2
“FOR OUR SINS,
THERE CAME AN UNKNOWN TRIBE”
Timeline
| 1223 | Battle of Kalka River |
| 1237–40 | Mongol invasion of Russia |
| 1240 | Kiev falls to the Mongols |
| 1267 | Russian Orthodox Church receives privileges from Golden Horde |
| 1325 | Ivan I Kalita becomes Prince of Moscow |
| 1340s–60s | Black Death ravages Russia |
| 1359 | Dmitry I Donskoi becomes Prince of Moscow |
| 1380 | Battle of Kulikovo |
| 1382 | Khan Tokhtamysh sacks Moscow |
| 1462 | Ivan III the Great becomes Prince of Moscow |
| 1480 | Great Stand on the Ugra River: end of Golden Horde vassalage |
Bas-relief of Prince Dmitry being blessed by Sergius of Radonezh (1849), Donskoi Monastery
Ludvig14—Creative Commons CC-3.0
In 1380, the chronicles tell, the armies of the Rus’ principalities came together under Prince Dmitry of Moscow at a place called Kulikovo (Snipes’ Field). There they faced the mighty hosts of the Golden Horde, the Mongol-Tatar overlords of Russia since their brutal conquest the century before. Outnumbered, the Russians nonetheless outsmarted and outfought their enemies, with the first blow being struck by the warrior-monk Peresvet. In so doing, they threw off the “Mongol Yoke” that had so oppressed them. “Prince Dmitry returned with a great victory, like Moses won against Amelek. And there was peace in the Russian land. And his enemies were put to shame,” wrote a chronicle. The bas-relief pictured here, once in the great Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, then moved to the Donskoi Monastery when Stalin had the building blown to rubble, shows a classic scene from the story. A pious Prince Dmitry kneels to receive the blessing of St. Sergius of Radonezh, one of the great figures of Russian Orthodoxy, surrounded by knights from across Russia. Behind Sergius stands Peresvet, about to be commended into the prince’s service.
The aforementioned chronicle was The Life and Death of Grand Prince Dmitry Ivanovich, an overblown, hyperbole-heavy and fact-light eulogy commissioned and written shortly after his death in 1389. It was part of two, intertwined processes of mythmaking, as both Moscow’s rulers and the church tried to place themselves at the heart of a Russian reemergence that was, itself, still very much a work in progress. Peresvet probably never existed. Dmitry’s army was by no means made up of contingents from every Russian principality; some stayed away, some such as Ryazan actually joined the other side. While Dmitry did indeed win the battle, gaining as a result the soubriquet Donskoi, “of the Don,” after the river on whose banks it was fought, this was not the decisive victory often claimed. Just two years later, an army would sack and burn Moscow and force Dmitry to reaffirm his allegiance to the Golden Horde. For another century, the Russians would still have to send caravans of silver in tribute to the Horde’s capital in distant Sarai.
For most Russians, though, this was not such a big deal. Indeed, the term “Mongol Yoke” would not have been recognized by anyone at the time. The Mongols were savage in their conquest, but surprisingly evenhanded in their rule, and for most Russians it made little difference whether the silver was heading to Kiev, Moscow or Sarai. It was really only later that this era was turned into such a pivotal moment in Russian history, but the power of this myth can hardly be overstated. It shapes modern political culture, attitudes to China and even liberals’ laments about why their country isn’t more European. Perhaps above all, the irony is that it was the Mongols who enabled the rise of what had previously been a petty little hunting-lodge village into the heart of the new Russia: Moscow.
The Three Brothers
A recurring theme in Russian folklore is that of the three brothers. There was Lech, Czech and Rus, the supposed founders of the three Slavic peoples: the Poles (Lechites), the Czechs and the Rus’. Most tales of three brothers, though, feature one who is strong and fair, one smart and adventurous, one—the youngest—either rotten to the core or else a holy fool.
Well, once upon a time, there were three cities, and in many ways each represented a different path that Russia could have taken. Kiev was the greatest, and in many ways the most traditionally feudal. Power was expressed through family lineage and the common belief that Kiev was the heart and soul of the Rus’. It would regularly be fought over as one prince or lineage tried to assert a claim, but all the pretenders essentially shared the same worldview. One aspect of this was a constant struggle between princes wanting to gather more lands to themselves, and the custom of appanage, of sharing inheritances between all of a lord’s sons, constantly fragmenting holdings that had been painfully and bloodily assembled. Kiev was a princely city, and for all its monkish chronicles of exalted piety and humility, its boyar aristocracy rose because of their skill and good fortune in the traditional arts of making war, conducting subterfuge, securing dynastic alliances and extorting tribute.
Novgorod to the north was a trading city, one whose reach extended into the Baltic Sea and its wealthy and cosmopolitan ports. More power lay with rich magnates and a rough-and-ready kind of oligarchic democracy. The veche, or assembly of the city’s freemen, had a real voice and the annually elected posadnik, mayor, was often a greater power than the prince. Tellingly, the city was often called “Lord Novgorod the Great” as if it was its own master, and the prince was seen more as its employee. According to the Novgorod Chronicle, for example, in 1136 the people of the city decided to throw out Prince Vsevolod, “and they made these his faults. I. He has no care for the peasants. II. Why did he want to rule in Pereyaslavl? III. He fled and left the army behind” in a recent war. To the Novgorodians, a prince was their figurehead and war leader. If he was neglecting his people, obviously eager to be in another city and not willing to lead their forces in battle, then he wasn’t up to the job. He was expelled, and though other princes would be more effective in dominating this self-willed city, Vsevolod was neither the first nor the last to be weighed and found wanting. In 1270, for example, one Prince Yaroslav found himself on the wrong side of the veche “and the men of Novgorod answered: ‘prince, go away, we do not want you. Or else we shall come, all of Novgorod, to drive you out.’” He left.
So Novgorod had its own culture. Christianity took longer to take root there—as late as 1071 there were pagan riots—and the boyars who dominated the city’s politics were as much commercial magnates as warriors. The city’s markets and trading stations made it a crucial source of silver for all the Rus’ and paid for the food it needed to have shipped up the Volga. They also meant Novgorod was almost as much a northern European city as a Russian one. It was deeply involved in Baltic politics, clashing with Sweden, fighting off the muscular Christian raids of crusading orders such as the Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, backing its allies in Livonia, being part of the intellectual currents of northern Europe. In short, Novgorod was a mercantile city, and its boyars prospered through trade and exploration, in what could, with a degree of optimism and oversimplification, be seen as a little like a very early, wooden-walled and onion-domed answer to a Renaissance Italian city-state.
When both Kiev and Novgorod were at their height, though, the third and youngest brother, Moscow, was scarcely a township. The first reference to it was in 1147, when Yuri Dolgoruky, “Long-Armed Yuri,” soon to be Grand Prince of Kiev, arranged a meeting there. Nonetheless, when the Mongols came, Kiev would be broken and Novgorod humbled, and it would be Moscow that would thrive. This was the city that would not only become master of all the Rus’ but also impose its own political culture, a fusion of Russian tradition, Mongol practice and Muscovite pragmatism.
The Coming of the Mongols
Nomadic and semisettled peoples to the south and east had been a perennial problem for the Rus’. The Judeo-Turkish Khazar Khanate of the Black Sea steppe had challenged them for control over the Volga trade routes in the ninth century. The Pechenegs from Central Asia had been a threat in the tenth, but would find themselves penned behind Rus’ forts to the west and assailed by new challengers from the east. These especially included the Cumans, also known as the Polovtsians, a serious problem in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, none were a truly existential threat to the Russians. Indeed, when not raiding the Rus’, they were trading with them or serving as mercenaries in one or another of the constant dynastic struggles that seemed the closest thing Russia’s princes had to a common hobby.
Although no one knew it at the time, though, far to the east a power was rising that would reshape Eurasia. In the late twelfth century, the Mongol warrior Temujin, later to be known as Genghis Khan, was uniting an alliance of nomad peoples. He began an era of conquest such as the world had never seen, and his successors would come to regard themselves as having a divine mandate to extend their rule across the world in the name of Blue Sky Tengri, the ruling deity of their shamanic faith. Settled peoples were conquered; other nomadic powers incorporated or destroyed. China, Central Asia, much of the Middle East, all would fall to this formidable steppe army, its savagery, its speed and also its capacity to wield diplomacy, disinformation and despair as effectively as bow and sword.
By the early thirteenth century, the Polovtsians, who had displaced the Pechenegs, found themselves in the same invidious position, facing a newer, greater, sharper-toothed nomad threat from the east. Polovtsian Köten Khan fled to the court of Prince Mstislav the Bold of Galich, his son-in-law, with a stark warning: “Terrible strangers have taken our country, and tomorrow they will take yours if you do not come and help us.” As new accounts came of a Mongol army on the banks of the Dniester River, Mstislav marched to meet them. The Russians and their Cuman allies were led into a trap and crushed at Kalka River.
However, this had merely been the advance guard of the invading force of the military commander Jochi Khan, Genghis’s oldest son, and so the Mongols failed to follow up on this victory. The Russians had no idea of the size and ferocity of the threat they faced, and the Mongols—also known as Tatars—seemed as mysterious as they had been murderous. As the Novgorod Chronicle put it, “for our sins, there came an unknown tribe. No one knew who they were, or their origin, faith, or tongue ... Only one Russian warrior in ten lived through this battle.” As no immediate invasion followed, the Rus’ managed to persuade themselves that the Mongols, whoever they were, had been deterred by their plucky resistance, and somehow a crushing defeat came to be seen as a bold defiance.
Until 1236, that is, when Jochi’s son Batu Khan led his main force westward. The last remnants of the Polovtsians were crushed, and then he turned to the Rus’. The next few years saw the Russians harrowed by a storm of fire and blade. City after city was taken: divided and unprepared, the Rus’ could not stand against the invaders. Proud Kiev fought, and was sacked with such murderous savagery that it was said that only 2,000 of its 50,000 population survived. Six years later a papal envoy wrote of ruins strewn with “countless skulls and bones of dead men.” Canny Novgorod learned the lesson, preemptively buying its survival with silver and surrender.
It seemed nothing could stop the Mongols’ inexorable westward march of conquest. Batu’s armies continued on to Hungary and Poland, when politics and wine did what no army had yet managed to do. The Great Khan, Batu’s uncle Ogedei who had succeeded Genghis, had a notorious fondness for drink—when his courtiers tried to limit the number of cups he was brought a day, he simply had them made bigger—and he died in 1241 after a night-long binge. While Batu continued to triumph in the field, he now faced what was likely to be a sequence of sieges where the cost of victory might outweigh the value of the plunder, and in unusually warm, wet weather at that, bogging down the usual lightning-fast Mongol cavalry. Perhaps it was with a sense of relief that, when he heard of Ogedei’s death, Batu returned to distant Karakorum, the Mongols’ capital, to take part in the negotiations that would select the new Great Khan.
The Mongol armies withdrew from Central Europe—but Russia remained under their control, part of the territories of the Golden Horde, as the western portion of the sprawling Mongol holdings was called. In conventional Russian accounts, what followed was more than two centuries of Asiatic despotism, during which time the Russians groaned under the “Mongol Yoke” and were locked away from the rest of Europe. The truth, of course, is rather more complex.
The Mongol Yoke?
The Mongols were more about conquest than administration. The Golden Horde, which would become increasingly autonomous as the Mongol Empire was just too large to rule as a single unit, built a capital for itself at Sarai, southeast of Russia, close to where the lower Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. The Mongols were not interested in imposing their own ways or faith on their subject peoples (from the mid-thirteenth century, Islam became dominant among them). Instead, they expected order and tribute, submission and obedience, and to that end were happy to rely on subject princes who could provide them. While at first the Mongols appointed their own local governors, baskaks, they were soon withdrawn as Russian princes proved willing to work for the Golden Horde instead.
Most were already used to being at best big fishes in small ponds, owing allegiance and tax to another. In many ways it made little difference to them just who was at the top of the food chain. They would make the journey to Sarai in hope of receiving the yarlyk, or mandate, to rule their principalities in the khan’s name. From time to time a city would rebel or fail to show the requisite deference to some traveling Mongol dignitary, and the result would be a bloody reprisal. More often, rival princes would seek to enlist the support of Sarai in their own private feuds and dynastic struggles.
On the whole, this was a time of religious tolerance (in 1267, the Great Khan explicitly brought the Russian Orthodox Church under his protection, exempting it from tax and military service) and burgeoning trade. It was a particular opportunity for the town of Moscow, and the Ryurikid dynasty which held it. Moscow had been sacked and burned like so many others during the initial invasion, but as it recovered, its princes proved to be the quickest and most effective at understanding the new rules of the game. They would become the Golden Horde’s most enthusiastic, effective and ruthless proxies. Whether it was raising taxes or punishing rebels, the Muscovite princes would eagerly do what Sarai needed—and make sure they profited richly in the process.
Alexander Nevsky, who had been prince of Novgorod before the Mongol invasion, saving northwestern Russia from the Teutonic Knights (Catholic crusaders who considered the Russian Orthodox as heathens, no better than Muslims), had from the first supported conciliation toward the Golden Horde. In return, he was awarded the yarlyk of Grand Duke of Vladimir-Suzdal, which had supplanted Kiev as, in effect, the mark of being the first among the Russian princely titles. The Ryurikids tried, with considerable success, to keep this title in the family pretty much consistently thereafter, and with it the prestige and opportunities for enrichment it offered. Moscow was one of the cities in his patrimony, the least important, so when he died it went to his youngest son, the two-year-old Daniil.
Nevsky’s successor, Yuri (r. 1303–25), spent two years schmoozing and politicking in Sarai and married Konchaka, sister of Uzbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde. Not least thanks to that inspired alliance, he was also made Grand Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal. However, Moscow was still locked in a struggle for dominance over the Russian principalities with Ryazan and, especially, Tver. On Yuri’s death, Prince Ivan I (r. 1325–41) neatly killed two birds with one stone by volunteering to lead the suppression of a rising in neighboring Tver. He not only got the chance to lead a Mongol army against his rival, he was also granted the usual prize of being made Grand Prince.
He became known as Ivan Kalita, “Moneybags,” for the wealth he accumulated. Money and power tend to attract more of the same, and he was able to use it to begin the process of expanding Moscow’s realms. Some smaller principalities, such as Beloözero and Uglich, he essentially bought; others, such as Rostov and Yaroslavl, he brought into the dynasty’s control through marriage. What the Ryurikids took, they would keep. Ivan instituted the practice of inheritance by primogeniture: the entire estate passed to the eldest son rather than being divided into multiple appanages. The family business remained concentrated and thriving.
Ivan’s successor Simeon the Proud (r. 1341–53) began to cast his eyes on Novgorod, seizing from it the lucrative town of Torzhok. Ivan II (r. 1353–9) was less successful, not least because at this time Russia was ravaged by the Black Death, killing perhaps a quarter of its population. Ivan was considered weak and passive by the ruthlessly opportunistic standards of the Ryurikids. His son Dmitry (r. 1359–89), by contrast, was daring and imaginative, and would take a gamble that could have proven disastrous, but instead turned out to be the true making of Muscovite dominance over all the Rus’.
Dmitry and Kulikovo
Prince Dmitry was in a very different strategic situation than his predecessors. The Golden Horde was in decline, its vigor diminished, its leaders fighting among themselves, the valuable trade along the Eurasia-spanning Great Silk Road dwindling. Meanwhile, Moscow had reached what seemed to be a peak in its own power, with worrying hints of its own fall to come. The city was now studded by cathedrals and girdled with fortresses. In 1325, Metropolitan Pyotr, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, had moved his seat to Moscow, symbolically making it, not Kiev or Vladimir, the spiritual capital of all the Russias.
© Helen Stirling
Yet not its political capital. Novgorod was increasingly dismissive of Moscow’s claims to hegemony. Ryazan and Tver were openly hostile. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a rising challenger to the northwest, and Moscow’s close connection to the Golden Horde, once a source of wealth and security, was becoming at best less useful, at worst an outright problem. It meant, after all, that the city was more likely to be pulled into the internecine struggles in Sarai. Through the 1360s and 1370s, it had largely been dominated by Emir Mamai of the Jochids, leader of one element of the Golden Horde, a schemer who ultimately proved too cunning for his own good. He tried to play Moscow and Tver against each other, first granting Dmitry the yarlyk of Grand Prince of Vladimir, then giving it to Prince Mikhail of Tver when Dmitry didn’t pay the full tribute Mamai had demanded. The truth of the matter was that Mamai needed more and more silver to fuel his own political intrigues in Sarai and was making unrealistic demands. Ultimately, Dmitry took matters into his own hands, besieged Tver, and forced Mikhail to grant him Vladimir. It was a significant moment: Russian princes determining that city’s fate themselves rather than waiting for Sarai’s decision.
At this point, Prince Dmitry was no nationalist rebel. He was not seeking to break Russia away from Sarai’s rule, simply to use a moment of opportunity to renegotiate the terms in Moscow’s favor. However, Mamai was facing a new and frightening challenger by the name of Tokhtamysh. Mamai was a plotter rather than a general like Tokhtamysh. He needed money to buy armies and allies—which he would have to squeeze out of a reluctant Russia—and he also needed to prove himself a decisive war leader. To this end, in 1380 he issued a demand for even more tribute than usual. Anticipating that Dmitry either wouldn’t or couldn’t comply, he began mustering a powerful expedition against Moscow, to take his tribute by force and also demonstrate his martial prowess.
Dmitry hadn’t wanted a war—his first instinct had been to try and scrape together the money—but when he heard of Mamai’s invasion, he decided to make a virtue out of a necessity. If he had to fight, he would turn this war into a rebellion against the Golden Horde and use that at once to try and consolidate Moscow’s dominance over the Rus’ and rewrite its reputation, turning the quisling city into the vanguard of Russia’s independence.
“Grey wolves ran howling from the mouths of the Don and Dnieper,” goes the epic Zadonshchina, “ready to rush into the Russian land. But these were not grey wolves but vicious Tatars, who wanted to fight their way through all the lands of the Rus’.” Mamai had gathered a force of perhaps 50,000 soldiers: Mongol-Tatars, Armenian auxiliaries, Genoese mercenaries from their trading stations on Crimea. Marching to join him were 5,000 Lithuanians under Grand Duke Jogaila and—with some reluctance—a thousand men under Prince Oleg of Ryazan, whose southeastern city was too close to Sarai to risk defiance. Dmitry was able to muster a force more like 30,000 strong, half from Moscow and its subject cities. In part this disproportion reflects the widespread suspicion of Moscow’s ambitions by the other princes: Novgorod, Tver and even Dmitry’s father-in-law, Prince Dmitry Konstantinovich of Suzdal held back.
The two armies met at Kulikovo, Mamai impatient to secure a victory before winter ended the campaigning season, Dmitry desperate to bring his enemy to battle before he could be reinforced by the Ryazan and Lithuanian contingents. It was a brutal, bloody fight—“men fell like hay under the scythe, and blood flowed like water in streams”—but Russian resolve and cunning finally won the day, Dmitry springing an eleventh-hour ambush that turned Mamai’s flank and routed his men. Dmitry lost perhaps a third of his army, but gained wagonloads of loot and, even more importantly, the reputation as the Russian champion who had defeated the irresistible Golden Horde.
Here is the point where myth and reality diverge most sharply. This was an undoubted battlefield triumph, but not a political turning point. Mamai would meet his end in Crimea, killed by the Genoese whose mercenaries he had allowed to die to give him time to flee. Tokhtamysh would consolidate his power and return with a new army, burn Moscow and force Dmitry Donskoi to bend the knee. The Russians would continue to be vassals of the Mongol-Tatar khans until they were faced down in the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480 by Grand Prince Ivan III (r. 1462–1505), Dmitry’s great-grandson. In the intervening century, Moscow would slowly continue what became known as the “Gathering of the Russian Lands,” a two-steps-forward-one-back process of consolidating its grip on the various principalities. Nonetheless, princes continued to travel to Sarai to be confirmed in their positions, and dynastic wars and intercity rivalries continued unabated.
The End of Foreign Rule
So much for the reality. The myth popularized at the time, and assiduously developed in the centuries since, was of a conclusive and dramatic victory and one which confirmed Moscow’s position not simply as the foremost principality of the Russias but also one whose status was endorsed by God. Dmitry Donskoi had, after all, cultivated the church and also made a point of inviting foreign traders with him to Kulikovo, so that they could spread the word of his victory. Although his successors would often face serious challenges, Dmitry certainly averted the impending decline he had feared for Moscow. Now, Kulikovo is a shrine to Russian nationalism, and in 1988 Dmitry was made a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2010, Patriarch Kirill said the “battle proved to everyone that Russia was like a powerful coil, capable of springing out and throwing back any opponent and go on to win.”
More broadly, though, the era of the so-called “Mongol Yoke” has become central to Russia’s imagined picture of itself—and many outsiders’, too. The conventional wisdom is that Mongol rule locked Russia away from a Europe that at the time was going through the Renaissance and the early stages of the Reformation. Instead of experiencing the cultural, social, economic and religious changes of those centuries, the poor Russians were lost in what Karl Marx fancifully called “the bloody swamp of Mongol slavery.” Meanwhile, the Russians internalized ruthless, “Asiatic” forms of rule, in which absolute power was wielded from the top with absolute brutality, demanding absolute submission from below. Moscow, as the city most closely tied to the Golden Horde, most enthusiastically adopted this political culture, and as it gathered the Russian lands, it also made them an image of itself.
Perhaps. To a degree there is truth here, but only the partial truth of a caricature. First of all, Mongol conquest did not seal Russia behind some “yurt-felt curtain.” Traders and emissaries, exiles and missionaries still traveled back and forth. Novgorod maintained its foothold in the Baltic, and Muscovite princes made dynastic marriages with both Constantinople and Lithuania. The difficulties of east–west travel without suitable river routes through the forest and the relative poverty of Russia are probably equal explanations for any isolation. After all, would there have been a Renaissance in Russia had it escaped Mongol invasion? To a large extent this movement, spreading from its epicenters in the Italian and Dutch cities, was the result of improved agrarian yields and thus a burgeoning mercantile class and urban population. The Mongol invasion certainly set back Russian urbanization and the city-based artisanal economy, and the added burden of tribute also had an impact on trade and agrarian expansion. Even so, it is difficult to imagine a Renaissance amidst the deep forests of Russia.
Likewise, some historians have argued that the Russians ended up adopting Mongol styles of rule wholesale. In part, they adduce this from the numerous words relating to governance that Russian has borrowed from them, from yarlyk (now used for a custom stamp) to dengi (money). However, absolutism is hardly an Asian invention, and the term tsar, emperor, which would in due course be adopted by the princes of Moscow, is rooted in the Latin caesar, and was actually applied to the Byzantine rulers.
The foundations of authoritarian rule in Russia could as easily be found in Constantinople-facing Kiev as Sarai-beholden Moscow. While there is no question that the Golden Horde had a greater influence on the latter, not least as many of its princes spent years among their Mongol masters, it is a convenient myth for everyone to blame the “Yoke” for a supposed Russian predisposition to despotism. For Russians, the Mongols gave them an alibi. For outside critics of Russia, past and present, this likewise provides a perfect way of “Othering” them, of defining them not as Eastern Europeans but as western Asians, or as some bastardized hybrid at best. “Scratch a Russian,” the nineteenth-century French aphorism had it, “and you’ll find a Tatar.”
The authority of the Golden Horde over the Russians was much more conditional than generally assumed, and often dependent on the support of local princes. Likewise, frequently it was the princes who used Sarai to prosecute their own schemes and advance their own interests. Set aside the devastation of the initial invasion—admittedly a lot to set aside—and the roots of Russian absolutism seem to be found in the objective circumstances of the time and the place. A poor land, in which princes needed to control their cities and their peasants firmly to extract as much tax as they could from them. A land where—away from the Mongols’ admirably fast yam postal routes—news and orders traveled slowly. The consequent tendency to autonomy demanded especially harsh treatment on the parts of overlords—Mongol or Russian—as a deterrent. To be sure, the Golden Horde, like Constantinople before it, gave them some practices and idioms of power, another layer of writing on the palimpsest. But Russia was still its own country, and Ivan III—Ivan the Great—and his successors were about to have the chance to show just what a country that would be.
Further reading: Janet Martin’s Medieval Russia 980–1584 (Cambridge, 2007) is still the best general textbook on this era, although the first part of Robert O. Crummey’s The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (Longman, 1987) is worthy of note. Charles Halperin’s Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (John Wiley, 1985) and Donald Ostrowski’s Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 1998) are the scholarly classics in the field. The Story of the Mongols, whom we call the Tartars (Branden, 1996) is a translation of Giovanni DiPlano Carpini’s account of his thirteenth-century travels all the way to Karakorum. For those who want to know more about Kulikovo, and what we do and don’t know about it, I cover this in Kulikovo 1380: The battle that made Russia (Osprey, 2019).