Western Turkic Khaganate

When the first great Turkic empire of the steppe divided at the start of the seventh century, its western half became a power in its own right, ruling the grasslands and oasis cities from the Tian Shan to the Caspian. Known to its own people as the Onoq, the "ten arrows", after its ten tribal divisions, the Western Turkic Khaganate controlled the central stretch of the Silk Road, dealt with Persia and Byzantium as an equal, and was finally broken by Tang China in 657.

The Göktürk empire was founded on the Mongolian plateau in 552 by Bumin of the Ashina clan. Bumin's brother Istämi led the push west, and within a few years Turkic horsemen had reached the Aral Sea and driven the Avars beyond the Volga. In alliance with Sasanian Persia the Turks destroyed the Hephthalites in the 560s, and a border along the Oxus left the Turks in control of the Sogdian merchant cities. Civil wars from the 580s onward, and especially the fighting of 593–603, separated the eastern and western halves into independent states.

Sogdian merchants were central to the khaganate's wealth and foreign policy. A Sogdian named Maniakh led a Turkic embassy to Constantinople in 568, seeking a trade partnership and an alliance against Persia, and the Byzantine envoy Zemarchus travelled back with him and described the Turkic court. Relations with Persia swung between alliance and war; the Persians defeated a Turkic incursion in 588–589, while the khagan Shikui raided Iran as far as Ray and Isfahan around 616–617. In 576–577 Turkic forces even took the Byzantine town of Panticapaeum in Crimea, the furthest west their power reached.

Its greatest ruler was Tong Yabghu, who reigned from 618 to 630 over lands from the Tarim Basin to the Caspian. His winter capital was Suyab in the Chui valley of today's Kyrgyzstan, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang is said to have met him. During the last great war between Byzantium and Persia, he sent forces through the Caucasus in 627; they stormed Derbent, joined the emperor Heraclius at the siege of Tiflis and later took the city. His son Tardush Shad established Turkic rule in Tokharistan, in today's Afghanistan.

The khaganate was a confederation rather than a centralised state. Its tribes were split into two wings, the more aristocratic Duolu in the east and the Nushibi in the west, with chiefs of different ranks. Rivalry between these wings became the khaganate's chief weakness. Murals from Samarkand painted in the mid-seventh century show Turkic attendants with long braided hair and lapelled coats, a rare picture of their appearance.

Tong Yabghu was murdered in 630, and in the same year the Tang destroyed the Eastern Khaganate. The western tribes split into warring factions under a series of short-lived khagans, and from 640 the Tang began taking the oasis states of the Tarim Basin that had been Turkic allies. Ashina Helu reunited the tribes as khagan in 651, but in 657 the Tang general Su Dingfang, supported by Uyghur cavalry, defeated him on the Irtysh River and captured him.

The Tang divided the ten tribes between two Ashina princes ruling as its clients, but both died in feuds in the 660s, and later Tang-appointed khagans had little real authority. The rebel Ashina Duzhi was captured by a Tang ruse in 679, and by about 700 the Turgesh had taken leadership of the western tribes. Further west, the Khazars rose to power as the khaganate broke up.

Our 700 map draws the Western Gokturk Khaganate, although the independent khaganate had been destroyed in 657 and by around 700 the region's tribes were led by the Turgesh. It is shown alongside the Tibetan Empire and the Khazars, while China to the east is the Tang dynasty, which had ruled since 618; for its origins see the Göktürks, and for its great western rivals the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire.