A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The last Timurids and the first Uzbeks 145
nomads of the Dasht-i Kipchak; by then this transformation may have
taken hold even among the Moghuls, the Chaghatayids of Moghulistan.
The tribes under his leadership, most of which spoke the Kipchak form
of Turkic, had their own lineages and appellations, but they were also
known by the general name of Uzbek, a word whose origin is a matter
of debate; it may indeed derive from Uzbek (or, more correctly, Özbeg),
khan of the Golden Horde who ruled from 1312 to 1341.Abulkhayr
spent the early years of his reign still deep in the steppe as khan of Tura
and Sibir, rivers and sites just east of the southern Urals; but in 1431 he
swept down beyond the Syr Darya all the way to Khwarazm, where he
seized the city of Urgench.This was a rather eccentric expedition
without lasting results, except as a precedent and proof of what the vigorous
nomads of the steppe were still capable of doing.The aforementioned
intervention of 1451 that enabled Abu Said to win the Timurid
succession in Samarkand was another demonstration of that vigor, and
a preview of a still bolder step that Abulkhayr’s grandson Muhammad
would take half a century later.Abulkhayr, however, perhaps still under
the spell of Timurid prestige, contented himself with moving the political
center of his fiefdom to the right bank of the Syr Darya, where he
secured several key fortified towns and chose one of them, Sighnaq, as
his headquarters.The Uzbek khan’s move made him the immediate
neighbor of Timurid Transoxania and put him almost as close to
Chaghatayid Moghulistan.The implications or potentials of this situation
were, however, suddenly thrown into confusion by the irruption of
the Kalmyks.
This was the first of the three major invasions of these nomads from
the east.The second took place a century later, and the third in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.The Kalmyks were Mongols, but
of a group that differed from those of Genghis Khan in the dialects they
spoke and in the territories they ultimately inhabited; hence also the designation
“Western Mongols,” which the Kalmyks and related tribes have
received in linguistic literature.Once again, the application of their
several ethnonyms is rather confusing and abitrary; Oirats, Ölöts,
Jungars are genuinely Mongol names, whereas Kalmyk has Turkic etymology;
we prefer it here for several reasons.First of all, only those
Western Mongols who penetrated into Central Asia and southern Russia
are normally associated with this name (those who stayed farther east
and had contacts, both peaceful and bellicose, with Eastern Mongols
and China are usually called Oirats or Jungars); it is also for this reason
that Kalmyk is the term most often found in Muslim sources, where it