A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

182 A history of Inner Asia
by then given the epithet Kunya (“Old’’), became a ruined site.Its
destruction had been started by Timur in 1381, but as we have remarked
in the introductory chapter, the area was not abandoned until 1576,
when the Uzboy, the northwesternmost branch of the delta, swerved its
course back to the Aral Sea instead of to the Caspian and thus left the
city waterless.
Immediately to the south of Yadigarid Khwarazm was the Kara Kum
desert, extending all the way to the oases along the Murghab and Tejen
rivers and those along the fringes of the Kopet Dagh and Balkhan
mountains.In Sasanian and early Islamic times this region had been
considered part of Khurasan, but now it was Turkmen territory, even
more turbulent than the Uzbek territory of Khwarazm and
Transoxania or the Kazakh territory of the Dasht-i Kipchak, for the
Turkmen tribes never united to form a khanate of their own on a par
with their neighbors to the north.They consisted of a number of tribes
such as Tekke, Yomud, Ersary, Chavdur, Saryq, Salar, and Göklen; the
first three were the most prominent, with the Tekke dominating the territory’s
center, the Yomud the west (including the Caspian littoral), and
the Ersary the east.Raiding Persian territories to the south had religious
merit (since people there were of the heretical Shii denomination) and
brought material rewards in the form of captives for the slave markets
of Khiva and Bukhara.
The Yadigarids were at times strong enough to encompass Turkmen
territory within their realm; on such occasions, they conceived of their
realm as consisting of two parts or sides, that of the “river” (su tarapy or
su boyu, meaning the Amu Darya), and that of the “mountains” (dagh
tarapy or dagh boyu).The northernmost part of the Amu Darya delta,
called Aral, often remained outside the Yadigarids’ control and formed
a khanate of its own, consisting of other Kipchak-speaking nomadic
tribes whose range extended from the lower Syr Darya along the eastern
shore of the Aral Sea all the way to the Amu Darya estuary.
Another special area was the territory between the Aral and Caspian
seas, whose two most important portions were known as Ust Yürt
(“Plateau”) and Mangyshlak, the large broad peninsula stretching along
the northeastern Caspian.Formerly pertaining, with Khwarazm, to the
Golden Horde, this area owed its importance to its position on the trade
routes between Transoxania and the Dasht-i Kipchak.It now lay outside
the reach of any recognizable authority, and was inhabited by a changing
mosaic of Turkmen and Kazakh tribes, serving as a corridor of
movement for these tribes between the Dasht-i Kipchak and the south.