Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (48 page)

With their main local enemies out of the way, there were few obstacles to Russian expansion eastward. What drove the expansion was primarily commerce—above all, the fur trade. Moreover, the Russians were a people of the forest and mixed forest-steppe zones. By expanding eastward through that zone in northern Central Eurasia, they avoided confronting the powerful steppe peoples on their own territory.
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Using the many rivers and their tributaries as highways, they continued their march eastward. Following the Lena River into the northeast they established Yakutsk in 1632 and, turning east, reached the Pacific Ocean and established the first Russian settlement there, Okhotsk, in 1647.
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The Russians also moved east of Lake Baikal to the Amur River basin. In 1651 they stormed a local town, Albazin, located on the upper Amur where the river turns south. They built and garrisoned a fort on the site and began settling colonists there. The Manchus, who had at that point barely established their authority in China, considered the territory to be theirs due to campaigns of conquest undertaken by Hung Taiji between 1641 and 1643.
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They strenuously objected to the Russian actions. When diplomacy did not succeed, the Manchus finally attacked and captured Albazin in 1685. The Russians were forced to cede the territory to the Manchus in the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689,
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but they gained trade concessions from the Manchus and continued to maintain themselves at Okhotsk on the Pacific coast.

In other directions, the Russian Empire expanded northwestward into the Finnic-speaking areas of the eastern Baltic. Peter the Great (1672–1725 [r. 1682/1696–1725])
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defeated the Swedes there in 1703 and founded St. Petersburg, giving the Russians a western port, which he also made the capital of the empire. With this foothold on the Baltic, he immediately ordered construction of a large fleet. The Russians used it to defeat the powerful Swedish navy in 1714, securing and expanding Russian possession of the region.
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After their defeat of the Ottoman Empire’s forces by land and by sea in 1769–1770, the Russians finally incorporated the Crimea into their empire (in 1783). The Black Sea became Russia’s southern border.
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The Russians established a Black Sea fleet, with its home in their new port of Kherson, at the mouth of the Dnieper River.

With four coasts—the Black, Baltic, Arctic, and Okhotsk seas—under their control the Russians then began expanding southward into the Caucasus and the steppe zone.

THE MANCHU-CHINESE EMPIRE OF THE CH’ING DYNASTY

In 1616 Nurhachi (Nurhači, 1559–1626), the leader of the Jurchen in southern Manchuria north of Liaotung, established a Chinese-style dynasty, the Later Chin, named after the Chin Dynasty of his Jurchen forebears. In 1618 he captured Liaotung from the Ming Chinese and in 1625 moved his capital south to Mukden (Shenyang). In 1636 his son and successor Hung Taiji (1592–1643) changed the dynasty’s name to Ch’ing (’Clear’) and in 1635 adopted a new ethnonym, Manju (Manju) ‘Manchu’, apparently after the name of the Bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañju-śrî ‘Lord Mañju’.
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In that year a rebellion broke out against the crumbling Ming, and Peking was taken by the rebels. The Ming government invited the Manchu prince-regent Dorgon in to help quell the rebellion. He defeated the rebels and captured Peking in 1644, but found that the Ming had already collapsed in North China, so instead of returning to Manchuria, the Manchus began their conquest of China, which they completed in 1662.
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Like their Jurchen Chin ancestors, and unlike the Mongols, the Manchus were willing to adopt Chinese culture, at least in order to learn better how to rule China.
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Although they generally did not allow ethnic Chinese to hold the highest administrative positions in the Manchu Empire, Chinese officials were allowed to rise to the level of a provincial governorship within China itself. Like the Mongols before them, the Manchus distinguished between “China” and “the whole Empire,” but unlike the Mongols and the Yüan Dynasty, the Manchus and the Chinese considered the Ch’ing Dynasty to be that which ruled the entire empire. Nevertheless, the Manchus also used dynastic marriages, personal oaths of vassalage, and religious connections to cement their relationships with Central Eurasians, whose territories were mostly not incorporated into the Ch’ing Dynasty system as provinces, with the notable and very late exception of East Turkistan, which was made a province, Sinkiang (Xinjiang ‘New Territory’) shortly before the end of the dynasty. The fusion of Manchus and Chinese was rapid and eventually total. The combination produced a powerful Manchu-Chinese
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state.

The Manchus were efficient, energetic rulers. Under Ch’ing rule, China grew quickly in population, and due to the conquests in Central Eurasia, the territory dominated by the dynasty grew greatly in extent. Like the Europeans who had reached China overland during the Mongol Empire period, the first Europeans to arrive by sea in the late Ming and early Ch’ing periods were astounded by the country’s prosperity and high cultural level, which they considered to be far ahead of Europe’s. But by this time the Europeans already had some technology that was ahead of anything known in China. Recognizing this, the K’ang-hsi Emperor, perhaps the most intelligent of all Manchu rulers, patronized some of the Europeans, particularly the Jesuits, who introduced traditional European mathematical astronomy in the seventeenth century.
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When Manchu-Chinese power eventually began to decline, and European power in Asia increased, the Ch’ing came to see the Europeans as a military and political threat.

THE JUNGHAR EMPIRE

Following the defeat of the Noghay Horde by the Russians, the Western Mongols or Oirats who had been part of its confederation were freed and began expanding into its territory. In 1591 the Russians granted them the right to trade duty-free in Tara and the other towns of Russian Siberia at the Oirats’ northern frontier, and some did reach Tara in 1606. In 1607–1608, some of the western Oirat leaders submitted formally to the Russian emperor, expecting him to defend them against their enemies the Kazakhs and the Eastern Mongols. However, the chief of the Junghars, Khara Khula Khan (d. 1634 or 1635)—a descendant of Esen Taiši (r. 1443–1454, Khan 1453–1454), who had united the Oirats briefly in the previous century
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—gradually built his prestige and power within a new Oirat confederation, beginning in 1608–1609. Because Russia was undergoing a period of political instability known as the Time of Troubles, the Oirat leaders broke with Russia. When the Russians recovered a few years later (electing as the new emperor Michael Romanov, who founded the Romanov Dynasty), they sent Cossack forces to attack the Oirats and forced them to retreat south in 1612–1613. Following a disastrous winter and a major victory over them by the Eastern Mongols, the Oirats lost much territory and again submitted to the Russians for peace and protection. But the Russians did not produce the expected help against the Eastern Mongols, and by 1623 the Oirats abandoned the Russian agreement. In that year the unified Oirat forces under the command of their titular khan, Baibaghas, who was chief of the powerful Khoshuts, attacked the Eastern Mongols under Ombo Erdeni Khan (d. 1659)
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and won an indecisive victory. At this time, some of the Oirats—particularly the Torgut—remained implacably opposed to the formation of a unified state; they migrated westward as far as the lower Volga and across it into the North Caucasus Steppe, where they entered into a tributary relationship with the Russian emperor. Another unified Oirat campaign against Ombo Erdeni in 1628–1629 led to victory, and Oirat territory in Jungharia and East Turkistan was once again returned to their control.
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In 1630 the Oirat khan, Baibaghas, died and was succeeded by the Khoshut leader Gushi Khan (d. 1655). He and Khara Khula Khan cemented a family alliance by the marriage of Gushi Khan’s daughter to Khara Khula’s son and heir Baatur Khungtaiji (r. 1635–1653). Khara Khula Khan took the title of Khan himself in 1634, but because he did not belong to the Chinggisid line, many Mongols opposed this move and killed him the following year.
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This seems not to have affected the family alliance at first. Gushi Khan,
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and Khara Khula’s son and successor Baatur campaigned together against the Kazakhs in 1634–1635.
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But Gushi Khan, who was a Chinggisid, remained an obstacle to Baatur’s goal of achieving a unified Junghar Empire. When Coghtu Taiji, a follower of Ligdan Khan (d. 1634), who had been attacking Dgelugspa monasteries in the Kokonor region, sent his son with an army against Lhasa, the Fifth Dalai Lama asked for help. Gushi Khan then led some 100,000 Khoshut on a campaign against Coghtu Taiji in 1636,
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and early in 1637 crushed his forces. In the same year he sent a mission to the Manchu emperor in China,
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and in 1642 was rewarded for his deeds by the Fifth Dalai Lama, who appointed him Khan of Tibet.
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Although the southern Mongols had been incorporated into the Manchu Empire by 1634, and in 1635 the Manchus had set up the Mongol Banners in what later became Inner Mongolia,
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the Manchus themselves were still barely established in China. Until they caught and executed the last legitimate claimant to the Ming throne in 1662,
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the Manchus remained focused on eliminating all opposition to them in China. Their policy toward Central Eurasia at that time was thus pacifist and noninterventionist toward nearly all factions.

The economy of Central Eurasia, including transcontinental trade, prospered once again under the Junghars.
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In 1641 Baatur negotiated solutions to conflicts with the Russians and gained access to duty-free trade at Tobolsk, Tara, and Tomsk. These towns prospered from the trade and drew “Bukharan” merchants from Islamic Central Asia, who served as intermediaries.
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He also built a small fortified capital city and Buddhist monastery at Kubak Zar between Lake Yamish and the Irtysh River, and several other towns, and brought peasants from Central Asia to cultivate agricultural fields around them. The Junghar capital grew into a major commercial center, where horses, Chinese products, slaves, metals, textiles, glass, and other goods changed hands. The settlement around Lake Yamish “became the largest trading center in Siberia until the designation of Kiakhta as the China trade center in 1689.”
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Baatur had accomplished much in his lifetime, but when he died in 1653, his son and heir Sengge and his other sons fought. The Junghar realm weakened due to the internal strife and Sengge’s increasing hostility toward the Russians.
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Finally Sengge was killed in 1670. His brother Galdan (b. 1644, r. 1671-April 4, 1697), who was a Buddhist monk and had long lived in a Tibetan monastery, renounced his vows and returned home. He executed the brothers who had killed Sengge. He also defeated and killed his father-in-law, the leader of the Khoshuts, in 1676 or 1677; suppressed the rebellion that followed, securing his control over power; and restored good relations with Russia.
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The Oirats had finally succeeded in building the Junghar Empire, the first major steppe realm since the Mongols of Chinggis Khan.

A Eurasian Renaissance

The Renaissance occurred not only in Western Europe but throughout the Eurasian continent. In many respects it represents the artistic and intellectual apogee of Central Eurasia. While the European achievements in art, architecture, and music are well known, the achievements of the Islamic world, especially in Western Central Asia, Persia, and northern India, and of the Buddhist world, especially in Tibet, are much less well known.

In the Islamic world, the Renaissance had begun at the time of Tamerlane, when Persian poetry attained perfection in the works of Hâfiẓ. Islamic miniature painting reached its height with the greatest Islamic miniature painter, Bihzad (ca. 1450/1460–ca. 1535), and others of the Timurid school of Herat. In 1522 Shâh Ismâ’îl, who patronized the arts in general, especially miniature painting and architecture, brought Bihzad from Herat to Tabriz. Bihzad introduced the Timurid school of miniature painting and trained a new generation of artists. Together they produced some of the greatest miniature paintings in the Islamic tradition. Shâh Tahmasp was also a patron of Islamic miniature painting, literature, and manuscript production. The most long-lasting accomplishment of Shâh ‘Abbâs was the building of a new capital at Isfahan, located in south-central Iran. Its plan was based on the Timurid city plan, with a huge central public square or
maidân
surrounded by beautiful mosques, bazaars, and palaces.

The Persian variant of the Timurid architectural style was brought to perfection in the gemlike buildings of Isfahan. Similarly, the Ottomans blended Islamic and Byzantine architectural forms to produce grand mosques and other monuments in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Islamic world, monastic orders grew in numbers and influence, with the accompanying construction of monasteries or
khânqâ,
and other buildings. Mendicant orders and pilgrimage to saints’ shrines also became widespread, necessitating the construction of caravanserais and the expansion and beautification of the shrines.