The Rouran Khaganate dominates the steppe

The Rouran are known almost entirely from Chinese histories, above all that of their enemies, the Northern Wei. According to the Book of Wei, their ruling house descended from Mugulü, a slave captured by Tuoba Xianbei raiders in the late 3rd century, whose son gathered a following, called his people Rouran and remained a vassal of the Tuoba; Emperor Taiwu later changed the name to Ruru, “wriggling worms”, in mockery. After defeats by the Wei, Shelun led his people north across the Gobi, seized the lands of the Gaoche (Tiele) and moved his camp to the Ruoluo river, identified with the Tuul in Mongolia. There, the Book of Wei says, he introduced military law — units of a thousand and of a hundred men under their commanders, booty for the first into battle and death by stoning for cowards — and, since the Rouran had no writing, his commanders counted their men with sheep droppings and later with notched sticks. Having crushed a rich remnant of the Xiongnu to the northwest, he ruled from the land of Karasahr in the west to that of Korea in the east — the usual seat of the Rouran court, the same history adds, lay north of Dunhuang and Zhangye — and in 402 took the name Qiudoufa khagan; the Wei historians explain qiudoufa as “controlling and expanding” and khagan as the equivalent of “emperor”.

The title kehan (khagan) had been used among the Xianbei as early as the 3rd century, but the Rouran made it the title of the supreme ruler of the steppe in place of the Xiongnu chanyu; after them it was borne by the rulers of the Turks, the Avars and later nomad empires. For a century and a half the Rouran raided the Wei frontier and allied themselves with the Wei’s rivals — the Later Qin, the Northern Yan and the Northern Liang; in 424 Khagan Datan surrounded the young Emperor Taiwu at Yunzhong, and the Wei answered with great expeditions across the Gobi, the best known in 429. The Rouran also dominated the oases of the Silk Road — in 460 they took Gaochang and set up a king there — and ruled subject peoples: the Gaoche, who broke away in the 480s, the Hephthalites in their early days, and the Ashina, who worked iron for them in the Altai.

The end came from within. Between 546 and 551 Khagan Anagui refused a Rouran bride to Tumen (Bumin), chief of the Ashina Turks, calling him “my smith slave”; in 552 Tumen routed the Rouran north of Huaihuang, Anagui took his own life, and by 555 the last Rouran groups had been destroyed. The dates are those of Shelun’s title (402) and of the Turkic victory (552). Some historians connect the Rouran with the Avars who appeared in Europe soon afterwards; genetic studies point to an origin of the Avar elite in the Mongolian steppe, but the link is still debated.