A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Chaghatayids 121
have discussed the transformation of that area from a partly settled
urban and agricultural country into the grazing grounds of nomadic
tribes: the new name was symbolic of the change.This development
presented a sharp contrast to Transoxania and Khurasan, where no or
little such change took place.It was thus no accident that this cleavage
eventually took on a political form: by 1370 a Muslim Turk, Timur, had
seized effective power in Transoxania and had founded a dynasty that
brought an end to Chaghatayid rule there; in Moghulistan and Sinkiang,
on the other hand, Chaghatayid khans ruled until the seventeenth
century.Timur’s emergence in 1370 can thus be considered another
watershed in the history of Central Asia, a formal end to Mongol hegemony
that had begun a century and a half earlier with the conquest led
by Genghis Khan.During the fourteenth century, this hegemony collapsed
or began to falter all over the once unified Mongol empire.In
China the last khan of the Yüan dynasty, Toghon Temür (1333–70), was
driven out by a national resurgence spearheaded by Chu Yüan-chang, a
peasant who then became, as Hong-wu, the first emperor of the native
Ming dynasty (1368–1644).In the Golden Horde, the rule of Janibeg
(1341–57) was followed by years of turmoil and infighting that in 1380
enabled the Russians to win their first great victory over the Mongols:
this was the “Battle on the Kulikovo field,” or also “on the Don river,”
hence the epithet “Donskoy” by which Prince Dimitriy of Moscow, the
victor over the Mongol khan Mamay, has been known in chronicles and
popular memory.In Iran, the Ilkhanid dynasty had collapsed even
earlier when Abu Said’s death in 1335 led to convulsions that by 1353
extinguished Mongol rule there.Gradually areas ruled by people who
claimed Genghisid ancestry, spoke Mongolian, and had not become
Muslims shrank back to Mongolia proper and, up to a point,
Moghulistan; even there, however, Islam demonstrated its resilient dynamism
by eventually reasserting itself and resuming its spread farther east
and over the rest of Sinkiang: for with Tughluq Timur (1347–63), the
conversion of the Chaghatayid khans became definitive.Some of them,
such as Mansur (1502–43) took up the jihad, aimed chiefly at eastern
Sinkiang, as the major mission of their reign; it was during this period
that formerly Buddhist places like Turfan definitively entered the Dar al-
Islam.By then, however, even these Mongol tribes of Moghulistan and
Sinkiang had probably become Turkicized linguistically; in this they followed
the example of most of the other remaining dynasties claiming
Genghisid ancestry except for those in Mongolia.In Transoxania, the