Khanate

Amongst the Uzbeks, it's very different.

He's actually remembered as Bahadur Khan or Batir Khan as a particularly sort of brave and forceful ruler, not so much for what he did to Stoddart and Connolly, which is Not very important in local historiography, but because of his victories over Kokand, the neighboring Khanate, whose territory Bukhara laid claim to.

So it's actually an interesting illustration of the divergence.

If you focus on the great game, then it's all about Stoddard and Connolly.

So he thinks that the Tsar Nicholas has been adequately appeased.

So from Khiva, Connolly goes to another Khanate, which is further east.

It's in what today is called the Fagana Valley, and meets with the Khan there.

But again, the Khan says, look, I'm not prepared to ally with Bukhara and Khiva against the Russians here.

Yep, no problem.

Respected Jewish author of the mid-20th century, a certain part of the Jews from Persia moved across the Derbent Pass to the lower Volga, where, where Atil, west coast of Caspian on Volga Delta, the capital city of Khazarian Kha- Khanate rose up starting 724 AD.

The tribal princes of the Turkish Khazars at the time, still idol worshipers, did not want to accept either the Muslim faith, lest they should be subordinated to the Caliph in, of Baghdad, nor to Christianity, lest they come under vassalage to the Byzantine Em- Emperor, and so the clan went over to the Jewish faith in 732.

But there was also a Jewish colony in the Bosporan Kingdom on the Taman Peninsula at east end of the Cri- of the Crimea, separating the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov, to which Hadrian had Jewish captives brought in 137 after the victory over Bar Kokhba.

Um, so the Turkish groups that you're talking about, um, the Polovtsi, the Pechenegs, um, they harassed Kievan Rus.

They were financed by Khazaria, and they were also middlemen.

If you wanted to trade the Black Sea points south, you had to pay a substantial toll to the Khazar Khanate, and, and this, this was a huge source of income.

And as soon as Kiev got large enough, uh, they, they put an end to it.

Okay.

And in the 7th and 8th centuries, they had their own empire, a Khanate.

Oh,

wow.

So the newly minted confession of Islam as the official cult of the Damascus Umayyad regime, as opposed, for example, to the official Zoroastrianism of the defeated Sasanians or the official Chalcedonian Orthodoxy of the Romans, this, you know, marriage of state power to religion was a very powerful thing in our period.

And this is where, interestingly, Mani failed in the West, but eventually succeeded among the 9th century Uyghur Khaganate, where Manichaeism became the state religion, the official religion.

I don't know if you can call the Khaganate a state in the modern sense, but political entity, right? Anyway, so self-definition as against others, and preferably a link to some kind of state power.

These are important aspects, I guess, in late antique institutionalized religion.

And I take it that that is what a lot of the debate around the religionification of Islam in this Umayyad period has to do with.

And an empire that would eventually last 600 years will spend the following decade tearing itself apart over who gets to succeed him.

And the man responsible for all of it, the man watching those regiments desert toward his own banners, is somewhere in his mid-60s, Still lame from arrow wounds he took decades earlier as a jobbing commander in a broken-up Central Asian Khanate, and he's about to become, however briefly, the single most powerful ruler in Asia.

His name is Timur.

And this is the day it all comes together, right before it starts, in its own strange way, to come apart.

his sons inherited enormous sections of the empire and developed what he had created even further.

The four great Khanates, into which the Mongol Empire was divided after his death, were ruled by his descendants, and all of them trace their authority back to his original unification.

One of the most astonishing facts about Genghis Khan's legacy is genetic.

Modern DNA studies have found that around 0.5% of the world's male population, approximately 16 million people, possess Y chromosomes almost identical to those attributed to Genghis Khan.