Chagatai Khanate

The Chagatai Khanate was the Mongol khanate that ruled the heartland of Central Asia, one of the four divisions of the empire of Genghis Khan, and the one that most retained the nomadic Mongol character of its founders.

It took its name from Chagatai Khan, the second son of Genghis Khan, who received these Central Asian territories as his appanage (ulus) following his father's conquests; the khanate is conventionally dated from around 1226, near the time the inheritance was settled, though it functioned as a distinct realm only after the wider Mongol Empire fragmented in the 1260s. The khanate encompassed the rich agricultural and commercial lands of Transoxiana, with its ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as the steppe and oasis regions of Turkestan and the Tarim Basin. This combination produced a recurring tension within the realm between the settled, increasingly Islamic and Persianate populations of the western towns and the conservative nomadic Mongol aristocracy of the eastern steppe, who clung to traditional ways and resisted assimilation. The khanate reached a degree of prosperity and centralisation in the early fourteenth century under rulers such as Kebek, who reformed the coinage and administration, and Tarmashirin, who embraced Islam, but the conversion of the western khans deepened the rift with the still-shamanist eastern nomads. These internal strains, combined with chronic dynastic instability and conflict with neighbouring powers including the Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde, fatally weakened the state. Around 1347 the khanate split apart: the western, more settled portion in Transoxiana fell under the control of powerful tribal emirs who reduced the Chagatai khans to puppets, while the eastern half became the separate realm of Moghulistan. It was from within the fractured western Chagatai domain that the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) rose to power in the later fourteenth century, building his own vast empire while ruling nominally in the name of Chagatai puppet khans.

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