southern highlands, and large tracts of barren steppe-land were occupied by almost equally primitive nomads, who drove their flocks from hill to valley and valley to hill, in search of pasture, according to season.
Eastward, again, of this "middle dominion," as it was often termed, came that of Oktai (or Ogodai), the third son of Chingiz Khan. His allotment was the country of the original Mongols with that of the tribes immediately around it, while he was also heir to his father's capital, Karakorum, and to the supreme authority over the Mongol people. On its western confines his dominion bordered, at first, on that of Chaghatai, in the country since known as Jungar or Zungaria[1]—a region that, for want of more exact boundaries, may be roughly described as lying north of the Tian-Shan, from about Urumtsi on the east, to the river Chu on the west, and having for its middle line the upper course of the Ili river. This region became the subject of much contention among the descendants of Oktai and Chaghatai, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and as the house of the former declined, the greater part of it, if not the whole, appears to have gradually merged into the territories of the Chaghatai Khans; while the clans that inhabited it, were dispersed among the tribes of Transoxiana and Kipchak, and their chiefs lived in obscurity under the Khans, or conquerors, for the time being.
Chaghatai himself appears to have been a just and energetic governor, though perhaps rough and uncouth, and addicted to the vice, common among the Mongols, of hard drinking. At any rate, he was animated by the soldier-like spirit of his father, and succeeded in keeping order among as heterogeneous a population, as a kingdom was ever composed of. In 1232, for instance, when sedition showed itself at Bokhara, he acted with promptitude, if with severity, and saved his country from a far-reaching calamity. He was, in all probability, an old-fashioned Mongol, for we read that he stood by the Yasák, or code of laws instituted by Chingiz Khan, and that he showed little favour to what was, at that time in his dominions, the comparatively new and rising religion of Islám. He must, however, have been fairly tolerant, for it is recorded that his minister for Transoxiana was a Musulman, called the Jumilat-ul-Mulk, and that mosques and colleges were founded during his reign, But if Chaghatai did not lean towards Islám, neither does it appear
- ↑ I.e., the country of the Jungar, or Zungar—the left-hand—Kálmáks.
