West of the Great Yuan lay the other three Mongol successor states. The Chagatai Khanate, so named because its rulers were the descendants of Genghis Khan’s second son Chagatai, sat squarely over central Asia, from the Altai mountains in the east to the Oxus River in the west. This khanate remained nomadic, tribal, and highly unstable, with repeated lurches between rival rulers. (In the fourteenth century it split, contracted, and morphed into an entity known as Moghulistan.) And for generations its rulers clashed with those of the Mongol Ilkhanate, established by Hülagü and his line on what
...more
