Muratbek Biy

Muratbek Biy (c. 1690 – c. 1758) was a chieftain (biy) of the Karakoyun clan who, according to Iradi tradition, led the clan's horsemen against the Dzungars in the first half of the 18th century.^[1]

The Dzungar Khanate overran the Talas and Chu valleys in 1723, during the years remembered by the Kazakhs as the "Great Disaster", and Iradi herders fled into the mountains or west toward the Syr Darya. Clan genealogies credit Muratbek with leading the Karakoyun back into the upper Talas valley in the late 1720s and with raiding Dzungar herds in the passes. Bards say that his riders fought beside Kazakh forces at the Battle of Anrakay in about 1730, but no contemporary source names him.^[2] In the following decades Iradi Christian horsemen served as auxiliaries of the Khanate of Kokand against Dzungar raids, and church chronicles of Iyık Janyl name a "Murat, chief of the Karakoyun" among the elders who received the khan's decree of tolerance in 1727 (see Treaty of Talas (1727)).^[3]

Historians accept that a Karakoyun chief of this name led the clan in the 1720s, but regard most of the stories about him as later epic material. He is remembered in clan sanjyra as the ancestor of several Karakoyun lineages, and his reputed grave, a stone enclosure near the Karakoyun Pass, is a place of pilgrimage for the clan.^[1]

References

1. ^ Sadykov, Zheenbek (1994). Genealogies of the Iradi Clans. Revised edition. Talas: Talas State University Press, vol. 2, pp. 211–230.
2. ^ Central Asian Folklore Society (2021). Epic Cycles and Horseback Chants of the Northern Valleys. Talas: Talas State University Press, pp. 102–118.
3. ^ Institute of History, Talas State University (2012). History of Irad in Three Volumes. Talas: Talas State University Press, vol. 1.