Kazakh Khanate

The Kazakh Khanate ruled the Central Asian steppe from about 1465 to 1847, the first state of the Kazakh people. Around 1465 two sultans, Janibek and Kerei, led their clans away from the Uzbek khan Abu'l-Khayr into the Chu valley, and the runaways they gathered were first called Kazakhs, adventurers. Under Kasym Khan in the early fifteen hundreds the khanate took Turkestan's holy cities, wrote the first Kazakh code of laws, and counted a million people in its felt tents. Society was organised in three zhuz, great hordes of the west, centre and southeast, each pasturing its own rivers. The Oirats and then the Dzungars pressed from the east for a century; in 1723 the Dzungar invasion drove whole hordes west in the calamity remembered as the Barefooted Flight. Ablai Khan played Russia against China for forty years to keep independence, accepting both emperors' titles while obeying neither. His successors could not repeat the trick: Russia built forts along the steppe rivers, taxed the nomads' herds, and in 1847 killed Kenesary, the last khan to resist, ending nearly four centuries of Kazakh rule and opening the colonial history of modern Kazakhstan.