page_title: Moghulistan
section_title: Moghulistan
hierarchical_section_title: Moghulistan / History / Moghulistan
caption_attribution_description: English: The map showing the Eastern Chagatai Khanate (Moghulistan) as of the year 1372 AD. 中文: 1372年东察合台汗国地图
context_page_description: Moghulistan, also called the Eastern Chagatai Khanate, was a Mongol breakaway khanate of the Chagatai Khanate and a historical geographic area north of the Tengri Tagh mountain range, on the border of Central Asia and East Asia. That area today includes parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and northwest Xinjiang, China. The khanate nominally ruled over the area from the mid-14th century until the late 17th century, although it is debated whether it was a continuation of the Chagatai Khanate, an independent khanate, or a tributary state to Ming Dynasty China.
  Beginning in the mid-14th century a new khanate, in the form of a nomadic tribal confederacy headed by a member of the family of Chagatai, arose in the region of the Ili River. It is therefore considered to be a continuation of the Chagatai Khanate, but it is also referred to as the Moghul Khanate.
  In actuality, local control rested with local Mongol Dughlats or Sufi Naqshbandi in their respective oases. Although the rulers enjoyed great wealth from the China trade, it was beset by constant civil war and invasions by the Timurid Empire, which emerged from the western part of the erstwhile Chagatai Khanate.
context_section_description: Arguments about succession resulted in the breakup of the Mongol Empire in Asia into the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) in China, Ilkhanate in Persia, and Golden Horde in Russia, which waged destructive wars with one another. After the Han Chinese united and expelled the Mongols from China, establishing the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), Yuan Mongol refugees, principally of the Borjigin clan, migrated to the eastern Chagatai Khanate. Those Mongols allied with the nomadic Buddhist, Christian and Shamanist rebels of the Issyk Kul and Isi areas against the Chagatai Khan Tarmashirin in the 1330s upon his conversion to Islam. This Khan and his heirs ruled a region of nomadic tribesmen and oasis-dwellers from the 14th to the 17th century. Moghulistan, which had formed the eastern portion of the Chagatai Khanate, became independent in 1347 under the Chagatayid named Tughlugh Timur. There is no accepted date for the dissolution of the Chagatai Khanate, although some historians mark it with the ascendance of Tughlugh. There were few contemporary histories of Moghulistan, in contrast to the well-documented Timurid Empire; most of modern knowledge about the region comes from the Tarikh-i-Rashidi.
  The eastern regions of the Chagatai Khanate in the early 14th century had been inhabited by a number of Mongol nomadic tribes. These tribes resented the conversion of Tarmashirin to Islam and the move of the khan to the sedentary areas of Transoxiana. They were behind the revolt that ended in Tarmashirin's death. One of the khans that followed Tarmashirin, Changshi, favored the east and was non-Muslim.
  In the 1340s as a series of ephemeral khans struggled to hold power in Transoxiana, little attention was paid by the Chagatayids to the eastern regions. As a result, the eastern tribes there were virtually independent. The most powerful of the tribes, the Dughlats, controlled extensive territories in Moghulistan and the western Tarim Basin. In 1347 the Dughlats decided to appoint a khan of their own, and raised the Chagatayid Tughlugh Timur to the throne.
  Tughlugh Timur (1347–1363) was thereby made the head of a tribal confederacy that governed the Tarim Basin and the steppe area of Moghulistan (named after the Moghuls). His reign was contemporaneous with the series of puppet khans that ruled in Transoxiana, meaning that there were now effectively two khanates headed by Chagatayids: one in the west, centered in Transoxiana, and one in the east, centered in Moghulistan. Unlike the khans in the west, however, Tughlugh Timur was a strong ruler who converted to Islam (1354) and sought to reduce the power of the Dughlats. In 1360 he took advantage of a breakdown of order in Transoxiana and his legitimacy as descendant of Chagatai Khan to invade the region and take control of it, thereby temporarily reuniting the two khanates. Despite invading a second time in 1361 and appointing his son Ilyas Khoja as governor of Transoxiana, however, Tughlugh Timur was unable to keep a lasting hold on the region, and the Moghuls were ultimately expelled by Amir Husayn and Timur, who then fought amongst themselves for control of Transoxiana.
  Tughlugh Timur also later converted to Islam, whose concepts of ummah, ghazat (holy war), and jihad inspired his territorial expansionism into Transoxiana. The conversion was also politically convenient in that he branded the dissident princes which he killed as "heathens and idolaters". Conversion amongst the general population was slow to follow. Timur appointed his son, Ilyas Khoja, Khan.
  Chagatayid rule in Moghulistan was temporarily interrupted by the coup of the Dughlat amir Qamar ud-Din, who likely killed Ilyas Khoja in 1368 and several other Chagatayids. The Moghuls that remained obedient to him were constantly at war with Timur, who invaded Moghulistan several times but was unable to force its inhabitants into submission. A Chagatayid restoration occurred in the 1380s, but the Dughlats retained an important position within the khanate; for the next forty years they installed several khans of th
caption: The map showing the Eastern Chagatai Khanate (Moghulistan) as of the year 1372 AD.
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