account makes him Tardush’s son, this work makes him Bagha, Ishbara’s brother, and the identification is not settled.[1] The attack belongs to a concerted effort by the western Göktürk, Byzantium and its Arab allies against the Sasanians. Gumilev’s claim that its aim was to break the Sasanian hold on the east–west trade is interesting but unproven.[1]

Tardush recovered from the defeat and from domestic disturbances by 598, and from about 600 to 603 he held supreme power in the united khaganates, the only man after Taspar to do so. Then, about 603, faced with a massive revolt of the Tiele and other tribes, which the Sui Shu names and which the Sui had instigated or encouraged, he fled to the Tuyuhun and disappeared.[2] This work adds poisoned wells on the march east and an exile in northern Tibet, which is the Tuyuhun country. Tardush, active on a pan-Eurasian scale, attempted to do too much.[1]

Succession after Tardush

The dislocations Tardush caused were as far-reaching in the west as in the east, and the sources contradict one another about who the later western khans were.[1] Some scholars derive them from Istemi; others, following the Sui Shu, from Apa Khan, Mukan’s son, who failed to gain the eastern throne; a third view has Istemi’s line take power in the west only after Tardush’s collapse; and a fourth, which tries to reconcile the sources, has Apa drive Tardush out of his western holdings, which set Tardush on his drive for the east, and hold the west for a time until Istemi’s line reasserted itself. This work records the four positions and adopts none. What it can say is that the men who ruled the west between 603 and 630 are given in the Chinese histories as members of the Ashina, and that the Türgeš who later took their place were not.

Heshana and Shegui (603–618)

Tardush’s successor, Heshana or Chuluo Khan, ruled from 603 to 611 and provided poor leadership, which led to revolts.[1] The revolts followed a new taxation of the Tiele, several hundred of their chiefs executed at a single meeting, a rising that set up a khan of the Qibi and drove the Göktürk ruler from Dzungaria to the Ili about 605, and then the Sui strategist Pei Ju’s alliance with the ambitious sub-khan Shegui, who attacked his overlord and drove him to Gaochang.[2] Heshana submitted to the Sui under the threat of his mother’s death, received the title Heshana Khan and a Chinese princess in 611, lost all control of his khaganate by 619, and was handed by the first Tang emperor to eastern Göktürk envoys at Chang’an, who executed him.[2] His whole biography is a humiliation, and why his eastern kinsmen wanted him dead is nowhere explained.[4]

Shegui, given as a younger brother of Tardush and by this work as a sub-khan under Pei Ju’s patronage, ruled from 611 to 618 or 619, extended his lands to the Altai in the east and “to the sea” in the west, and kept his primary camp in the mountains north of Kucha; the Tang history has him send the ostrich eggs of Babylonia to China as tribute.[1] The second war with Persia belongs to these years: a Göktürk army reached Ray and Isfahan in 606 and 607 and was withdrawn for reasons unknown, after which a Sasanian general defeated the Göktürk’s Hephthalite vassals near Balkh, and Bactria was recovered only eight years later under Tong Yabgu.

Tong Yabgu (618–630)

Under Shegui’s younger brother Tong Yabgu the west had its brief efflorescence.[1] He brought the Tiele to full submission and annexed their lands, extended his sway over Afghanistan as far as Gandhara, established an orderly government from the Thousand Springs, sending tuduns to supervise the eltebers of conquered peoples, and kept good relations with the Tang, which contributed, with mutual raiding, to the destruction of the eastern khaganate. As the ally of Heraclius he warred with Persia in Transcaucasia and contributed significantly to the Byzantine victory and the collapse of the Sasanian state. The war included a thousand Göktürk envoys to Heraclius in Anatolia, Börü Shad before Derbent in 627 with forty thousand men, the sack of Partaw, the siege of Tiflis with the emperor, the meeting at which Heraclius embraced the yabgu, called him his son, crowned him with his own diadem and promised him his daughter, the withdrawal, Nineveh, and the return to take and sack Tiflis. The Armenian history that carries this calls the Göktürk Khazars, an anachronism with a true core; the Khazar state grew from this ground, and the yabgu khan who was Heraclius’s ally is the Jebu Khagan of the Armenian sources and the Sir Yabgu of the Greek. Xuanzang, who visited the court at Suyab in 629, saw a khan in green satin with hair to his waist, two hundred ministers in embroidered robes, a tent shining with gold embroidery, envoys from China and Gaochang, wine and music for the envoys and grape syrup for the pilgrim, and a ruler who, being a fire-worshipper, would not sit on wood.

His apparent lack of concern for his own nomadic subjects caused revolts, that of the Karluks about 627 among them, and he was assassinated by his uncle, who briefly held the khaganate as Mohedu in 630. The reign is dated 618 to 630; whether it began in 618 or in 619 is not settled.[1]

Ten Arrows (630–657)

The murder touched off a civil war and the disintegration of the western Göktürk into the On Oq, the Ten Arrows, a confederation that fully manifested itself under the khan Shaboluo Dielishi in 634 to 639 and consisted of two tribal unions of five tribes each, the Üç Tuğlu east of Suyab and the Nushibi west of it, each with its own khan; each chieftain had been given an arrow as a symbol of authority, whence the name, and the chieftains bore the titles čor in the Üç Tuğlu and irkin in the Nushibi. The tribes can be listed from the Tang histories; the sanguinary details of the internecine strife between the two unions, in which China was an occasional player lurking in the background.[1] This work has it as a twenty-seven-year contest of five against five across the Ili, in which the Ashina were set up as khans and counter-khans in turn, symbolically, until the last of them was captured by the Chinese in the 650s.

That last khan was Ashina Helu of the Üç Tuğlu, who had dominated the Ten Arrows since 653 and was taken by Tang forces in 657; the western khaganate then came formally under Chinese protection and was divided into ten prefectures. The Tang annals put the campaign in 657, the capture in 658 and Helu’s death in 659, and one reckoning takes the last of those years as the end of the khaganate.[1] The Tang used Ashina against Ashina: princes who had served Ilig Khan as governors and generals were sent west at the head of Chinese armies, so that on the officers’ level the war in the Tarim in the 640s was Göktürk against Göktürk. By the end all the Göktürk had lost, without exception; those who had not gone over to the Tang were in captivity in northern China, under the Xueyantuo and the Nine Oguz, or had founded states of their own, the Khazars and the Tokhara yabgus and the Göktürk Shahi among them.

Under the Tang and the Türgesh (657–766)

The rest is the history of a confederation that intermittently functioned as a state. Some of the Ten Arrows came under Tibetan overlordship in the late 660s; the Tang regained the region by the 680s; the revived eastern khaganate raided the Ten Arrows repeatedly in 685 to 688, and the Üç Tuğlu khan emigrated to China in 690; Tang-appointed Ashina governors twice took the title of khan in alliance with Tibet, in the 670s and in 694. In 699 the eastern khan Qapagan set his brother and nephew over the two branches, but within the confederation the Türgeš tribe was gaining supremacy, and their leaders Wuzhile, Saqal and Su-lu held the west from 699 to 738, made Suyab their urban centre, defeated the Arabs in 720 and 724, received an Ashina bride from the Tang in 722, and were broken by the Arab victory at Kharistan in 737. The Kül Tegin inscription, carved in the middle of this, says that the Türgeš khan was “our own Türk, our own people”, that he died because of his ignorance and his offences against us, and that the people of the Ten Arrows suffered; and among the mourners of 732 it names “my son the khan of the Türgeš, of the Ten Arrows”.[5] The Karluks, driven out of Mongolia by the Uyghurs, migrated into the Ten Arrows’ lands about 745; the Tang lost the region to the Arabs at Talas in 751; and by 766 the Karluks held Suyab and the whole of the western Göktürk lands. In its Ten Arrows stage the western polity would be very hard to call a state: the khaganal dignity remained, and the titles and officials, but internal cohesion had completely broken down, and the polity had reverted to a tribal union.[1]

Assessment

The western wing was the Göktürk’s bridge to the rest of the world. Through it the khaganate touched Persia, Byzantium, India and the Caucasus, took the trade of Sogdiana and the tribute of the Tarim, sent silk to Constantinople and iron to the Romans, and fought three wars with Persia in forty years; its rulers married a daughter to a Sasanian king and were crowned by a Roman emperor. The pax turcica, the free flow of goods between east and west that the Göktürk unification of the silk route allowed, is an account of the west above all.[1] It was also the half of the state in which the Göktürk were fewest, and the half that ceased soonest to be a state; the observation that most of Central Asia is still called Turkestan, the land of the Göktürk, is a valuation of what the western wing left behind, not a finding.

Rulers

  1. Istemi552–576Yabgu
  2. Tardush576–603Yabgu
  3. Heshana Khan603–611
  4. Shegui Khan611–619
  5. Tong Yabgu618–630Yabgu
  6. Ashina Helu651–657

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Golden 1992
  2. ^ a b c d e Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  3. ^ a b c Menander Protector
  4. ^ Yavuz 2025
  5. ^ Kül Tegin inscription

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)

Related

What links here11

Persons
Ashina Helu · Bumin Khan · Tardush · Tong Yabgu · Töremen Apa
Polities
First Göktürk Khaganate · Tang
Conflicts
Civil war, 584–603
Places
Paikent · Suyab
Lineages
Ashina

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Western Göktürk Khaganate.” Turkic Atlas, revised 12 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/western-turkic-khaganate/

Last revised: 12 September 2026