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Ethnic and Racial Studies

ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

Multi-ethnic Empires and the formulation ofidentity

Beatrice Manz

To cite this article:Beatrice Manz (2003) Multi-ethnic Empires and the formulation of identity,

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26:1, 70-101, DOI: 10.1080/01419870022000025289

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870022000025289

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Multi-ethnic Empires and the

formulation of identity

Beatrice F. Manz

Abstract

This article explores the effect of multi-ethnic empires on the formulationof identity, examining particularly identities developed before the modern

period. Imperial state structures and legitimation influenced the under-standing of ethnic identities; the resulting definitions and expectations oftenoutlived the empire. Modern European nationalism developed from thegroup feeling and ideologies of medieval and early modern Europe, influ-enced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In western and central Asia large-scale secular identities also existed in the pre-modern period within severalgreat empires: the Islamic caliphate, the Mongol Empire, and the RussianEmpire. In these states, the connections made between various markers ofidentity language, origin, and territory were unlike those in Europe, andthe expectations connected with separate identity were also different.

Despite the spread of European nationalism and the creation of modernnation-states throughout these regions, earlier systems of identity havesurvived and influenced the form of modern national sentiment.

Keywords: Empires; identity; nationalism; Central Asia; caliphate; MongolEmpire.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Yugoslavia have re-focused attention on two topics of interest to historians: the formulationof secular identities and the legacy of multi-national empires. In thisarticle I shall trace the interaction between empire and identity over timeand space, looking particularly at identities developed outside of Europeand before the modern period. In order to analyse the development andmeaning of such group loyalties, I move away from some of the concernswhich have dominated recent discussion of communal sentiment.Scholars have most often explored national movements as they devel-oped in Europe and spread to the rest of the world; for the modern worldthese are seen as the primary form of political and ethnic solidarity. For

some time scholars were divided between those who viewed national

2003 Taylor & Francis LtdISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI:10.1080/01419870022000025289

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sentiment as a modern and constructed identity, and those who con-sidered it natural and primordial.

A few recent investigators have abandoned the modernist perspectivebut continue to see the nation as a construct, and these scholars have

traced the history of national sentiment and imperial structures as theydeveloped in medieval Europe. (For example, Hastings 1997) Most com-parative and theoretical writing still analyses communal loyalties of thepast primarily in relation to the modern nation of the European type,with the goal of indicating how past identities pre-shadowed the nation(Eley and Suny 1996, pp. 45, 1819; Smith 1996, pp. 10631). In studiesof empire and its connection to identity, the state that has particularlyinfluenced views of multi-ethnic empires is also European: the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose breakup created the map of modern Europe.

The most detailed examinations of early national identity have con-centrated on Europe, and a number of scholars of the non-Westernworld have protested against the imposition of Western or moderncategories on peoples distant in time and space. Writers reacting againstthe historiography of nation-building argue that at least outside ofEurope no national or proto-national identities existed in the past, andthat to trace their development is a distortion of history.1 Many haveargued that identity centred around religion, tribe, clan or village, andthat intermediate communities held little meaning. However, for

historians of the Asian continent in the medieval period the denial oflarge-scale secular identities does not offer a solution, because such com-munities are constantly referred to in our sources. In the Islamic worldfor instance we read of Turks, Tajiks (Persian speakers), Arabs, Kurds,and Kazakhs; these identities clearly had importance for the people ofthe period. Since these groups were recognized entities, we must attemptto find out what they meant and we must do so within the context oftheir own time.

If we examine earlier identities primarily to determine their relationto nationalism, to class them as either national or non-national, or assub-national, supra-national or proto-national, we risk missing thepolitical meaning that identities held for people whose loyalties werequite simply unrelated to a national framework.2 In this article, I proposeto abandon issues of classification, and to step back from both the nation-state and nationalism, to examine the formation of long-lasting groupidentities which had both political and communal importance. Many ofthese had a number of the markers we are familiar with in modernnationalism of the European type common history, language and per-ceived affinities. They differed sharply from modern national identities

not so much in size as in the connections perceived between variousethnic markers and the expectation aroused by common communalfeeling.

One crucial element in the formation of pre-modern identities was

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their function within the multi-ethnic empires which used to controlmuch of the world. State structures and systems of imperial legitimationinfluenced the formation and understanding of ethnic identities; theresulting definitions and the expectations attached to them could outlive

the empire itself, and survive within another system. I would suggest thatthe imprint of earlier imperial systems of thought still exists in manyparts of the world and continues to colour perceptions of identity, defi-nitions of difference, and expectations of community. The importance ofhistory in the formation of nationalism helps to preserve earlier imperialconcepts within states of a far different structure.

Although state and imperial systems of Europe fostered the develop-ment of a nationalist sentiment which has now spread throughout muchof the world, the resulting understandings of nation may not be identi-

cal to those in Europe. The centrality of the Austro-Hungarian exampleto European experience and the spread of nationalism in the modernworld should not blind us to the reality and importance of other typesof structure and of identity. The new states formed in western and centralAsia in the twentieth century emerged from several major imperial tra-ditions which interacted to form a powerful set of identities and expec-tations. The formation of the Islamic caliphate in the seventh centurycreated a new framework for the understanding of difference and ofallegiance; in the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire first threatened

this system and then adopted much of its structure and ideology. TheRussian Empire, developing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, fellheir to much of the Mongol legacy, and thus indirectly to the Islamic.Finally, when the Soviets reconstituted the Russian Empire, they pre-served many of its systems and ideas. Just as the traces of the medievalEuropean states and the Austro-Hungarian empire still exist, so too dothe different traditions developed in the empires of western Asia.

The Habsburg Empire

Let me start with the familiar European experience, the one from whichwe wish to move away. As nationalism intensified and more peoples

joined the ranks of conscious nationalities, Europe watched the dramaplayed out in its one local multi-national empire. When political thinkersof the nineteenth and early twentieth century turned their attention tonational demands, they took Austria-Hungary as their example, and sawits problems as the ones to be solved. The empires collapse during WorldWar I opened the way for the formation of the political map of twenti-eth-century Eastern and Southeastern Europe.3 We should recognize the

influence of the Austro-Hungarian example on thinking and policies atthe turn of the century, but we need not ourselves accept it as thedefining standard of a multi-national empire; in fact, if we compare it toempires elsewhere, we find it interestingly atypical.

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The Habsburg state originated from the Holy Roman Empire of themiddle ages, and combined an imperial ideology derived from Romewith legal legitimation derived from numerous smaller polities. (Kann1977, pp. 711; Ingrao 1994, pp. 26) The empire was built on the local

structures of Europe, where early medieval expansion had createdregions with strong local traditions of rulership, law and custom (Bartlett1993, pp. 35, 12330, 16771, 197220). After 1438 the crown of the HolyRoman Empire was held almost exclusively by the members of theHabsburg house, who used it to enhance their prestige while continuingto amass territory. At the time that the Habsburgs rose to pre-eminence,much of Europe was organized in composite monarchies whichcombined two or more separate regions, each possessing its own crown,a landed nobility with inherited rights, and local laws. One monarch

could most easily achieve power over several territories not by abolish-ing their separate crowns which could provoke resistance but byholding several crowns at once, serving simultaneously as king of oneregion and perhaps archduke of another. The ruler remained dependenton the loyalty of subordinate regional powers and was pledged to upholdtheir laws. (Elliott 1992, pp. 505) The Habsburgs acquired some regionsthrough marriage, some through a combination of diplomacy andpressure. Most lands came into the dynastys possession already formed,retaining their political structures and individual legitimacy as duchies,

principalities, or kingdoms. Within each a local diet of hereditary nobles,ecclesiastical officials and townsmen represented their estates, formallyrecognized the power of the ruler, and together symbolized the status ofthe region as a political and historical entity, with separate laws andcustoms.4

The empire of the Habsburgs was exceptional in Europe not for itsstructure, but for the length of time that it lasted as a composite state.While most other European states centralized in the course of the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, the difficulties and costs of the endeav-our were readily apparent in rebellions and continued resentment fromregions stripped of what they considered their legal and historic rights(Elliott 1992, pp. 638). The Habsburgs retained their composite struc-ture through the nineteenth century, and continued to include peoplesof different languages, customs and history. Although the claim to thetitle of Holy Roman Emperor was not abandoned until 1806, the mosteffective legitimation of the empire remained regional and mosaic, basedon the acceptance of the emperor as ruler of separate provinces. Severalregions such as Bohemia and Hungary had originated as kingdoms, witha founding myth centred around the conversion of a ruler, immortalized

as a patron saint; even after the suppression of many Bohemian rightsin the seventeenth century, the Habsburg ruler had himself crownedKing of Bohemia in the cathedral of Prague (Macartney 1962, pp. 1015;Merinsky and Meznik 1998, pp. 3951; Slma 1998, 327).



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Even with greater centralization in the eighteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian emperors hesitated to deny the legitimacy of all local dietsand historic titles, preferring to use formal recognition by componentparts of the empire to enhance the legitimacy of the whole. (Taylor 1948,

pp. 1417; Kann 1977, pp. 5960) To placate nationalist sentiments andbolster their central position, Habsburg rulers in the nineteenth centuryrevived some local ceremonials of rule (Taylor 1948, pp. 4751, 55). Thetitles borne by the last Habsburg monarch, Franz Joseph, give a vividillustration of the structural basis of the empire:

Franz Joseph I, by Gods grace Emperor of Austria, King of Hungaryand Bohemia, king of Lombardy and Venice, of Dalmatia, Croatia,Slavonia, Galizia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, etc.;

Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Krakow, Duke ofLothringen and Salzburg, . . .

and so on for about twenty more regions, followed by lesser titles andregions in equal number (Bezecny 1908, p. 11). By the twentieth centurymost of these titles may have been anachronistic, but the fiction stillmattered.

The development of nation-states in western Europe presented amodel for the smaller nationalities of eastern Europe. In the declining

years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, peoples seeking autonomy andlocal privileges based their demands on the sovereignty and sanctity ofthe medieval kings who had defined their regions, or on the historicprivileges granted to local hereditary nobility (Taylor 1948, pp. 2830;Sperber 1994, p. 98; Evans 2000, p. 188). For nobles and many emergentnationalists the possession of local legitimacy served to bolster adeveloping national identity in which language, historical communityand region were closely connected. The European formulation of nationand identity gave high priority also to another trait the possession ofa written vernacular language. The political importance of languageappears to have begun in the Middle Ages, where we see the growingprestige of conquest languages and occasionally an appeal to commonlanguage to justify political alliances (Bartlett 1993, pp. 198202). Thepossession of a written language, most notably English, German, orFrench, came to be a defining attribute of a ruling nation and was some-times imposed on related subject peoples as a sign of their subordinationto the centre (Hobsbawm 1990, p. 37; Elliott 1992, pp. 656; Hastings1997, pp. 39, 457, 68, 72, 99).

Within the Habsburg monarchy, German was the language of govern-

ment and most of the governing class. Two other developed languages,Italian and Hungarian, were recognized as languages of high culture andhistorical importance, while most of the numerous and less developedSlavic languages within the empire, like Czech, Serbian, or Slovenian,

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held lower status. Within much of eastern Europe, the master lan-guages were those of the landed aristocracy and the urban middle class,who formed the elite over a largely Slavic agricultural population. Withthe rise of nationalism among the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy in

the nineteenth century, the right to the development of local literary lan-guages took a prominent place. Education and the publication of textsin the vernacular became a common demand from the Revolutions of1848 onwards, and the existence of historical rights, laws and corporateidentities served to justify such demands (Taylor 1948, pp. 23, 517, 626;Havrnek 2000, pp. 124130).

As I have shown, the political development of Europe fostered aparticular set of connections among social, political and ethnic traitswhich became central to modern European nationalism. Formal written

language came to be associated with political power, and ancient king-ships with modern political aspirations. Within the heterogeneous landsof the Habsburgs the accepted markers of identity language, territory,corporate history and common customary practices very often failedto match. In the Kingdom of Bohemia both German and Czech tra-ditions were deeply rooted, while the Hungarian crown of St. Stephenincluded lands inhabited by Magyars and numerous Slavic populations.Nonetheless, the components of national identity were too widelyaccepted to be discarded. Discrepancies in the territory inhabited by the

speakers of a language and the historical sovereignty that they claimedled to conflict and repression or to imaginative administrative proposals,but not to a rethinking of the formulation of nationality or of the legit-imacy of the idea. The regionally based structure which I have describedwas not like that of most empires; indeed for those of us used to readingnon-European history, the Habsburg empire looks peculiar, almost non-imperial. If we are to understand the legacy of identity left by more fullyuniversalistic empires, we should leave the Austro-Hungarian experi-ence behind us and investigate different structures and ideologies.

The Islamic caliphate

The development of the Islamic caliphate produced a less regional ideo-logical structure, in which language and local identities played a verydifferent role. When in 634 the Arabs emerged from the Arabian penin-sula to conquer half of the Roman empire and all of the Persian, theywere a provincial people, but they had a new revelation and a missionto make Gods will manifest on earth. The formation of the caliphalempire was strikingly different from the development of the Habsburgs,

and more common in the history of empires. The Arab conquest was avictory of the periphery over the centre; it was achieved by force of armsand in a remarkably short time. Almost all the regions that the Muslimstook over were already part of an imperial system. As rulers of the



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Middle East, the Arabs fell heir to two traditions more sophisticated,more complex and richer than they. They made little attempt at first tochange the societies they took over but they did formulate for themselvesa new legitimation. Their rulers were called Caliphs deputies of God,

or of His Prophet and the stunning success of their conquests providedproof for their claims. Both the Islamic religion and the empire were uni-versalistic and absolute, meant for all peoples alike.

The caliphate was similar to the Habsburg empire in that it preserveddifferences among its subjects which served to demarcate the structureof society and its relation to the government. At the beginning the funda-mental division of society was a simple one, that between ruler and ruled.The Muslim Arab ruling class was to remain separate and to live off thetaxes of its subjects. Most Arab immigrants were settled in new garrison

cities, and the regime taxed only the lands held by non-Muslims, on theassumption that conquered peoples would retain their beliefs andcontinue to hold most of the land. The new ruling class was defined atonce by faith and by ethnicity. The first distinction of the ruling class wasits religion Islam and the major legal distinction between populationsin the caliphate was drawn on religious lines; Muslims were taxed at alower rate and formed a legally privileged group. Each religious com-munity retained its own laws and leadership over internal affairs, whileits members were subject to administrative and Islamic law in their

dealings with people outside the community. The autonomy enjoyed byreligious groups had little territorial expression; with the conversion ofthe majority of the population over several centuries, Christians, Jewsand members of other religions remained as communities scatteredthroughout the Islamic realm.

As a small minority ruling over more developed peoples, the Arabscould well have become assimilated to their subjects, and their survivalas a separate people was the result of deliberate policies. Ruling inDamascus, employing sophisticated Greek and Persian bureaucrats,early Arab rulers cultivated a separate identity based explicitly on theirperipheral origins. They justified their status as a ruling class, firstbecause they were proponents of the true religion, and second becausethey were Arabs: pure, tough soldiers, uncontaminated by city life. Whilethe Muslim ruling class might be less sophisticated than its servitors, itsmembers claimed the superior virtues of the soldier and nomad (Pellat1953, pp. 1256, 13541; Goldziher 1967, pp. 11415; Beeston et al. 1983,pp. 389, 3936). There was a deliberate attempt to retain and even recon-stitute elements of past lifestyle. Although the army of conquest had notbeen organized primarily along tribal lines, the caliphs revived Arab

tribal structures and formally enshrined them as military and adminis-trative units. Tribal genealogies were preserved and elaborated asimportant sources of privilege (Crone 1980, pp. 2932, 418; Hawting1986, pp. 3642; Hinds 1971, pp. 3469, 3567). The Arabs further used

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their tribal structure to block access to the ruling stratum and preservethe distinction between groups. A new convert to Islam had to becomethe formal client (mawla), of an established tribe, and this act entailedaccepting inferior status (Goldziher 1967, pp. 99104).

Arab purity and the monopoly of Islam could not be preservedwithout effort. While maintaining the theory of Arab exclusivity, thecaliphs relied heavily on the personnel of the dynasties they had takenover to administer their new lands and they lived off the fruit of non-Arab labours. Arabs married, or kept, non-Arab women acquired in thecourse of conquests, and these women bore quite a few of their children.The distinction between the Arabs and their subject peoples became awilled one, probably on both sides. The revival and collection of pre-Islamic poetry and the study of pure Arab language served to codify and

enshrine Bedouin Arab ways, while the development of tribal genealogyas a science helped to limit the increasingly frequent invention of tribaldescent lines (Pellat 1953 pp. 512, 345; Goldziher 1967, pp. 12631,16775; Morony 1984, pp. 195, 20810, 2378, 2548). The fear thatArabs were becoming too strongly assimilated to a new, imperial,sophisticated lifestyle was sometimes openly expressed, as Arab com-manders called for a return to the starker lifestyle and military virtuesof a former time (Pellat 1953, p 5, note 2; Morony 1984, pp. 2623).

After about a century of Muslim rule, the concepts of Arab and

Muslim could no longer be considered coterminous. The classification ofpopulations took on a different character, now serving to distinguish onetype of Muslim from another. The way in which this happened and thetraits emphasized were a reflection of the social and political concernsof society. At the beginning of the caliphate both the Roman and thePersian populations influenced the Arab ruling class, but with thetriumph of the Abbasid dynasty in 750 A.D., the capital of the Islamicstate moved to Baghdad, close to the capital of the former Sasaniandynasty, and Iranian culture became paramount in court circles. As thenumber of converts increased, the requirement of attachment to an Arabtribe and the disadvantages attached to client, or mawla, status had tobe abandoned. With the development of a significant class of educated,bilingual, Muslim Iranians, Iranian tradition became central to Islamicculture and learning. Although philosophical and scientific works weretranslated into Arabic from Greek, works on history and statecraft cameprimarily from the Persian, and the court of the caliph adoptednumerous aspects of Iranian imperial ceremonial and legitimation.5 Twotrends, however, discouraged the creation of a uniform culture andsociety: first, an increased competition between Arabs and Persians in

the cultural sphere, which led to a sharp literary controversy over themerits of different populations and, second, the importation of newnomad manpower from the Eurasian steppes to serve in the army of thecaliphate.



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The early Abbasid period, with its active cultural borrowing, broughtrenewed defensive action to protect Arab culture. The Arabic sciencesof philology, poetry and genealogy continued to develop, and Bedouininformants became so sought after that scholars had to protect them-

selves against impostors. The famous ninth-century author al-Jahizcomplained of the assumed Bedouin accent of affected people, andparticularly of the nomads who pitched their tents in the neighbourhoodof main roads and busy markets, and pretended still to be true, uncont-aminated Bedouin (Pellat 1969, p. 105). By this time converts to Islam,more secure in numbers and influence, could think of aspiring to equalitywith the Arabs. In the ninth century a literary movement known as theShuubiyya arose, which was made up of Iranian writers who complainedabout continuing claims of Arab ethnic superiority and asserted the

equality if not superiority of their own traditions. The writers identifiedwith this party were Muslim and wrote in Arabic; the movement neitherpromoted the Persian language nor disparaged Islam. What the Shuubiparty did do was to ridicule a number of Arab ideals, most particularlythose connected with desert Bedouin origins. Its adherents pointed outthat while the Persians were creating a great and sophisticated civiliz-ation, the Arabs had been in the desert, uneducated and uncouth, livingin misery and surviving on dried leather and lizards. Pro-Arab writersreplied that while the effete Persians prided themselves on elaborate

manners and luxurious fashions in hair and dress, the noble, unspoiltArab lived in the desert, uncontaminated by city life, delighted with hisdiet of dried leather and lizards, hedgehogs and snakes (Lecomte 1965,pp. 34951; Hutchins 1988, pp. 12832).

What is striking about the Shuubiyya is its concentration on idealcultural types and appropriate characterization rather than political tra-ditions or goals. The aim of the pro-Iranian party was to enhance thestatus of Iranians and Iranian culture within the Islamic world, not topromote cultural or political autonomy. One major result of theShuubiyya was a set of well-defined characteristics for Iranians andArabs, contrasting the courtly, urban, sophisticated Iranian with themilitary, tribal Arab of nomad origin. There was little disagreement onthe characteristics to be ascribed to the Arabs and the Iranians; what wasat issue was the relative worth of peoples and of the character traitsagreed on.6 These characterizations remained important, enshrined forcenturies in literature of lasting popularity, most notably in the essays ofthe enormously influential author al-Jahiz.

By the ninth century, when the traits of Arabs and Iranians wereepitomized, they were already becoming archaic. The Arabs in particu-

lar were now a largely settled and civilian people, and their place in thecentral armies of the caliphate was being filled by a new source ofmanpower: Turkic slave soldiers imported from the steppes of InnerAsia. In this way the Turks first arrived in the Middle East. Military

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slaves proved useful and became a central part of most major armies.These new soldiers were at once disliked and admired. They were seenas uncouth, foreign and destructive but, nonetheless, perfect for soldiersbecause of their unspoilt character and their nomadic upbringing. As al-

Jahiz characterized them they were similar in many ways to the Bedouin indeed, he called them the Bedouins of the non-Arabs.7

In the middle of the eleventh century the Turkic presence in theMiddle East was strengthened by the arrival of nomad Turks as con-querors and rulers. In 1035 several Muslim Turkic tribes under theleadership of the Seljukid dynasty crossed the Oxus looking for pasture,and soon turned to war. The Seljukids quickly conquered the centrallands of the caliphate, but they did not bring about a fundamental changein traditions of rule because they fitted into a pattern already partly

established. Leaving the Arab caliph nominally in control, the Seljukidleaders took the lower title of Sultan and ruled by virtue of a patent fromthe caliph, and through the strength of their armies, divided nowbetween imported slave soldiers and the tribal Turkic soldiers they hadbrought with them.

From the ninth century onwards, Arabs, Iranians and Turks coexistedin the Islamic world. Their relationship was not without strife, but it wasbased on the assumption that all should live in the same realm, in whicheach had a place and function. The most salient differences among the

three peoples related to their perceived lifestyles. Arabs, whatever theiractual situation and habits, long remained in some way associated withthe image of the Arabian peninsula at the birth of Islam whether withthe Bedouin of the desert or with the modest merchant lifestyle of theProphet and his companions. The image of the Persian with his sophisti-cated and imperial past remained attached to court bureaucracy andlanded aristocratic life. Finally, the Turks were firmly characterized bytheir nomad origins, combining cultural inferiority with military superi-ority.

Each of these groups spoke a different language, and other segmentsof the populations spoke yet others. Like the Habsburgs, the caliphsruled over a polyglot realm, but the political importance of languagesand the relation among them developed very differently. Despite theirsmall numbers, the Arabs were extraordinarily successful in imposingtheir language. They were helped by the central religious position ofArabic, embodied in the Quran, and probably also by the fact that manyof their western subjects spoke Semitic languages related to Arabic. Asspeakers of related languages converted, most eventually became Arabicspeakers. Starting in the beginning of the eighth century, Arabic was the

language of caliphal administration and it soon became likewise thelanguage of religious studies, scholarship and literature. With the domi-nance of Arabic, written Persian began to languish and, as we have seen,the Iranians who argued for their cultural superiority did so in Arabic.



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For a while Arabic held a position analogous to that of both Germanand Latin in the early Habsburg realm.

In the late tenth century, when a significant proportion of the Iranianpopulation had converted to Islam, Persian re-emerged as a written

language and a vehicle for high culture, now in the Arabic script andwith a significant percentage of Arabic vocabulary. The Persian literaryrebirth began in the eastern regions of the caliphate, promoted first bythe Iranian Samanid dynasty (8191005) which patronized literature innew Persian and adopted the language for government administration.However, there were few dynasties of Iranian origin in the medievalMiddle East, and what allowed New Persian its success was its use bythe numerous dynasties of Turkic origin. The next dynasty to adopt itwas the Ghaznavid dynasty (9771187), of Turkish slave origin, which

took over both the territory and the bureaucrats of the Samanids. Whenthe Seljukid Turks invaded the Middle East, they came in througheastern Iran, and after they defeated the Ghaznavids, they hired theirbureaucrats and took them west to conquer Baghdad, thus returning thewritten Persian language to the earlier centres of its culture. TheSamanids, Ghaznavids and Seljukids all continued to patronize litera-ture and scholarship in Arabic as well.

The Seljukids and their nomad followers remained self-consciouslyTurkic but they made no attempt to impose Turkic on their subjects or

to develop it as a literary medium. Instead they patronized scholarshipand literature in the languages of their subjects; religious studies, phil-osophy and scientific literature remained largely in Arabic, while history,poetry and belles-lettres were more often written in Persian. TheSeljukid pattern of promoting cultural production in the high culture ofthe subject peoples while preserving a separate identity became astandard practice among the dynasties of the Middle East, many ofwhom were of Turkic origin. The symbiotic relationship of Turkic rulerswith Iranian bureaucrats and scholars became a pattern throughout theeastern and northern Islamic world, and a series of dynasties of steppeorigin carried Persian literature into Anatolia in the west, to India in theSoutheast. In the later middle ages Turks began to write their languagein the Arabic alphabet, with the addition of Arabic and Persian vocabu-lary, but only in the Ottoman Empire did written Turkic supplant Persianor Arabic. Whereas in Europe the language of the ruling class becamethe language of high culture, in the caliphate, from the time of theSeljukid invasion, the prestigious languages were those of the subjects,while the vernacular of the rulers remained less developed.

One particularly striking difference between the Habsburg monarchy

and the Arab caliphate lay in the relative unimportance of territoriallegitimation within the Middle East. We should not take such a trait toimply the absence of meaningful local boundaries, loyalties and politics.Large territorial entities created under the pre-Islamic Iranian Sasanian

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Empire remained visible and important throughout the Islamic period.(Fragner 1999, pp. 1316) The caliphate was divided into provinceswhose approximate boundaries remained stable over many centuries ofincreasingly decentralized government and within provinces cities served

as reference points, providing a centre for market towns and a strongfocus for local loyalty and identity. As the caliphal government declinedin power, it was not infrequent for a governor to make himself essen-tially independent in a provincial capital and win the loyalty of the eliteof the provincial cities. A few regions, such as Sistan and the Caspianprovinces, appear to have harboured traditions of local rule, resulting ina long series of dynasties based in the region. While these areas repeat-edly made up parts of larger empires, they retained active and appar-ently relatively independent political systems.

What differentiated Islamic regionality from that of Europe was itslack of connection with legal rights and political legitimation. Althoughthere appear to have been local aristocracies holding land over longperiods, city and regional elites did not have legally inherited positionsand rights, and the reciprocal ties between them and local rulers werenot formalized as they were in the European diets. Rulers might basetheir power and wealth on the population of the region, but when theyhad to justify their rule they turned to the centre. As long as the caliphateexisted, local rulers could legally claim only contingent sovereignty, con-

firmed by a patent from the caliph, though they might extort their patentby force. If leaders needed further legitimation, they sought it in relationto imperial traditions, notably the Iranian. In the regions which hadmade up the Sassanian empire we often find rulers reviving the old titlesand claims of the pre-Islamic Persian monarchy. These pretensionshowever were largely divorced from territorial claims and from actualdynastic descent. No single dynasty was the exclusive owner of Iranianlegitimation; it could be used by any ruler, and in fact was a significantelement of the court culture of Arab caliphs and later of Mongol khansin the Middle East.8

We find therefore that in Islamic imperial traditions, the most stronglyexpressed identities brought with them no specific territorial claims. Theaccepted principles of rule were based on the traditions and recognizedfunctions of the three major peoples of the Islamic Middle East: Arabs,Persians and Turks. The delimitation of regional legitimacy, however, wasnot connected with identity, depending instead largely on the ability tocontrol the area in question. Power was justified less through specific thanthrough general principles, which varied little throughout the Islamicworld. Claims of independent, sovereign power were limited to the caliph,

who had to be descended from the tribe of Muhammad, and thus be ofArab origin. Other Muslim leaders acquired legitimacy through a patentfrom the caliph, and proclaimed as a major goal of their rule the protec-tion of Islam, which as a religion was still associated with a scripture and



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with the tradition of scholarship in the Arabic language. Further legiti-mation was available from the Iranian tradition, and was accessible to anyruler within the lands of the former Iranian empire, or even beyond.

After the arrival of the Seljukid Turks in the eleventh century, Turkic

dynastic principles were at least informally accepted; membership in theSeljukid house and Turkic provenance were major advantages foraspiring rulers. Turkic legitimation, although limited to members of theruling tribe, could be applied in any area a member of the clan couldconquer and hold. Whatever the origin of the ruling dynasty, the standingarmy was made up of troops of steppe origin, either slave troops or newlyarrived Turkic nomads. Such steppe troops had the twin advantages ofnomad skill in warfare and separation from the population as a whole.

Within the caliphal empire, it was not expected that the ruler would

be of the same ethnic group as the bulk of the population indeed, thecontrary expectation held sway. It came to be an understood principleof politics that the ruler and military should be above and separate fromsociety, able to balance the needs of competing groups within society,rather than furthering the interests of the one to which they belonged(Mottahedeh 1980, pp. 1759). The early Arabs had emphasized theirdistance and difference from the major populations they controlled, andlater caliphs, though less different from their increasingly Muslim andArabized subjects, ruled through a foreign military force. After the

arrival of the Seljukids, most dynasties in the Middle East and CentralAsia were of Turkic or other tribal origin.

The Mongol Empire

The Arab caliphate served as a system of power for about three hundredyears, and as a system of legitimation and social order for a further threehundred. What destroyed it was the rise of another great universalempire: that of the Mongols. The dynasty founded by Chinggis Khan wasfar from short; it lasted from 1206 to the fall of the Kazakh khanates inthe nineteenth century. Mongol rule left a strong mark on the regions itcovered and remains a politically important issue even today. Like theArabs, the Mongols came from the periphery and quickly conquered aseries of regions far richer and more developed than they. Although theybrought no new religion, they claimed to rule through Gods favour,demonstrated by the success of their conquests. The world belonged byright to them; peoples were either submitted or rebellious, not neutral.(Rachewiltz 1973, pp. 245) One would think the Islamic and the Mongolempires inimical and incompatible. Both were universal, one based on

the settled and agricultural regions, the other in the nomad steppes, onefounded on strict monotheism, and the other on a combination ofpaganism and prudent respect for other religions. Yet as it happened,the two empires combined to a large extent. The Mongols conquered the

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eastern, Iranian, regions of the Middle East, and this area remainedunder Mongol influence for a long time. Starting at the end of the thir-teenth century, the ruling class of the western Mongol Empire adoptedIslam and began to speak Turkic, the language of most of their nomad

subjects; from this time on they are best characterized as Turco-Mongo-lian. They formed a relatively uniform ruling class stretching over a vastterritory, from the Altai and Turkestan to the Black Sea steppe, throughIran, eventually reaching into India.

By the early fourteenth century, the institution of the great khan haddisappeared, but the Turco-Mongolian ruling class retained loyalty to theMongol political system and accepted, at least in theory, the exclusiveright of descendants of Chinggis Khan to the sovereign titles of Khan andKhaghan. Though tribal chiefs might rule independent polities, they con-

tented themselves with modest titles and often ruled through puppetkhans. The primary legitimation for Mongol rule lay in two things: firstthe charisma and universalist claims of the descendants of Chinggis Khan,and second, the preservation of Mongol law and custom, referred to as

yasa and tre. Mongol Khans presented themselves as guardians of worldorder and enhanced their prestige through large-scale cultural patronage.Within Muslim regions, an additional principle was added, namely therole of the ruler as protector and promoter of Islamic religion and law.

We find under the Mongols, as under the caliphate, a deliberately plural

society in which different cultures and languages were intertwined. Theruling stratum of court and army jealously preserved its separate identity.Turco-Mongolian courts patronized high culture primarily in the lan-guages of their subjects, celebrating the history and culture of these peoplealong with their own. In the Mongol Middle East and Central Asia,Iranians made up the peasant subject class and they also provided theeducated elite. Like earlier Turkic rulers, the Mongols hired Persianbureaucrats and brought them into new regions now often far beyondthe borders of the caliphate. The Mongols also made free use of Iranianlegitimation, and it was under their rule that the Iranian verse epic, theShahnama, achieved its status as a royal book, the subject of elaborateillustration (Fragner 1999, pp. 5161). As in the caliphate, peoples andcultures lived together, ruled by a heterogeneous and interdependent elitewhich preserved disparate cultural, historical and linguistic traditions.

We can see in the Mongol Empire a re-enactment of some of the pro-cesses found in the early Islamic period. Once again, subjects and rulersinfluenced each other and tried to resist mutual assimilation. Each groupsaw itself as superior and did not hesitate to criticize the other. Persians,guardians of high culture and now also of religion, considered the Turco-

Mongolian elites uncultured, overbearing, and threatening even to thereligion which they claimed to espouse, since they remained faithful tothe un-Islamic customs of the Mongol Empire.9 The nomad elites in theirturn thought Persians inferior in military skill and bravery, effete,



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duplicitous and untrustworthy. These opinions did not prevent thedifferent groups from working together and learning each others lan-guages and customs, but it produced a kind of ritualized conflictexpressed in literature and in administrative in-fighting. Mongol com-

manders in Iran used Iranian troops but resented Iranian pretensions tomilitary prowess; the Mongol Ilkhans, Tamerlane and his descendants,and the Uzbek khanates all reserved the highest military ranks for theirTurco-Mongolian followers. The histories written for the court usuallyplayed down the role that Iranian soldiers and commanders played incampaigns.10 Formal ethnic separation was further reinforced by therevivalist streak found in both Islamic and steppe societies.

All students of medieval and modern Islamic history are familiar withperiodic Islamic revival, and with criticism of ruler and society for failing

to adhere to appropriate standards of Islamic behaviour. On the nomadside there was a similar tradition, attested in the seventh- and eighth-century Turkic inscriptions of the Orkhon river, in which the decline ofTurk power was blamed on assimilation to settled societies. The TurkMahmud al-Kashghari, writing in the Middle East during the Seljukidperiod, repeated the need to maintain purity within Turkic traditions.Such calls to revival, Islamic and nomad, are constantly repeated in theMongol period.11

As I have shown, the characterization of separate ethnic groups within

the Islamic caliphate had mirrored the concerns of early Islamic society:Arabs, Persians and Turks were characterized according to origin, life-styles, and equally importantly, in relation to the functions they filled ina multi-ethnic empire. Under the Mongol empire ethnic distinctionsremained useful and were reworked to form a new condominium ofnomad Mongols and Turks with settled Iranians. The need to preservedifference arose not simply from personal, or communal, dislike, but alsobecause accepted ideas of legitimation, on both sides, made sharp dis-tinctions desirable. The Mongols believed that supreme rule belongedto the house of Chinggis Khan, and that the military should remain inthe hands of the descendants of his armies, distributed among his sons.The ruling class should remain at least partly nomadic and, above all,faithful to the traditions of the Mongol Empire. The Iranians, on theirside, were used to having foreign rulers and military, and sought efficientprotection for the practice of agriculture, trade, and religion, bestachieved through strong armies. Through long experience and tradition,they believed that the best armies were those of nomadic origin. On bothsides therefore, the difference between nomad rulers and settled subjectswas not only tolerated but desired.

The creation of new identities in the fifteenth century

The fifteenth century was a transitional period in the Mongol empirewhen several new political and ethnic identities appeared, some of which

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have lasted to the present. The new groups came into being as a resultof strife within Mongol society; we can see, both in their creation and intheir characterization, the concerns which animated Mongol politics.The empire was regionally divided almost from its inception. Regions

were allocated to members of Chinggis Khans family, who were toacknowledge the supreme power of one great khan descended fromChinggis Khan. Over time four major Mongol successor states came intoexistence, ruled by descendants of Chinggis Khan: the Ilkhanid dynastyin Iran, the Ulus Jochi in the steppe lands of Russia and Kazakhstan, theYan dynasty in China and Mongolia, and the Chaghatayid khanate inCentral Asia.

The fifteenth century witnessed a further subdivision of the Mongolworld into new states and confederations, many of which had lasting

ethnographic impact. It is at this time that we find the appearance of newnames attached not simply to dynasties, but to the people making updifferent polities: the names Chaghatay and either Moghul or Chete forthe populations of separate sections of the Chaghatayid Khanate, con-trolled by the descendants of Chinggis Khans second son Chaghatay;the names Uzbek and Kazakh for adherents to different confederationsin the eastern section of the Russian steppe, inherited by the family ofChinggis Khans eldest son, Jochi. The Chaghatay and Moghul identitiesproved ephemeral, but Uzbek and Kazakh identification have lasted to

the present, along with the older Tajik and Turkmen identities. Themajor ideological motivation for new splits in the ruling class appears tohave been the issue of adaptation to settled society. In order to exploittheir sedentary subjects efficiently, the Mongol ruling class had comeinto increasingly close symbiosis with urban and agricultural popu-lations. This brought economic and political gains, but opened the doorto accusations of unfaithfulness to Mongol tradition.

Chaghatay identity: We can find an illustration of the controversy overassimilation in the creation of the new identity known as Chaghatay.The descendants of Chaghatay held Central Asia, including both westernand eastern Turkestan up to the Altai. Their state, known as theChaghatayid Khanate, broke up in the fourteenth century. As medievalhistories relate the story, the split resulted from the actions of its rulerTarmashirin Khan (132634) who converted to Islam, adapted to settledways, and abandoned many of the old Mongolian customs. Some of hissubjects, angry at the betrayal of Mongol tradition, rebelled and deposedhim; in the resulting disorders, the khanate divided in two. The easternsection remained under Chinggisid khans, pagan for another generation,and continued a traditional nomadic lifestyle. The western section, now

known as the Ulus Chaghatay, was centred in the agricultural sectionsof the former khanate and while the Mongol aristocracy and their fol-lowers remained largely nomadic, they lived in close contact with settledpeople. They also appear to have been Muslim from this time on, andmany were bilingual in Persian and Turkish.



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In the Ulus Chaghatay power was held by tribal leaders, rulingthrough a Chinggisid puppet khan. Here, in 1370, a new leader arose:Temr or Tamerlane, who conquered Iran, Khorezm and the Jaxartesregion, and though himself not a descendant of Chinggis Khan, ruled a

state based on Mongol political traditions and intimately involved in thepolitics of both the Mongol and the Central Islamic worlds (Manz 1989,pp. 227, 4165). Throughout Temrs reign and to a large extentthrough that of his successors, the Turco-Mongolians descended fromthe nomads of the Ulus Chaghatay retained a privileged status andformed the backbone of the standing army. These people came to beknown as Chaghatay, a name applied to the Turco-Mongolian popu-lation first of the Ulus Chaghatay (13341370), and then of the Timuridstate through the fifteenth century. While the term Chaghatay derived

from the name of Chinggis Khans son Chaghatay, it did not serve in thisform to designate only his descendants, nor was it applied particularlyto the Timurid dynasty, rather it applied to those of their subjects andfollowers who originated within the Mongol tradition. As the name wasused occasionally in sources written specifically for the dynasty, it wasclearly a positive term.12

To understand the content of Chaghatay identity, we must examinethe groups from which the Chaghatay differentiated themselves. Themost basic distinction was between nomad and settled: between the

Chaghatay and the Iranian population, referred to consistently andsometimes pejoratively as Tajik. The most common name applied tothe Chaghatay was the generic term Turk, which served to distinguishthem as people of Turkic speech and nomad extraction. In some cases,we find the term Turk and Tajik used to designate the population ofthe realm as a whole; in others, Tajik bears a more specific culturalconnotation, as ethnic Iranian (Hasani 1994, pp. 80, 92; Subtelny 1994,pp. 489). In relation to Tajiks the Chaghatay might identify themselvessimply as Turks, but within the nomad world they made further distinc-tions. The most important dividing line was that between those whobelonged within the Mongol tradition and those who remained outsideit. The Chaghatay were clearly separated from the Turkmen, a termapplied to the western (Oghuz) Turks, the descendants of the tribesmenwho had come into the Middle East with the Seljukid dynasty, beforethe Mongol invasion, and had remained distinct from the eastern Turks.There were large Turkmen confederations in the Middle East at thistime, some allied and some opposed to the Timurids, but all clearly dif-ferentiated from the Chaghatay and other Turco-Mongolian nomads.13

The differentiation of Turco-Mongolians from the settled and from

non-Mongol nomads was an old one; what was new to the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries was the development of separate identities amongthe Turco-Mongolians themselves. Here the Chaghatay were distin-guished in particular from two neighbouring groups: the Uzbeks and the

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Moghuls. Moghul was the name most often applied to the people of theeastern Chaghatayid khanate, the section which had separated at thetime of Tarmashirin Khan and had retained a more conservative nomadlifestyle and ideology. The people of the eastern Chaghatayid khanate

were distinguished clearly from the Chaghatay in Timurid sources, calledeither by the neutral term Moghul, or by the more pejorative termChete meaning robber, a name which referred clearly to their lack ofdiscipline and order, stemming perhaps from a looser system of rule andfrequent succession struggles (Manz 1992, p. 38). We find Moghulsamong Temrs commanders, identified by their ethnic name.

The Chaghatay were further differentiated from the Uzbeks, also ofTurco-Mongolian provenance.14 The use of the term Uzbek was muchbroader than that of Chaghatay, and is harder to characterize precisely.

When it was used by settled people, or by more assimilated, bilingualnomads, the name could have a general pejorative meaning, suggestinguncouth nomads, inferior in respect to sedentary culture (Subtelny 1983,p. 133). In this sense, it could be applied to any nomad or semi-nomadicpeople, including the Timurid population. We find for instance that alocal ruler in Azarbaijan unfriendly to the Timurids referred to theirarmy as Uzbek although not, obviously, when writing to the powerfulTimurid ruler himself.15 However, the most frequent use of the nameUzbek in contemporary sources was to denote the tribesmen of the

eastern Ulus Jochi, the section of the Mongol Empire controlled by thedescendants of Chinggis Khans oldest son Jochi.16 If, then, we look atthe boundaries of Chaghatay identity, we can see them defined first ofall against the world of settled Iranians and of Turks outside the Mongolenterprise. Among the Turco-Mongolian population the Chaghataywere further differentiated by their origin within a particular section ofthe Mongol Empire and by their willingness to adapt to settled popu-lations and civilization.

The Uzbeks and Kazakhs: Two other major new groups arose duringthe fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries which have remained activeup to the present: the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs. The story of their separ-ation is reminiscent of the history of the crisis within the ChaghatayidKhanate which gave rise to the split between the Moghul and Chaghatay.In the early fifteenth-century a new Chinggisid leader appeared in theUlus Jochi. This was Abul Khayr Khan, a descendant of Jochi, whogathered a large number of tribes in the eastern regions around himself,proclaimed himself Khan in 1428 and for a period controlled the regionfrom the Urals to the northern Syr Darya. It is here that we see the begin-ning of the political entity which later formed the Uzbek khanates. In

the 1450s, Abul Khayr suffered a serious defeat at the hands of theOirats, a Mongol confederation from the east. As a result, a number ofhis tribal followers deserted him, led by two Chinggisids of a differentJochid lineage, named Girey and Janibeg. The desertion of tribes from



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Abul Khayr seems to have originated partly in protest against the levelof authority he exerted, and from a desire to retain tribal autonomyunder the leadership of a different Chinggisid line.17 The deserters cameto be known as renegades in Turkic Qazaqs (or Qazaq-Uzbeks). Abul

Khayr attacked them but was defeated and died in 1468. Girey andJanibeg then returned with their followers to the north and took overmuch of the region of Abul Khayr Khan, bringing with them the newname they had acquired. The original confederation, however, did notdisappear. Abul Khayr Khans nominal position was later inherited byhis grandson, Muhammad Shaybani, who spent his early career with asmall number of followers under the protection of the Mughals andTimurids on the borders of Transoxiana, and for two years within theTimurid realm, in the city of Bukhara.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Shaybani Khan gathered anomad force, including about 5060,000 tribesmen of the original con-federation, many of whom had in the meantime lived under Kazakh rule,but now rejoined the Abul Khayrid family, whose fortunes appeared tobe rising. With these troops Muhammad Shaybani took Transoxianafrom the descendants of Tamerlane, proclaiming a new and more legiti-mate Chinggisid state (Sultanov 1982, p. 20). Here begin the UzbekKhanates which lasted up and into the Russian conquest of CentralAsia.18 While Muhammad Shaybani and his followers took over Tran-

soxiana, the family of Girey and Janibeg with their nomad followersremained in the northern steppe. This confederation, also under Ching-gisid khans, was designated not by a separate dynastic name, but asKazakhs. The order they upheld was both Chinggisid and deliberately,conservatively, nomadic. The term Uzbek from this time applied not tothe nomads of the steppe, but to those in and around Transoxiana, underShaybanid leadership. The border between the Kazakh and Uzbekkhanates usually lay a little to the north of the Jaxartes, or Syr Darya,River (Kliashtorny and Sultanov 1992, pp. 2536).

When we look for a pattern in the splits creating new polities and iden-tities within the Mongol lands we see similar patterns within theChaghatayid and Jochid sections of the empire. The ChaghatayidKhanate split apparently over the question of adherence to conservativeMongol custom; the eastern sections adhered to older ways, to theChaghatayid khans, and, for one generation, to Mongol shamanism,while the western section chose Islam and coexistence with the agri-cultural and urban populations. The split between Uzbeks and Kazakhsbegan probably both as a conflict of loyalties to different dynastic linesand as a protest against the imposition of strong central control, but as

the Uzbeks became increasingly involved with the politics of Transoxi-ana, the split turned also into a distinction between more and less con-servative nomadic lifestyles.

The political importance of lifestyle is indicated by the care with which

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distinctions were articulated. We have seen that the more assimilatedTurco-Mongolians within the Middle East carefully separated theirsphere from that of the settled population, while at the same time main-taining a difference between themselves and the Uzbek nomads of the

steppe, considered less adept in high civilization. The Chaghatay used thepejorative term Chete for their eastern Chaghatayid neighbours, close inorigin, but different in lifestyle. On their side, the more conservativenomads emphasized their loyalty to older traditions, seeing it as a virtue.The Moghuls used the term qaraunas, or half-breed, for the Chaghatay,suggesting that they intermarried with the settled population (Manz 1992,p. 38). In the case of the Kazakhs there seems to have been a deliberateeffort to emphasize their nomadism in relation to other Turco-Mongolian peoples. We find in the Tarikh-i Rashidi, a history written in

Persian in the early sixteenth century by a Moghul prince of the easternChaghatayid state, a quotation from the Kazakh Khan Kasim:

We are men of the steppe. Little good is to be found here other thanhorses. Our food is horse flesh and in our region there are no gardensor buildings. Our recreation is to inspect our herds.19

This was addressed not to the ruler of a sedentary state, but to anotherTurco-Mongolian ruler, Said Khan of the Moghuls.

The accepted markers of modern European national identity language, common culture, origin and place played a subordinate rolein the late Mongol world. It is notable that the tribal origins of severaldifferent groups were similar, and the histories written for and aboutthem make no attempt to obscure the fact. Chaghatays and Uzbeks hada number of tribal names in common, as did Chaghatays and Moghuls.Among the Kazakhs and Uzbeks, the confluence of tribal origins isstriking; these two people derived from a common place and back-ground; when they split, it was not only along tribal lines, but alsothrough divisions within tribes (Sultanov 1982, pp. 7, 203). Whenmembers of the same original tribes belonged to separate politicalorganizations they developed different identities. Territory and languagealso played a secondary role in divisions among Turco-Mongoliannomads. Groups such as the Chaghatay and Kazakh expanded theirholdings and moved out of their original lands without losing theirseparate name and identity. The written Turkic language was commonamong many states, and dialects were not taken into consideration.

Political allegiance, whether to a branch of the Chinggisid house or toa dynasty of tribal origin, held greater importance in the formation of

identity. It is in the coalitions centring around a ruler that we find thegenesis of most independent groups. These confederations, consisting ofnomadic tribes able to move and to switch allegiance at will, could existonly with the continued consent of all members, at least of the tribal



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aristocracy. For this they required both loyalty to a successful dynastyand a common political culture an area of agreement on style of ruleand relationship to settled culture (Manz 1992, pp. 2936). It is above allin the central questions of Mongol political culture that we find the

markers of separate Mongol identities. The issues of central versus dis-persed power and of separation from the settled population, as opposedto close exploitation, lay at the base of political splits along the steppefrontier. When we look at identities formed by such divisions we findthem defined by differences along this spectrum.

Despite new group identities, states within the Islamic Mongol worldlong continued to use systems of legitimation worked out in theCaliphate and the Mongol Empire, which were based on broad imperialideals. If we compare the titles accorded to rulers in the Mongol and

Islamic worlds to those of the Habsburgs, whom we discussed earlier, weshall get an idea of the differences we are discussing. The Habsburgs, incollecting titles, concentrated on regions with separate historical tra-ditions, preserved within the empire. In the late Mongol world we findrulers also using a combination of titles from different traditions, buteach of them suggests universal rule: the Arab titles Protector of theCaliphate, Sultan of Sultans, the Iranian title Padshah, meaningsovereign, and the Mongol title Khaghan, meaning supreme Khan.Even in regional states, legitimation remained imperial.

The political system developed within the Islamic Mongol regions hadan exceptionally long life, particularly in Central Asia. Within the Uzbekkhanates and their successor states, the formal division between a militaryand court of nomad origin, and a civilian, city administration from thesettled population lasted up to the Russian takeover in the nineteenthcentury. Although by this time many Uzbeks were no longer nomads, anda large part of the settled population had become either bilingual orTurkic-speaking, the old distinction between nomad and settled traditionsremained important to the structure of government and society. Even atthe beginning of the nineteenth century, connection to the Turkic andMongol dynasties of the past remained central to legitimation. Despitethe increasing number of Turkic speakers, Persian remained the primarylanguage of high culture. Central Asian society remained consciouslyheterogeneous, and the markers distinguishing different groups remainedsimilar to those developed in the Mongol period. Just as the Habsburgimperial titles of the early twentieth century preserved the regional basisof the imperial structure, the Central Asian khanates of the nineteenthcentury still mirrored the Chinggisid and Islamic traditions.

Imperial legacies within the Russian and Soviet states

The lands of the Russian Empire stretched from Europe to Asia, andwere heir to both Asian and European traditions. The Muscovite state

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which formed the base of the empire rose to prominence within theGolden Horde, the westernmost section of the Mongol Empire, and itowed many elements of its political structure and ideology to its Mongolheritage. The Muscovite rulers gradually gathered the Russian lands,

partly by manoeuvre and negotiation, like the Habsburgs, and partly byforce of arms. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453,Muscovy was able to lay claim to the Roman and Christian imperialinheritance. The adoption of Byzantine and Orthodox legitimation didnot lead Russian rulers to abandon Mongol legitimation; early rulerscontinued to use insignia and symbols of the Mongol empire. As late asthe time of troubles in the early seventeenth century, the enthronementof a Chinggisid tsar appeared as a possibility (Cherniavsky 1975, p. 134).When the Muscovite rulers began to expand their territory beyond the

original Russian lands, the first regions they took were the successorstates of the Golden Horde, with which they had remained intimatelyinvolved. As the Tsars pushed their territories east, they took over thenorthern remnants of the Mongol Empire, replacing the highest levelsof government and incorporating the military classes into the Muscovitearmy. Many elites of the conquered regions retained their land, noblestatus and local positions, though now as part of the Muscovite state(Kappeler 1992, pp. 304, 545). In the first periods of Muscovite expan-sion, Chinggisid prestige continued as an element both in state legiti-

mation and in the ranking of newly incorporated elites.Russias turn towards Europe in the late seventeenth century broughtin new ideas of empire and legitimacy, but also reinforced some earlierdistinctions between peoples. The non-Russian regions of the empirecame to be seen in a new light, as regions either to be assimilated or tobe identified as foreign. Peter I (r. 16891725) instituted Christianizingpolicies; the Mongol, or Tatar, nobles who became Christian retainedtheir status, while those who refused forfeited their titles. Catharine II(r. 176296), while proclaiming religious tolerance, sharply differenti-ated the civilized agricultural populations from nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies, which were classed as fundamentally differentpeoples, called inorodsty. In this way, the Mongol and Islamic emphasison nomadism and lifestyle continued to exist, but was reversed. Themilitary abilities and resistance to assimilation shown by nomadschanged from a mark of superiority to one of inferiority. In Catharinesadministration nomadic societies were considered particularly backwardand dangerous.

European ideas of empire also affected the administration of newlyacquired territories. Western regions inhabited largely by Slavs were

influenced by the nationalistic ideologies of central and western Europe.We find here the demands for cultural development seen in the Habsburgempire and, in response, pressures from the government towards assimi-lation and Russification. Outside of Europe, the experience of empire was



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a very different one. The eastern, and especially the non-Christian,regions that the Russians conquered in the eighteenth and nineteenthcentury were less closely incorporated into the imperial administration.They were considered inferior; the Russians came in as a civilizing race,

ruling from outside. In the modern empire the Muslim regions, in particu-lar Central Asia and Kazakhstan, held low status. There was no questionof their peoples assimilating to the Russian way of life or of their upperclasses entering the elite of the empire. (Kappeler 1992, pp. 35, 13940,159, 166) The eastern regions therefore neither felt the full pressure ofRussification, nor became exposed to eastern European national move-ments.

In the twentieth century the lands of the Russian Empire becamethose of the Soviet Union, and within this new framework the legacy of

past empires continued. In the development of policy the most directinfluence was the one from outside: from the Austro-Hungarian empire.When Lenin and Stalin developed a nationalities policy for the Bolshe-vik party, it was natural for them to look to their fellow socialists ineastern Europe, who were deeply concerned with issues of nationality.The ideas they took from them clearly mirrored the experience ofAustria-Hungary. Peoples were to be defined as nations on the assump-tion that language, local custom, national history and ethnic loyaltieswould shape the political aspirations of autonomous national units.

Above all, it was assumed that separate ethnic or national groups werelikely to seek at least cultural autonomy, if not independence. The Bol-sheviks disagreed with Austro-Hungarian Marxist thinkers like OttoBauer and Karl Renner on several important issues; for instance, whileAustro-Hungarian socialists attempted to solve the problem of dispersedpopulations through the programme of non-territorial culturalautonomy, the Bolsheviks insisted on the convergence of territory withother national characteristics (Stalin 1936, pp. 513; Pipes 1964, pp.2349). The differences in Bolshevik policy should not, however, blindus to the similarity of their concepts of nation and nationality.

In the European regions of the USSR, Soviet policy was applied topeoples who had been involved in European nationality politics and hadformed their identities within the same mould as the peoples of centraland southern Europe. Further east, the Soviets met populations withtotally different ideas of identity, regionalism and legitimation. Through-out the Soviet period, nonetheless, nationality policy adhered to thecriteria and concerns with which it began. National republics werecreated with the help of ethnographers, on the assumption that languageand ethnic characteristics were the primary factors to be evaluated.

While the justification for boundaries concentrated on ethnicity, it seemslikely that the Soviets, perhaps unconsciously, also resembled the Habs-burgs in their acceptance of legitimacy based on historical statehood.This trait is illustrated in the formation of the Soviet Central Asian

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republics. In choosing an ethnic name for the central republic of Tran-soxiana, the planners rejected that of Sart, applied mostly to Turkicsettled peoples, because they regarded it as pejorative. Instead theychose Uzbek, which denoted the population descended from the Turkic

tribes which had entered with Shaybani khan, and was attached to theformer ruling class.

The Uzbek republic then received the capital regions of all three ofthe Uzbek khanates, inhabited not surprisingly by many people callingthemselves Uzbek. The Tajiks and Turkmens who had formed part ofthe populations of these khanates got only the territories earlier domi-nated by leaders of their own ethnic groups, regions now separated fromtheir former agricultural and administrative centres. Once the republicshad been formed, they were encouraged to create identities which would

fit at once their languages, their histories and, if possible, their borders.Past rulers and luminaries of the several nations had to be assigned toindividual republics. Language policy followed the Central Europeanmodel; where no written language existed it was quickly developed, andmuch of nationality politics revolved, as in the Austro-Hungarianempire, around questions of education and administration in republicanlanguages (Simon 1991, pp. 3163; Slezkine 1996, pp. 20230).

In Soviet policy, the Austro-Hungarian influence dominated, but in therealm of culture and practice, we see other legacies equally active. Like

the Tsars and the Mongols before them, the Soviet regime considerednomadism an important factor in the classification of peoples. For a briefperiod in the 1920s, nomads were idealized as a classless society, but inthe early thirties nomad societies came to be characterized as feudal thus premodern and regressive (Edgar 1999, pp. 1327). The drivetowards collectivization in the late twenties and early thirties was usedto attack nomadism in the regions where it still survived. In Central Asia,the Soviets preserved the cultural distance with the belief in their superi-ority and civilizing mission that the Russians of the nineteenth centuryhad held. Thus, the distinction between different lifestyles and betweeneastern and western non-Russian regions, begun under the Tsars,remained intact through the Soviet period.

The Soviet regime exerted more direct pressure in Central Asia thanhad the nineteenth-century Russian regime, but despite its intransigence,it left intact a number of structures and ideas from the pre-Russianperiod. Indeed, in certain ways, the Soviets fit into the pattern set by theIslamic Caliphate and the Mongol Empire. Once again a foreign rulingclass held power, basing its legitimacy on its outside origin, its separateculture and language. Where earlier the administrative and cultural elites

had been bilingual in Turkic and Persian, now they were bilingual inRussian and either Turkic or Tajik. The Soviet government promotedculture in both Russian and republican languages. The settled popu-lation had often expressed its irritation with the Turco-Mongolian ruling



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class or its foreign armies, now Turks and Tajiks resented Russians. Likenomad rulers of an earlier period, Russians felt themselves superior andmade no attempt to hide the fact.

Like all creators of national identity, Soviet functionaries used the past

to create the present. While trying to promote new republican loyalties,the Soviet regime paradoxically kept alive many old ideas of identity.The emphasis that the government placed on ideology and its belief inthe political importance of historical writing made it impossible for theCentral Asians to forget their past. Although the writing of history wasmonitored by the state, the prestige of the field attracted serious scholars,especially for the medieval period, and the basic textual and factualresearch was solid. The results of this research, presented in the appro-priate ideological form, formed a central part of public education. The

need to create separate republican characters and histories served as areminder of the commonality of historical experience, as scholars ofdifferent republics tried to parcel out the luminaries of the past. Strug-gling to define what had belonged to each republic, Central Asians couldnot forget that Tajiks and Uzbeks had lived close to each other and hadshared both rulers and scholars, while Uzbeks and Kazakhs reading oftheir ethnogenesis were reminded of historical and linguistic bonds.

The differentiation of identity through the distinction between nomadand non-nomad peoples also remained alive. In writing their history, the

peoples of Central Asia had to deal with the question of their nomadand Chinggisid origins, now a brand of shame rather than a source ofglory. The Uzbeks, inhabiting an intensively agricultural region anddescended from nomads who had lived close to the settled, chose to playdown their nomadism and stressed the local, Central Asian aspect oftheir heritage. For the Kazakhs, this was a less workable solution, andwe find some attempts to defend the nomad tradition (Pishchulina 1977,pp. 78; Subtelny 1994, pp. 523). Thus we find in the Soviet period anecho of the contests of earlier times.

By the time the USSR collapsed the Central Asian republics hadachieved modern identities showing the elements of European national-ism emphasis on region, common historical experience, culture andlanguage. The meaning of these elements and the way they are inter-connected, however, need not be the same as what we find in Europe.Within the new identities of Central Asia, older concepts have remainedalive and active. It is in the connections made between different aspectsof cultural and political identity that the heritage of earlier empiresremains important: the relationship between language use and politicalloyalty, between ethnic differentiation and movements towards sepa-

ratism. When we examine events since the breakup of the USSR, we cansee the influence of earlier understandings of identity. While the expres-sion of republican patriotism might be similar to that of Westernnationalism, the expectations attached to it can be quite different.

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In the 1980s many observers regarded Soviet Central Asia as the softunderbelly of the Soviet beast. The fact that Central Asia was strikinglydifferent from Russia brought an assumption of greater separatistfeeling. It was clear that the Russian Soviet presence was resented, and

with reason, since forced cotton specialization had led to widespreadecological damage. Anti-Russian feeling was well documented. BothSoviet and Western scholars noted the persistence of Islamic observanceand the reluctance of many Central Asians either to intermarry withRussians or to work outside their region. Nonetheless, when the SovietUnion broke up, the Muslim Central Asian republics were among thelast regions to declare independence. If our expectations are geared toEuropean models, this behaviour seems odd, but I suggest that in thecontext of the Islamic and Mongol legacies it is logical. The Russians

who ruled Central Asia had directly replaced earlier rulers and filled asimilar function. Earlier foreign ruling classes had been resented, oftenvocally, but their presence was, nevertheless, accepted because theyprovided security and military power. Within the Soviet Union, CentralAsians could count on the protection of the huge Soviet army, on con-tinuing cultural patronage, and on the prestige of belonging to a majorpower. Russians could be criticized as foreign but the expression offeeling against them did not lead to a movement towards separatism.

One subject of interest to Western scholars was the republic bound-

aries drawn in the 1920s, portrayed by some writers as arbitrary,designed specifically to divide the peoples of Central Asia. The denialof national identities in pre-modern Central Asia led some writers tostate that identity was based primarily on religion and below that ontribe, village or confessional community, and that intermediate identi-ties, comparable in size to the modern nation, did not exist (Khalid 1998,pp. 184190). The distinctions made between different Turkic peoplesand the creation of separate written languages for Uzbeks, Turkmens,Kazakhs and Kirghiz, has been seen as an imposition of artificial bound-aries (Bennigsen 1971, pp. 1745). With the development of free speech,the revival of Islam, and the resumption of pan-Turkic ideals after thefall of the Soviet Union, scholars and journalists speculated about thecreation of a Muslim Turkic coalition or even state, and the possibilityof serious disagreement over borders. So far, despite rhetoric, little hashappened on this front, and here again, one may see the survival of olderideas about the relationship of territory and identity. As we have seen,language was not an important factor in the formation of earlier Turkicethnic groups. The Turks, sharing closely related languages, historicorigin and consciousness, have usually lived in separate and often

warring states. While the distinctions between modern republican lan-guages are in part a twentieth-century construction, the borders betweenthe Turkic states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are notvery different from earlier borders between the Kirghiz and Kazakh



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nomads of the steppe and the settled populations in the Uzbek khanatesof Bukhara and Khiva (Manz 1994, p. 16). Except for the inclusion ofthe Khivan oasis in Uzbekistan, they do not represent a major break withearlier tradition. We must remember further that in the Mongol and

Islamic worlds regional identification was not necessarily connected topolitical loyalty or state legitimation. Thus while some activists suggesteda unitary Turkic state, both the past and the present were against them.

The one current Central Asian republic whose territory is a lastingsource of dispute is the one most solidly founded on western nationalmarkers of historical precedent, ethnic identity and linguistic difference,namely Tajikistan. Having chosen for the Tajiks the one region ofCentral Asia which had not only been inhabited, but even largely ruledby Iranians, the Soviet state assigned to them the mountainous border-

lands which Turkic nomads never settled or ruled directly. The mountainpopulations, however, had been known as Ghalcha, and were con-sidered different from the agricultural and urban Tajiks. Tajik identityhad long been defined not by territory or monarchy, but by functionwithin a large, rich and powerful society. The Tajiks, under Islamic,Mongol and Uzbek rulers, were the bearers of high culture throughoutCentral Asia. The other strongholds of Tajik language and populationand those most important in their history were at the opposite end ofthe spectrum of civilization, namely the two great cities of the region:

Samarqand and Bukhara, from which many Tajik intellectuals originate.It was in these cities that the cultural heroes of Persian civilization,assigned to the Tajiks, wrote their masterpieces. The exclusion of theircentres of high culture continues to be a sore point for the Tajiks, whoseactual territory has little connection either with their past identity or withthe cultural history formulated in the Soviet period.20

Conclusion

The group identities of the modern world have a long and varied history,and this history continues to matter. We can see in medieval and earlymodern Europe the origins of ideas and structures that combined toform the ideal of the nation-state. Regions were formally linked to acomplex of laws, customs and legitimation. Language was an importantmarker of identity, a tool for the imposition of central rule, and if it wasalso a literary language, a badge of superiority. It was on these structuresthat the Austro-Hungarian Empire was built, and by preserving them,the empire determined the lines along which it would be divided intonations.

In the two great empires which dominated Eurasia the Islamic andthe Mongol identity was differently structured and understood. Here thenomadic and sedentary lifestyles formed the most basic and unchangingmarkers of identity, strong enough to survive even the sedentarization of

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most nomads. Language and religion, while important, were expand-able; one state or region could be expected to contain populations ofseveral religions and languages, and such diversity was desirable.Finally, regional identity, while strong, had no connection to imperial

legitimation. By the late medieval period, in both the Mongol and theIslamic worlds an elite of nomad provenance ruled over a multi-ethnicsettled population which provided the scholars, bureaucrats, and thelanguage of high culture for the rulers. Like the Austro-Hungarian state,these were multi-ethnic empires, but in contrast to the Europeanpeoples, their major ethnic groups were scattered throughout theempire, and thought to belong not in an original homeland, but wherethey currently lived.

The Russian Empire provided a bridge between these two systems,

both physically and temporally. The core of the empire lay firmly in theRussian lands but it began its development within the Mongol systemand showed Mongol influence in its early expectation of difference andrespect for nomad origins. Russian expansion into European territoriesand the rise of western European prestige brought European ideas intoRussia, but as I have shown, earlier systems of thought remained alivein the eastern regions. The Soviet state, despite its attempt to transformsociety, kept alive much of what it inherited from earlier empires. I haveillustrated in this article how such influences have shaped modern ideas

in Central Asia.The identities of Central Asia Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh are real, powerful and based in history, but they have not all fosteredthe expectations and actions Western nationalism would demand ofthem. As national, republican identities, all have changed and evolvedconsiderably during this century, but they are not new creations, formedentirely by Western forces. They are rather identities with

manz multi-ethnic empires

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