Kazakh Khanate rose about 1465 on post-Golden Horde steppe
The Kazakh Khanate was a Central Asian nomadic state from roughly 1465 into the early nineteenth century, emerging from Jochid and Uzbek fractures. By the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Kazakhs secured vast steppe east of major river lines. Later centuries brought decentralisation as rival leaders multiplied.
Its roots lie in the Mongol conquests. Genghis Khan, proclaimed ruler of all Mongols in 1206, gave his eldest son Jochi the lands he subdued, and after Jochi died in 1227 the inheritance passed to his sons Orda and Batu. That Ulus of Jochi, better known as the Golden Horde, slid into turmoil after 1357; Urus Khan of its eastern Kok Horde took Sarai in 1374–1375, and from 1428 the Shibanid Abu’l-Khayr built a rival eastern realm historians call the Uzbek Khanate.
Dating the break is contested. Kazakh historians accept 1465, taken from Muhammad Haidar Dughlat’s Tarikh-i Rashidi, while Russian scholarship follows Tursun Sultanov in pointing to Abu’l-Khayr’s death in 1470–1471. Eastern writers called the realm Ulus of the Kazakhs or simply Desht-i-Kipchak, sixteenth-century Mongolian texts used Togmak, and Europeans wrote Kasaki Orda and similar forms.
Under Burunduk and Kasym Khan the Kazakhs came to hold almost the whole steppe east of the Caspian and north of the Aral, reaching the upper Irtysh and the Altai foothills; many date true independence to Kasym, whose rule stretched to the Urals. It is often described as the first Central Asian nation-state founded by the modern people themselves, and it outlived the other successor states of the Jochids.
In the seventeenth century three zhuz, the Senior, Middle and Junior hordes, took shape, and after Tauke Khan died in 1715 or 1718 they behaved as separate khanates. Ablai Khan reunited them and played Russia off against China; once he died in 1781, though, St Petersburg appointed their khans and abolished the office in 1822–1824. Sultan Kasym rose in revolt from 1824 to 1827, and Kenesary Qasymuly proclaimed himself khan in 1837, fighting on until his death in 1847.
Source: Kazakh Khanate
