Chagatai Khanate

The Chagatai Khanate, the Ulus of Chagatai, was the Mongol khanate of Central Asia, allotted to the second son of Genghis Khan and his seed. From Almaliq it watched the Silk Road cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim. Its Mongol ruling houses slowly turned Turkic in speech and Muslim in faith, yet kept the yasa customs of the steppe administration. In 1346 the khanate split in two: the west, sitting on Samarkand and Bukhara, sank by 1369 into a puppet of Timur, whose khan line guttered out in 1402, while the east, Moghulistan, wandered between Almaliq, Kashgar and Turfan under its own khans. The eastern main line, latterly the Turfan khans, broke in 1570 when its last khan was taken by Yarkent, itself of Chagatai blood; most historians count Yarkent apart, though it carried the line to about 1700, when the Dzungars swallowed it. The Chagatai tongue the khanate spread across Central Asia lives on in Uzbek and Uyghur.