The Kazakh Khanate was a nomadic pastoral confederation on the Central Asian steppe, traditionally dated to a breakaway around 1465, when sultans descended from Genghis Khan led their followers east. Their people, organized into three tribal divisions called jüz, became the society from whom the modern Kazakh nation takes its name. It was never a tightly unified state, and Russia abolished the office of khan in stages — the Middle Jüz in 1822, the Junior Jüz in 1824. Kenesary Kasymov's revolt of 1837–1847 was a last bid to restore it. Russian absorption ended the khans' rule but not the Kazakh identity.
The Kazakh Khanate began not with a conquest but with a walkout. In the 1460s two royal cousins, Janibek and Kerei, gathered their followers and rode away from the powerful khan they were bound to serve, striking out east across open pasture to rule on their own. The people who followed them came to be known as Kazakhs, a name many later took to mean the free, the wanderers, the ones who had broken away. A whole nation would carry, in its very name, the memory of leaving.