“The Mongol armies,” writes Mr. S. Lane-Poole, “divided into several immense brigades, swept over Khwārazm, Khorāsān, and Afghanistān, on the one hand; and on the other, over Āzerbāyjān, Georgia, and Southern Russia; whilst a third division continued the reduction of China. In the midst of these diverging streams of conquest Chingiz Khān died in A.H. 624 (1227), at the age of sixty-four. The territory he and his sons had conquered stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Euxine, and included lands or tribes wrung from the rule of Chinese, Tanguts, Afghans, Persians, and Turks.
“It was the habit of a Mongol chief to distribute the clans over which he had ruled as appanages among his sons, and this tribal rather than territorial distribution obtained in the division of the empire among the sons of Chingiz. The founder appointed a special appanage of tribes in certain loosely defined camping-grounds to each son, and also nominated a successor to himself in the Khānate.”[379]
In this division of the newly founded Mongol Empire,--_i.e._ Transoxiana, with part of Kāshghar,--Badakhshān, Balkh, and Ghazna fell to the lot of Chingiz Khān’s second son, Chaghatāy, the founder of the Khānate of that name, which existed for 146 years, till its overthrow by Tīmūr in A.H. 771 (1370).
The annals of his branch of his dynasty have hitherto been obscurer than those of the other descendants of Chingiz.[380] He appears to have profited by the lessons of the Naiman chancellor,[381] and to have developed into a just and energetic ruler, capable of preserving order among the heterogeneous population under his charge.
He scrupulously observed the _Yasāk_, or Civil Code, established by his father, and, like him, was tolerant towards all religions and creeds. He fixed his capital at Almāligh,[382] in the extreme east of his dominions. His Mongol ministers, loving the life of the steppes, probably induced him to choose this locality rather than Samarkand or Bokhārā.[383] They would serve no Khān who did not lead a life worthy of free-born men; and Chaghatāy and his immediate successors saw, as did his later descendants, that the one way of retaining the allegiance of his people was to humour their desires in this respect and live with them a nomad’s life.[384]