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Abstract

The tribal history of the Kazakh Khanate and its antecedents is a historical problem which is very far from having found a consensus. There are several complicating factors. The very first is the confusion over the meaning of the terms “White Horde” (Aq orda) and “Blue Horde” (Kök orda). The second is the blind eye which is turned to the sources and scholarship regarding the tribal composition of the Golden Horde (13th-14th centuries) and the Later Golden Horde (15th-8th centuries). The third is the question of the origin and tribal composition of the Kazakh Khanate. A fourth is the question of how these tribal formations developed. The fifth and final one is the more recent question of the tribal question of the Kazakh tribes of the Lesser Horde, Middle Horde, and Greater Horde. Each one of these questions has underlying it a serious of a priori questions and theoretical assumptions.

It has been shown that the leading “ruling tribes” participating in the governance of the “White Horde” (Aq orda) or western part of the Golden Horde (ulus of Jochi/Coçi~Joshy) consisted of the Qongrat, Qıyat, Mangıt, and Sicivut. On the other hand, it has been shown that the “ruling tribes” of the Khanates of Kazan and Crimea in the Later Golden Horde consisted of the şirin, Barın, Arğın, and Qıpçaq. It is likely that this is to be explained by the demographic collapse of the sedentary centers of the White Horde during the time of the Black Death. This begs the question of how to situate the Kazakh Khanate in relation to the populations of the Golden Horde and the Later Golden Horde.

The paper considers the data in recent article on the genetic background of the individuals found in the so-called “Mausoleum of Joshy Khan” in Ulytau, Kazakhstan (Askapuli et al. 2026) and another article discussing the “founder effect” among the Arğın (Zhabagin et al. 2016) to: 1) compare the tribal formations of the Golden Horde and Later Golden Horde with the information for the population of the Kazakh Khanate; 2) consider the implications of the “founder effect” on the rise of the tribes in the Kazakh Khanate; and 3) consider what the effect of depopulation from the Black Death might have been on this process.