Oirat Confederation

The Oirats are the western Mongols. From the late fourteenth century to the seventeenth, they formed a confederation, often called the Four Oirat, that rivalled the eastern Mongols for leadership of the Mongol world and, at times, dominated the steppe. Their descendants include the Kalmyks of Russia and the Oirats of western Mongolia and Xinjiang.

The Oirats, whose name may mean "forest people" or "confederates", lived in the forests and steppes of the upper Yenisei, southern Siberia and western Mongolia. They submitted to Genghis Khan in 1208, and their leaders married into his family. Under the Mongol Empire, Oirat troops fought in many campaigns. After the Yuan dynasty fell in 1368, the Oirats became independent of the khans in eastern Mongolia.

The confederation was made up of several tribes, traditionally four, though the membership changed over time: the Choros, Torghut, Dörbet and Khoshut, and earlier groups such as the Khoit. Each was led by its own nobles, and they met in assemblies. Because their leaders were not descended from Genghis Khan in the male line, they could not traditionally claim the title of khan, and often ruled through puppet khans of Genghis's line, taking titles such as taishi.

In the early fifteenth century, the Oirat leader Toghon gained control over much of Mongolia. His son Esen Taishi united the Mongol steppe from Lake Baikal to the Ming frontier and extended influence into Central Asia. In 1449 Esen defeated a large Ming army at the Battle of Tumu and captured the Zhengtong emperor, who was released a year later. In 1453 Esen took the title of khan himself after killing the Genghisid khan, which many Mongols opposed. He was assassinated in 1455, and Oirat power declined.

In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the eastern Mongols under Dayan Khan and his descendants regained leadership and pushed the Oirats west. The Oirats fought the Kazakhs and Moghuls in Central Asia. In 1640, Oirat and Khalkha leaders met and agreed a common law code, the Mongol-Oirat Code.

The Oirats adopted Tibetan Buddhism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 1648 the Oirat monk Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamtso created the Clear Script, todo bichig, an adaptation of the Mongolian script that recorded Oirat pronunciation more accurately, used for translations of Buddhist texts.

In the early seventeenth century, the Oirat tribes moved in different directions. The Torghuts, with some Dörbets, migrated west to the lower Volga around 1630, becoming the Kalmyks, who became subjects of Russia. The Khoshuts, under Güshi Khan, moved to Kokonor and Tibet, where in 1642 Güshi Khan made the fifth Dalai Lama the ruler of Tibet. The Choros founded the Dzungar Khanate, in Dzungaria, which became the last great nomadic empire.

In 1771 many Kalmyks, oppressed by Russian rule, migrated back east to Dzungaria, a disastrous journey on which most died. The Dzungar Khanate was destroyed by the Qing in the 1750s, with most of its people killed. Today, Oirats live in western Mongolia, in Xinjiang and Qinghai in China, and in the Republic of Kalmykia in Russia, the only Buddhist region of Europe.

Our maps show the Oirats on the 1492 and 1500 maps, with an outline of up to about 860,000 square kilometres, which the basemap places entirely within today's Russia, around Novosibirsk's site. Their homeland lay further south, in western Mongolia and the Altai, so this outline is only a rough guide.