История Ногайской Орды

The book gives, for the first time, a detailed history of the Noghay state. It investigates into the shaping of the steppe state of the Manghït Yurt, the core of the future Noghay Horde. The career of the Golden Horde ruler Edigii (Yedigei), the founder of the Noghay nobility, is being followed. The work also covers the developments that led to the independence of the Noghay Horde and its highest peak of power in the first half of the 16th c. The circumstances of the three major cases of unrest in its history (in the 1510s, 1550s and 1590s) are being looked into, and the Horde's gradual decline and fall, as well as its conflicts with the Cossacks and the Kalmyks are described. Aside from the inner history of the Noghays, the book discusses their contact with neighboring lands, including the Tartar, Central Asian and Kazakh Khanates, Russia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The sources covering the history of the Noghay Horde are sufficiently numerous and diverse. Records of the 15th — 18th cc. originating from different countries and written in a number of languages shed light on all aspects of life of that nomadic empire. As the Noghays had regular contact with Russia, the records of Moscow archives became the principal source of information for the present study. Many of said records are being introduced into the sphere of scholarly analysis for the first time. Besides, Oriental and Western sources — together with Russian chronicles and other documents — are used here as well.

As a result of the effort of several scholarly generations, a sizeable bulk of data was accumulated, which is useful for analyzing the history of the Noghay Horde. However, it was only in a very few works on history that the Noghays figured as the central object of study. They were for the vast majority of authors a mere background detail necessary for their analysis of the main topic — the history of Russia, the Kazan or Crimean Khanates, etc. Those few books that do treat of the Noghays as such are often based on outdated concepts and very inadequate sources. The situation existing in historiography could, on the whole, be described as follows: the history of the Noghay Horde was known in outline, but remained as yet unwritten. The present book is an attempt to fill this gap.

The first part of the book ("The Emergence and Disintegration of the Noghay State") deals with the political history of the Noghay Horde.

In the early 1390s, after prolonged wanderings, the Q'fpchaq tribe (el) of the Mangh'its, headed by their leader (bek) Edigii, settled in the steppes of West Kazakhstan, in the basin of the Yayi'q and the Emba. The Mangh'its established there a nomadic domain of their own, the Yurt. Given the conditions of the disintegration of the Golden Horde, the main safeguard of the new Yurt's existence was de facto the ruler of the Horde and the leader of the Mangh'it el Edigti.

Their close and regular contact with the monarchs enabled the Mangh'it aristocrats — Edigü's descendants — to secure the highest governmental post of the beklerbek and even to usurp the election of candidates to the khan's throne. A pithy expression of that prerogative can be found in the decision passed by a congress of the Mangh'it nobility regarding the possible enthronement of one of the Uzbek princes in the 1470s: "From the days of yore to this day, every khan who was pronounced [khan] by the amirs of the Mangh'its gave the amirs of the Mangh'its liberty in the land". The acquisition by the Mangh'it Yurt of political significance in Dasht-i Q'ipchaq of the second half of the 15th c. is associated with the name of Edigti's grandson, the biy (= head of the Yurt) Musa. The sundry nomadic tribes that were under his rule acquired the common name of the "Noghays".

By the early 16th c., Noghay nomadic areas united to form an entirely independent political entity that had administration, army and territory of its own. Subsequent to Musa's death (ca. 1502), the early phase of the Noghay Horde history, during which the state was regarded as part of the Khanate of the left wing of the Ulus of Jochi, came to an end.