Qazaqlïq is a form of living, of fighting, and of pursuing the goal of establishing oneself as a ruler. The phenomenon is well known in Central Eurasia from the late Mongol period. Famous qazaq fighters were Timur and some Timurids, in particular the last important Timurid ruler in eastern Iran, Ḥusayn-i Bayqarā, but also many Chinggisids, including the founders of what was to become the Qazaq polity, Jānībeg and Girāy sultans, later khans (late fifteenth century), and, on the other hand, the founder of what later became the “Uzbek” state in Central Asia, Muḥammad Shaybānī Khan (late fifteenth–early sixteenth centuries).
Joo-Yup Lee goes beyond this basic knowledge in many ways. His book offers the first systematic study of the qazaqlïq phenomenon, and it covers not only the regions where Persian and later Turki were the main idioms of historiography, but also the western part of the Eurasian steppe zone, including the Crimea and what is today Ukraine, where Russian and Latin are more important, and where Tatar and Ottoman Turkish also have their place. Thus, readers get a full picture of what it meant to be a qazaq in post-Mongol Eurasia. This is supported by Appendix I, “The Use of the Terms Qazaq and Qazaqlïq in Written and Oral Sources” (pp. 171–82), a very welcome tool.
Lee proceeds through a study of early (and later) occurrences of the term qazaq and its equivalents in many languages. I found the quotations in Russian and Latin particularly interesting (probably because I had no idea that the word was used in those languages for roughly the same way of life). The western groups are treated above all in chapter 3, “The Qazaq, or Cossack, Groups of the Black Sea Steppe” (pp. 74–93), and the title announces that in this chapter Lee argues that the Cossacks indeed originated in groups that practiced a sort of qazaqlïq. The argument is not based on the similarity of the words—“cossack” in Russian is kazak, closer still in pronunciation to qazaq than the English word—but on the use of the term in the sources (Russian, Latin, Polish, Tatar, Ottoman). There are also Tatar groups who lived in the same region and in the same style. Qazaqlïq therefore is not linked to Islam or to Christianity, not to being a speaker of a Turkish or a Slavonic language—groups of qazaq originated on both sides of what is perceived as a cultural divide, and both Christian and Muslim rulers employed them.
Lee shows how qazaqlïq can be broken down into three stages (diagram, p. 49): first comes “flight/separation from one’s own tribe or polity”—qazaq groups are fugitives or outcasts. The second stage describes the qazaq way of life: “[v]agabondage/brigandage on the frontier or remote regions/raising funds”—qazaq groups are often perceived as robbers, and robbery can indeed be an important factor in making a living. The third stage, then, is classified as “[p]olitical alliances/state formation/coming to power,” and here, I think, a difference is notable between the western and eastern parts of the Eurasian steppe zone.
We do not come across instances of the third stage in the west; on the contrary, qazaq groups came to serve the existing powers, Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate, later the Ottoman Empire. In the east, qazaq leaders were often pretenders, scions of the ruling house, very frequently Chinggisids (Timur is an exception in that he is the only qazaq leader not to come from a ruling dynasty, the only newcomer succeeding in establishing his own dynastic rule). Thus, qazaqlïq tunes in with the well-known “steppe way” of succession: all pretenders from a given dynastic family, all of whom had an equally acceptable and accepted claim to rule, had to prove their mettle on the battlefield, and the successful candidate ideally was the winner in a fratricidal war. Moreover, the successful leader of a warband could appear as the savior of the state and the nation. To give an example (not quoted by Lee): the legendary khaqan Elterish is thus styled in the Köl Tegin inscription (east, lines 12–14): Elterish starts out with a small number of retainers, but on word of this, some 70 warriors group around him, and after initial successes, this number increases to 700, and in the end Elterish is able to restore the khaqanate. Lee has a chapter on “Quasi-Qazaqlïq Activities and Quasi-Qazaq Groups in Pre-Mongol and Mongol Central Eurasia” (chapter 2, pp. 51–73), and these contexts are frequently alluded to, but not spelt out explicitly.
In Part 2 (chapters 4–6), Lee addresses the post-Mongol situation, and he treats the careers of Muḥammad Shaybānī Khan on the one hand and those of Jānībeg and Girāy Khans on the other in some detail; this feeds into the chapter on the formation of a separate Qazaq polity. Indeed, Lee argues that the separation of the groups who were to become Qazaqs from those who were going to be Uzbeks is a result of the political decision of the two princes to go their own ways and to break away from the descendants of Abū l-Khayr Khan, the ancestor of the Shaybānid dynasty. This is very convincing, and so is his conclusion that the two major (and enduring) results of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century qazaqlïq episodes are the formation of the cossack groups in the western steppe, and the evolution of a Qazaq polity in the east.
Chapter 6 is on “The Legend of Alash Khan and the Genealogy of the Uzbeks,” a kind of afterthought, but at the same time a case study of how tales of qazaqlïq may be woven into genealogy, mythology, and invented traditions of all sorts.
Lee has given us a very useful book, impressive in the wide variety of sources, a large panoply of source languages, and a broad geographical outlook. The focus is on qazaqlïq throughout, and the author never loses sight of it. It is also refreshing as a counterpart to all kinds of nationalist and ethnocentric narratives, and it puts questions of ethnogenesis into their right place—political questions come first.
