1

CENTRAL ASIA BEFORE

THE ADVENT OF RUSSIAN
DOMINION1
Michael Hancock-Parmer

[East of the Caspian] towards the sunrise there stretches from its shores a boundless
plain as far as sight can reach.At that time, the Massagetae were ruled by a queen, called
Tomyris, whose husband had died.The Persian Emperor Cyrus sent a message with a
pretense of wooing her for his wife, but Tomyris would have none of his advances, well
understanding that he wooed not her but her kingdom.
(Herodotus 1858: 344)
–Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE)

If you have nothing to tell us, but that on the banks of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, one
barbarian has been succeeded by another barbarian, in what respect do you benefit
the public?
(Voltaire 1901: 93)
–Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778)

Central Asia is a region where history has left an oversized footprint.

(McChesney 1996: 1)
–Robert D. McChesney (b. 1944)

From the chapter title – ‘Central Asia before Russian Dominion’ – one may guess which por-
tions of Central Asia are under review; namely, those that fell to the military conquest of the
Russian Empire, the territory of the modern republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes called Western Turkestan or until 1991 Soviet Central
Asia, these vast territories roughly equal the size of continental Europe.We may broadly divide
the history of the region across three eras: the present back to the arrival of permanent Russian
military settlement (ca. 1865–present), the Islamic period (beginning with the occupation of
Merv and Herat in 651 CE) and the pre-Islamic period (stretching back to the Achaemenid
Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE).This historical survey will summarise the history of
the territory relevant to contemporary Central Asia from the earlier two eras.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429057977-1
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 Michael Hancock-Parmer

Pre-Islamic period
Central Asia was home to both sedentary and nomadic societies long before the historical
period. Following Richard N. Frye, the primary difference between the different groups of peo-
ple indigenous to Central Asia was language or tribal affiliation, markers that leave no remains
in the archaeological record (Frye 1996: 31). Reading potsherds allows archaeologists to track
changing practices, but linking pottery decoration to a tribe, language or culture is speculative
at best. In other words, unknowable languages were spoken by unknowable cultures, living in
small and scattered populations.
The region is home to thousands of archaeological sites and some modern cities were first
settled as encampments and villages in the prehistoric era. Agriculture arrived in the region
around 7000 BCE, though restricted to oases, river valleys and arid zones watered using irriga-
tion. By 6000 BCE, large mammal domestication included sheep, goats and cattle, though it
was the domestication of horses after 4000 BCE that cemented the importance of the region
in world history (Findley 2005: 23). No evidence has yet emerged of large towns prior to the
first millennium BCE and around the time of the arrival of the Indo-European speakers.
The term ‘Indo-European’ refers to the language and not the ethnic or genetic markers of
these people. This survey of the history of Central Asia includes a focus on the linguistic evi-
dence, which should not be conflated with modern ethnic or national identity.This refers both
to prehistorical languages like Proto-Indo-European and more recent languages preserved in
the historical record.
While Caucasoid and Mongoloid anatomical features in skeletal remains have extended
east and west across Eurasia since ancient times, their skeletons do not record their languages.
Linguistic evidence suggests that the wide-ranging Indo-European speakers were acquainted
with both agriculture and herding.These Indo-European speakers figure prominently in recent
scholarship on the rise of the wheel, pastoral nomadism and mounted archery (Anthony 2007).
Speaking of long-term cultural continuities in the region (not exclusive to Western Turkestan,
of course), characteristics and practices ‘misleadingly grouped together as shamanism’ (Findley
2005: 25), including water taboos, animal art and cults of ancestral spirits, link the Saka, Scythians,
Turks, Mongols and Tokharians, connecting Indo-European and Altaic cultures across the inland
grassy sea.While the Indo-Europeans dominated Central Asia until the first century CE, archae-
ological evidence suggests that ‘already by the second millennium BCE … Mongoloid types had
begun to expand westward’ (Frye 1996: 35), with the population-multiplying consequences of
the successful acquisition of animal husbandry and agriculture.
In the earliest historical era, interactions between pastoral nomads and their sedentary neigh-
bours already marked Central Asia, as portrayed in the religious texts of Zarathustra (Zoroaster).
A priest of the old Aryan religion, Zarathustra probably lived in Bactria, the most prosperous
and populous part of the region, around the year 1000 BCE. He advocated reform by reject-
ing the glorification of violence and the worship of the vast pantheon of deavas. Zarathustra
instead proclaimed the existence of one deity, Ahura Mazda, ‘wise lord.’William McNeill sug-
gested the possibility of the religion of Zarathustra maturing alongside the spread of sedentary
populations in Persia and Central Asia, outlawing ‘bloody sacrifices’ in favour of ritual prayers
and celebrations that later emerged as central to the religion itself, offering an intriguing paral-
lel to the adaptations of Judaism and Christianity during the Roman era (McNeill 1963: 154).
Many other religions later passed through Central Asia in the historical period, including the
earlier expressions of Buddhism emerging from Afghanistan, as well as Judaism and Christianity.
However, for longevity and impact, Islam remains the central religion of historical and con-
temporary importance. Its longevity of religious and political control began in the early eighth

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century, continuing with Islam’s replacement of a rich tapestry of confessional diversity with a
superficial, if vocal, majority. Even so, much evidence from the Islamic era suggests that older,
indigenous religious practices and beliefs continued.
The first historical political power in the region that can be identified without speculation
was the Medes, under whom the religion of Zarathustra spread from Mesopotamia to Anatolia,
Persia and Central Asia. The Medes came to rule over the Persians in Fars and, together with
the Babylonians, brought down the Assyrians by conquering Nineveh. The agriculturally set-
tled Medes and Hittites of Anatolia spoke languages related to those of the nomadic Saka and
Scythians of the Eurasian plains. However, arguing that these populations shared ethnic, cultural,
religious or economic connections is more fraught.
One may usefully divide Central Asia roughly north from south.This creates two large geo-
graphic expanses: one dominated by pastoral nomadism (the north) and the other intensely
cultivated amid nomadic herders (the south). In the time of the Medes, who ruled the southern
agriculturalists, the northern inhabitants were recognised in Persian and Egyptian sources as the
nomadic Saka.They divided the Saka into vague groups under evocative labels like the Hauma-
brewing Saka, the Saka beyond the river, the Saka beyond Sogdiana, the Saka beyond the plains
and the Saka beyond the marshes. None of these groups have been meaningfully connected to
known archaeological sites, similar to the Massagetae of the Greek sources who lived east of
the Caspian Sea, but unlike the Scythians of the Pontic steppe personally visited by Herodotus.

Persia and Alexander

The ancient armies of the Medes and Persians forged both alliances and deadly wars with their
nomadic neighbours. Nomads and townsfolk have long worked and lived side-by-side, such that the
attempts of anthropologists to meaningfully separate the two categories have often failed in prac-
tice, devolving into discussions of ‘semi-nomads’ and the like.The arrival from outside the region of
powerful agriculturalists or pastoral nomads had echoing influences in the region; as the arrival of
the Persians coincided with the growth of cities, so did the movements of the Turks and Mongols
see the rise of gigantic pastoral societies. Speaking of the Persians, the two largest and important
cities of the region at the time were Samarkand and Balkh (Marakanda and Bactra, respectively, to
the Greeks), with the tertiary centre of Merv (Margiana) linking them to the Achaemenids and
Medes in greater Iran.The Aramaic language used to run the Achaemenid Persian Empire became
the basis for the earliest indigenous written languages of Bactrian, Sogdian and Khwarazmian –
but they came later, after Alexander’s conquest and the establishment of the Greco-Bactrian and
other successor states.When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE, the Greco-Persian Empire he
had conquered dissolved and Central Asia passed to Seleucus I Nikator.The dynasty that survived
Seleucus through his son Antiochus (by his wife Apama, daughter of the Sogdian Spitamenes) has
not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but historians know it as Greco-Bactria. In the
1960s, archaeologists investigated a set of ruins known by its Turkic name Ay Khanum and found a
recognisable Greek polis in northern Afghanistan.The inscriptions and materials attest to the spread
of uncontaminated Greek language within the bounds of Central Asia. Moreover, the two de facto
state languages of Aramaic (from the Achaemenids) and Greek appeared south of the Hindukush
on the didactic Buddhist inscriptions of Ashoka (c. 304–232 BCE).

Parthia and the silk routes

The Seleucid dynasty maintained independence in southern Central Asia until the mid-second
century BCE, despite increasing threats in the north and west. After Hannibal’s decade-long

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occupation of the Italian peninsula in the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian Empire suffered
a fatal reversal of fortune. Hannibal escaped east to the Phoenician heartland and Roman east-
ern expansion pushed him further east in the Parthian and Greco-Bactrian wars on the western
fringes of Central Asia. Rule of the region passed entirely to the Parthians under Mithridates I
(c. 171–138 BCE). Despite the advent of political unity, the Parthian rulers oversaw a period of
increasing chaos following waves of nomadic incursions from the north.
A movement of nomadic people not unlike the massive migration of Germanic tribes into
the Roman Empire thoroughly remixed the demographic makeup of Central Asia, beginning
already in the second century BCE.The linguistic and cultural makeup of the northern steppe
began to shift as the Finno-Ugric- and Indo-European-speaking populations gave way before
the proto-Turkic-speaking. Where the influx of nomads among the sedentary inhabitants falls
on the continuum between assimilation and extermination remains unknown. During this
period (c. 200 BCE–200 CE), Central Asia existed on the periphery of larger states: Parthia to
the north and west and the long-forgotten Kushan to the south and Han China to the East. In
terms of cultural history, Mahayana Buddhism spread along the trade routes that blossomed in
Central Asia connecting Rome, Parthia, Sogdia, India and China.This network was first labelled
the Great Silk Route by the German Orientalist Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 in recog-
nition of its most prominent luxury item, silk, being of profound commercial and diplomatic
importance as a trade good.
The dynamic period of political shake-ups reflected an underlying demographic change,
though understanding the change in terms of ethnicity, culture and language remains beyond
the grasp of the surviving evidence. The Zoroastrian Sasanid state in Iran replaced that of the
Arsacid Parthians in the 220s, while the Kushan fell to a nomadic invasion from the north in
the mid-fourth century CE, the so-called Kidarite Huns, in turn, replaced by a more powerful
nomadic confederation, the similarly Altaic Hephthalites, who passed through Central Asia into
what is now Afghanistan before conquering large sections of northern India.The Turkicisation
of the steppes continued, most famously as other relatives of the Xiong-nu of the Chinese
sources invaded Anatolia and Eastern Europe, the Huns of the late Classical period. The Silk
Roads flourished throughout this politically turbulent time, even into the sixth century CE.The
Sogdian merchants that dominated trade began to establish colonies ever eastward, communities
of Buddhists and eastern Christians.
Manichaeism, an extinct world religion, first thrived and then slowly dissolved in the period
between the third and fifteenth centuries CE. The artist-healer-prophet Mani (216–277) was
distantly related to the Arsacid royal family of the Parthian Empire and had his first religious rev-
elation at the age of 12. Raised in an environment bestride Zoroastrian, Christian and Buddhist
teachings, Mani utilised these thinkers of the (not-so-distant) past in describing a dualistic reli-
gion of good and evil, sinful and pure, the elect and the auditors (Tardieu 2009). Mani suffered
a martyr’s death, ensuring his philosophy would outlive him.Though there is no way to docu-
ment the historic connection between the two, many have supposed that Manichaeism survived
in Europe in the form of Catharism, so viciously exterminated in the thirteenth century during
the Albigensian Crusade.
Another people emerged from northeastern Asia in the sixth century CE, the Göktürks
(Celestial Turks) under their Qaghan, the title an etymological cousin of Khan. Thanks to the
wide dispersion of their pastoral nomadic subjects, the Türk Qaghanates occupied truly massive
territories throughout the Eurasian steppe belt.The memory of the Qaghanate survives in part
thanks to their inscribing their political origins in violent rebellion from the Tang Dynasty in
China on stone monuments found in Mongolia by the Russian Turkologist Nikolai Yadrintsev

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in 1889. By the end of the seventh century, the first Turkic state had splintered and fertilised
numerous successors throughout and without the region, from the Khazars west of the Volga to
the newly emerged Qarluqs of Central Asia proper.

Islamic period
It was this period (c. 670s–690s) in which eastern and western powers again encroached in
the form of Tang China and the Umayyad Caliphate. The Arab conquest of Central Asia far
exceeded that of the Chinese; from their base of operations established in Merv (Antiochia in
Margiana to the Greeks, near modern Mary in Turkmenistan), the ghazi fighters and their mawali
patrons first raided and then occupied most of southern Central Asia, inspiring a much more
rapid, even zealous, conversion to Islam than that found in the Zoroastrian Iranian lands to the
west. Just as Greek invaders and opportunistic local rulers shared control, the Arab conquerors
received assistance from mawali counterparts and this model extends into the modern era with
the Russian conquest, with the use of indigenous nomadic tribes. We will extend that model
into the modern period, when the nineteenth-century Russian conquest similarly exploited
local aid in the form of Kazakh tribes looking to achieve independence from their overlords in
Kokand.
Islamic influence spread rapidly. Qutaiba b. Muslim, named governor of Khorasan in 704,
began Islamic annexation of the region and the Muslim armies had reached the Syr Darya River
(Seyhun) already by 751. In the same year, the Battle of Talas near the present-day border of
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan settled Islamic dominance of the area over that of the Tang Chinese
dynasty.The Turkic Qarluqs, Oghuz and Qipchaq migrated ever westward into various pastures
of Eurasia. Later scholars used the names of these three tribal confederations to create linguistic,
ethnic and other conventional classifications of the diversity of Turkic languages and cultures.
Roughly speaking, the Qarluqs lived in the east and middle (modern Uzbeks and Uyghur), the
Oghuz in the west (modern Turkmen and Turks) and the Kipchak in the north (modern Tatar,
Karakalpak, Kazakh and Kyrgyz).
In the ninth and tenth centuries, the border towns near the Syr Darya River between the
steppe and sown, namely Farab (Otrar), Isfijab (Sayram) and Shash (Tashkent), witnessed the first
large-scale conversions of Turkic speakers to Islam. It was at this time that the term ‘Turkmen’
(Turcoman, Türkmen) came to specifically refer to the western-most Turks, the Oghuz, largely
to differentiate them from their non-Muslim neighbours (Golden 1992: 212–13). Around the
year 985, a Turkmen notable named Seljuk fell out with the head of the Oghuz in Yangikent
and fled a short distance to Jend in the delta of the Syr Darya (the ruins of which are in south-
ern Kazakhstan).The Seljuk Empire originated in Central Asia but rose to power and historical
importance only after its centre moved west into Persia.At its zenith, the territory of the Seljuks
stretched from the Bosphorus to Afghanistan until its dissolution in the late twelfth century.
One of the curious problems of the arrival of Islam into Central Asia was whether and how
to convert the native population. Scholars in the past have argued that Islam was ultimately, like
most major religions, a culture of cities.This was certainly the case of temple-centred Judaism
and even Christianity, its pretensions to pastors, sheep and flocks notwithstanding. Muhammad,
however, spoke often and directly to nomads. The issue is far beyond the scope of this intro-
duction, as the word arab itself carries the meaning of wandering like a nomad. Exceptions and
explanations from Muhammad explained how the obligations of Islam could be met by both
city dwellers and merchants, travellers and Arabs/nomads.Why, then, did religious conversion in
Central Asia focus so heavily on the mawali of the cities?

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Perhaps because the first Islamic dynasty in the region was Iranian, that is to say, a citified
dynasty: the Samanids. The early form of the modern Persian language dates to this period,
particularly and most indelibly etched by the pen of Ferdowsi (c. 940–1020), author of the
Shahnameh, the Book of Kings and a colossal work of expressive historical fiction telling the
mythical and historical past of Iran and Turan. That ancient phrase ‘Iran and Turan’ expresses
both familiarity and contempt between the sedentary Iranians of the agricultural regions and
Turan, which by then had come to mean the nomadic Turks beyond the Oxus River (Jeyhun).
Curiously, however, the Samanids had already a century before Ferdowsi’s time introduced the
crucial institution of the ghulam, Turkic slave-soldiers who quickly became the core of the
armies of Islam far beyond the bounds of Central Asia. The Samanids, then, founded at least
two long-lasting institutions in the Islamic world:Turkic military slaves converted to Islam and
Bukhara as a source of Islamic schooling and culture. It is no mistake that the so-called Golden
Age of Islam rests on the laurels of thinkers with nisbas like Bukhari, Balkhi, Farabi, Khwarezmi
and Biruni, although Central Asia’s most famous son was likely the polymath Ibn Sina (c. 980–
1037). As a physician, his fame relies on al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb, taught in Europe into the Early
Modern era as The Canon and as a philosopher his works directly influenced scholasticism and
its champion Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).
When, around the year 1000, the Turks completed their ‘infiltration of the oasis states,’ they
sealed the current cultural form with their defeat of the ‘last Iranian dynasty to rule in Central
Asia.’ From then until now, Central Asia has split two ways: the west, leaning towards the Near
East, and Iran, while similarly Muslim, bearing ‘a thick [Chinese] veneer, which was penetrating
ever deeper’ (Frye 1996: 238). Bartol’d and his followers in Turkology differ on this pivot point
and prefer to see modern Central Asia ultimately descending from the arrival of the Mongols
in the thirteenth century.

The arrival of the Mongols

When the assembly of nomads in the steppes of northeast Asia declared Temujin (c. 1167–1227)
as Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan) in 1206, still long before the creation of the massive Mongol
Empire enshrined in many history surveys, many territorial and regime changes were already
afoot. The Khwarezm Shah’s state centred in modern Uzbekistan faced incursions from the
south, originating within the growing Ghurid Empire. In eastern Central Asia the Qara-Khitai,
or Western Liao (Golden 1992: 185), oversaw a fusion of Chinese and nomadic imperial rule
over a Turkic, Muslim population (Biran 2005). A group of Naimans, fleeing Chinggis Khan,
follower their leader Kuchluk in an attack on the Qara-Khitai, with support from local Qarluqs.
This blow to the Qara-Khitai opened the way to opportunistic war by the Khwarezm Shah.
Kuchluk, a Christian convert to Buddhism who prohibited public Muslim worship in his realm,
emerged from the chaos as the de facto ruler of the region. Muhammad, the Khorezmshah,
satisfied that his eastern borders were secure, directly challenged the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad
in 1217, though winter storms and Kurdish troops prevented the military sovereignty once
enjoyed by the Great Seljuks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A powerful but recently
humbled Khwarezm Shah likely did not see the nomads to his northeast as an existential threat;
the two groups exchanged embassies in 1215 and 1218.Tensions rose, however, when one of his
governors, in the city of Otrar on the northeastern fringe of his power, slaughtered a caravan
under the protection of the Mongols and seized their goods. Chinggis Khan sent an ambassador,
assuming a misunderstanding, but the Khorezm Shah ordered the murder of that ambassador.
As a result, the Mongols retaliated with the goal of total annihilation. ‘For Chinggis Khan in

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particular, war was a personal vendetta against wilfully defiant rulers … which was justified
in one of three ways’ (Atwood 2004: 349): as vengeance for past attacks, as a punishment of
those giving aid to his enemies or as retribution for those who executed Mongol envoys.The
Khwarezm Shah had committed a capital crime and while Temujin did not invent this code, he
brutally followed it.
Presciently, the Qarluqs had recently sworn fealty to Chinggis Khan before he passed through
the ruined Qara-Khitai state and deposed Kuchluk, so that the Mongols were greeted as libera-
tors by the Muslim population in eastern Central Asia.The remnants of the Qara-Khitai military
joined the invasion of the Khwarezm Shah Empire and razed the bulk of its cities and popu-
lated areas between 1219 and 1222.The war was deeply personal and bound by a strict code of
honour; entire towns might be spared, sold into slavery or slaughtered in service to the sense of
Chinggisid justice. Great cities were torn apart, brick by brick, the smoking rubble ploughed
into the ground: the region as a whole would recover, thanks to its central importance in the ris-
ing Mongol Empire, but many of the cities so destroyed never rose from the ashes. Mongol rule
later stretched into Russia, instigating the so-called Tatar Yoke, but any such harness weighed
much heavier on the shoulders of the people of Central Asia.After the initial conquest,Temujin’s
third son, Ogedei, pursued the remnants of their enemies west, seizing the steppe and forests
of the Russian princedoms in 1237–1241.This effectively brought all of Central Asia from its
southern boundaries in Afghanistan to its northern extremes in Bulgar within a single state.
Central Asia was unified for the first and so far last time in recorded history. The Mongol
Empire was the largest contiguous land empire the world has yet seen, but it fragmented after
three generations.Already before the end of the thirteenth century, the descendants of the sons
of Chinggis Khan had shifted their centres of political power outside of the bounds of this sur-
vey: the heirs of Chaghatay to Eastern Turkestan (Moghulistan) and the house of Jochi to Sarai
and Haji-Tarkhan (Astrakhan), the cities of the Golden Horde of the ‘Tartars.’The territories of
Jochi and Chaghatay saw their nomadic populations thoroughly Turkicise and adopt Islam – this
is usually credited to Uzbek Khan (r. 1313–1341) for the Jochids and Baraq Khan (r. 1266–1271)
for the Chaghatayids. The territory of Hulegu, another grandson of Chinggis Khan, included
the southwestern marches of Central Asia. By the early 1300s, his progeny nominally controlled
the region south of the Amu Darya River.
Not long after the death of the last of his dynasty in 1335, Central Asia splintered briefly
into warring chieftains, only to be nearly entirely reunited first by the Chaghatayid Khan
Toghluq-Timur and then more completely by his protege,Timur Bek (Amir Timur,Tamerlane,
1336–1405). Far more a military and charismatic force than a governor,Timur carved a Turco-
Mongol state from the stretched and cracking hide of the deserts and oases while making use of
Chinggisid charisma in the form of expendable puppet Khans. His was the foundational proto-
gunpowder empire, as the three states recognised as such (the Ottomans with their Janissaries,
the Mughals with their Sepoys and the Safavids with their Qizilbash) arose from the remnants of
the Timurid Empire in the sixteenth century (Lincoln 1994: 41–7).Timur’s military technology
and repeat invasions engendered a level of cruelty that surpassed the Mongols, notably in Herat,
Baghdad and Delhi.
The rule of Timur’s descendants centred on the deserts and oases of southern Central Asia,
while the Chinggisid charisma and pastoral nomadism continued in the north. Abu’l-Khayr,
elected in 1428 as Khan of the house of Jochi in Western Siberia, conquered the Syr Darya
region by the 1440s but in turn fell prey to the Oirats coming west from the Chu River.This
cataclysmic encounter (or his own misrule) forever split the followers of Abu’l-Khayr into the
Uzbeks (as his people had already been known) and the Uzbek-Qazaq. The Uzbeks moved

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south of the Syr Darya, while the Uzbek-Qazaqs, or Kazakhs, came under the patronage and
protection of the last of Chaghatay’s house on the steppe fringes of Moghulistan.They served
as a buffer against continued Oirat expansion. When Abu’l-Khayr died in 1468, more Uzbeks
joined the Kazakhs in the Seven Rivers region (Semirechie, Zhetisu, Yeti Su). Abu’l-Khayr’s
grandson Muhammad Shahi Bek remained on the Syr Darya. Muhammad, known as Shah-
Bakht or more famously as Shibani Khan, followed the model of Tamerlane and through shrewd
patronage and betrayal became ‘the chief power in Central Asia’ (Grousset 1970: 482), at the
expense of the Timurid Sultan Ahmad Mirza. Uzbeks swelled his forces, allowing Shibani Khan
to conquer Samarkand in 1500.
During this generation, poet-philosophers ruled Central Asia: Shibani Khan, Babur the
founder of the Mughal dynasty in India and Ismail Safavi of Persia, all left impressive literary
legacies. Religious controversies abounded, as the rise of the Qizilbash in Safavid Iran fomented
violent advocacy of Shiism.The Uzbeks under Babur and Shibani Khan rendered many of them
martyrs in the defence of the Sunnah. The rise of Shiism in Safavid Persia increased isolation
in Central Asia, separating them from the rest of the Muslim world, or in the words of Sir Olaf
Caroe (1892–1981),‘the curtain had fallen on Turkestan long before the days of Soviet rule, even
before the Tsars’ (Caroe 1953: 135).

Decline: Through globalisation or isolation?

The passing of the Central Asian Timurid dynasty in 1507 coincided with the advent of increased
maritime trade in Western Europe around Ottoman middlemen, inadvertently producing New
World European colonisation. ‘The West’ expanded economically and demographically at the
expense of the ‘the rest.’ However, in the words of Robert McChesney, there remains ‘strong
evidence that Central Asia remained closely tied to the global economy after the maritime
trade opened’ (McChesney 1996: 42–3). For example, McChesney has noted the existence of a
nascent tobacco industry cultivated in Bukhara already in the 1680s.There was an underlying
superstructure made up of shrines, Sufi lineages and the webbing of a religio-economic mana-
gerial class of traders and shrine families dating to the Timurid. These same networks under-
girded the so-called Gunpowder Empires in Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran.
Perhaps the Gunpowder Empires might more accurately be labelled Shrine Empires, or Sufi,
Empires? The great shrines of Central Asia sustained towns and flourished in major cities, dip-
lomatically connecting religiously motivated nomads and with their sedentary neighbours, and
peacefully redistributed some of the accumulated wealth of the region. It was this culture and
economy, largely in place by the early fifteenth century, that the Russian Empire encountered
when it seized control in the late nineteenth.
The existence of this Sufi shrine network of political and economic allegiances offers explan-
atory options to historians who struggled with big-picture views of the sixteenth through eight-
eenth centuries in the region. Its existence shows how the arrival of the exiled Jochid Khans
fleeing the expansion of Muscovy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century succeeded in
Central Asia because of their integration into the system.The network’s prominence would also
explain why the Oirat interludes, ostensibly interested in replacing the network of Sufi shrines
with Buddhist ones, were so violently catastrophic in the region. I believe this organisation of
shrines underlies the phenomenon observed by Professor Manz when she wrote that, despite
the ‘unnecessary cruelty of his campaigns [and] the confusion of his administration, … what has
struck me in my study of Temur’s career is not failure, but success, not confusion but system’
(Manz 1989: 19).

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The arrival of Muscovy

The expansion of Muscovy southwards into the lands north of Central Asia indelibly marked
the seventeenth century in the region, which splintered from pressures entering from the north
and east.The Kazakh Khanate struggled to maintain control of pastures seized by the Buddhist
Oirats while the Uzbek clans controlling the agricultural and merchant riches of the cities
continued to subdivide among cadet branches of the Jochids, the Ashtarkhanids in Bukhara and
the Arabshahids in Khorezm. There were periods of strife, but on the whole the 1600s in the
southern half of Central Asia saw economic and social stability, illustrated by the literary pro-
duction of Abu’l-Ghazi (1603–1663), the learned Khan of Khorezm (r. 1643–1663) who wrote
Shajara-i Turk (The Genealogy of the Turks), appreciatively studied by European Orientalists since
the eighteenth century.
Two migrations occurred between the Mongol Conquest of the thirteenth century and the
Russian Conquests of the nineteenth century: the first and larger in the early sixteenth century
with the arrival of the Uzbeks and the second and more destructive in the early eighteenth
century with the arrival of steppe refugees fleeing the expanding Jungar-Oirat state. The first
migration fomented the creation of the Khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, while the second the
creation of the Khanate of Kokand in the Ferghana Valley. In the mid-sixteenth century, the
modern ethnic identity of Central Asia came into focus:Turkmen in the south and west, Kyrgyz
in the central mountain pastures, Kazakhs in the steppe roughly north of the Syr Darya and
Uzbeks to the south, near the oases inhabited by Persianate Tajiks. From the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century, first one and then another Khanate temporarily absorbed its neighbour or
fell to outside interventions, but two powerful external forces entered the region that stymied
any attempts to recreate Tamerlane’s state: first from the east with the Jungar-Oirat state (1635–
1755) and then from the south under ‘the second Alexander,’ Nadir Shah Afshar (1688–1747).
The Jungar rulers sought sovereignty over all the lands immediately east of Central Asia, from
the Mongol steppe and the Tibetan plateau and vassal-tribute from their neighbours. Zealous
defenders of the Dalai Lama in Tibet and so legitimised by Buddhist patronage rather than
Chinggisid charisma, the Jungars followed a khung-tayiji whose title came from service to the
Dalai Lama, the theocratic ruler in Lhasa. The armies of Galdan Boshugtu Khan (1644–1697)
drove the Eastern Mongols into the arms of the Qing dynasty, seized the entire Tarim basin
and raided deep into Central Asia, sacking the cities on the northern banks of the Syr Darya.
Following the death of Galdan during a retreat in the wars with the Qing Empire, Galdan’s
nephew Tsewang Rabtan (1643–1727) more successfully avoided antagonising the Qing while
violently punishing Lhasa, which he ordered sacked in December of 1717 – better destroyed
than ‘put at the service of China’ (Grousset 1970: 533). Then, in response to the Kyrgyz and
Kazakh raids into the heart of Jungar control in the Ili Valley, the Jungar forces launched a series
of attacks in the 1720s, taking (or perhaps liberating) the cities of the Syr Darya from Kazakh
control. Consequently, these actions of Tsewang Rabtan instigated a large refugee migration
throughout the region: north towards the Oirats on the Volga (the Kalmyks), west towards
Khiva, south towards Bukhara and east into the Ferghana Valley. It is an open question whether
these Kazakhs returned to the steppe or integrated into the population of their adopted regions.
It was into this Central Asian context of reciprocal vying for territory between 1680 and
1730 that Peter the Great (1672–1725) sent two disastrous expeditions. First, the Bekovich party
met their bloody end in Khiva in 1717 and secondly, the Bukhgol’ts expedition was turned
back by Jungar military superiority in 1716. Hoping to regain prisoners and organise an alli-
ance against the Qing, Peter and his successors sent peace envoys to the Jungars in the 1720s
and 1730s, noting the presence of a cannon foundry and printing press, products of industrious

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Swedish prisoners of war first captured by Peter at Poltava in 1709. Little was demanded (or
could be taken by force), but much was promised by these Russian embassies, as witnessed by
the nominal allegiance of the Kazakhs to similar Russian envoys in 1731 and 1740.
Several interregnums and succession crises marked this period: crises followed the deaths
of Peter in 1725, the Kangxi Emperor of China in 1722, the overthrow of Safavid Persia by
Mahmud Hotaki in 1722 and the violent interregnum in India between Shahid-i-Mazlum
Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–1719) and Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748). Within Central Asia itself,
the death of Ubaydullah II, Khan of Bukhara (r. 1702–1711) was followed by that of the last
powerful Khan of the Kazakhs, Tauke (Tawakkul, d. ca. 1717). Ubaydullah was succeeded by
Abu’l-Fayz Khan (r. 1711–1747), whose long reign is best understood as a product of his impo-
tence and willingness to take direction, whether from his own court of Uzbek tribal chiefs or
that of Nadir Shah. The weakened condition of Central Asia, despite the persistence of tradi-
tional economic ties with its neighbours, allowed peripheral powers to increase their expansion
into the region throughout the century. The Russian Empire ringed in the steppe along the
northern rivers with Cossack fortifications, and the Qing annihilated the Jungars and brought
Moghulistan (thereafter Xinjiang, New Borderland) and Tibet under their control.The Oirat-
Jungars dispersed, those in the Central Asian steppe integrating into the Kazakh population with
whom they had long maintained marriage relations.To the south, the Mughal Empire no longer
reached the borders of Central Asia and was subsequently replaced by the Durrani Empire (a
successor state of Nadir Shah) before the gradual expansion of British economic and administra-
tive control of India.
The nineteenth century saw the arrival of the Russian administrative apparatus among the
Kazakhs. Having abolished the Khanate, the Russians divvied up the pastures into faux prov-
inces, each under a ‘sultan-governor’ from the family of Chinggis Khan with a small military
detachment.These advances were not unopposed: some Kazakh Chinggisids offered violence in
return, most famously under Sultan Kenesari (fl. 1836–1847).
The phrase ‘Great Game’ is most evocative for many English speakers for this historical
era, particularly readers of its chief populariser (for Americans, at least), the journalist and
author Peter Hopkirk (1930–2014). Infelicitously for Hopkirk’s readers,‘the clichés concern-
ing the “Great Game …” are much less innocent. They do not simplify; instead they deeply
distort the past’ (Morrison 2017). One traditional argument sees Russia invading Central
Asia to restore prestige lost to Britain and France during the Crimean debacle and to restore
its economy.Wonderful to behold in power-fantasies that reduce suffering and bloodshed to
colourful maps and board games, when real-life political figures like George Nathaniel, aka
Lord Curzon Viceroy of India (1859–1929), equated the region with a ‘giant chessboard,’
there were consequences beyond the players losing a point or winning a game. But it was a
chessboard quite empty of pieces belonging to supposed puppet masters in St. Petersburg and
London.The invisibility of indigenous military and religious cooperation and support (mean-
ing Kazakh, Kyrgz, Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen allies in wrestling power from the Khan and
Emir) is captured well in this typical statement: only ‘about 40,000 [ethnic Russian] troops
[were] stationed in the [region], which had a population of about six million souls … [it was
rather] the construction of railroads and of a telegraph network [that] proved an effective
means of controlling the colony’ (Soucek 2000: 204). While the keepers of maps in Europe
held the population of Central Asia as little more than scenic backdrop in their power strug-
gles, in fact Central Asia was conquered with Central Asian help and could not have been

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otherwise. Only recently has the role of the Kazakhs in the Russian Conquest begun to come
more fully to light (Kilian 2013).
Individual inhabitants of Central Asia of power and means enjoyed a quid pro quo relation-
ship with their Russian contemporaries; Russian fortifications, after all, survived best when
supported by the local population which they guarded, protected or, at least, cowed. Even with
tenuous local support, Russian imperial leadership could not find a silver bullet method towards
control in the region. Russian imperial agents employed a multifaceted effort to control the
local population, using coercion and adventure through mutual cattle-hustling raids with and
against Cossack fortifications, religious inculcation through Tatar migrants and Christian mis-
sionaries, and bribery and coercion through new legal statutes and previously bought ‘loyal’
middlemen.
By the 1850s, the water-borne stratagems that saw the Caspian and the Aral as under-utilised
Naval playgrounds had failed to pay dividends and were actually drained on resources, while
attempts by Ignatiev to foster better diplomatic and trade relations with Bukhara and Khiva
similarly fizzled, except to ‘remove the fog’ regarding the relative military strength of the adver-
saries. Ironically, the railroad and telegraph network were more useful to the Bolsheviks in tak-
ing control of the state apparatus than it was to the Tsarists in controlling the local population.
It was with Kazakh assistance that the Russian Empire took the steppe and deflated the ambi-
tions of the Khanate of Kokand; after the death of its last military commander of note,‘Alimqul
(‘Aliquli, c. 1833–1865), Kokand was a spent force (Tashkandi 2003: 7), and Russians completed
their annexation in early 1876.
First the storming of Tashkent in 1865 and finally the acquisition of Merv in 1884 sealed the
Russian conquest of Central Asia in blood. The Emir of Bukhara and Khan of Khiva became
de facto vassals of the Tsar. Russia took pains to penetrate the high Pamirs in the 1890s, setting
the border at the furthest extremes at the edge of Afghan sovereignty. Svat Soucek has placed
these movements in the context not just of British India but also of French North Africa, where
European colonisation ‘presents an even closer parallel’ (Soucek 2000: 200) in Algeria, Tunisia
and Morocco.
In conclusion, when the agents and subjects of the Russian Empire arrived in Central Asia,
in a trickle in the eighteenth century which increased to a steady flow by the mid-nineteenth
century, they found a region with a longer, richer history than their own. Before Moscow or
St. Petersburg had come into being, empires had risen and fallen into dust multiple times in the
mountains and salt marshes, oases and steppes east of the Caspian Sea.With the Russians came
a resurgence of postal routes, the likes of which had last crisscrossed the region in the Mongol
era. More transformative was the graduated arrival of railroads, telegraphy, electricity, publish-
ing houses and medicine capable of defending against smallpox, cholera and malaria. For one,
no nomadic state has risen again since the promulgation of these technologies. These changes
marked the entire world; the struggle to find continuities linking the eighteenth and twentieth
centuries is the work of an entire field of historians studying the so-called Early Modern period.
Electric lights and streetcars delighted and worried inhabitants of Moscow and Tashkent alike;
the ease of movement from the Russian heartland to the colonial cantons in Tashkent and Vernyi
(Almaty) increased contact and colonialist anxieties in ways recognisable to historians of the
British, French and Spanish Empires.The indigenous population encountered by the pioneers
of the Russian Empire were predominantly Turkic in language and culture, but still Persian
survived across Central Asia, and even thrived in certain pockets across the region, given a

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Persianate hue to the Turquoise cultural landscape. From this mixture arose one of the headaches
of the Russian administration, the Sarts. A term applied to various groups of people for vari-
ous reasons, the origin of that term was the loss (or lack) among some settled Central Asians of
their historic identity: the Turco-Mongolic tribal lineages. In short, a Sart had no tribal identity,
whether or not their ancestors had such lineages. For example, while the term was applied to
some ancestors of modern Tajiks and Uzbeks, it was also used by the Russians to describe a small
group of sedentarised Oirats (e.g. Sart Kalmyks) in Kyrgyzstan.There it gave the same sense of
having lost touch with a nomadic life and lineage. In the next chapter, Ian Campbell lays out the
finer details of growing Russian hegemony, including their attempts to define and control the
usage of the term ‘Sart.’ Dr. Campbell illustrates the history of Russian Central Asia up to the
sudden and violent arrival of Soviet rule in the winter of 1917–1918.

Note
1 This historical introduction would not have come together without the support of Devin DeWeese at
the Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (RIFIAS) at Indiana University in Bloomington.Thanks
to a generous grant from Ferrum College, I was able to work within its holdings and write this new
synthesis, an homage to Bartol’d and Bregel. If one cannot locate the time to read the translation of
Vasilii Bartol’d’s (1869–1930) dissertation Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion,Yuri Bregel’s (1925–
2016), An Historical Atlas of Central Asia provides the best and most complete précis of the region’s
history.

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