JUNKO MIYAWAKI (Tokyo, Japan)

THE CHINGGISID PRINCIPLE IN R USSIA

.
1. Introduction

The present writer specializes in the history of the Mongols from the
time of the founding of their empire in the thirteenth century to the present.
She has spent especially the past ten years writing on the nomadic Dzungar
empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I. Ia. Zlatkin's Istoriia Dzhungarskogo Khanstva (1635-1758) is
anachronistic in its title, for the Dzungars had no khan as early as 1635, nor
was there a Dzungar khan of the Oyirads after the death of Galdan in 1697.
The khanship of the Oyirad tribal federation passed from the head of the
Khoshuts to that of the Dzungars and after Galdan to that of the Torguts. The
Oyirad khanship was conferred on those chiefs by the Dalai Lama regime in
Tibet, not by the Russians. The conferments were based on the traditional .
Chinggisid principle of the Mongols, an unwritten law that only male
descendants of Chinggis Khan were entitled to be khans.' I
Siberia and Central Asia, the inhabitants of which came into contact
with the Russian Empire and were gradually incorporated into it in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are often regarded as eastern frontiers by
Russian historians. In the eyes of the descendants of the Mongol Empire,
however, those regions were the very center of their world. The world of

1. The presentwriter has publishedon this questionthe followingarticles:J. Miyawaki,

"'TheQalqa Mongolsand the Oyirad in the SeventeenthCentury,"Journal of Asian History
(Wiesbaden)18 (1984): 136-73;idem, "Did a DzungarKhanateReallyExist?,"Journal of the
Anglo-MongolianSociety 10 (1987): 1-5; idem,"On the OyiradKhanship,"Aspectsof Altaic
Civilization, ed. Denis Sinor (Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press, 1990): 142-53; idem, "A
Volga-KalmykFamily Tree in the Ramstedt Collection,"Journal de la Société Finno-
Ougrienne (Helsinki)83 (1991): 203-34. "Backgroundof the Volga-kalmykKhanship:The
Case of Ayouki khan of the Torguts," Altaic Religious Beliefs and Practices (Budapest:
HungarianAcademyof Sciences, Eotcvos LorandUniv., 1992):239-43. Further discussions '
are found also in still unpublishedpapers:"TheLegitimacyof Khanship among the Oyirad
(Kalmyk)Tribesin relation to the ChinggisidPrinciple,"read at the InternationalSeminaron
the Mongol Empireand Its Legacy, School of Orientaland African Studies, Universityof
London,March 19-21,1991;"The Birth of the KhongtayijiViceroyaltyin the Mongol-Oyirad
World,"read at the 34th Meetingof the PermanentInternationalAltaisticConference,Berlin,
July 21-26, 1991.Section 6 of the presentarticle is based on "The Legitimacyof Khanship
amongthe Oyirad(Kalmyk)Tribes in relationto the ChinggisidPrinciple."
 262

nomads had its own logic and order. After the Russians had completed their
conquest of that world in the nineteenth century, they revised its history from
their own point of view and thus generated false interpretations.
Russo-Mongol relations began with the Mongol conquest of Russia in
the thirteenth century. The commonly accepted view is that the Mongol rule
in Russia lasted for a quarter millennium until the latter was completely
liberated in the time of Ivan III in the late-fifteenth century. Yet Russia, at
the time of its formation centered around Moscow, strongly retained
. characteristics of a successor state to the Mongol Empire. Three more
centuries were needed for Russia to gain decisive ascendancy over the grand
'
khans of the Tatars and the Central Asian khanates, its fellow successors to
the Mongol Empire. ,
Should we ignore Mongol traditions and the relationship between Russia
and other successors to the Mongol Empire, we would never be able to
understand fully Russian history from the thirteenth up to the eighteenth
century. Despite great roles played by the Mongols in Russian history,
Russian historians have so far systematically underestimated them. =

2. The birth and growth of the Mongols .

Chinggis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, was born in the second
half of the twelfth century the son of the chief of a clan in a group of tribes
' generally known as the Mongols. The earliest mention of the name Mongol
(Meng-wu) is found in Chinese sources of the seventh century, when it was
one of the Shih-wei tribes inhabiting the banks of the Onon, now flowing
along the Russo-Mongolian border into the Shilka east of Lake Baikal in
Eastern Siberia. The Shih-wei were generally regarded akin to the Qitays
(Ch'i-tan) and consisted of diverse tribes, some of which, however, were
reported to speak different languages. They had no single supreme leader over
themselves but were governed by their several tribal chiefs who were in turn
subordinate to the Turk (Tu-ch'ueh), a great nomadic empire ruling on the
Mongolian Plateau.2 ,
The inscription on the K61 Tegin Monument, the oldest extant Turkic
text from the time of the Turk Empire in the eighth century, refers to the
Thirty-Tribe Tatars occupying a region between the Quriqans on the eastern

2. Chiu T'ang Shu, ch. 199b,Northern Barbarians,Shih-wei;Hsin T'ang Shu, ch. 219,
Northern Barbarians,Shih-wei,Pei Shih, ch. 94, Shih-wei.Sections2, 3 and 5 of the present
article are based on Junko Miyawaki, "Mongoru-kei minzoku" (The Mongolic Peoples),
Minzokuno Sekaishi4 :Chuo Yurashiano Sekai (WorldHistoryof Peoples,vol. 4: The Central
Eurasian World) (Tokyo: YamakawaShuppan Sha. 1990), 271-394. The quotations from
Chinesesourceshave been taken fromthis book.
 263

shore of Lake Baikal and the Qitays on the Shira M6ren.3 This reference to so
many Tatar tribes points to their territory covering the lower reaches of the
Kerulen, the basins of the Argun, the Onon and the Shilka. There is little
doubt that Tatar was an ancient Turkic name for the same group of tribes as
the Shih-wei in Chinese sources. Both Shih-wei and Tatar were generic
names for a group of various tribes.
Chinese sources report on many nomadic peoples who rose and fell one
after the other in North and Central Asia ever since the founding of the
Hsiung-nu Empire in Mongolia toward the end of the third century B.C.
These peoples did not, however, become physically extinct when their power
fell. It was only that their old rulers were replaced by new ones. According to
Chinese sources, for example, after the Hsiung-nu had been destroyed, "more
than a hundred thousand families of their survivors remained, all calling
themselves Hsien-pei";4 again, "the ancestors of the T'ieh-le were descendants
of the Hsiung-nu." One such source reports on the T'ieh-le that "their tribes
are most numerous, and inhabit their lands without interruption," and, after
counting more than forty of those tribes, that "they are generically called
T'ieh-le although they have different clan names."5
Circumstances were the same with the Turks. They were the greatest
nomadic empire that had ever ruled the vast expanse of Central Eurasia before
the time of the Mongols, but "the peoples within their domain were by no
means pure and uniform, but consisted of thousands and tens of thousands of
stocks."6
The Mongols, who had been but a small tribe in the Onon Valley in the
seventh century, kept growing on the outer rim of the Qitay Liao Empire
through the tenth and eleventh centuries until they branched into many
powerful clans and became one of the allied tribes of the Jushen Chin Empire
in the twelfth century. Then, as soon as Chinggis Khan, who had come from
one of their clans and succeeded in bringing together under himself all
nomadic tribes of the Mongolian Plateau, was elected their common supreme
leader, that is, khan, all those nomadic tribesmen living on the steppes were
now Mongol.
'
3. How the nomads were named and classified

Rashid al-Din, in his J6mi' al-Tawdrikh, written in fourteenth-century

Iran (then part of the Mongol Empire), calls all the nomads on the Central

3. W. Radloff,Die aittarkischenInschriftender Mongolei(St. Petersburg:Académieim-

p6rialedes sciences,1895-99).
4. HouHan Shu,ch. 90, Hsien-pei.
5. Sui Shu,ch. 84, NorthernBarbarians,T'ieh-le.
6. Sui Shu,ch. 84, NorthernBarbarians,T'u-chiieh.
264

Eurasian steppes Turks, classifying them into "those Turk tribes which have
been commonly called Mongols since olden times" and "those Turk tribes
which are now called Mongols but earlier used to have other names and their
own independent chiefs."' The name Tatar, which Russians and other
Europeans used to apply to all the nomadic peoples, Mongols and others, of
the Central Eurasian steppes, had earlier been a Turkic generic name, first
recorded in an eighth-century inscription, for many nomadic tribes in the
northeastern comer of the Mongolian Plateau.
It is true that a nomadic tribe in thirteenth-century Mongolia did bear the
name Tatar. In Chinese sources, on the other hand, the name Tatar (T'a-t'a)
first referred to Turkic tribes and was later applied to the post-imperial
Mongols by the Ming Chinese, who avoided the name Mongols as it might
imply a dynastic legitimacy for them going back to Yuan times.8 Thus one
and the same name may have different meanings and contents depending on
the period, the region and who uses it. In the time of the Mongol Empire of
the thirteenth century, Mongol, Turk and Tatar were interchangeable names,
all applied generically to the same group of nomadic peoples of the Central
Eurasian steppes.
It was only the nineteenth-century European comparative linguists who
classified descendants of the Mongol Empire separately into Turkic and
Mongolic on the basis of their speech; it is clearly anachronistic to project
such linguistic classification back onto the thirteenth-century political
identities. In sum, the descendants of the Yuan dynasty, after it had lost
China as one of its colonies in the second half of the fourteenth century,
became direct ancestors of the present-day Mongol nation, while a federation
of powerful tribes, which had occupied the northwestern corner of the
Mongolian Plateau in the imperial period, was the origin of the Oyirad or
Kalmyks, a nation non-Mongol but Mongolic-speaking. Those two nations,
now classified as Mongolic, embraced Tibetan Buddhism in the sixteenth
century and later. In contrast, those nations now classified as Turkic are far
more diverse both ethnically and linguistically. Still, one common feature
among them is that they have become Muslims, although at different times.

4. All the Tatars in Russian history are Mongols

In Russia the descendants of the Mongol Empire were always called

Tatars. Those who actually ruled Russia were the family of Jochi, eldest son
of Chinggis Khan. J6chi"s second son Batu succeeded his father as head of

7. Rashid-ad-Din, Sbornik letopisei, tom 1, kniga pervaia (Moscow-Leningrad:

AkademiianaukSSSR,1952).
8. MingShih,ch. 327,ForeignNations8, T'a-t'a.
 265

the family, established his base on the Volga, and firmly controlled Russia.
Batu's eldest brother Orda, too, inherited half of his father's troops and held
in his possession the eastern part of the Qipchaq steppes, now Kazakhstan,
which had been the original pastures of the family.
When he was head of the Jochid house, Batu built Sarai on the bank of
the Volga but did not live in the city himself. Instead he lived in his great
golden pavilion and kept moving along up and down the Volga. Ibn Battuta,
a fourteenth-century traveller, observed that the khan's great pavilion stood
on wooden pillars plated with gold foils. It was because of this pavilion that
the nomadic kingship of Batu and his kinsmen was called the Golden Horde
(zolotaia orda).
Eastern sources surviving from the Yuan period, however, contain no
reference to the regime of Batu and his descendants. Those Mongols in the
east do not seem to have called their brethren in the west an Altan Ordo
(golden pavilion). Mongol chronicles composed in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries simply call Jochid khans "khans of Toghmogh." The
name Tokmak, now surviving only as that of a small city between the Issyk
Kul and Bishkek in Kirgizstan, used to refer to a much wider region.
Sarai, often mistaken for their capital city, was indeed a great center of
commerce. For nomads, however, a city was not a place of habitation but a
place where goods brought in from other parts of the world and foods were
stored, markets were opened, and merchants -and craftsmen lived to serve their
khan whenever his roving court happened to be nearby.
All the so-called Tatars in later Russian history are descendants of this
Golden Horde. The Uzbeks and the Kazakhs, who emerged on the Central
Eurasian steppes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and later, were
nations newly formed around the Jochid family, too.

. '
5. The Mongol Empire and its legacy

Once extending over most of the Eurasian continent, the Mongol Empire
changed the course of world history and left a lasting impact on the
civilizations that came under its colonial rule. The nomadic Mongols,
however, seldom attempted to write their own history so that their presence
would be justified. They left behind little more than genealogies. On the
other hand, the sedentary peoples who once lived under Mongol rule wrote
history to suit their own taste. This situation was what caused the impact of
the Mongol Empire on local civilizations to be underestimated in China,
Russia, and Iran. It is too big a question'to go into more detail here. For the
nomadic peoples, the most important legacy bequeathed by the Mongol
Empire to its onetime members was the traditional Chinggisid principle: that
 266

only male descendants of Chinggis Khan were entitled to call themselves

khans.
In 1260, at a time when the Mongol Empire was ruled by Chinggis
Khan's grandsons, internal strife broke out over who would succeed as the
fifth grand khan; this resulted in the emergence of independent regimes in
different parts of the Eurasian continent. In a nomadic empire, which was in
fact a federation of nomadic tribes, a monarch was elected at the great
assembly of nobles and generals, each of whom represented his own great
tribe. Succession among nomads was in principle by equal division, and all
male offspring of a nomadic monarch were equally entitled to succeed him.
As a result, since the earliest times many a great nomadic empire experienced
an outbreak of internal disturbance upon the death of an able leader as his
sons and grandsons struggled over who would succeed him; this in turn led
to a breakup of the empire founded by him into ever smaller fragments. Even
the Mongol Empire, which dominated an unparalled expanse of territory
extending almost from one end of the Eurasian continent to the other, was
not free from this tendency. As the Chinggisids grew in number, more and
more local nomadic regimes were born and contended among themselves in
'
all parts of their empire.
Each of the four major successor states to the Mongol Empire, namely
the Yiian Dynasty, the Golden Horde, the 11-khanate, and the Chaghatai
Khanate, was weakened by repeated internal quarrels over succession until it
lost control of its colonies in agriculural lands and retreated back into its
pastures on the steppes in the mid-fourteenth century. In the view of the
sedentary peoples who once lived under Mongol rule, this marked an "end"
of the Mongol Empire, at which time the Central Eurasian steppes entered a
dark age. It was not quite that way as far as the nomads themselves were
concerned. Rather, Mongol imperial traditions long persisted among them.
The Chinggisid principle continued to dominate the nomads' minds.
Since olden times a nomadic leader had to be acknowledged by his
fellow tribesmen as a good commander in war, a fair distributor of spoils,
and a just arbitrator of troubles. If he failed to qualify as such, his nomad
followers had no scruples about deserting him and going over to other, abler
chiefs with their people and herds. Another, most important item of
consideration was added to the list of qualifications in the Mongol imperial
period of the thirteenth century and later, namely, whether or not a ruler was
a male descendant of Chinggis Khan. If an ambitious leader was not lucky
enough to be born Chinggisid, he was obliged to marry a Chinggisid
princess and become a son-in-law to the imperial family. A prominent
example is the case of Timur, who founded a great Central Asian empire in
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. A Mongol of the Barlas clan
born in West Turkestan, he did not have Chinggis Khan's blood in his veins.
 267

He married several princesses from the house of Chaghatai and styled himself
only Amir Kurgen, or Lord Son-in-Law, but never khan.v
The Yuan dynasty, the khanate primus inter pares in the Mongol
Empire, lost China and retreated into its old homeland on the Mongolian
Plateau in 1368, where real power fell for a time into the hands of the
Oyirad, a federation of anti-Khubilaid tribes. The ensuing confusion ended
and the Mongols were reunified as a nation only when Batu M6ngke Dayan
Khan, said to be the last surviving male Chinggisid, sat on the throne toward
the end of the fifteenth century. In 1635 a Mongol prince who was a
descendant in the direct line of the Chinggisid family presented the leader of
the Manchus, then newly gaining power in northeast Asia, with a jade seal of
the Yuan emperors and joined others in electing the latter new grand khan.
This established for the Manchu Latter Chin dynasty a solid basis for
legitimacy as successor to the Mongol Empire, and the former adopted a new
dynastic name, the Great Ch'ing, in the following year.'°
The Khalkha Mongols, whose pastures used to occupy the eastern
two-thirds of present-day Mongolia, felt threatened when Inner Mongolian
princes accepted the alien Manchu king as their khan. In 1640 the Khalkhas
entered an alliance with their earlier enemy, the Oyirad. Subsequently a civil
war broke out between the Left and Right Wings of the Khalkha, in which
Galdan Boshoghtu Khan the Dzungar Oyirad intervened and invaded the
Khalkha land in 1688. The Left-Wing Khalkha princes headed by Tiishiyetii
Khan fled southward, and when they reached the Inner Mongolian border they
sought protection of the Manchu Ch'ing emperor. They held a great assembly
at Doloon Nuur in Inner Mongolia in 1691, at which they elected the
Manchu emperor their khan and accepted his rule. Their pledge of allegiance
to the Ch'ing was what gave their homeland the later term Outer Mongolia.
Of the 49 banners in the 6 Inner Mongolian leagues and the 86 banners
in the 4 Outer Mongolian leagues in Mongolia of Ch'ing times, 23 Inner
Mongolian and 83 Outer Mongolian banners were ruled by princes who were
descendants of both Chinggis Khan and Dayan Khan. Princes of all other
Inner Mongolian banners but 4 were descendants of Chinggis Khan's
'
brothers.

9. Accordingto Prof. Eiji Mano, Kyoto University,of the eighteen wives whom Timur
legallymarriedirihis life, two, SarayMulkKhcnimbint QazanSultcn Kh6nand TukalKh6nim
bint Khidr Khw6jaKhcn, were princessesof Chaghataidkhans,while two others,TumanCghc
bintMisc Taychiutand ToghdiBi bintAq Sifi Qongirat,hadChinggisidbloodin theirveins.
10. HidehiroOkada, "China as a SuccessoFState to the Mongol Empire."Paper read at
the InternationalSeminar on the Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London, March 19-21, 1991.The seminar was organizedby
DavidO. Morgan,MartinaDeuchler,and ColinJ. Heywood.
268

The Manchu emperors treated the Chinggisid Mongol princes

preferentially as their allies, granting the latter titles of nobility. The Manchu
and the Mongol aristocracy were bound together by frequent marital ties.
Already devoted to Tibetan Buddhism, the Mongols produced in this period
many learned lamas. Most of the higher-ranked lamas among them were of
princely birth and hence Chinggisid. Both the first and second reincarnations
in the lineage of Jebtsundampa Khutughtus, always the supreme lamas
among the Khalkhas in Outer Mongolia in Ch'ing times, were Chinggisid
princes from the house of Tüshiyetü Khans. The third reincarnation and his
successors in this lineage were reborn among Tibetans as wished by Ch'ing
emperors, but each of them was technically nobody but a rebirth of the
Chinggisid founder. When in 1911 the Hsin-hai Revolution broke out in
China and the Ch'ing Dynasty was about to fall, the Khalkha Mongols
elected the Eighth Jebtsundampa, a reincarnation of Chinggisids, their khan
and declared the independence of Mongolia from the Manchu Ch'ing Empire.

6. The Chinggisid principle among the Oyirad or Kalmyks

The feeling that only a descendant of Chinggis Khan was fit to be a

legitimate ruler persisted in the minds of not only the nomads who were once
active members of the Mongol Empire, but also other inhabitants of the parts
of the Eurasian continent who once lived under its rule. Among the Kalmyks
or Oyirad, too, in whose seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history the
present writer specializes, there were frequent attempts at modifying their
chiefs' genealogy to suit the Chinggisid principle.
The Oyirad nation, called Qalmaq (Kalmyk) by Turkic speakers of
Central Asia, was linguistically Mongolic but was regarded as alien by the
Mongols who had been reunified late in the fifteenth century. There was no
male descendant of Chinggis Khan to be found among the heads of the tribes
making up the Oyirad federation. Nevertheless the Oyirad produced such
famous khans as Giiiishi Khan, Galdan Boshoghtu Khan and Ayuuki Khan in
the seventeenth century. In what way could those events be reconciled with
the Chinggisid principle?
Oyirad chronicles tell us that their nation was a tribal federation
commonly called the Four Oyirad. In spite of the number "four," at least
eight groups existed to make up the Oyirad in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. This has given rise to confusion in the sources and among scholars
old and new. Hidehiro Okada studied their origins and reached the following
conclusions: In the days of the Mongol Empire, the north and northwest of
Mongolia were inhabited by four great tribes, the old Oyirad, the Barghud,
the Naiman, and the Kereyid. After the fall of the Khubilaid Yuan Dynasty
late in the fourteenth century, they joined forces in a new tribal federation
 269

against the Mongol tribes still supporting the dynasty, and came to be called
the Four Oyirad. They were later joined by the Khoshuts, a tribe of Mongol
origin, when Toghon and his son Esen were leaders of the Oyirad Empire in
the first half of the fifteenth century. The well-known Dzungars and the
Dorbets, tribes that share a common ancestral legend very similar to that of
the ancient Uighurs, appear to have descended from the Naimans. The
Torguts are obviously descendants of the Kereyid tribe because their princely
house has Toghril Ong Khan as its founder. The Khoits are without doubt
descendants of the old Oyirad tribe." I
Thus the Khoshuts are the only tribe of Mongol origin in the Four
Oyirad tribal federation, and all native sources agree that its princely house
claims a lineage going back to Jochi Khasar, brother of Chinggis Khan. Yet
older princely genealogies of the Khorchin Mongols, a tribe universally
acknowledged as rightful heirs of Jochi Khasar, make no reference to the
Khoshuts as a branch of their tribe.
By the seventeenth century both the Mongols and the Oyirad were ardent
believers in Tibetan Buddhism. Even the Manchu emperors were eager to act
as patrons of the religion. With most of the Mongols now under Manchu
domination, the Oyirad must have regarded themselves as the only successors
to the Mongol Empire still proudly independent. They needed their own
khan in order better to contend with their neighbors, the Kazakhs and other
Central Asian tribes in the west still governed by Chinggisid khans. Their
wish was supported by the Dge-lugs-pa regime of the Dalai Lamas in Tibet,
itself aiming at an expansion of its own influence. Yet even the ambitious
fifth Dalai Lama was hardly able to ignore the deep-rooted faith in the holy
Chinggis Khan prevalent among the nomads of Central Eurasia when he tried
to confer khanship on their chiefs.
Giiushi Khan of the Khoshuts was a chief accepted as a descendant of a
brother of Chinggis Khan, if not a descendant of Chinggis Khan himself, by
the Manchu Ch'ing emperor and his Mongol vassals alike. Thus Guushi's
khanship did not completely go against the Chinggisid principle.
Bctur Khong Taiji, a Dzungar chief prominent in Russian sources, was a
son-in-law of this Guushi Khan. When Guushi Khan made his successful
military expedition to Kokonor at the invitation of the fifth Dalai Lama, he
was accompanied by the head of the Dzungar tribe. According to Tibetan
sources, the khan, after the victory in Kokonor, bestowed on the Dzungar
chief the title khong taiji ("viceroy") gave him a daughter to wife and sent
'
him home.'2 Among Bctur Khong Taiji's many sons only two, Sengge and

'
11.H. Okada,"Originsof the D6rbenOyirad,"Ural-AltaischeJahrbficier, NeueFolge 7
( 1987): 18 I -2 I 1.
12.Ho-chinYang,TheAnnalsof Kokonor(Bloomington:IndianaUniv.Press, 1969), 37.
270

Galdan, were born to the Khoshut princess.'3 Sengge married a granddaughter

of Ochirtu Chechen Khan of the Khoshuts, who was son of Gifshi Khan's
eldest brother Baibaghas and Guushi Khan's nephew and adopted son, and
succeeded as head of his tribe over the head of his elder half-brothers after the
death of his father. 14Sengge however had no time to inherit the title of khong
taiji and was soon assassinated by his half-brothers. Galdan, full brother of
Sengge, had studied for ten years as a monk in Tibet and was a disciple of
both the first Panchen Lama and the fifth Dalai Lama. He avenged the murder
of Sengge and succeeded as head of the Dzungar tribe in 167I, and assumed
the title of khong taiji by permission of the Dalai Lama.15
Galdan, who was already a grandson of Giiiishi Khan of the Khoshuts on
the maternal side, married Sengge's widow. Soon he fell out with Ochirtu
and took the latter prisoner in 1676. He was now uncontested leader of all the
Oyirad, and his leadership was confirmed in 1678 by the Dalai Lama with
the title of Bstan- `dzin Bo-shog-thu Khang or the King of Heavenly Destiny

13. dPag bsam ljon bzang,Collected Works of Sum-pa-mkhan-po,VoL I (Ka),aeata-

Pitaka series (New Delhi:InternationalAcademyof IndianCulture, 1979).Vol. 214, f. 307b.
14. For the death of BdturKhongTayiji of the Dzungarsin 1653 and his son Sengge's
being a son-in-lawof OchirtuChechen Khanof the Khoshuts,see Biographyof Caya Pandita
in Oirat Characters, Corpus ScriptorumMongolorum,Tomus V, Fasc. 2-3 (Ulan Bator-.
Shinzhlekh Ukhaany AkademiinKhevlel, 1967),48, 16ab. P. S. Pallas, Sammlungenhis-
torischerNachrichteniiberdie mongolischenVölkerschaften(St. Petersburg,1776),ErsterTeil,
40, says: "Gleich nach Antrittder Regierungheyrathete[Galdan]seines BrudersWittweAna
Dara, eine Tochter des ChoschotischenZazanchan."Anu was a granddaughter,not daughter,
of Ochirtuaccordingto HeseiToktobuhaTulergiMonggoHoiseAiman-iWangGungsai Iletun
UlabunlCh'inting Wai fanMengku Huipu WangkungPiao cJwan,Vol. 79, 4a-b/2b-3a.
15. Accordingto the Autobiographyof Dalai Lama V (Za hor gyi bande ngag dbang blo
bzangrgya mtsho 'i 'disnang 'khrulpa' i rol rtsedrtogs brjod kyitshuldu bkodpa du ku la' i gos
bzang), dBen sa sprul sku, i.e., Galdan,visitedthe Fifth Dalai Lama for the first time on the
12th day of the first monthof 1656(Vol. Ka, f. 245b). Thereafterhe stayed in Tibet to study
Buddhism.On the l6th day of the eighth monthof 1666,the DalaiLama was visitedby some
two hundredOyiradheadedby Sengge'swife Tshe dbang rgyal mo (Vol. Kha, f. 19b).On the
23rd day of the eleventhmonthof the same year, the Dalai Lama bestowedon dBen sa sprul
sku a Grub rgyal benedictionfor longevityand many presents,includinga set of monk's habit,
and, with an instructionthat he mighthelp the Buddhistcause with his supervision,personally
gave him a rosary of pearls uponhis departure(Vol. Kha, fs. 26b-27a).On the basis of such
references and other evidence,Zuihii Yamaguchidoubts the Mongoliansources in Tibetan
which report that dBen sa sprul sku or Galdanrenouncedhis monkhoodand returned home
only after the violent death of Sengge,and thinks that Galdan returnedhome as a monk ac-
companiedby Sengge's wifein 1666.Autobiographyof Dalai Lama V,Vol. Kha,f. 107b, 11.5-
6, says that Mgron gnyer Dar dar was dispatchedto give formalrecognitionto the chief. Vol.
Kha, f. 1l0a says: "A letterand presentsarrivedfrom dBen sa sprul sku." From the entry of
the sixth month of 1672(Vol. Kha, f. 147a)on, "dGa 'Idan hung tha'i ji" is identifiedby that
name. On this occasionthe DalaiLamadispatcheda messengerto Galdanwith the presentsof
a seal and clothes (Vol. Kha, f. 147b). All references here are from communicationwith
Yamaguchi.
 271

Who Holds Up the Religion.'6 This means that the Dalai Lama confirmed
Galdan as khan of the entire Four Oyirad in his capacity of a defender of
Buddhist faith. The new khan, who was a onetime Dge-lugs-pa monk and
now patron of the sect, was an ideal ally for the Dalai Lama, and his relation
by blood to Gffshi Khan must have weighed decisively in favor of his
khanship.
Galdan, however successful he was in building his great nomadic
empire, was no match for the Ch'ing Manchus. In June 1696 his army
suffered a crushing defeat by the Manchu expeditionary forces at Juun Modu
in the land of the Khalkhas. He hid himself with a small number of men in
the Altai Mountains until he died of an illness in April of the following
n .
year.
Meanwhile, in Tibet the fifth Dalai Lama had been dead since 1682 and
Regent Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho was in charge of government in his place.
The regent was quick to choose Ayuuki of the Volga Torguts as Galdan's
successor as khan of the Four Oyirad, and conferred on the Torgut chief the
title of Da'i-ching Khang already in February 1697 when the
Dzungar chief was still alive.'8 Ayuuki's father Punchugh was a son of
Shukur Daiching, head of the Torgut tribe. Punchugh had married Galdan's
full sister, who was a daughter of a daughter of Guushi Khan of the
Khoshuts, and had had Ayuuki by her.'9 Thus Ayuuki, too, was related to
Giiushi Khan by blood.
Galdan's nephew Tsevang Rabtan, whose father was Sengge, had
revolted against his uncle while the latter was still alive and established his
power in Dzungaria. Tsevang Rabtan was later confirmed as head of the
Dzungar tribe by the Dalai Lama regime of Tibet but the title conferred on
him by the latter was no more than Erdeni ioriqtu xong tayiii.20 Galdan was

16.Autobiographyof DalaiLama V, Vol.Ga, f. 82a.

17.H. Qkada,"Galdan's Death:When and How,"Memoiresof Research Departmentof
the ToyoBunko(Tokyo)37 (1979):91-97.
l8. Biographyof Dalai Lama Vl (Thamscad mkhyenpa drug pa blo b=angrin chen
tshangsdbyangsrgya mtsho'i thun mongphy'i rnampar thar pa du ki la'i 'phro 'thud rab gsal
gser gyi snye ma), f. 157b.says: "On the fourteenthday [of the first month of 1697},a Thor
god representative,Rab 'byams pa bsTan pa rab 'byor arrived. Althoughit might have been
better if done so after [the Dalai Lama's] arrival [in the Potala),as circumstancesindicated
that it was the time then, he was given the title of Da'i-chingA-yo-shiKhang,a seal and a set
of clothes,togetherwith a scarf (kha btags), a knifeand other things as presents frommyself
(=RegentSangs rgyas rgya mtsho, the author)."This referencealso is from a communication
with Yamaguchi.
19. IletunUlabun/ Piao chuan,Vol. 101,fs. 6a-7a/3b-4a.
20. Biographyof Dalai Lama V, Vol. Cha, f.194b.Underthe date of the ninth month of
1694,the text (continuedby RegentSangs rgyas rgya mtsho after the death of the fifth Dalai
Lamain 1682)says that TsevangRabtanwas grantedthe title Er-te-niJo-rig-thu HongTha'i-ji,
a seal, clothing,and a set of Mongolian-stylethreewheels.
272

the only khan among the Dzungar chiefs who wielded power over much of
Central Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while all others had
only the title of khong taiji (viceroy).
Both Tsevang Rabtan and Ayuuki had Giiiishi Khan's blood in their
veins. The selection of Ayuuki for khanship rather than Tsevang Rabtan was
made by the Dalai Lama regime of Tibet in name but by the ambitious regent
in fact. Even in such political maneuvers the Chinggisid principle had to be
respected as a minimum requirement for khanship to be recognized by the
Manchu Ch'ing in the east and the Turkic-speaking tribes in the west. In
application the principle was made to include descendants of Chinggis
Khan's brother, or even those on the maternal side, through its looser
interpretation made possible by the religious authority of the Dalai Lamas.

7. The Chinggisid principle in Russia .

'
Now we come to our main concern, Russian history. In the past most
Russian specialists in medieval Russian history have preferred to ignore
reality and have described the Mongol influence as negligible or entirely
deleterious and then have moved on rapidly to other topics of investigation,
as already pointed out so convincingly by Charles J. Halperin in Russia and
the Golden Horde. 21
The first thing the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde did after
subjugating the Russians was to take a census of the population, the first
ever in Russian history. His representatives, darughas or baskaks, who
collected
. taxes and conscripted troops, were stationed everywhere.
Russia under the Mongol rule was integrated into the international
community of that time and a wider circle of trade. The Ryurikid Rus'
princes contended among themselves to marry Chinggisid Mongol princesses
and be sons-in-law of the Golden Horde so that they would be able to enjoy
privileges at the court of the khan. Whenever a quarrel broke out in his
family a Rus' prince would go to Sarai bearing many presents with which to
please the khan and obtain a decision favorable to himself. Rus' cities also
expected the khan to arbitrate between themselves in disputes.
Moscow was not even mentioned by the name when the Mongol army
first conquered the Rus' cities in 1237. It is only a conjecture that a small
city called Makar was Moscow. 22It grew rapidly under the rule of the Golden
Horde by undertaking collection of Mongol taxes until it was a grand duchy
commanding no less than seventeen miliarchies (t'maltamen) in 1399.

21. CharlesJ. Halperin,Russiaand the GoldenHorde (Bloomington:IndianaUniv.Press,

1985),vii. The followingtwo paragraphshave used this work.
22. Rashid al-Din, The Successorsof Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle (New
York:ColumbiaUniv.Press, 1971), 59.
 273

Moscow was further helped in its growth by the Golden Horde policy
favoring it in order to counter the rise of Lithuania on the Baltic coast.23
The historicity of the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, conventionally
regarded as the first success for the Russians in overturning the "Tatar yoke,"
was seriously challenged by Leslie Collins, of the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies at the University of London. He pointed out that the
supposedly great victory of Grand Duke Dmitrii Donskoi of Moscow over
Mamai is lauded only in Russian chronicles, while no mention of such a
battle is found in any contemporary diplomatic documents.2a
. Mamai was actually a non-Chinggisid who used a puppet khan on the
throne of the Golden Horde. Tokhtamysh, a true Chinggisid and Jochid, with
support from Timur, had come marching against him from the east and had
taken Astrakhan' and Sarai already in 1378. In 1381 Tokhtamysh defeated
Mamai's army on the Kalka and was enthroned as khan at the Golden Horde.
He sacked Moscow in the following year. Dmitrii Donskoi fled the city. The
excuse for his absence given by the Russian chronicler was as follows: Thus
Donskoi, who had met and defeated the usurper Mamai in battle, did not
want to "raise his hand" against the true tsar' Tokhtamysh, or left Moscow
when he learned that the "tsar' himself was riding against the city. 25
Thus even Russian Orthodox monks who wrote chronicles never thought
of rejecting the Chinggisid principle. Russian historians' insistence that the
word tsar' itself reflected a tradition going back to the Roman Empire
notwithstanding, it had been in use ever since the time of Chinggis Khan as
a Russian equivalent of "khan." The tsar' of Russia was indeed a successor to
the Mongol khans.
Let us now take a look at the famous event of 1574 pointed out by
Omeljan Pritsak.26 Ivan IV (the Terrible) of Moscow is said to have officially
adopted the title of tsar' as early as 1547. Our Russian source reports:

At that time Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich enthroned Simon Bekbulatovich as

tsar' in Moscow and crowned him with the crown of the tsar's, and
. called himself [simply] Ivan of Moscow; he left the city and lived in
Petrovka. All the offices of tsar'dom he passed to Simeon, and himself
rode simply, like a boyar with shafts, and whenever he comes to Tsar'

23. Halperin,Russiaand the GoldenHorde, 41, 54.

24. Leslie J. D. Collins, "The Fall of Shaikh Ahmed Khan," (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of
London, 1970).The work remainsunpublisheddue to obstructionfrom several quarters,ac-
cordingto oral communicationwith its author.
25. Halperin,Russiaand the GoldenHorde,99.
26. Omeljian Pritsak, "Moscow, the Golden Horde, and the Kazan Khanate from a
PolyculturalPointof View,"SlavicReview26 ( 1 967):577-83.
 274

Simeon, he sits at a distance from the tsar's place, together with the
boyars.

This Simeon Bekbulatovich was a Mongol, whose true name was Sain
Bulat, and khan of Kasimov to the southeast of Moscow. Naturally he was a
male descendant of Chinggis Khan. In the following year Simeon abdicated
in favor of Ivan, who thus became tsar' again.
Through this transaction the Grand Duke of Moscow managed to qualify
himself as one of the legitimate successors to the Golden Horde, and made it
possible for himself to rank with other J6chids or even bring them under his
power. It is interesting to note that Ivan the Terrible was in the male line a
direct descendant of Dmitrii Donskoi, and in the female line a descendant of
Mamai, Donskoi's antagonist.27 .

8. More questions about Russian history

Timur ravaged the territories of the Golden Horde and died early in the
fifteenth century. Afier that period the Golden Horde began fragmenting into
many smaller hordes or regimes. Fights over suzerainty where incessant
between the Great Horde and other J6chid hordes of the Crimea covering both
the peninsula and Ukraine, the Kazan' and Astrakhan' khanates.
The conventional view of Russian historians is that the Golden Horde
was destroyed by Mengli Girai of the Crimean Tatars in 1502. According to
Collins, however, what really happened was a transfer of the throne of the
Great Horde from the Transvolgine House of Namagan to the House of
Kunchek, or the House of Tokhtamysh, to which Mengli Girai belonged.
With this incident the internal troubles since 1380 came to an end in the
Golden Horde, which was now to be governed by the House of Kunchek un-
til its destruction by Catherine II in 1783. The new grand khan from the
House of Kunchek was duly given international recognition by
Poland-Lithuania, Moldavia, Kazan', Moscow, and others. The population of
the Great Horde moved to the Crimea where Mengli Girai had his base, and
the horde was never more powerful, according to Collins. These were the
Crimea Tatars to whom Russians had to keep paying tribute until the time of
Peter the Great.
On the other hand, the House of Namagan lost to the Russians its
pastures on the eastern bank of the Volga, and some of its descendants
moved away to Bukhara. Simeon Bekbulatovich, who was once put on the
throne as tsar' of Moscow by Ivan IV, was actually a great-grandson of

27. Ibid., 578.

 275

Ahmed, the last grand khan from the House of Namagan who lost his throne
at the Great Horde to the House of Kunchek in 1502. 28
More and more of the Tatars, who were descendants of the Golden
Horde, fell under the rule of Moscow thereafter. Nevertheless, Russia's
relationship with the Tatars and other Central Asian nomads up to the
eighteenth century may not have been anything like how later Russian
historians would interpret it. Of those interpretations of Russian history from
the nineteenth century and later, two questionable issues are pointed out in
the following:
The first question concerns the cossacks (Kazaks) and the Kazakhs of
today. Their names are etymologically the same. The cossacks are said to
have inhabited wide-open steppes forming independent military communities
called sotnyas or centuries, each headed by an ataman or chief, and been
employed by the tsars of Moscow in defending Russian borders against the
Turks, Tatars, and Poles since the fifteenth century. The word ataman is
clearly of Turkic origin, while centuries belonged to the traditional Mongol
military organization. How could they have originated as fugitive Ukrainian
serfs, as maintained by Soviet historians? There can be little doubt that the
nucleus of the cossacks descended from a nomadic people who made up a
part of the Mongol Empire.
Chester S. L. Dunning, in his paper "Cossacks and the Southern
Frontier in the Time of Troubles" read at the present conference, points out
that toward the end of the sixteenth century the Muscovite government tried
to subordinate the free cossack lands in the south and the east, forcing the
Volga cossacks to retreat to the Don or to move into the Caucasus or farther
east. According to records by the Kalmyks themselves, their migration to the
Volga, which they reached in 1630, is described thus: "Prior to their reaching
the Zai (laik) River, they subdued one group of Tatars, who were camping
beside the Embe River. Crossing over the laik River they subjugated the
Tatars named Noghai, Khatai, Kipchakh, and Jiteshen. "29 This description
does not include cossacks among inhabitants of the steppes between the
Yaik-Ural and the Volga. How are we to interpret this? Is it not possible that
those whom Russians called cossacks were actually only a kind of Tatars
when seen from the perspective of the nomads native to the region?
The word "Qazaq" is usually interpreted as meaning in Turkic "a free
man in nobody's possession, an adventurer, a vagabond," that is, one who
has separated himself from his own nation or tribe and lives as an adventurer.

28. L. J. D. Collins,"The House of Toktamysh,"paper read at the InternationalSeminar

on the MongolEmpireand Its Legacy, Schoolof Orientaland African Studies,Universityof
London,March I9-2l, 1991.
29. StephenA. Halkovic,The Mongolsof the West(Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press,
1985),41-42.
276

The Kazakhs of today are said to have separated themselves from the Uzbeks
governed by the Shaibanid family, which had been founded by Shiban, a
younger brother of Batu. It is also said that the oldest Kazakh group was
formed in Semirech'e northwest of the T'ien Shan Mountains early in the
sixteenth century. Nevertheless, Russian sources for a long time used to refer
to the Kazakhs as the Kirgiz.
This confusion in ethnic identity is now blamed on a tack of exact
knowledge. Is it not possible, however, that "Kazak," an ethnonym coming
into use in different localities in the fifteenth century and later, was a generic
name for all nomads who had separated themselves from groups ruled by
descendants of the Golden Horde, just as "Oyirad" was applied in the east to
those who were not members in the new Mongol tribal federation?
The second question concerns Ermak, the Don cossack, his conquest of
Siberia and the Sibir' Khanate.
Siberian history now survives only in what Russian historians have
written, and we have no way of knowing how much has been distorted in
their writings. Still, we can catch in them occasional glimpses of historical
truth. Actually there is no contemporary source on Ermak's conquest of
Siberia, of which everi the chronological dates are uncertain. Ivan the Terrible
is said to have reprimanded in 1582 the Stroganovs who had sent Ermak to
Siberia, and ordered the hanging of Ermak and his cossacks. Prince
Mametkul, son of the Sibir' Khan Kuchum whom Ermak had attacked, was
later taken prisoner and sent to Moscow, where he retained the title Tsarevich
of Siberia and served as a regimental commander in the Russian army. The
prince took part in the Swedish War in 1590, and was with Tsar' Boris in
1598 when the latter awaited an invasion by the Crimeans.3° Is it not
possible to regard Russian relations with other peoples of this period as fam-
ily quarrels among successors to the Mongol Empire?
Kuchum the Sibir' khan fell in a battle in 1598. In the same year boiarin
Boris Godunov became tsar'. Tsar' Boris is said to have treated well those
members of Kuchum's family taken prisoner in the battle and granted the
khan's sons the title tsareviches .3 Boris Godunov, who was not a Tatar,
nevertheless chose to call himself a Tatar.
One son of Kuchum not taken prisoner was the so-called Tsarevich
Ishim. He was married to a daughter of Kho Orlok, chief of the Torgut

30. I. V. Shcheglov,Shiberiya Nendai Shi (Khronologicheskiiperechen' vazhneishikh

dannykhiz istorii Sibiri), trans. Ryuri Yoshimura(Tokyo: Nippon Koron Sha, 1943; Tokyo:
Hara Shobo, 1975).This Japaneseedition contains a text 859 pages long translatedfrom the
originalRussianedition (Irkutsk,1884),with a chronologicaltable 85 pages long and an index
55 pages long, both newly added.The Russian originalbeing inaccessible,referenceshere are
given accordingto the paginationin the Japaneseedition:pp. 45-61 (under 1579-1583).
31. Ibid., 83-86(under 1598-1599).
 277

Kalmyks.32 It so happens that Ishim, a Kazakh khan who was enthroned in

1598, had a son named Ablai, while 1. V. Shcheglov, in Khronologicheskii
perechen' vazhneishikh dannykh iz istorii Sibiri, reported that there was an
Ablai Khan who was a son of Ishim Khan and a grandson of Kuchum
Khan.33 Russian sources of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth
century are so confused that it is not clear how Tsarevich Ishim and Ishim
Khan are related to each other. It appears as if Ishim son of the Sibir' khan
and Ishim Khan of the Kazakhs existed simultaneously.
Still, a prominent editorial error has already been pointed out in the
collection of Russian documents, Materialy po istorii russo-mongol'skikh
otnoshenii. In an earlier work, the present writer has established that the
editors, who mistakenly believed in the existence of a Dzungar state at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, erroneously identified Baibagysh, head
of the Khoshuts killed in an internal strife, to be a son of Khara Khula, head
of the Dzungars, and went so far as to split the single person into two,
Baibagysh the Dzungar and Baibagysh the Khoshut, with notes in the index
to this effect. Is it not possible that the Sibir' Khanate moved south to
become rulers of a portion of the Kazakhs? The earliest reports on the people
identifiable as the present-day Kazakhs are only from the eighteenth century,
when they were already divided into three hordes. Is it possible to identify
the origin of each of those Kazakh hordes? This is the biggest question that
troubles the present writer now. She will be very happy to have an answer to
this question.

Institute for Basic Studies in International Relations

32. Ibid., 1 05(under 1616);HenryH. Howorth,Historyof tneMongais, fromthe Ninthto

the NineteenthCentury,vol. I (London:LongmansGreen, 1876), 561;MichaelKhodarkovsky,
"The Arrivalof theKalmyksand the MuscoviteSouthernFrontier1600-1670,"RussianHistnry _
15 ( I 988):229;Materialypo istorii russko-mongol'skieotnosheniia160Î-1636 (Moscow:AN
SSSR,1959).
33. Shcheglov,ShiberiyaNendaiShi, I 1 7(under 1624),124(under 1632).