ABSTRACT
There do not appear to have been any rigid ethnic distinctions between the various branches of the Mongol Empire and as the central power waned there was considerable movement of tribal groups. This was particularly the case between the states of Chagatai and Dzhuchi; there were no insurmountable physical obstacles in their way and until well into the fifteenth century the situation remained extremely fluid, with individual leaders suddenly gathering up their followers and migrating vast distances. The need for alliances against immediate neighbours also encouraged contacts with more remote forces. In the late fourteenth century, for example, Toktamysh, a Khan of the White Horde, travelled from Troki (Trakai in the present-day Lithuanian SSR) to Samarkand to seek assistance from Timur against rivals on the Volga, a distance of nearly 4,000 km. Gradually, though, more settled patterns emerged. There were still a few instances of whole groups of people moving, as when Bukharans went to Siberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or Kazakhs from the Little Horde migrated to the Orenburg district at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. (The Kazakhs and Kirghiz, however, appear to have retained their mobility into the twentieth century: in the first decade of the Soviet period some of the Kirghiz moved to Afghanistan and a large number of Kazakhs are thought to have moved to China.)
388 Appendix: Non-Muslim Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union Some of the Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union were converted to Islam as early as the eighth century, others (the nomadic Kirghiz and Kazakhs) as late as the nineteenth century, but the majority had become Muslim by the fifteenth century. The tiny number who did not adopt Islam were those on the very fringes of the Turkic world, such as the isolated tribes of Siberia and the Gagauz in Bessarabia. The Karaims are exceptional in that for centuries they were surrounded by closely related Muslim Turkic peoples, yet they remained faithful throughout to their own form of Judaism.
