Kazakh Khanate

The Kazakh Khanate was a nomadic state on the steppes of Central Asia, founded around 1465 and lasting until the Russian Empire absorbed it in the nineteenth century. It is regarded as the beginning of Kazakh statehood; in 2015 Kazakhstan celebrated its 550th anniversary.

In the mid-fifteenth century, the eastern steppe was dominated by Abu'l-Khayr Khan, a Shaybanid ruler of the Uzbek nomads. Around 1458–1465, two of his rivals, Kerei and Janibek, both descendants of Genghis Khan through Jochi's son Urus Khan, broke away and led their followers east to the Zhetysu region, south-east of Lake Balkhash, with the support of the Moghul khan Esen Buqa. Those who followed them became known as the Kazakhs, a word probably meaning "free" or "wanderer", referring to people who had left their ruler. After Abu'l-Khayr's death in 1468, many more nomads joined them.

The Kazakhs fought the Uzbeks, now led by Muhammad Shaybani, who moved south and conquered Transoxiana. Under Kasym Khan, who ruled from about 1511 to 1521, the khanate controlled most of the Kazakh steppe, from the Ural river to the Ili; a European writer, Sigismund von Herberstein, estimated its population at a million. The Kazakhs controlled the cities along the Syr Darya, such as Turkistan, Sauran and Sighnaq, which were important for trade and agriculture. In the late sixteenth century, Tauekel Khan briefly took Tashkent and Samarkand.

The Kazakhs were pastoral nomads, moving seasonally with herds of horses, sheep, camels and cattle between summer pastures in the north and mountains and winter pastures in the south. They lived in yurts, and their diet included meat, milk and kumis, fermented mare's milk. Oral poetry, epic songs and the music of the dombra, a two-stringed lute, were central to their culture. Society was organised in clans and tribes, with the aristocracy, the "white bone", tore, descended from Genghis Khan, and the commoners, the "black bone".

By the seventeenth century, the Kazakhs were organised into three tribal unions, or zhuz: the Senior Horde in the south-east, the Middle Horde in the centre and north, and the Junior Horde in the west. Tauke Khan, who ruled in the late seventeenth century, is remembered for a code of laws, the Jeti Zhargy, "Seven Charters", and for councils of biys, judges.

In the early eighteenth century, the Dzungars, Oirat Mongols, invaded the Kazakh lands. In 1723 they devastated the Kazakhs, a catastrophe remembered as the "Years of Great Disaster", Aqtaban Shubyryndy. The three hordes united and defeated the Dzungars at Anyrakay in 1729–1730, under leaders such as Abylai, later Abylai Khan.

Seeking protection, Abu'l-Khayr Khan of the Junior Horde accepted Russian overlordship in 1731, and the Middle Horde followed. Russia built forts along the steppe frontier. Abylai Khan, who ruled the Middle Horde from 1771, balanced between Russia and the Qing. The Russian government abolished the khans' authority in the Middle Horde in 1822 and the Junior Horde in 1824. A revolt led by Kenesary Kasymov, Abylai's grandson and the last Kazakh khan, from 1837 to 1847, ended in his death. Russian settlers took more land, and the Kazakhs suffered greatly in the twentieth century, especially in the famine of 1930–1933 caused by Soviet collectivisation, in which over a third of Kazakhs died.

Our maps show the Kazakh Khanate from 1530 to 1715. Its largest outline, about 2.2 million square kilometres on the 1530 map, is 90 percent in today's Kazakhstan. Tashkent and Almaty lie inside it. On the 1783 map the region is shown as Central Asian khanates.