The Chagatai Khanate was one of the four Mongol khanates that emerged as the empire of Genghis Khan divided among his sons — the Central Asian state that took shape around his death in 1227 to rule Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin. The united realm fragmented in the mid-14th century. Its western half was absorbed by Timur around 1370, while its eastern successors, the khans of Moghulistan, persisted into the seventeenth century. It carried the name of Chagatai, Genghis Khan's second son, and lent that name to a Turkic literary language that would outlive the khanate by centuries.
Of the four pieces into which the Mongol Empire broke, this was the one that could never decide what it wanted to be. Its western half filled with walled cities, coined money, and mosques. Its eastern lords kept to open pasture and branded the westerners soft traitors to the nomad life — though the line between the two was always more political than absolute, with Islam and the caravan trade crossing it freely. For a lifetime the two halves pulled against each other, until a limping soldier named Timur mastered the west. And even he, who would go on to terrify half the world, never dared call himself khan. He ruled as a royal son-in-law, propping puppet grandsons of Genghis Khan on a throne he could seize but was not born to sit on.