Dzungaria: a mysterious enemy of Russia and China
Screex The Oirats are considered the heirs of Genghis Khan. They lived in a vast country stretching from the Kazakh steppes to Tibet. The first mention of the Dzungars (or as…
«Yedigey — the last strong khan of the Golden Horde»: could return the former power
"Everything has an end and everything has a beginning" - not without reason so says a very famous saying. And the Mongol Empire - a powerful steppe power, the greatest…
«Kalmyk Khanate»: Russia’s adversaries turned allies
The Kalmyk Khanate, which existed from 1633 to 1771, was the successor of such irreconcilable opponents of Russia as the Nogai Horde and the Oirat Khanate. But history has arranged…
The emergence of the Iranian Huns, the Chionites
Not much information has been preserved about this people. The history of this branch of the Huns is very complicated, and it began at the spurs of the Altai Mountains.…
Khiva Khanate: How One of the Greatest Uzbek States Emerged and Fell
We know very little about the Khanate of Khiva. However, it is one of the "robber" states, which raided each of its neighbors for slaves. The reason for its conquest…
Bukhara Khanate: the greatest of the Uzbek states in Central Asia
The Bukhara Khanate is one of the three Uzbek states in Central Asia that existed from the 1500s to the 1920s, but for the last half century under Russian protectorate.…
Why did the Turks defeat the Scythians?
In other times nomads of Iranian origin occupied half of southern Siberia. And in the east, their possessions reached what is now Western China. Not to mention their homeland and…
Loyal of the loyal: why did Armenians betray the Ottoman Empire?
The Ottoman Empire always looked westward and came to the Caucasus much later. The reason was not strategic interests in the region, but the need to oppose the Shiite Safavid…
Mass circumcision of Georgians/Armenians/Parsis by Jalaladin’s Turks
In general, I was shocked to read this description, but you can't take words out of a song (in this case, the chronicle of the Armenian historian Kirakos Gandzaketsi (c.…
Very ancient geopolitics or how the forest dwellers stopped and repulsed the warlike steppes
They were unstoppable. Having broken out of the South Russian steppes, the Aryan tribes flooded the steppes and forest-steppes of Eurasia up to the Urals and Western Siberia. It seemed…