Karakhanid Khanate

The Karakhanid Khanate was the first Turkic dynasty to embrace Islam, ruling the oasis cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin for nearly four centuries. Its founders, Karluk and allied tribes, broke from the Uyghur Khaganate around 840 and pressed west; in 999 they took Bukhara itself and extinguished the Samanids, dividing the middle Oxus with Mahmud of Ghazna. The khan Satuq Boghra's conversion in the mid-tenth century made Islam the court religion, and Kashgar, Samarkand and Bukhara became schools of Turkic-Islamic learning: Mahmud al-Kashgari compiled his great dictionary of the Turkic dialects there, and Yusuf Balasaguni wrote his mirror for princes at Balasagun. The realm lived on the Silk Road transit between China, the steppe and Khorasan, taxing caravans rather than farming peasants. Around the mid-eleventh century the khanate split permanently into an eastern half ruled from Kashgar and a western half from Samarkand, and the two halves spent as much energy fighting each other as their neighbours. Both acknowledged the Western Liao after 1141. The east fell to the usurper Kuchlug in 1211 and the west to the Khwarezmshah in 1212, just before the Mongols swept both conquerors away. The Karakhanids left behind the first mosques and madrasas of the eastern steppe frontier and a written Turkic that outlived their state.