JUNKO MIYAWAKI (Tokyo, Japan)

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 I descendants of Chinggis Khan were entitled to be khans.' 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 DzungarKhanate Really Exist?,"Journal of the Anglo-MongolianSociety 10 (1987): 1-5; idem, "On the OyiradKhanship," Aspects of 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: of Eotcvos Lorand 239-43. Further discussions HungarianAcademy Sciences, Univ., 1992): ' are found also in still unpublished papers:"TheLegitimacy of Khanship among the Oyirad (Kalmyk)Tribes in relation to the ChinggisidPrinciple," read at the InternationalSeminar on the Mongol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 Birth of the Khongtayiji Viceroyalty in the Mongol-Oyirad World,"read at the 34th Meeting of the PermanentInternational Altaistic Conference, Berlin, July 21-26, 1991.Section 6 of the present article 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.Sections 2, 3 and 5 of the present article are based on Junko Miyawaki, "Mongoru-kei minzoku" (The Mongolic Peoples), Minzokuno Sekaishi4 :Chuo Yurashiano Sekai (WorldHistory of Peoples,vol. 4: The Central Eurasian World) (Tokyo: YamakawaShuppan Sha. 1990), 271-394. The quotations from Chinese sourceshave been taken from this book. .

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