“I will give the people unto thee” : The Činggisid Conquests and Their Aftermath in the Turkic World

Abstract

The Mongol conquests produced the last in a series of realignments of the Turkic peoples, creating, more or less, the configurations in which we find them today. The earliest of these realignments was associated with the rise and fall of the Hsiung-nu polity (second century BC to mid-second century AD). This was the first of the attempts at a pannomadic state. Mao-tun, the “Great Shanyü whom heaven has set up”, the founder of the Hsiung-nu union, boasted in a letter to the Han Court that because of his efforts “all the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family.”2Činggis Qan expressed similar thoughts regarding the “people having skirts of felt” i.e. living in feltcovered tents.3Although it cannot be demonstrated that all the Eurasian nomads were, indeed, incorporated into the Hsiung-nu polity, substantial numbers of the Turkic nomads undoubtedly were. In its formative, “heroic” years of conquest and in the course of its collapse, a number of Turkic (and other) pastoral, nomadic peoples were brought into motion along China's northern frontiers and adjoining regions. Others were pushed westward, some making their way to what is today Kazakhstan and into the Caspian-Pontic steppelands. This marked the first large-scale movement westward of Turkic peoples from Inner Asia to Central Asia and thence to the Western Eurasian steppelands. The final stages of these migrations ultimately brought some of the nomads to Danubian Europe and the Hungarian Plain.