FROM ULUS to KHANATE: the MAKING of the MONGOL STATES C
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First published in R. Amitai-Preiss & D.O. Morgan (eds), The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999 9 FROM ULUS TO KHANATE: THE MAKING OF THE MONGOL STATES c. 1220–c. 1290 Peter Jackson Although authority and dominion ostensibly belong to one man, namely whoever is nominated khan, yet in reality all the children, descendants and uncles partake of kingship and property.1 o wrote the Persian historian Juwaynı¯ in c. 1260. The Mongol conquests were Sregarded not as the possessions of the emperor or Great Khan (qaghan, qa’an) but as the joint property of the imperial family (altan orugh) as a whole, including female members. The sources suggest that there were a great˙ many family members to cater for. The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, who travelled east across the steppe in 1253, commented on the number of Chinggis Khan’s descendants, who ‘are daily multiplying and spreading out over this vast wilderness’.2 Indeed, they appear to have doubled even while Juwaynı¯ was writing, since the number of Chinggis Khan’s descendants is put at more than 10,000 early in his work, but towards the end is said to exceed 20,000.3 Such statistics hardly command confidence; though it is only fair to add that Rashı¯d al-Dı¯n, the great historian and wazir to the Mongol ruler of Iran in the early fourteenth century, credits Chinggis Khan’s eldest son Jochi alone with approximately forty sons (of whom he was able to name, however, a mere fourteen).4 THE FOUR ULUSES Provision had to be made for all these descendants. During his lifetime Chinggis Khan is believed to have granted to each of his four sons by his chief wife—Jochi (d. 1226/7), Chaghatai (d. 1242), Ögödei (d. 1241), his successor as qa’an, and Tolui (d. 1232)—a territory in the Asiatic steppe-forest zone (i.e. excluding, as far as we can tell, sedentary areas). These ‘appanages’ or ‘domains’ are denoted as ulus in the sources, and are to be distinguished, incidentally, from the qol-un ulus, or ‘ulus of the centre’, of which the qa’an himself was master and which is examined in the work of Professor Buell5—not, in this case, an appanage or a principality, but a kind of ‘royal demesne’, to borrow the terminology of the Latin West. Around the time that Juwaynı¯ wrote, however, momentous changes were taking place within the empire. The transfer in 1251 of the dignity of qa’an from the family of Ögödei to that of Tolui was followed by the suppres- sion of most of the princes of the lines of Chaghatai and Ögödei who opposed the new 230 THE HISTORY OF MONGOLIA regime: these two middle branches of the imperial dynasty were drastically pruned and their possessions in large measure redistributed, so that the ulus of Ögödei virtually ceased to exist and that of Chaghatai survived only in attenuated form.6 The new qa’an, Möngke, then put his younger brothers, Qubilai and Hülegü, in command of operations in China and Persia respectively. After Möngke’s death in 1259, Qubilai profited from his location in an area of valuable sedentary resources to make a successful bid for the imperial dignity in opposition to his brother Arigh Böke. Taking advantage of the civil war further east, a grandson of Chaghatai named Alughu succeeded in reconstituting Chaghatai’s ulus in Turkestan, and Hülegü converted his own position into that of an ulus-holder on a par with the other major princes. Qubilai was recognized as qa’an only by Hülegü and his successors, the Ilkhans, in Persia.7 In the second half of the thirteenth century, then, the Mongol empire seems to disintegrate into a number of separate—and often mutually hostile—states. These were: (1) the so-called khanate of the Golden Horde, ruled by the family of Jochi and founded by Jochi’s son Batu (d. 1255/6); (2) the khanate ruled by Chaghatai’s line in Turkestan and Transoxiana; (3) the Ilkhanate in Persia and Iraq, governed by the descendants of Hülegü (d. 1265); and (4) the dominions of the qa’an in China and Mongolia, of the line of Qubilai (d. 1294), who as Toluids were more closely related to the Ilkhans than any other branch of the imperial dynasty. This pattern of four khanates, it should be noted in passing, was not materially affected by the opposition to Qubilai of Ögödei’s grand- son Qaidu in Central Asia, for Qaidu presided over what was essentially a magnified version of the Chaghatayid polity.8 Nor did it make any difference when, after Qaidu’s death, the Mongol world again acknowledged a single emperor, in the person of Qubilai’s grandson and successor Temür Öljeitü, and the various khanates made peace with one another (1303–4), for the general reconciliation was shortlived. By this date the Ilkhanate was in practical terms autonomous, since Ghazan (1295–1304), who as a convert to Islam was eager to display his credentials as a Muslim sovereign, had deleted the qa’an’s name from the coinage.9 From an early date, historians have grown accustomed to think of the Mongol world, at least until the collapse of Mongol government in Persia in the 1340s and the qa’an’s expulsion from China in 1368, as consisting of these four states. Thus a fifteenth-century history of the Mongols, purporting to have been written by Temür’s grandson Ulugh Beg, bears the title Ta’r¯ıkh-u ulu¯s-i arba a-yi Ching¯ız¯ı (‘History of the four Chinggisid uluses’), by which are meant the powers listed above.10 It must be stressed that this framework corresponded more to the realities of the early fourteenth century than to those of Chinggis Khan’s own era. Only two of the uluses allotted by the conqueror to his four sons—those of Jochi and Chaghatai—are recognizable in the khanates that emerged after 1260. Unfortunately, many modern historians tend to speak of the uluses of Chinggis Khan’s four sons in such terms as to imply either that these were cotermin- ous with the whole empire or that the subsequent development of four separate regional khanates was in accordance with the conqueror’s own design. Thus Professor Allsen, in his splendid book Mongol Imperialism, writes: ‘At Chinggis Qan’s death in 1227, the empire was formally partitioned among his eldest sons.’ Or similarly, to quote the late Professor Joseph Fletcher, ‘Chinggis Khan had divided the territory of his realm into four “nations” (ulus), which he gave to his four sons.’11 Professor Barfield has been an exception to this common tendency.12 I, alas, have not;13 and in the following paper, I want to ask what an ulus was, to investigate how many major uluses there were, to examine the emergence of uluses and khanates, and to try to offer a fresh perspective..