CHAPTER XXVI
THE SHAYBĀNIDES
The Mongol dynasty, established in China and known as the Yuen, founded by Kubilāy Khān[423] cir. 1260, began to decline very soon after his death (1294); and in 1353 a native of humble birth, named Chu Yūan Chang, succeeded in overthrowing the alien line, and, in 1368, originated the famous dynasty of Ming. The nomads’ rule was again confined to the steppes of Mongolia.
Eastern and Western Turkestān continued, in the Ming period, to constitute the dominions of the Chaghatāys.[424] This so-called Middle-Empire originally included Transoxiana, but in the first half of the fourteenth century Transoxiana came under the sway of a separate line of Chaghatāy Khāns.
INTERIOR OF A KIRGHIZ TENT
North of the Middle-Empire was that of the Dasht-i-Kipchāk, which included the vast steppes extending east and north of the Sea of Aral, a part of modern Siberia, the land north of the Caspian, and both sides of the Lower Volga.[425] These broad realms had been given to Chingiz Khān’s first son, Jūjī, on whose death, in 1225, it was divided into two sections. The Eastern division, the habitat White Horde, fell to Jūjī’s eldest son, Orda; while the Western, that of the Golden Horde, was ruled over by Bātū, the conqueror of Russia, who had his residence in Sarai, on the Lower Volga.[426]
Another branch of the house of Jūjī was the heritage of his fifth son, Shaybān, whose dominions were contiguous with those of the White Horde.[427] They became famous in the fifteenth century under the name of Uzbegs, and the origin of their name has given rise to many strange conjectures.
The real founder of the Uzbeg power was Abū-l-Khayr, a descendant of Shaybān in the sixth degree, who was born in A.H. 816 (1413). His rule extended over the western portion of the present Kirghiz steppes. About the year A.H. 870 (1465) a number of these Uzbegs, discontented with their Khān, Abū-l-Khayr, migrated into Moghūlistan, with the Sultans Girāy and Jānībeg, of the line of Jūjī.[428] Isan Bughā, the then Khān of Moghūlistan, or Jatah, received them hospitably, and allotted them some territories on the river Chū, to the west of his own domains. These emigrants were subsequently known as the Uzbeg-Kazāks, or simply Kazāks.[429] After the death of Abū-l-Khayr, in A.H. 874 (1469), a large number of his Uzbegs passed into Moghūlistan and joined their kinsmen.[430]
Abū-l-Khayr overran Khwārazm and part of Turkestān; and at the beginning of the sixteenth century his son Mohammad Shaybānī, also known as Shāhī Beg, made himself master of Samarkand and Transoxiana, and was the first of the so-called dynasty of the Shaybānides. It is more than a mere coincidence that the appearance of the Uzbegs and Kazāks in Southern Central Asia was contemporaneous with Russia’s liberation from the Tartar yoke.