The Western Turkic Khaganate: the “ten arrows” from the Altai to the Oxus

The western lands of the Turks had been ruled since Istämi by his line, and after Tardu’s flight in 603 they went their own way. According to the Old Book of Tang, Tardu’s grandson Shekui extended the realm from the Altai to the sea in the west, and his brother Tong Yabghu subdued the Tiele in the north, held off Persia in the west and reached the borders of Jibin (Kapisa, in present-day Afghanistan) in the south, commanding hundreds of thousands of archers. He moved his court to Qianquan, the “Thousand Springs” north of Tashkent, gave the rulers of the oasis states the Turkic title eltäbär and sent a tudun to supervise them and collect their tribute: “the western barbarians had never been so powerful”. His eldest son, Tardu Shad, ruled at Kunduz in Tokharistan, and the Sogdian merchant towns of the Chu valley prospered under Turkic protection.

The khagans wintered in the Chu valley at Suyab, a town of Sogdian merchants. There, by the account of his biography, the pilgrim Xuanzang met the “Yabghu Qaghan” out hunting: the khagan wore a green silk robe, his hair uncovered and bound with a silk band some three metres long, and was surrounded by more than two hundred officials in brocade robes with braided hair. In a tent glittering with gold ornaments he feasted the monk together with envoys from the Tang and Gaochang, and then sent him on with an interpreter and letters to the rulers on the road to Kapisa. Because the Chinese histories date Tong Yabghu’s murder to 628, historians either move Xuanzang’s departure from 629 to 627 or think that he met Tong Yabghu’s son. Far to the west, in 627, during Heraclius’s last war with Persia, Turkic troops from the North Caucasus — “Khazars” to the Byzantine chroniclers — met the emperor at Tiflis and besieged the city together with him; their leader, whom the Byzantines call Ziebel, has been identified with Tong Yabghu himself or with a kinsman of his.

Tong Yabghu’s harshness alienated his subjects, and about 628 he was killed by his uncle, who made himself khagan. The oasis states and the Tiele tribes fell away, and the Turks split into rival Duolu and Nushibi factions. Soon after 635 the khagan Ishbara Tolis organised them as the “ten arrows” (On Oq) — ten chiefs, each given an arrow: five Duolu arrows east of Suyab and five Nushibi arrows west of it — but the civil war went on, and in 638 the realm was divided along the Ili. The Tang took Gaochang in 640 and by 648 had subdued Karashahr and Kucha. Ashina Helu, a former Tang general, reunited the ten tribes in 651, but in the winter of 657/658 Su Dingfang, with Uyghur horsemen, routed his army near the Irtysh; Helu fled towards Tashkent, where a local lord seized him and handed him over. Early in 658 the Tang divided the ten arrows between two Ashina khagans under the Kunling and Mengchi protectorates, while in the west the Khazars rose from the khaganate’s ruins.