Edige

Edige is the supreme hero of Nogai heroic song and the pivot of the great epic that bears his name, sung across the Kipchak world from the Nogai and Tatars to the Kazakhs, Karakalpaks and Bashkirs. Behind him stands the historical emir Edigü (c.1352–1419), the Manghıt commander who broke Khan Toqtamish and built the ulus from which the Nogai Horde and the Nogai people descend. The epic gives him a marvellous pedigree: through the saint Baba Tükles's marriage to a peri he is of part-otherworldly blood. Orphaned when Toqtamish kills his father Qutlı-Qıya, Edige flees to Timur, returns to overthrow the khan, and rules the Horde before his own fall, bequeathing the struggle to his son Nuradin.

Parentage

• Qutlı-Qıya

Children

• Nuradin

Domains

• war
• sovereignty
• vengeance

Powers

• founds the Manghıt–Nogai polity
• avenges his slain father and overthrows the khan
• bears the otherworldly blood of a peri

Epithets

• Эдиге би

Relations

• parent: Qutlı-Qıya
• child: Nuradin
• enemy: Toqtamish

Sources

• V. M. Zhirmunsky, Tyurkskiy geroicheskiy epos (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), 'Skazanie ob Idige'
• A. I.-M. Sikaliev, Nogayskiy geroicheskiy epos (Cherkessk: KChIGI, 1994)
• Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (University Park, 1994)