Chagatai Khan

Flag of Chaghtai Khan.

Map of Chaghtai Khan's rule.

In 1232, when sedition showed itself at Bukhara, he acted with promptness, if with severity, and saved his country from a far-reaching calamity.[1] He was, in all probability, an old-fashioned Mongol, for he stood by the Yassa and that he showed little favor to what was, at that time in his dominions, the comparatively new and rising religion of Islam.[1] Muslims viewed Chagatai Khan with negativity and hostility because Chagatai Khan strictly enforced Mongol Yasa law against Islamic Shariah law banning Halal animal slaughter and Islamic prayer ritual ablution as well as the Islamic legal system. The Uyghur steward Vajir was accused of poisoning Chagatai Khan to death in 1242 by his wife Yisulun.[2][3] He was fairly tolerant, however, as his minister for Transoxiana was a Muslim, called the Jumilat-ul-Mulk or Qarachar Noyan,[4] and that mosques and colleges were founded during his reign.[1] Chagatai was also never inclined towards Christianity, though that religion, as practiced by the Nestorians, must have been familiar to him.[1]

Chagatai's own capital was at Almaligh, in the valley of the Upper Ili, near the site of the present Kulja, and consequently in the extreme east of his dominion.[1] His reason for fixing it in that remote position, instead of at Bukhara or Samarkand, was probably one of necessity. His Mongol tribesmen and followers—the mainstay of his power—were passionately fond of the life of the steppes.[1] The dwellers in houses and towns were, in their eyes, a degenerate and effeminate race: the tillers of the soil, slaves who toiled like cattle, in order that their betters might pass their time in luxury. They would serve no Khan who did not pass a life worthy of free-born men and Chagatai and his immediate successors probably saw, as his later descendants are described by Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat to have seen that the one way of retaining the allegiance of his own people, was to humour their desires in this respect, and live, with them, a nomad's life.[1]

The funeral of Chagatai Khan.

Chagatai died in 1242, after a reign of about 16 years, and within the same year the death of Ogedai occurred at Karakorum.[1] Thus two out of four of the chief divisions of the Mongol empire were suddenly deprived of their sovereigns, with the result that nearly the whole of the successors of Genghis Khan began disputing for the succession.[1] However, for the time being, it ended in Turakina, Ogedai's widow, being appointed regent.[1] But lasting disputes remained among the rival claimants and for long afterward, the disputes regarding the succession to the throne of the great Khan became inextricably mixed up with the affairs, especially in the eastern part, of Chagatai's Khanate.[1]

Little is known of the way in which Chagatai disposed of his kingdom at his death, and there appears to be no mention, anywhere, of his having followed the ancestral custom of his house in distributing it among his descendants. He is recorded to have left a numerous family, but to have been succeeded by a grandson, and a minor, named Qara Hülëgü, while his widow, Ebuskun, assumed the regency.[1]

In the Baburnama written by the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur, Page 19, Chapter 1; described genealogy of his maternal grandfather Yunas Khan as:

Yunas Khan descended from Chaghatal Khan, the second son of Chlngiz Khan (as follows,) Yunas Khan, son of Wais Khan, son of Sher-'ali Aughldn, son of Muhammad Khan, son of Khizr Khwaja Khan, son of Tughluq-timur Khan, son of Aisan-bugha Khan, son of Dawa Khan, son of Baraq Khan, son of Yesuntawa Khan, son of Muatukan, son of Chaghatal Khan, son of Chingiz Khan.[8]

"Chughtai Khanates" A research project by Dr Abdul Rauf Mughal

 This article incorporates text from The Tarikh-i-rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, by Edward Denison Ross, a publication from 1895 now in the public domain in the United States.