Turco-Mongol tradition  Turco-Mongol or the Turko-Mongol tradition was an ethnocultural synthesis that arose in Asia during the 14th century, among the ruling elites of the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate. The ruling Mongol elites of these Khanates eventually assimilated into the Turkic populations that they conquered and ruled over, thus becoming known as "Turco-Mongols". These elites gradually adopted Islam (from previous religions like Tengrism) as well as Turkic languages, while retaining Mongol political and legal institutions. The Turco-Mongols founded many Islamic successor states after the collapse of the Mongol Khanates, such as the Tatar Khanates which succeeded the Golden Horde (e.g. Khanate of Crimea, Astrakhan Khanate, Kazan Khanate, Kazakh Khanate) and the Timurid Empire which succeeded the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Babur (1483–1530), a Turco-Mongol prince and great-great-great-grandson of Timur, founded the Mughal Empire, which would go on to rule almost all of the Indian subcontinent. These Turco-Mongol elites would become patrons of the Turco-Persian tradition, which was the predominant culture amongst the Muslims of Central Asia at the time. In subsequent centuries, the Turco-Persian culture would be carried on further by the conquering Turco-Mongols to neighbouring regions, eventually becoming the predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of South Asia (Indian Subcontinent), specifically North India (Mughal Empire), Central Asia and Tarim basin (Northwest China) and large parts of West Asia (Middle East). Before the time of Genghis Khan, Turkic peoples and Mongols exchanged words between each other, with Turkic languages being more active than Mongolian. A much earlier Turco-Mongol tradition existed in, as evidenced by the extensive lexical borrowings from Proto-Turkic in the Proto-Mongolic language from around at least the first millennium BCE. Turkic and Mongolic languages share extensive borrowed similarities in their personal pronouns, among other lexical similarities, which seem to date to before this era and already existed before the breakup of the Turkic people around 500 BCE. A still more ancient period of prolonged language contact between Turkic and Mongol languages is indicated by further and more fundamental phonotactic, grammatical, and typological similarities (e.g. synchronic vowel harmony, lack of grammatical gender, extensive agglutination, highly similar phonotactic rules and phonology).