In the second half of the VI century in the vast steppes of Central Asia as a result of wars from ancient times inhabited where the Turks came from and what it means nomadic herders formed a single powerful state. At its head stood the kagans — chiefs, from the Ashina clan, originally living in the Altai mountains. The Ashina clan owned iron mines necessary for the production of weapons, which made it especially strong and influential. Therefore, the representatives of the clan and the tribes that served him received the nickname «Turks», which meant «strong, sturdy, firm». The Turkic Kaganate united different nomadic peoples on a huge territory from the Aral Sea almost to the Pacific Ocean, covering the eastern part of modern Kazakhstan, Tien Shan, future Mongolia, North-Eastern China. Then Kaganate has joined the European steppes from Azov and Black Sea, including area of the Lower Don and the Volga region, and steppes of the Western Siberia. From its subjects the ethnos of ancient Turks was formed. However, it was difficult to govern such a large territory at that time. The ancient traditions of tribal democracy were still strong among the nomads, and the Kagan depended to a great extent on the opinion of the tribal nobility in making his decisions. And different tribes had different interests. Already in 603 the united Kaganate broke up into two parts: West Turkic and East Turkic. Both formed states repeatedly tried to subdue China. In the middle of VIII century the West Turkic Kaganate finally broke up into a number of independent tribal associations living in the conditions of early feudal system, and the East Turkic Kaganate was conquered by Uigur tribes.
Syr Darya
On the territory of the former Western Turkic Kaganate, in the hot steppes around the Central Asian river Syr Darya, Turkic tribes of the Oghuz have been nomads since at least the 10th century. Arab sources (in the VIII century Arabs-Muslims conquered a significant part of Central Asia) indicate that the territory of the Oguzes was not limited only to the lands of the Syr Darya, but extended from the Caspian Sea to the city of Bukhara, subordinate to the Arab Caliphate. The exact origin of the name «Oguz» is unknown. According to one version, it is a compound of the words «ok — arrow» and «uz — multitude», literally meaning «many arrows», i.e., «many tribes». According to another, it is related to the combination «ak uz», i.e., «white people, white tribe». There is also a version that the word «Oguz» itself means simply «tribe». At the head of the Oguz tribe were chiefs — yabgu, who were chosen at meetings of respected warriors, but were chosen only from representatives of one clan. That is, the Oghuz society was at a transitional stage from the ancient military democracy to the hereditary monarchy typical for the Middle Ages. Men of the ruling clan, who could be elected as chiefs, were called inals. They were taught military and political wisdom by specially chosen educators — atabeks, who enjoyed special respect in the society. In the management of the tribal army the chief-yabg was assisted by an experienced warrior — shubashi. The Oguzes partially assimilated some originally foreign-speaking nomadic tribes, in particular those of Sarmatian and Ugrian origin.
Central Asia and the extreme east of Europe in the Early Middle Ages. The original territory of the Oghuz settlement is circled in red
Like all steppe Turks, the Oguzes lived by nomadic cattle breeding, moving cattle from one steppe pasture to another and moving with them as the animals ate grass. Like all steppe nomads, the Oguzes had a portable tent — a yurt — as a dwelling. Leaders and noble, rich people, whose families and clans owned a large number of livestock, lived in large yurts, while ordinary herders lived in smaller yurts. According to oriental legends, the ancestor of all Oguzes was Oguz-khan, who was often endowed with mystical origin. The Oguzes themselves preferred to call themselves in the old way: simply Turks. In the process of disintegration of the Western Turkic Kaganate in the steppes of the Don, Volga and North Caucasus in the VII century a separate strong state — Khazar Kaganate was formed. Khazar Kaganate attracted to its side a part of the Oghuz, who began to fight with its eastern rivals — an association of different Turkic and Iranian tribes, known under the common name of Pechenegs, who at that time roamed the territory of modern Western Kazakhstan. Under pressure from the Oguzes, the Pechenegs moved to the Volga in the IX century. In the X century the Khazar Khaganate, exhausted by Slavic invasions, fell, and the Pechenegs began to spread further west, settling the Don steppes, and in the next century the Oguzes began to migrate to Europe, who began to be pressed by the Kipchaks (Polovtsians) who were conquering Central Asia. Oguz settlers to the European steppes where the Oguzes come from are known in Russian chronicles under the name «Torks» (i.e. Turks). They did not manage to hide on the Volga and Don from the expanding Kipchak expansion: Kipchak tribes quickly penetrated here as well. Comparatively few Torks were forced either to join the Kipchaks and the Pechenegs, who went further west, or to seek support from the princes of the Russian lands neighboring the Don and Black Sea steppes. Russian princes often hired Torks to serve in the fortresses bordering the steppe. In the end Oguzes-Torks dissolved among more numerous neighbors. There is an assumption that the descendants of the Oguzes of the Black Sea region who went far to the west are the Turkic-speaking Gagauz living in Moldavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, although the similarity of their language with the Oguz language is doubted by many researchers.
Another part of the Oguzes in the X century settled to the south — in the desert oases before the beginning of the territory of Iran and further to where the Oguz Turks moved to Iran proper and the Middle East. Being in close contact with the indigenous Muslim population, they themselves accepted Islam and concluded mixed marriages with representatives of local peoples, as a result of which the anthropological appearance of the southern Oguzes began to change from generation to generation: in the Mongoloid appearance typical for nomads of Central Asia, more and more southern European elements appeared. Native inhabitants of the Muslim East, the Oghuz settling in West Asia, whose leaders with their troops entered the service of local rulers, in return receiving from them lands suitable for tribal nomads, began to be called Turkmens (in Western literature: «Turkomans»), which meant something like «similar to the Turks». In the populous regions of the Near and Middle East, however, the territories suitable for nomadic cattle breeding were much smaller than in Central Asia, so some Oguzes-Turkmen adopted a sedentary way of life, largely adopting the culture of neighboring peoples. The Oguzes still called themselves mostly just Turks, but gradually the external name became more and more popular among some Oguz tribes themselves.
Among the Oguzes, who left the original ethnic territory on the Syr Darya in the 10th century, were people belonging to the Kynyk tribe, who were led to the east of Central Asia — to the Maverannahr region — by a leader named Seljuk. By his name, the separated tribal branch was called Seljuk, and later this name was extended to all Turkic-speaking subjects of Seljuk’s descendants. In Maverannahr, the Seljuks entered the service of Nuh ibn Mansur, the ruler of the Samanid state of Bukhara, which at that time had its center in Bukhara. At the end of the 10th century, the Samanid state fell under the onslaught of the Karakhanid tribes from the east, but the Seljuks were able to gain considerable strength in his vassal service. At the beginning of the 11th century, tribes led by Seljuk descendants spread across Maverannahr and Northern Iran. The formal ruler of the whole Islamic world at that time was considered to be the caliph of the Abbasid family, whose residence was in Baghdad, Iraq, but by that time his power had become nominal, and different dynasties ruled in different regions of the Muslim East. In the 30s of the XI century, Masud, the ruler of the Middle Eastern state of Ghaznavids, in exchange for vassal service, made the Seljuks rulers of the historical region of Khorasan, which covered the territories of modern Turkmenistan and Eastern Iran. However, the loyalty of the Seljuks to their suzerain was short-lived: soon they went out of obedience and began to pursue their own policy in the entrusted lands. The Ghaznavids failed to bring them to submission: in 1040 Seljuk’s grandsons Togrul-bek and Chagri-bek in 1040 completely defeated Masud’s army, which was more than twice as numerous and equipped with fighting elephants, at the fortress of Dandanakan near the oasis of Merv (modern Turkmenistan). Having established themselves in Khorasan, the Seljuks, first under the leadership of Togrul-Bek, then under the leadership of their other rulers, began to conquer other rich areas of the Muslim East, rapidly expanding the subjugated territory to the west. They conquered almost all of Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq, and in 1055 entered Baghdad, considered the formal capital of the Islamic world, where they freed Caliph Abdullah ibn Ahmad al-Qaim from the burdensome tutelage of the Iranian Buid dynasty, which controlled Iraq. Although the Seljuks did not return the caliphs to their former power, they generously provided them with money and other allowances, so that the caliphs again became, figuratively speaking, though not to rule, but to reign. In return, Caliph Abdullah granted Togrul-Bek the title of sultan. Subsequently, Seljuk rulers received power on why in Asia Minor Anatolia Turkin inheritance, but with the formal sanction of the Caliph. As a result of the conquests of Togrul-Bek in the East formed a vast and powerful state — the Seljuk Sultanate. Under the successors of the first Seljuk sultan it conquered Armenia, part of the Near Eastern territories of the Byzantine Empire, and in 1071-1081 it conquered the overwhelming majority of the territories of Malaya. — The overwhelming majority of the territories of Asia Minor (Anatolia), after which the era of Turkic domination in the region began. The Seljuk sultanate reached its greatest power during the reign of Melik Shah (1072 — 1092), when the Seljuks conquered part of Georgia in Transcaucasia and the Karakhanid state in Central Asia. The borders of the sultanate stretched from Asia Minor to Maverannahr, from Azerbaijan to the sands of Arabia. The Seljuks tried to challenge the Egyptian Fatimid dynasty for power over Palestine in the eastern Mediterranean, where the world’s Islamic holy sites of al-Aqsa Mosque and Qubbat al-Sakhra are located in Jerusalem, and then fought the European Crusaders who invaded Palestine. It was at this time that Europeans first became intimately acquainted with the formidable eastern power created by the Oghuz tribe. Since the Seljuks, like most of the other Oghuz, preferred to call themselves simply Turks, Europeans called them and the population of Asia Minor that had adopted their language «Turks». From Europe this word, denoting the Turkic-speaking population of Asia Minor, came into the Russian language.
Seljuk state
However, the Seljuk state was consolidated more by religious and kinship solidarity than by the real strength of the sultan’s power. According to feudal tradition, the sultans divided the lands of the state among their sons, who served as provincial governors first under their father, then under their brother who inherited the supreme throne. Each aspired to be an independent ruler in his own domain. And this made them more vulnerable to external enemies. By the middle of the 12th century, the power of the Seljukid rulers in all regions of the former power, including Central Asia, fell under the blows of various kinds of conquerors. Only in Asia Minor until the beginning of the XIV century there existed the Konya Sultanate with its capital in the city of Konya, whose rulers were representatives of the Seljuk dynasty. It was divided into several provinces — beyliks, which were ruled by beys — large feudal lords. Beys also aspired to be full rulers, to pursue a policy without regard to the will of the sultan. Eventually, the Koni sultanate also disintegrated, and one of the beyliks that became independent, ruled by Osman, a representative of the Turkmen tribe of Kayy, later, joining neighboring lands, grew into a new sultanate, which became the geopolitical core of the Ottoman Empire.
Distribution of Turkic-Oghuz languages
The Oguzes in their original, «pureblood» form disappeared during the heyday of the Middle Ages. The new conditions they found themselves in when moving from their historical homeland to the rich, densely populated regions of the Islamic East and the waterless deserts of the Central Asian Southwest, and even more so when becoming the ruling stratum of the population of regions that had a long-standing developed state structure, forced them to fundamentally change their way of life. They were in close contact with the peoples in whose environment they had to settle, concluded mixed marriages, adopted, especially those who had adopted a sedentary way of life, the everyday culture and customs of those peoples. Sultans and beys could no longer live traditionally in nomadic tents: their social status required their resettlement in permanent fortified palaces. Gradually, the Oghuz as such culturally dissolved among the superior population of the conquered countries. However, the Oghuz language, brought to the new regions by the Turkmen nobility and used in the countries ruled by the Oghuz dynasties as the official language, quickly enough replaced the local languages. Iranians, Greeks and other peoples, who came under the rule of Turkmen rulers, got used to using Oghuz language in communication with officials, in drawing up legal documents, in contacts with representatives of other tribes, and gradually forgot their own languages. Thus, in the countries that were ruled by Oghuz settlers at one time or another, the languages of the Turkic-Oghuz group, derived from Old Oghuz, became established. The most widespread of them are Turkish, Azerbaijani and Turkmen. Despite sometimes very significant differences in culture, traditions, mentality, caused by historically different living conditions and ancient ethnic origin, representatives of different peoples speaking Turkic-Oguz languages can often understand each other quite freely.