Qutlugh (Ilterish) restores the Turkic Khaganate

For fifty years after 630 the Turkic tribes lived under Tang rule in the frontier protectorates, their chiefs serving as Tang officers — the Orkhon inscriptions later lamented that the Turkic nobles had taken Chinese titles and served the Chinese emperor for fifty years. In 679 Ashide Wenfu and Fengzhi raised Ashina Nishufu as khagan, and after his death the rebels turned to Ashina Funian; the Tang general Pei Xingjian crushed both revolts, and in 681 Funian and Wenfu, who had surrendered, were beheaded in Chang’an together with more than fifty other leaders.

Among the survivors was Qutlugh, from a family of hereditary tudun-chor chiefs — a distant kinsman of Illig according to the Old Book of Tang, his grandson according to some modern accounts. The Old Book of Tang says that he gathered some 5,000 of the scattered Turks in the Zongcai mountains, raided the Toquz Oghuz for sheep and horses and proclaimed himself khagan. In 682, by the Zizhi tongjian, he and Ashide Yuanzhen — usually identified with Tonyukuk, who by his own inscription set Qutlugh on the throne — seized the town of Heishacheng, the “Black Sands”, and raided the Bingzhou frontier (the Old Book of Tang places the seizure of Heishacheng in the twelfth month of that year, early 683); on 12 July 682, by the New Book of Tang, the prefect of Lanzhou in Shanxi fell fighting them. The inscription of Qutlugh’s son Kül Tegin tells how his father set out with seventeen men, gathered seventy and then seven hundred, and led forty-seven campaigns and fought twenty battles; in the Old Turkic texts he is Ilterish Qaghan. The founding is conventionally dated to 682, although S. G. Klyashtorny dated its beginning to 679–689.

In the second half of the 680s Ilterish and Tonyukuk defeated the Toquz Oghuz and took Ötüken, the old heartland of the khagans, while raiding deep into Tang territory. On his death — in 691 by the reckoning of the inscriptions, about 693 by the Chinese histories — his brother Qapaghan took the throne. The Second Turkic Khaganate lasted until the Uyghurs and their allies destroyed it in 744; the Orkhon stelae of Tonyukuk, Kül Tegin and Bilge Qaghan, carved in the Old Turkic runic script, tell the story of the Turks’ subjugation by the Tang and their liberation under Ilterish.