オイラット・ハーンの誕生

The Mongol Empire, which was built by Chinggis Khan through his unification of the nomadic peoples of Central Eurasia in the early thirteenth century, in the same way as the great nomadic empires that preceded it, split up into four major states due to internal conflicts among its rulers in the latter half of the same century. Its successor states also either fell or split up further during the middle of the following century. A difference of major importance, however, between the Mongol Empire and its predecessors was that the Central Eurasian nomads never forgot the glorious name of Chinggis Khan even after the split and the fall of its successor states. In the later nomadic society people's minds were long conditioned by the unwritten law that only those having Chinggis Khan's blood in their veins were entitled to khanship. The Oyirad, a group of people who held sway over Mongolia for some time after the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, are known to Westerners as the Kalmyks or the Western Mongols. They were called 'aliens (qari)' by the Mongols proper, or the descendants of the Yuan loyalists who reunited in the late fifteenth century. No male descendant of Chinggis Khan was to be found among chiefs of the groups making up the Oyirad. Still they produced such famous chiefs as Guusi Khan and Galdan Bosoqtu Khan in the seventeenth century. When and through what process was khanship born in the Oyirad? Who was it that legitimized such a title? Early in the seventeenth century, the Oyirad tribes succeeded in destroying a Mongol khan who had been their overlord and freed themselves from their former tributary obligations to the Mongols. Now they wished to have their own khan and obtained permission to do so from the Fifth Dalai Lama, the supreme leader of the Dge lugs pa Sect of Tibetan Buddhism, a faith which they had zealously embraced. Yet, even the Oyirad had not lost their traditional respect for Chinggis Khan, which enabled only Guusi Khan of the Xosud tribe and his descendants to assume the title of khan, since they supposedly could date their ancestry back to Josi Qasar, a younger brother of Chinggis Khan. Among the sovereigns of the so-called Zun Γar 'Empire' that grew powerful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to become the last of equestrian nomadic empires in Central Asian histofy, only Galdan, whose mother was a daughter of Guusi Khan of the Xosud, was granted khanship by the Dalai Lama. All others held only the title of xong tayizi, which meant a viceroy under a khan among the Mongols. Thus there never was a 'Zun Γar Khanate'.