Foreign conquerors?

Historian Yuri Bregel points out that the Uzbek conquest was not just a matter of thrones changing hands, but was “a mass migration of a part (probably a smaller part) of the nomadic Özbeks from the Qipchaq steppes southward, to the sedentary areas of Western Turkestan; according to some (largely hypothetical) modern estimates, the total number of these Özbeks was between 240,000 and 360,000” [Bregel, p. 50]. These Uzbeks were Turko-Mongol Muslims speaking Qipchaq Turkic, who settled among Turko-Mongol Muslims speaking Chaghatay or Oghuz Turkic and other Muslims who spoke Farsi. Over time the Uzbeks adopted Chaghatay Turkic (or Turki) as their literary language, although the elites used Farsi as well. While the Uzbek khanates were new states, their establishment was not a case of foreign conquest in the same way that the Spanish invasion of the Aztec Empire was.

Central Asia in the context of the Islamic world

The early 16th century saw the foundation and growth of three great Islamic empires: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal. All three of these empires had roots in Inner Eurasia. The Turkish Ottomans originally came from the region, although by the time they conquered Constantinople in 1453 they were distanced from their eastern cousins. They did not, for example, feel any need to claim legitimacy on the basis of descent from Chingis Khan. The Safavids created an Iranian Shiite dynasty, but founder Shah Ismail (r. 1501–1524) commanded an army of Turks from the Azeri region northwest of Tehran. The rulers he ousted, the Aq-Qoyunlu or Horde of the White Sheep, were also Turks—their khan Uzun Hasan was Ismail’s own grandfather [Barfield, pp. 70–75]. Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal Empire of India, was a Turko-Mongol Timurid who had been expelled from Samarkand by the Uzbeks. The entire region from Constantinople to the eastern Desht-i Qipchaq/Kipchak Steppe was in flux, as the new empires fought each other to control territory and establish economic dominance. The Uzbeks, Kazaks, and Uyghurs also fought each other, and the Safavids and Mughals, to establish their kingdoms. Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Oirat/Zunghar tribes participated in these struggles, providing supplies and/or fighters to various armies, benefitting from new trade opportunities and suffering from the disruptions of war. Central Asian societies were deeply integrated into the larger Islamic world and contributed significantly to it.

Uzbeks and Safavid Iran

Two different Uzbek tribal confederations established ruling dynasties in Transoxiana in the early 16th century: the Shaybanids in Bukhara (1500) and the Yadigarids or Arabshahids in Khiva (1511). The Shaybanid Uzbeks also added the territories of Tashkent and the Ferghana Valley to their khanate, driving the last Chaghatid puppet khans east to the Tarim Basin, where they formed two weak kingdoms centered at Yarkend and Turfan. The Chaghatids, who did not leave much of a historical record behind them, disappeared entirely by the mid-16th century.

The border areas between emerging states were the sites of intense fighting. Shaybani considered the Khurasan region and city of Herat to be part of his inheritance as a Chingisid, and in 1506 justified driving out the last Timurid rulers there on that basis. Soon after, Shaybani faced a challenge from Shah Ismail, who was not only establishing a new government in Iran, but forcing Iranians to adopt Shi’a Islam as well. Shah Ismail and Shaybani denied each other’s political legitimacy, and Shaybani further claimed to fight Ismail in the name of Sunni orthodoxy. Like his predecessor Timur, Shaybani drew on Mongol and Islamic traditions as suited his needs. The Uzbek army could not match the Iranian forces, and in 1509 at the town of Marv, Shah Ismail not only defeated the Uzbeks, he killed Shaybani himself.

The fate of Shaybani’s corpse illustrates the complex intermingling of politics, religion, and cultures here: the Shiite Ismail sent Shaybani’s scalp to Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I, who had supported the Uzbek leader as a Sunni champion. Having beheaded and scalped his foe, Ismail then made the top of Shaybani’s skull into a drinking cup, which was a steppe warrior custom that long pre-dated Islam [Soudavar, p. 95].

The Uzbeks gave up their claims to Khurasan within a few years of Shaybani’s death, and the border between Uzbek Transoxiana and Iran was more-or-less fixed at the Amu Darya/Oxus river. This did not end the fighting. Later Uzbek rulers made several attempts to take Khurasan from the Safavids, but won only temporary successes. The Safavids initially closed their border to Uzbeks, but economic need outweighed political and sectarian rivalry, and trade caravans resumed their business. Neither the Uzbek nor Safavid governments could impose their will on all sectors of society. It even happened that merchants traded with each other while armies fought [Levi, p. 41]. The presence of a powerful Shiite state next door highlighted the fact that the dominant form of Islam among Uzbeks was Hanafi Sunni; this contrast helped to fix one component of Uzbek identity.

Uzbeks and Kazakhs

The Shaybanid and Arabshahid Uzbek dynasties fought to expand their borders to the north and east, which brought them into conflict with Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. Whereas the Uzbeks rapidly adopted settled oasis culture as they moved south, the Kazakhs maintained in the Desht-i Qipchaq/Kipchak Steppe a nomadic tribal confederation under the leadership of khans who were the descendants of founders Janibek or Girey.  Kazakhs spoke Qipchaq Turkic while the Uzbeks were adopting Chaghatay (also called “Türki”) and absorbing many Farsi loan-words. These differences in lifeways, lineage and language became boundary markers between Kazakhs and Uzbeks. Although the two groups had common ancestors in the Shibanid horde, and both were Muslim, by the middle of the 16th century they had become two separate ethnicities. They could no longer easily interact with each other.

In addition to diverging languages and lifeways, war is another powerful creator of difference between peoples. For much of the 16th century Kazakh and Uzbek rulers fought over control of the Syr Darya river, Tashkent and the western Ferghana Valley. In 1598 the Kazakhs captured not only Tashkent, but Andijan and Samarkand, and came close to Bukhara itself, although in the end they held on only to Tashkent and the Syr Darya watershed northwest of Tashkent. This territory included the important shrine town of Yasi or Turkistan, where the Sufi sheikh Ahmad Yasavi (d. 1166) is buried. The fighting intensified hostility for obvious reasons, but it also affected how non-combatants thought of themselves. Farmers, herders, craftsmen or merchants under the long-term rule of Kazakh or Uzbek khans had to adapt to the language and customs of the officials with whom they dealt. Daily life in Tashkent under Kazakh rule was noticeably different from daily life in Uzbek Bukhara, which was one of the great intellectual centers of the Islamic world. Uzbek governors (hokimlar) brought with them a much stronger Iranian cultural influence than did Kazakh officials. At the individual level, over time differences in language and habits built up into differences in communal identification, even if genealogical connections to the new community had to be invented. In places that changed hands frequently, like Tashkent, inhabitants developed their own local identity based on their distinctness from the larger khanates.

While it is convenient for historians to use broad labels for these people—the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs—it is essential to remember that these peoples were confederations of tribes and sub-tribes that commonly fought among themselves when they were not fighting with outsiders. At some point in the 16th or 17th centuries the Kazakhs split into three hordes or “hundreds” (juz in Kazakh): the Great, Middle and Lesser, each controlling its own territory. Within these hordes there was also a vertical division between the “white bone” aristocracy (people who claimed Chingisid descent or descent from pilgrims to Mecca or other Muslim notables) and the “black bone” ordinary Kazakhs. Identity fractured and shifted with changes in social context.