A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

146 A history of Inner Asia
usually appears, however, as Qalmaq; Kalmyk is the form prevalent in
Russian, while in English the spelling has also appeared as Kalmuck.
The Kalmyk khans began to play a political role in Mongolia soon
after the return of the Genghisid Yüan Mongol dynasty, driven out of
China by the Ming in 1368.They only briefly and marginally rose to
positions of supremacy there, but greater fortunes awaited them farther
west, in Sinkiang and the Kipchak steppe, and even at times in Tibet and
Khwarazm.Their case of course immediately suggests an analogy with
the Genghisid Mongols.It did have similarities, but there were more fundamental
differences: the essential one being the fact that Kalmyk invasions
were of the elemental, common type resulting chiefly from
migrations of whole tribes, not a repetition of the boldly conceived,
carefully planned, yet grandiose conquests that made the events of the
thirteenth century a historically unique phenomenon.The victories,
conquests, and empires realized by the Kalmyks were only a pale shadow
of those achieved by their eastern cousins.In two respects, however, both
groups ultimately experienced a similar fate: abandoning their ancestral
shamanism, they converted to Buddhism; and they ended up paying a
heavy price, demographically, to the demands of their far-flung campaigns
and migrations and of their new religion.Moreover, the third
stage of Kalmyk expansion, directed toward China and Russia, collapsed
in part because radical transformations had begun to tilt the military
balance away from the mobile steppe nomads toward modern
armies of sedentary states equipped with artillery.
In 1456, however, the Kalmyk khan Amasanji, irrupting with his
mounted troops into Moghulistan and the Kipchak steppe, defeated the
similarly armed horsemen, first those of Yunus Khan and then those of
Abulkhayr.The Uzbek chieftain fled to Sighnaq and withstood the
Kalmyk siege, but the defeat meant a fatal blow to his prestige, and he
ceased to play the role that had held such promise for him.An additional
and specific effect of this disaster was the withdrawal of many Uzbek
tribesmen from Abulkhayr’s authority; these nomads joined the followers
of two other Genghisids, Janibeg and Girey, who had recently established
the nucleus of a new khanate farther to the northeast, deeper
within the territory of the former White Horde in what is now central
Kazakhstan.These rebel Uzbeks came to be known as Kazakhs, a word
believed by some to have the same etymology as the Russian “kazak”
and the English “Cossack.” Later, when contacts between Russians and
Kazakhs intensified in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
“Qazaq” sounded to the Russians too much like “Kazak,” and by the