[2]
1260–1350: UNRAVELING AND THE BUILDING OF NEW POLITIES

The Mongol Empire illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the Inner Eurasian smychka. Given effective leadership, the main factors limiting Mongol power were the ability to hold alliances together as the empire expanded across Inner Eurasia, and the need to maintain the flow of resources that glued the system together (Figure 2.1; Map 2.1). Successful wars mobilized large amounts of booty that could be distributed to regional leaders, while the Mongols were fortunate in having several very capable rulers, beginning with Temujin himself. The good fortune and political virtuosity of Chinggis Khan help explain the early successes of the empire, not just because he juggled predation and alliance-building with such skill, but also because he had the foresight to nominate Ogodei as his successor.

Figure 2.1 Photograph of part of Baldugin Sharav's painting, One Day in Mongolia. Courtesy of Daniel C. Waugh.

Map 2.1 The Mongol Empire at its height in 1250. Adapted from Atwood, Encyclopedia, 366.

THE BREAKUP OF THE UNIFIED MONGOL EMPIRE: 1260

Khan Mongke died suddenly on August 11, 1259, campaigning in Sichuan province in China. The empire fell apart almost immediately. With no obvious successor to Mongke, the empire split along genealogical fault lines, as different Chinggisid princes asserted their authority over their home territories or uluses to form four smaller empires: in China and Mongolia, Central Asia, the western region later known as the Golden Horde, and the Il-Khanate in Persia.

The Chinggisid family (Figure 2.2) understood the breakup as a partitioning of the family business, and they also understood exactly when it occurred. Forty-five years later, in 1305, Il-Khan Oljeitu (r. 1304–1316), the Chinggisid ruler of Persia and great-grandson of the Il-Khanate's founder, Hulegu, wrote to King Philippe IV of France that, “We, … descendants of Chinggiz Khaqan should put an end to the vituperation which had been going on for forty-five years up to now.”¹

Figure 2.2 Genealogy of Chinggis Khan's family (shading = Supreme Khans).

Explaining the breakup is not hard. Mongke, unlike Chinggis Khan, had failed to appoint a successor, so that no one was ready and prepared to hold the system together after his death. Those who survived him had to put most of their efforts into defending their own uluses, and differences between the uluses magnified conflicts within the family. Particularly deep were the differences between regions with large agrarian populations, such as China and Persia, and the largely pastoralist uluses of Inner Eurasia. Besides, the ruling family itself was changing. Its younger members had become accustomed to the wealth and luxuries of the agrarian world, and none had the ambition, the determination, the ruthlessness, or perhaps the sheer luck of Chinggis Khan.

But these are relatively superficial reasons for the breakup, and the empire could surely have survived longer if it had not begun to run out of resources. The empire was now so huge that it was difficult to coordinate its different armies, or move revenues and officials across the empire. Even more important, the huge flows of resources and people that had held the empire together in the past were beginning to dry up. There were no longer any easy conquests to be had after the conquest of Persia. Even if Mongke had survived, further conquests would prove as tough and as expensive as the China campaigns in which he perished. Little now held the empire together apart from the prestige and authority of Mongke himself, which is why the empire unraveled so fast after his death.

Here, we will largely ignore the Outer Eurasian uluses of China and Persia, and focus on the Inner Eurasian uluses that emerged in Mongolia, Central Asia, and the Pontic steppes. The histories of the Inner Eurasian uluses would be shaped largely by their geography, and by the skills and fortunes of their leaders. Above all, their fate would depend on the capacity of rulers to sustain regional flows of resources large enough to support regional versions of the smychka.

THE LEFT WING: MONGOLIA AND YUAN CHINA

We begin with Mongolia, the heartland and driver of the Mongol Empire. While it might have seemed natural for power to drift back to this region, that did not happen. Never again would Mongolia generate as much mobilizational power as in the thirteenth century.

In the far east of Inner Eurasia, the borders between forest, steppe, and arable lands are clearer and less negotiable than in most other regions. North of Mongolia lie the forests of eastern Siberia, which were populated by foragers and herders with limited but valuable resources such as furs. Mongolia, lying between Siberia and the Gobi desert, was a large region of hilly steppe that had been settled by pastoralists since the second millennium BCE. South of the Gobi desert lay more pasturelands in the Ordos region, as well as the rich farming regions of greater China. Along China's northern borders, pastoralists and farmers met in the most sustained trans-ecological confrontation anywhere in the world. Geography and ecology would play a determining role in the battle for control of the Chinggisid family business in the east.

In accordance with steppe tradition, Ariq-Boke (d. 1266), the youngest son of Chinggis Khan's youngest son, Tolui, inherited the family's Mongolian homeland. This gave him control of the capital, Karakorum. He also acquired Mongke's great seal, which was passed to him by one of Mongke's officials. Within weeks of Mongke's death Ariq-Boke summoned a quriltai to elect a new khagan. But if he hoped to replace Mongke, geography was against him.

The breakup of the empire cut the northward flow of resources from China, which was now controlled by Ariq-Boke's elder brother, Qubilai (1215–1294). Qubilai had been campaigning with Mongke in southern China and excused himself from attending the quriltai summoned by Ariq-Boke on military grounds. But when Ariq-Boke began moving troops to north China, Qubilai abandoned the campaign against the Song and headed north, in a strategic retreat that may have postponed the final conquest of south China for two decades.2 In April 1260, Qubilai summoned a separate quriltai at his northern capital of Kaiping (Marco Polo's Shangdu and Coleridge's Xanadu), 10 days north of the future capital, Beijing. After three ritual refusals to take the throne, Qubilai declared himself Mongke's successor as khagan. Ariq-Boke immediately had himself elected khagan at a second quriltai in Karakorum, apparently with the support of Batu's brother, Berke (r. 1257–1267), now khan of the western regions later included within the Golden Horde. Mongke's other brother, Hulegu, now the ruler of Persia, supported Qubilai. These alliances, formed on either side of the ecological fault lines between the empire's Inner Eurasian and Outer Eurasian territories, would prove remarkably durable.

In the east, there followed a four-year civil war. Though Ariq-Boke controlled the symbols of power, Qubilai controlled much greater human and material resources. To make things worse, Ariq-Boke failed to secure control of the Central Asian ulus that had once been held by Chagatay, Chinggis Khan's second son. That forced him to mobilize soldiers and resources from Mongolia, Western Xinjiang, and the Yenisei region. In a world of low productivity, the Yenisei region was important because, as Rashid noted, it had many cities as well as many nomads. It also produced iron and iron implements, including weapons and agricultural tools, and had regions of irrigated agriculture, where wheat, barley, and millet were grown, and settlements in which Chinese artisans produced textiles.³

But Qubilai had China. He also inherited the Mongolian army that had been fighting the Song. He showed how uneven the balance of resources was by the simple expedient of canceling the caravans carrying Chinese provisions to Karakorum. This caused an immediate and devastating famine in the Mongolian capital.⁴ Late in 1860, Qubilai's forces occupied much of Mongolia.

Ariq-Boke's increasingly desperate attempts to mobilize resources from his under-resourced ulus eventually alienated potential allies. He appointed Alghu, a grandson of Chagatay, as khan of Central Asia. But Alghu, stung by massive requisitions for the war against Qubilai, declared his independence, depriving Ariq-Boke of the richest of all his territories. Ariq-Boke tried to reconquer Central Asia in a campaign so brutal that it devastated large regions and caused a massive famine. According to the historian Bartold,

Ariq-böge's troops seized so much corn in the fertile Ili valley [in 1263] that throughout the winter the horses were fed on it. Such pillage caused a terrible famine in the country, and in the long run proved disastrous to the army, for in the spring of 1264 the horses, accustomed to corn, sickened and died from green fodder. In these circumstances, Ariq-böge was abandoned by most of his generals who disliked him for his cruelty.⁵

In the spring of 1264, Mongke's son, Urung Tash, demanded the jade seal or tamga of his father, then traveled to China and submitted to Qubilai.⁶ Qubilai easily repelled Ariq-Boke's attacks on northern China, and in 1264 Ariq-Boke submitted to Qubilai, was forgiven (unlike most of his lieutenants), and died two years later, in 1266.⁷ Qubilai now controlled Mongolia and China, and enjoyed the symbolic support of the Il-Khanate. In 1271 he proclaimed the start of the new Yuan dynasty. But he would never gain the support of Batu's realm, the Golden Horde, and he also failed in a 20-year campaign to control Chagatay's former ulus in Central Asia and Xinjiang.

In 1266 Qubilai moved his capital from Karakorum to Daidu (Beijing). After little more than 30 years in the Eurasian limelight, Karakorum became once more a provincial steppe settlement. The power, prestige, and wealth that had flowed into Mongolia under the unified empire now ebbed out again, leaving Mongolia as little more than a remote Chinese colony. It was important as a base for warfare with Central Asia, as a supplier of horses, and as a symbol of the Yuan dynasty's steppe origins, but it was no longer an independent power. The government planted garrisons in Mongolia, and supported them by the forced settlement of Chinese farmers along the Kerulen river; at Chingqai, near modern Uliastay, 250 miles west of Karakorum; and near Karakorum itself. Along the Kerulen river, Chinese farmers lived “in sod huts on the banks, growing wheat and hemp, and ice-fishing in the wintertime.”⁸ In 1307, just 100 years after the great quriltai at which Temujin was proclaimed Chinggis Khan, Mongolia became a province of Yuan China, with the name of Ling-pei, and Karakorum became a mere provincial capital.

Mongolia did not flourish under the Yuan. Trade ceased almost entirely, funds for the post-horse system dried up, and most of the towns and artisan colonies founded in the imperial era disappeared.⁹ The Mongolian historian Gongor writes that, “After their retreat into the homeland, the Mongol feudal lords lost the large-scale tribute that China had paid, and the result was an ever-increasing level of exploitation of their native subjects.”¹⁰ A trickle of resources still flowed into Mongolia from China's Mongolian ruling elite, and as early as the summer of 1261, Qubilai sent relief supplies to Karakorum.¹¹ But for a century, Mongolia was the only region of Inner Eurasia more or less permanently ruled from Outer Eurasia.

Mongolian soldiers and nobles fared better in China than in Mongolia, particularly after Qubilai granted Mongols the highest status within his lands. Qubilai encouraged the Mongol elite to wear traditional Mongol clothing, and he took part in traditional Mongolian hunts on his visits to Shangdu. Official banquets were celebrated in imperial Mongol style, with huge amounts of alcohol.¹² However, not all Mongols in China lived well. Marco Polo described how Mongolian garrison troops supported themselves from “the immense herds of cattle that are assigned to them and on the milk which they send into the towns to sell in return for necessary provisions.”¹³

Emigration stripped Mongolia of its nobility and most of its soldiers. When the Yuan dynasty collapsed in 1368, as many as 60,000 Mongols, many of them deeply Sinicized, fled back to Mongolia with the remnants of the Yuan court.¹⁴ Under the Ming, Mongolia lost even the symbolic prestige it had enjoyed under the Yuan dynasty. In 1388, Ming armies crushed a Yuan army near Lake Buyr and destroyed Karakorum. But the return of so many Mongols from China undoubtedly created a cultural leaven that would eventually allow new attempts to form unified Mongolian armies and polities.

THE CENTER: CENTRAL ASIA AND XINJIANG

The complex ecological checkerboard of Central Asia and Xinjiang, where farming oases and trading cities alternated with steppeland and desert, explains why it was so difficult to build a stable smychka in the region.

THE CHAGATAY ULUS

North of Central Asia lay the vast woodlands of western Siberia. To their south, the Kazakh steppes extended for 3,000 miles from the Urals and the Caspian Sea to the Altai and Tienshan ranges, and from southern Siberia to the oases of Transoxiana. Here, most pastoralists nomadized north in the summer and south in the winter, or practiced forms of transhumance in the mountainous regions of the Semirechie north of the Tienshan mountains. They often traded with, ruled, or exacted tributes from the cities along the Syr Darya river. The pasturelands of Semirechie (in modern Kazakhstan) and Zungharia (in northwestern Xinjiang) extended from Talas to the Altai and eastwards towards Uighuristan. They contained some fertile regions that supported major trading towns, such as Turfan and Hami, which effectively controlled access to China. Semirechie and Zungharia, which contained rich agrarian regions and flourishing towns, constituted, along with the Volga delta and the Crimea, some of the most valuable and hotly contested regions of steppeland in Inner Eurasia.

South of the Kazakh steppes, but divided by the Pamir mountains, lay the urbanized oases of Transoxiana to the west and the Tarim basin to the east in modern Xinjiang. All were watered by rivers flowing from glaciers high in the mountains, and most lay between the base of the mountains and regions of steppe or desert. Because they were separated by regions of desert and steppe, Central Asia's rich trading cities rarely managed to unite, so they were vulnerable to steppe armies. Here, any smychka linking pastoralist military power and urban commercial power was likely to be unstable because pastoralists, too, were divided by geography.

Beatrice Manz offers a fine short summary of the ecology of Transoxiana:

The Oxus [Amu Darya] region contains both excellent farmland and steppe, and these moreover are often interspersed. Even within rich and irrigated agricultural areas … there is much land which is suitable only for nomadic exploitation. The many rivers of the region create large areas of brackish marshland, useful for nomads wintering in the lowland steppes. Almost no part of this region moreover is distant from the mountains whose foothills provide summer pastures. … The nomads of the Ulus lived in close contact with its settled population, whom they controlled and exploited directly. They knew the value and the requirements of the agricultural and urban economies, and were able to deal easily with the leaders of the settled communities under their control.15

East of Transoxiana and south of the Tienshan mountains lay the Tarim basin. Surrounded by mountains that provided abundant snow-melt, and with the harsh and almost impenetrable Taklamakan desert at its heart, the Tarim basin formed a ring of irrigated oases within which prosperous trading city-states had emerged. Though usually independent, these cities often paid tributes either to pastoralists from Zungharia or to officials from China. In Central Asia, in a neat illustration of the geography of the smychka, military power could be found in the steppelands of Zungharia, Semirechie, or Transoxiana, while most of the region's material, human, commercial, and cultural wealth lay in the urbanized lands to the south.

At the height of Mongol power, much of this region fell within a single ulus, that of Chinggis Khan's second son, Chagatay (1183–1242). By personal and cultural preference, Chagatay controlled his domains from the steppelands of Zungharia (Map 2.2). According to Juvaini:

Map 2.2 The Chagatay khanate in 1331. Adapted from Atwood, Encyclopedia, 84.

In spring and summer he had his quarters in Almaligh and Quyas, which in those seasons resembled the Garden of Iram. He constructed large pools … in that region for the flocking of the waterfowl … at every stage, from beginning to end he laid up stores of food and drink.¹⁶

Controlling the ulus from Zungharia made sense for a ruler who grew up in the steppes. It also made military and political sense, as long as the armies and administrators of the unified empire, such as the very able governor of Transoxiana, Mas'ud Beg (d. 1289, son of Chinggis Khan's appointee, Mahmud Yalavach (fl. 1218–1252)), could hold the smychka together by transferring revenues from Central Asia's cities towards their steppelands. However, the violent purge that followed Mongke's accession in 1251 removed most princes of the Chagatayid and Ogodeid lines and ruined the towns of Zungharia. Of the Tarbagatay mountains, near Quyas, William of Rubruck wrote in the 1250s, “There used to be sizeable towns lying in the plain, but they were for the most part completely destroyed so that the Tartars could pasture there, since the area affords very fine grazing lands.”¹⁷ Barthold claimed that the region did not return to early thirteenth-century levels of urbanization before the nineteenth century.¹⁸

As we have seen, Chagatay's grandson, Alghu, asserted his independence of Ariq-Boke almost immediately after being granted authority over Transoxiana. Like his grandfather, Alghu ruled from the Qayaliq/Almaliq region of Zungharia where he could assemble pastoralist armies.¹⁹ By 1263 Alghu had gained the support of Transoxiana's governor, Mas'ud Beg. The link between Alghu and Mas'ud Beg recreated the smychka by giving Alghu a firm grip on resource flows from the southern cities.

Alghu also attempted to expand west of the Amu Darya into territory claimed by the Il-Khanate, in modern Turkmenistan and Khorasan. These regions, in the north-east of modern Iran and the north of Afghanistan, offered a promising “looting zone”: a borderland region that could provide occasional booty without the costs of formal rule. Here armies could be kept busy and their commanders could find temporary pasture lands and booty. At his death in 1265/6, Alghu seemed well on the way to recreating the Chagatay ulus by building a new smychka that could balance the key elements of the Central Asian smychka, with its steppe armies, city-states, flows of commercial wealth, and looting zones.

QAIDU (1235/6–1301)

The next 40 years would be dominated by the figure of Qaidu (1235/6–1301), a grandson of Ogodei. In 1252, Mongke granted Qaidu pastures in Ogodei's former ulus, near the town of Qayaliq in Zungharia. William of Rubruck, who stayed in Qayaliq for 12 days in November 1253, described it as “a large town … containing a bazaar to which merchants resorted in large numbers.”20 This was a region rich in grazing, fishing, and hunting lands, with a few small commercial towns.²¹ With these limited resources Qaidu built a traditional nomadic following. According to one source, he scolded Qubilai for betraying Mongol tradition, saying, “The old customs of our dynasty are not those of the Han laws.”²² Like Chinggis Khan and Ogodei, Qaidu remained true to Mongol religious traditions, though he also tolerated other religions.²³ Most of his subjects were probably Muslims, though there were also Nestorian Christians in the major cities, and Buddhists in Qayaliq and Hami.

After Alghu's death in 1265–1266, and a brief civil war with Alghu's successor, Baraq, Qaidu was recognized as khan of the Chagatay ulus in 1269. He immediately gained the support of Khan Mengu-Temur, the ruler of Batu's former ulus in western Inner Eurasia. The treaty of 1269, at which Baraq accepted Qaidu's authority, shows that Qaidu had a sophisticated understanding of the Central Asian smychka. In the 1250s, as governor of Transoxiana, Mas'ud Beg had restored the wealth of the region's cities after the devastating Mongol wars of conquest. He rebuilt irrigation systems, stabilized the currency, and checked looting by nomadic armies. But much of his work was undone during the conflicts after Mongke's death. Qaidu appreciated Mas'ud Beg's achievements and knew how important it was to protect the region's cities even from his own armies. In their 1269 treaty Qaidu and Baraq swore an oath “on gold,” that, “henceforth they would dwell in the mountains and plains and not hang around cities, or graze their animals in cultivated areas, or make exorbitant demands on the peasants.”²⁴ Baraq was encouraged to direct his forces towards the looting zones of neighboring Khorasan, while Qaidu's troops harried another looting zone east of Zungharia, in the borderlands of Uighuristan contested by Qubilai.

In 1271, after the death of Baraq, Qaidu was enthroned in Talas as khan of the Chagatay ulus. Though Qubilai claimed to be khagan of all the Mongol realms, Qaidu made no attempt to seek Qubilai's blessing. In the same year, Mas'ud Beg pledged allegiance to Qaidu. Qaidu left him in charge of the cities of Transoxiana until his death in 1289, when Mas'ud Beg's sons succeeded him.²⁵ After 1282, when Baraq's eldest son, Du'a, accepted Qaidu's overall authority, there followed almost a quarter of a century of relative stability. Peace and the protection of the cities that produced most of the ulus’s wealth and much of its military equipment stimulated an economic revival.

John Dardess describes well how the Central Asian smychka worked in this period.

This renewed policy of peace and order within the Mongols’ Central Asian realm and the return of the princes to the steppe zone allowed the Medium Imperium to maintain preparedness and discipline among its steppe warriors. The princes as war leaders could give constant personal attention to their nomad cavalry. At the same time, supplies and revenues could be regularly drawn from their sedentary economic dependencies, since these were once again protected from casual pillage or irregular and excessive exactions. The military energies of the princes and their armies, no longer committed to plunder and internecine war at home, could instead be directed to war and plunder across the frontiers.²⁶

In Transoxiana, Qaidu delegated the administration of taxation to Mas'ud Beg, who ruled through local kings or maliks. The maliks apparently retained considerable independence, for most of the region's coinage was issued in their names. On the eastern and western fringes of his territory, in Uighuristan and the border with Khorasan, looting was the most effective form of wealth mobilization, while also providing training and experience for Qaidu's armies and keeping them away from the region's major cities. Sustained, low-grade warfare in Uighuristan may have yielded considerable booty, though it also reduced trade along the Silk Roads, which encouraged Chinese merchants to shift towards the Indian Ocean sea routes.²⁷

On his eastern borders, Qaidu withstood two decades of sustained pressure from Qubilai. He was protected in part by the length of the supply lines from China. In the late 1280s, Yuan forces began to pull back. Chinese soldiers, farmers, and artisans were allowed to return from the Tarim basin cities to north China, and in 1289, the “Bureau of Pacification” in Khotan was closed.²⁸

THE CHAGATAY ULUS AFTER QAIDU

Qaidu died in 1301. He was succeeded by Baraq's son, Du'a, after a brief conflict with Qaidu's own son, Chabar. In 1303, Du'a and Chabar made peace with Qubilai's Yuan successor, Temür, then sent a delegation to Oljeitu, the Persian Il-Khan, who immediately joined a new, but largely symbolic treaty between the major Chinggisid uluses. Like the 1991 treaty establishing a “Commonwealth of Independent States” after the breakup of the USSR, this did not recreate the former empire, but formally acknowledged its dissolution.

Under Qaidu's successors, the fragile unity of the Chagatay ulus broke down as rulers abandoned the steppelands, settled in the cities, and turned to the most dynamic cultural and religious traditions of neighboring agrarian regions, those of Islam. Du'a ruled from a base in Transoxiana. Kebeg (r. 1309, 1318–1326) built a residence at Nakshab (Qarshi) near Samarkand, and began for the first time to issue coins with his own name.29 Though not a Muslim, he was sympathetic to Islam. Ibn Battuta, who visited the region in 1333, writes that, though an infidel, Kebeg was “just in government, showing equity to the oppressed and favor and respect to the Muslims.”

Kebeg's successor, Tarmashirin (1326–1334), also lived in Transoxiana, but converted to Islam. Ibn Battuta met Tarmashirin in the spring of 1333, and described him as “a man of great distinction, possessed of numerous troops and regiments of cavalry, a vast kingdom and immense power.” He found him living in a large camp or orda between Qarshi and Samarkand, consisting mainly of tents, including a tent mosque.³⁰ Ibn Battuta's description of an audience with him is as fine a description as we have of a Mongol khan of this era, surrounded by his keshig, or royal guard.

I found him in a tent, outside of which there were men ranged to right and left, the amirs among them [seated] on chairs, with their attendants standing behind and before them. The rest of the troops [too] had sat down in parade order, each man with his weapons in front of him. … When I entered the king's presence, inside the tent, I found him seated on a chair, resembling a mosque-pulpit and covered with silk embroidered in gold. The interior of the tent was lined with silken cloth of gold, and a crown set with jewels and precious stones was suspended over the sultan's head at the height of a cubit. The principal amirs were [ranged] on chairs to right and left of him, and in front of him were the sons of the kings holding fly-whisks in their hands. At the doorway of the tent were the [sultan's] deputy, the vizier, the chamberlain, and the keeper of the sign-manual.³¹

Despite the rich symbolism of pastoralist tradition, shifting the center of power into Transoxiana and converting to Islam undermined the smychka by removing Tarmashirin geographically and culturally from his military base in the steppes. Tarmashirin introduced sharia law which, with its more individualistic approach to law, conflicted at many points with kin-based steppeland traditions. He also failed to summon annual quriltais. In 1334, two years after Ibn Battuta met him, Tarmashirin was deposed and executed after a revolt in Zungharia by regional leaders who complained he had broken with the traditions of the Mongol Yasa by not visiting the steppe regions in four years.³²

The Chagatay ulus now split into eastern and western sections, divided by the Pamirs, and within each region power fragmented even further. “The qan of the ulus became less and less important. Tribal chieftains dominated, with the ruling class now more comfortable in cities than in the steppe.”³³ The eastern lands of Zungharia, Uighuristan, and the Tarim basin formed a separate ulus of Moghulistan. The split between the Chagatay lands and Moghulistan, which had a natural geographical foundation in the geography of the Pamirs and the Tienshan mountain ranges, would prove more or less permanent, and from now on we will refer to these regions as Transoxiana or Central Asia (west of the Pamirs) and Moghulistan or Xinjiang (east of the Pamirs). After a period of confusion, Tughlugh-Temur (r. 1347–1363), a grandson of Du'a, established his authority over Moghulistan, ruling it until his death in the early 1360s. In 1353, Tughlugh-Temur converted to Islam, but not until the sixteenth century would Islam become the dominant religion of Moghulistan.³⁴

The western parts of the Chagatay ulus would not be reunited until the reign of Timur, which began in 1370, almost 35 years after Tarmashirin's death. Yet the region's elites retained a sense of belonging to the Chagatay ulus, an identity that Timur would build on.³⁵

THE WEST AND THE GOLDEN HORDE

In accordance with Mongol tradition, the lands furthest from the Mongolian homeland fell within the ulus of Chinggis Khan's eldest son, Jochi (d. 1225?), and Jochi's second son, Batu (effective ruler from 1241 until his death in 1255). Their ulus included all regions west of the Urals and the Volga. It also included the cities of Khorezm in Transoxiana, and much of the Kazakh steppes, though strictly, these belonged to Batu's elder brother, Orda. Orda's realms are sometimes known as the “Blue” (or eastern) wing, and the lands west of the Volga as the “White” (or western) wing.36 But Orda and his successors seem to have accepted the seniority of Batu and his lineage.

BATU'S ULUS

Like Chagatay's, the ulus of Jochi included three broad ecological bands. A forested northern region extended from Siberia to the Baltic; a region of steppelands reached from Zungharia to Hungary; and a thin and divided southern strip of agrarian and desert lands with a sprinkling of oasis or coastal cities reached from Khorezm to the shores of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.

West of the Volga, the three main ecological belts were clearly defined. The urbanized southern strip was thinner and more vulnerable to predation than in Central Asia. The forest lands to the north, unlike the underpopulated lands of Siberia, contained large agricultural populations and the many towns and cities that had once constituted Kievan Rus’. In Jochi's ulus, then, steppe armies had the unique opportunity of building a smychka that could mobilize from farmlands and cities and trade routes both to the north and south of the steppes. However, the first administrators of the new polity, having learned their craft in Mongolia and Central Asia, looked first to the rich cities and trade routes of the south. It took them time to work out how best to mobilize from Kievan Rus’ to the north. In the long run, though, the existence of sedentary lands both to the north and south of the Pontic steppes helps explain the durability and resilience of the mobilizational machine built by Batu and his successors.

Arabic and Persian sources described the region as “the Tatar lands,” or the “northern lands,” or “Desht-i-Kipchak” (the land of the Kipchak), or the “Ulus of Jochi,” or the “Ulus of Batu.” Contemporary Russian sources normally referred to “the Tatars,” or (from the 1280s) the “orda” (or royal camp) of the ruler.37 Though created and ruled by Mongols, the region's elites were soon Turkicized as they absorbed Turkic tribes and military units from the Pontic steppes.³⁸ Turkic replaced Mongolian on coinage during the reign of Tode-Menghu (1280–1287), and after conversion to Islam, in the reign of Ozbeg, Arabic became the language of religion.³⁹ We will refer to the polity Batu founded as the Golden Horde, though this is, strictly speaking, anachronistic, as that name first appeared in Russian sources long after its demise. The name may have originated from the golden ceremonial tent (or orda) of Khan Ozbeg (1313–1341).⁴⁰ (Map 2.3.)

Map 2.3 The Golden Horde during the reign of Khan Ozbeg (1313–1341). Adapted from Atwood, Encyclopedia, 204.

BASIC STRUCTURES OF THE GOLDEN HORDE

The Golden Horde was created during the western campaigns of 1237–1241, which were commanded by Jochi's son, Batu. Though Batu's lineage died out in 1360, the polity he founded would survive, with some interruptions, for 180 years, until the death of Edigu in 1420.

After Ogodei's death in 1241, most Mongol armies campaigning in the west returned to Mongolia. However, Batu and his closest followers settled in the rich pasturelands of the southern Volga, not far from the old Khazar capital of Itil. They began to nomadize between summer pastures near the northern trading towns of Volga Bulgharia (whose old capital, Bulghar, acted briefly as a provisional capital under emirs from the former Bulghar ruling elite), and a winter camp at Saray, the new Jochid capital, in the Volga delta (modern Selitrennoe, north of Astrakhan).41 By the early 1260s, Saray was already the center of a powerful mobilization system. In 1263/4, Mamluk ambassadors arriving from Egypt to visit the orda of Batu's brother and successor, Khan Berke (r. 1258–1267), “traveled for twenty days through a steppe dotted with tents and [flocks of] sheep, until they reached the river Itil [Volga] … [O]n its banks is the camp of the Khan Berke. By means of [the Volga], food and sheep are brought to them.”⁴²

After conquering the Pontic steppes, Batu's armies removed the former Polovtsian elites and either enslaved their followers (generating a glut in the slave markets of the Black Sea cities), or incorporated them within their own armies.⁴³ Then, like his grandfather, Chinggis Khan, Batu allocated grazing lands to his brothers and followers at a quriltai. When Carpini traveled through the region in 1246, just 10 years after the conquest of Rus’, and five years after Ogodei's death, regional leaders already had their own territories and migration routes. Most routes, like Batu's, ran north and south along major rivers, the Yaik (Ural), the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper. Dominating the new system were 10 to 14 Chinggisid princes or commanders (temniki), each controlling pasturelands along a major river system. Each regional army consisted, in principle, of a tumen, or about 10,000 soldiers.⁴⁴ In 1253, William of Rubruck found that:

every commander, according to whether he has a greater or smaller number of men under him, is familiar with the limits of his pasturelands and where he ought to graze in summer and winter, in spring and autumn. For in the winter they move down southwards to the warmer regions, and in the summer they move up northwards to the colder ones. They pasture in the waterless grazing grounds in the winter, when the snow is there, since snow serves them for water.⁴⁵

Over time, local uluses evolved into hereditary chiefdoms. The four main uluses, whose leaders would form the powerful council of four qarachi beys, were based on Khorezm, Saray, the steppes north of the Caucasus, and Crimea. Within these main uluses there were approximately 70 smaller uluses corresponding to the 60 to 70 “emirs” mentioned in Arabic sources.⁴⁶ The pasturelands of these core regions provided the military foundation for the Golden Horde, while the hierarchical structure of uluses gave it political and organizational shape.

Batu's choice of the Volga delta as his personal base made sense. The region was surrounded by rich and extensive pasturelands, and had provided a center for pastoralist confederations since at least the time of the Sarmatians, early in the first millennium BCE. It was also an important commercial choke point, from which it was possible to tax the commercial caravans that traveled east and west between Central Asia and the Black Sea, or north and south between Persia, Central Asia, and the forest lands of Volga Bulgharia, Rus’, and the Baltic. The basic structures of the Golden Horde reproduced those of the Mongol Empire. “From Sarai, the Golden Horde rulers reduplicated almost exactly the system of dispersed economic dependencies centered upon Karakorum: Sarai was 700 miles from Moscow, 600 miles from Kiev, and in the opposite direction, 800 miles from its dependency of Khorezm.”⁴⁷ The geography of the new smychka was very clear. Its military power lay in the steppes, while its wealth lay to the south, west, and north of the steppes, and in the caravans and ships that moved goods within and through Batu's ulus.

The Golden Horde had access to three distinct types of mobilizational regions. The first included the thin strip of cities along its southern borders from Khorezm to the Black Sea, and the rich trades that passed between them. The second consisted of the northern Slavic lands once unified within Rus’. Here, forests, scattered rural populations, and cities, generally poorer than those of the south, posed distinctive mobilizational challenges. Resources were abundant but widely dispersed, and pastoralist armies could not keep their armies long in the woodlands with their limited pastures. Finally, there were potential looting zones in eastern Europe, Azerbaijan, and northern Iran, and even, occasionally, in Central Asia.

Batu's tax collectors focused first on the trading caravans and cities of the south, where they found a mobilizational environment similar to Transoxiana. In the early years of the Golden Horde, trade caravans and river trades may have been its most important source of wealth.⁴⁸ Batu and his successors understood and respected the commercial, financial, and administrative expertise to be found in regions such as Khorezm, whose officials replicated the role once played by Uighur officials under Chinggis Khan. Urgench (modern Kunya-Urgench), the capital of Khorezm, enjoyed a revival of wealth and fortunes in the fourteenth century before being destroyed by Timur in 1388. Ibn Battuta visited the city in February 1333. He described it as

the largest, greatest, most beautiful and most important city of the Turks. It has fine bazaars and broad streets, a great number of buildings and abundance of commodities; it shakes under the weight of its population, by reason of their multitude…⁴⁹

The Golden Horde also controlled trading cities along the Syr Darya, such as Otrar, Sygnak, and Dzhend, as well as cities on the northern shores of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. This gave them control over the resources flowing through the northern, steppe branch of the Silk Roads, which led to the trading cities of the Black Sea, Byzantium, and the eastern Mediterranean. At its height, the Golden Horde was able to protect caravans traveling from Khorezm to the Black Sea. Ibn Arabshah, an Arab historian who wrote in the early fifteenth century, noted that, “There was a time, when caravans departing from Khwarazm by carts moved safely and without danger to their destination – the Crimea. It took three months to cross that distance.”⁵⁰ Plenty of people lived in the arid steppes between so that caravans did not need to hire guides or bring food or fodder. By the early fifteenth century, though, he noted that few lived in the steppes and caravans no longer traveled through them. Black Sea cities had traded between the steppes and the Mediterranean for at least two millennia, handling products of the forests (honey, wax, and furs) and of the steppelands (grain, horses, fish, and slaves), as well as more exotic trade goods from the far north and the far east. All these products enjoyed sustained demand from Mediterranean consumers. The slave trade was particularly profitable. Slaves, some sold by their own families, might be used as servants in the Crimean cities, or sold by European merchants as domestic servants or concubines in Europe or, particularly if they came from Central Asia, as soldiers in Mamluk Egypt.⁵¹

So vital was the commercial and financial prosperity and expertise of the southern cities that in 1267 Khan Mengu-Temur sold control over Caffa (a town of little significance before this date) to the Genoese, and granted Venice concessions in Azov (Tana). Both cities flourished, and Caffa became a major center for the slave trade. In 1332 Ibn Battuta found 200 trading and military ships in Caffa's harbor. He reported that Caffa had a Genoese governor and most of its inhabitants were “infidels.”⁵² The Golden Horde took a good share of the profits from these markets, supervising them through a governor based in Solgat (Staryi Krim). Eventually, the rulers of the Golden Horde negotiated treaties that allowed Italian officials to collect fees of 3–5 percent on the value of all traded merchandise for their Jochid overlords, in return for considerable independence and Jochid protection for their trade and subjects.⁵³

The most important of the Golden Horde's looting zones were in northern Persia and eastern Europe. As in the Chagatay ulus, looting zones provided military training and booty for pastoralists, and helped cement the loyalty of regional leaders, whose wealth and authority they bolstered. Looting raids also provided information on the strength of neighbors and rivals, and on possibilities for further expansion.

The third and most distinctive mobilizational region lay in Rus’ and Volga Bulgharia, in the forested north. The human and material wealth of the north was scattered in villages and towns that were generally smaller and poorer than those of Transoxiana or the Black Sea shores. Forests reduced the mobility of pastoralist armies, and provided little fodder for their horses, so at first the Mongols probably thought of the region as a western equivalent of Siberia. On the other hand, river systems linked the major cities of the region into commercial networks that reached from the Baltic to the Volga and Caspian, and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. These routes had great potential importance as they connected Saray to the flourishing markets of northwestern Europe.

For Arabic geographers, as for the Mongols, the ecological similarities of northern forest peoples blurred the cultural differences between them. Allsen writes:

At the western end of the steppe–forest frontier, both the Eastern Slavs and the Volga Bulgars had mixed economies that combined, in varying proportions, agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and urban handicrafts production. And such a characterization, at least at this level of generalization, can just as accurately be applied to Qirghiz of the Yenisei or the Jurchens of the Amur basin. It is not surprising then, that in the Islamic geographical tradition northerners are much homogenized. The term Saqālibah embraced disparate ruddy complexioned peoples – Scandinavians, Slavs, Finns and Turks – of the northern forests. The Persian author Gardīzī, in the mid-eleventh century, even relates and conflates the Saqālibah with the Khirkhiz (Qirghiz) of the Yenisei.⁵⁴

The Mongol conquest of Rus’ destroyed many of its cities. There were 14 Jochid campaigns in northeastern Rus’ alone in the 25 years after the invasion of 1237, and many more followed. So divided were the principalities of Rus’ that, before the 1320s, Mongol contingents were often joined by armies from the principalities.⁵⁵ Some regions, such as the old Rus’ capital of Vladimir, never fully recovered. Economic activity and building declined, as did the quality of workmanship, as artisans were dispatched to build and beautify the steppe cities of the Mongols.⁵⁶ However, some Rus’ towns, including Novgorod, Pskov, Tver, and Smolensk, escaped the attentions of Mongol armies, and may even have benefited from an influx of refugees and the decline of their rivals.

At first, the Mongols used the crudest of methods to mobilize resources from the north. Batu sent temporary agents or basqaqs (many of them probably from Urgench) to Volga Bulgharia and the principalities of Rus’, where they demanded significant resources. In the 1250s, Mongke held an empire-wide census and attempted to regularize tax collection from all regions, but his death in 1259 ended all tax transfers to Karakorum.⁵⁷ By the end of the thirteenth century, in both Rus’ and Volga Bulgharia, tax collection was mostly left to local princes who had been confirmed in office by the khans of the Golden Horde. The taxes they collected included tribute payments (the vykhod), which may have consisted mainly of furs at first, though eventually they would be paid in silver coins worth several thousand silver rubles a year.⁵⁸ There were no silver mines in Rus’, so the princes of Rus’ acquired their silver from trade with Europe, where rich silver mines had been discovered in Saxony and Bohemia in the tenth century. The villages and towns of Rus’ also had to support the post-horse system, the iam, a burden so onerous that villages along post-horse routes were exempted from all other taxes. Customs duties were levied on all trade goods (tamga), and cities and villages had to support Mongol officials traveling in Rus’.⁵⁹ There were many other informal costs to be borne, such as the gifts that princes gave to khans and their officials on visits to Saray (gifts that could prove critical in deciding the outcome of contests between rival princes), as well as the extortionate demands of Mongol officials.

Low productivity limited agrarian surpluses, which increased the relative importance of commercial wealth both to the Golden Horde and to the princes who collected the tributes.Novgorod, with its well-established European networks, played a pivotal role in these trades. Novgorod's merchants sold furs, wax, timber, and potash to Flemish and German merchants in return for silver, wine, beer, and textiles. Novgorod used European silver to buy grain from Riazan’ and Moscow, but much of the silver was used to pay the vykhod, which was sent down the Volga river to Saray. European and Russian goods, particularly furs, could also be sold profitably in the markets of Saray and the Black Sea, while steppe goods such as horses and hides were traded northwards.⁶⁰

In the Golden Horde, as in Transoxiana, mobilizing resources through local princes worked well as long as Saray kept tight control of the region. Before the death of Mongke in 1259, princes traveled to Karakorum to be confirmed in office. Under the Jochids, they traveled to Saray, where they often left sons behind as hostages. Visits to Saray could be lethal. Between 1308 and 1339 eight princes (including four grand princes) were executed at Saray.⁶¹ But those princes who survived these trips got to know the system from the inside and sometimes established close ties of patronage and even friendship with the rulers and officials of the Golden Horde. Over almost two centuries, more than two hundred princes received the Mongol iarlyk, confirming them in office.

In return for loyalty and the delivery of tributes, the khans of the Golden Horde provided protection both for princes and for the Orthodox Church. In accordance with Mongol tradition, the church was exempted from taxation, and in 1261 Metropolitan Kirill and Grand Prince Alexander Nevskii of Vladimir persuaded Khan Berke to found a Christian bishopric in Saray. In return, the Mongol khans asked only for the church's blessing, so that now Orthodox leaders prayed for the khans of the Golden Horde as well as the princes of Rus’.⁶² Relative independence, expanding trade, and a degree of protection eventually allowed some of the principalities of Rus’ to prosper despite the tribute burden. By the end of the thirteenth century, there were signs of economic and demographic recovery.⁶³ Some old cities expanded and new cities appeared. Urbanization suggests population growth and an increasing tax base. Renewed building of stone churches is one indication of increasing wealth. The fact that even villages contributed to tribute payments, sometimes in silver, is another sign of economic recovery.⁶⁴

At the heart of the Jochid mobilizational machine was the khan's camp or orda. When Ibn Battuta traveled through the Golden Horde in 1332–1333, he found the orda of Khan Ozbeg in the north Caucasus, near modern Piatigorsk:

we saw a vast city on the move with its inhabitants, with mosques and bazaars in it, the smoke of the kitchens rising in the air (for they cook while on the march), and horse-drawn waggons transporting the people. On reaching the camping place they took down the tents from the waggons and set them on the ground, for they are light to carry, and so likewise they did with the mosques and shops.⁶⁵

From one point of view, Ozbeg's orda was the headquarters of an army. From another, it was a mobile capital city, the home of officials and religious leaders, as well as members of the royal family.

Over time, like the rulers of the Chagatay ulus, the elites of the Golden Horde were drawn towards the cities. Some of the newer cities were founded and built by the Mongols. They were as artificial as Karakorum and, like Karakorum, they were originally built, provisioned, and beautified by slave labor, which was cheap after the vast deportations of the era of conquest. Giovanni Carpini mentions no towns in the region of Saray in 1246, but eight years later, in August 1254, Batu's son, Sartaq, told William of Rubruck about “Sarai, the new town Baatu has established on the Etilia [Volga].”⁶⁶ When he visited Saray in 1333, Ibn Battuta found it to be “one of the finest of cities, of boundless size, situated in a plain, choked with the throng of its inhabitants, and possessing good bazaars and broad streets.” It took Ibn Battuta half a day to walk from one end of the city to the other, through “a continuous line of houses, among which there were no ruins and no gardens.”⁶⁷ Modern excavations suggest that, with its suburbs, Saray covered 36 sq. kilometers and had a population of perhaps 75,000 people, making it much larger than Karakorum, and as large as Europe's major cities.⁶⁸ It had 13 mosques and a diverse population of Mongols (few of whom were Muslims), Alans (mostly Muslims), Kipchak, Cherkess, Russians, and Byzantines (all of whom Ibn Battuta described as Christians). “Each group lives in a separate quarter with its own bazaars. Merchants and strangers from the two Iraqs, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, live in a quarter which is surrounded by a wall for the protection of the properties of the merchants.”⁶⁹

EVOLUTION OF THE GOLDEN HORDE

As in Central Asia, affluence and stability drew Mongol elites out of the steppes and towards the cities, where they found wealth, luxurious lifestyles, and connections. And, as in the Chagatay ulus, these changes undermined the traditional smychka by creating cultural, political, geographical, and economic divisions between rulers who lived in cities (or mobile cities like Ozbeg's orda) and their steppeland armies.

Batu ruled the western ulus from 1241 until his death in 1255. After the death of his son, Sartaq, and then of Sartaq's son, Batu was succeeded by his brother, Berke (r. 1258–1267). As ruler at the time of Mongke's death, Berke became the first independent ruler of the ulus that would become the Golden Horde. Raised in Khorezm, Berke was a devout Muslim. This helps explain two critical events in his reign that would shape Jochid foreign policy for many decades. In 1262, after conflicts about how to divide the spoils during the conquest of Persia, Berke attacked his cousin, the Il-Khan, Hulegu. Soon after, he concluded a defensive alliance with Sultan Baybars, the ruler of Mamluk Egypt, the power whose demand for soldier/slaves provided a market for those captured in the era of conquest, and energized the slave trade of the Black Sea cities. The lucrative trade with Egypt and the Mediterranean explains why the Golden Horde was so keen to keep the Dardanelles open either by allying with Byzantium or by threatening it through the Balkans.

After his death in 1267, Berke was succeeded by Batu's grandson, Mengu-Temur (r. 1267–1280). Under Mengu-Temur's successor, Tode-Menghu (r. 1280–1287), a non-Chinggisid commander, Emir Nogai (d. 1299), became the real power in the Golden Horde. Nogai had been one of Khan Berke's most successful military commanders and controlled a large ulus in the west of the khanate, reaching from the Danube to the Pontic steppes, in the region that would eventually form the heartland of the Crimean khanate. In his final years, Nogai emerged as the aqa or senior figure of the Jochid dynasty, though, as a non-Chinggisid, he could not rule himself.70 Nevertheless, Russian chronicles describe him as a “Tsar,” and foreign diplomatic embassies often treated him as the real power in the khanate. He married into both the Il-Khanate and Byzantine royal families and, for a time, ruled the kingdom of Bulgharia.⁷¹ Nogai organized the coup that placed Mengu-Temur's son, Khan Toqta (r. 1291–1312), on the throne, but he was eventually killed in conflict with Toqta, who won these conflicts partly by maintaining the support of pastoralist leaders and their armies. Toqta followed up his victory by reallocating lands and migration routes to loyal followers, and confiscating the pasturelands of his enemies. The extent of Nogai's power is shown by the fact that, after his death, the Golden Horde lost control of the lands he had conquered in the foothills of the Carpathians.⁷²

Toqta was succeeded in 1313 not by his son but by his nephew, Ozbeg (r. 1313–1341), who gained the throne after a coup organized by his mother, Balajun. She was supported by Qutluq Temur, the emir of Saray, who controlled powerful armies from Khorezm. During Ozbeg's long reign, there were important changes in the structure of the khanate. Ozbeg himself converted to Islam, under the influence of a Bukharan sheikh, Ibn ‘Abd-ul-Hamid, and during his reign Islam became the official religion of the khanate, though it still had little influence in the steppes.⁷³ Fedorov-Davydov argues that this change is linked to the rise of a new, more urbanized elite group, with close connections to the Muslim elites of Saray and Khorezm (where Ozbeg's patron Qutluq Temur would become governor), and to the Muslim world of the Mediterranean.⁷⁴ If true, this suggests that the coup that brought Ozbeg to power was a rebuff to traditional steppe elites, and revealed the rising power of an emerging central bureaucracy, dominated by urbanized Muslims. One sign of this shift may be the decline of the traditional quriltai. None were held in the Golden Horde after 1300. Under Ozbeg we also begin to see more bureaucratized administrative structures, such as the institution of the qarachi beys, a council of four leading emirs whose leader, the beglerbegi, was a sort of prime minister. This institution may have been modeled on a similar institution in the Il-Khanate, or it may derive from the structures of the original keshig, or bodyguard, of Chinggis Khan. By the time of Ozbeg, the Khan's orders were being counter-signed by one of the four qarachi beys.⁷⁵

Another sign of the growing importance of cities and trade is increased town building, including the building of a new capital, New Saray, for Khan Janibeg (1342–1357). The collapse of the Persian Il-Khanate after 1335 diverted much Central Asian trade through the more stable lands of the Golden Horde.⁷⁶ However, little of this wealth reached the steppes, further weakening the ties between steppe armies and city rulers. When, in the middle of the fourteenth century, we find Jochid leaders hiring Italian mercenaries, we must suspect a serious breakdown in the yoking mechanism of the smychka.

CONCLUSION

In the century after Mongke's death, we see a rapid but partial unraveling of the Mongol Empire. The central authority evaporated, and so did the power and wealth of the capital, Karakorum. But in the major uluses or family domains, relatively stable regional systems of rule emerged. In each, however, tensions arose between the different components of the smychka. In the Far East, that tension was expressed in Chinese rule over an impoverished Mongolian steppeland. In Central Asia, ties between pastoralist and urban regions loosened, and mobilizational systems splintered into local tribal groupings. In the Golden Horde, a regional smychka survived for well over a century, but by the middle of the fourteenth century, ties between the pastoralist and urbanized drivers of the smychka were loosening. In the 1360s, the Golden Horde would fall apart during a prolonged civil war.

NOTES

1 Spuler, History of the Mongols, 143.

² Rossabi, “The Reign of Khubilai Khan.”

³ Dardess, “From Mongol Empire,” 122–123.

⁴ Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, 218.

⁵ Barthold, “History of the Semirechye,” in Four Studies, 1: 123.

⁶ Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 60.

⁷ See Dardess, “From Mongol Empire,” and Atwood, “Ariq Böke,” in Encyclopedia, 21–22.

⁸ Dardess, “From Mongol Empire,” 153.

⁹ Vladimirtsov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 127–128.

¹⁰ Gongor, “Khalkh Torchoon,” 516.

¹¹ Endicott, “The Mongols and China,” 467.

¹² Rossabi, “The Reign of Khubilai Khan,” 6: 472.

¹³ Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, 115; and see Vladimirtsov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 126–127, which stresses the survival of Mongolian class hierarchies even in Yuan China.

¹⁴ Endicott, “The Mongols and China,” 466; Vladimirtsov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 142.

¹⁵ Manz, Tamerlane, 22; see also Kort, Central Asian Republics, 6–10, for an overview of Central Asia's geography and climate.

¹⁶ Juvaini, The History, 272–273.

¹⁷ Rubruck, The Mission, 147.

¹⁸ Barthold, “History of the Semirechye,” 122; Allsen adds that the Chu river valley, through which Rubruck had passed in 1253, “had had a well-developed urban and agricultural life, [but] was never rebuilt and remained for the next several centuries, a bastion of pastoralism”: Allsen, Mongol Imperialism, 89.

¹⁹ Manz, Tamerlane, 23; Buell, Dictionary, 81.

²⁰ Rubruck, The Mission, 19–20.

²¹ Biran, Qaidu, 19–20; Qaidu was the son of Kashin, Ogodei's youngest son by his chief wife; he grew up in the orda of Ogodei and survived the civil war after the election of Mongke probably because he was too young to be actively involved; in 1252, Mongke gave him Qayaliq (Haiyali), to the north-west of Almaliq, near present-day Kopal.

²² Biran, Qaidu, 27–28.

²³ Biran, Qaidu, 92–95.

²⁴ Rashid al-Din Tabib, Compendium of Chronicles, 3: 522.

²⁵ Biran, Qaidu, 32.

²⁶ Dardess, “From Mongol Empire,” 133–134.

²⁷ Biran, Qaidu, 56–57.

²⁸ Biran, Qaidu, 44.

²⁹ Akhmedov, “Central Asia,” 265.

³⁰ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 3: 556–557.

³¹ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 3: 557–558.

³² Buell, Dictionary, 87–88; Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 3: 561–562; and see Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 119–120.

³³ Buell, Dictionary, 88.

³⁴ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 67–68 and 79.

³⁵ Manz, Tamerlane, 23.

³⁶ Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 154–155 and 160 on the color symbolism; white was associated with the west and blue with the east, so the “orda” of Batu and his brother Orda were sometimes referred to as the “White” and “Blue” hordes.

³⁷ Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 151–153.

³⁸ Fedorov-Davydov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 39, for archaeological evidence that the Mongol elites were concentrated in the Volga delta region.

³⁹ Morgan, The Mongols, 125; on Mongol and Arabic, see Golden, An Introduction, 297.

⁴⁰ On the history of the term “Golden Horde” see Ostrowski, “Golden Horde”; the term first appeared in the late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century “History of Kazan,” which is largely mythical; see also Schamiloglu, “The Golden Horde,” 2: 819; Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 153–154; Atwood, Encyclopedia, 201.

⁴¹ On Bulghar as a temporary capital, see Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 95, 101; on rule through Bulghar emirs, see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 53; on Selitrennoe, see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 203.

⁴² Spuler, History of the Mongols, 181.

⁴³ On the glut of slaves, see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 203.

⁴⁴ Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 27; see Carpini, The Story of the Mongols, 99–100, for Carpini's account; Atwood, Encyclopedia, 202; Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 164, lists 12 major uluses in the late thirteenth century, from that of Nogai, north of the Danube, to those along the right and left banks of the Dnieper, along the Don, along the right and left banks of the Volga, along the two banks of the Yaik, and finally, that of Shiban in northern Kazakhstan; in addition, there were two major urban uluses, in Crimea and Khorezm.

⁴⁵ Rubruck, The Mission, 72.

⁴⁶ Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 166–167.

⁴⁷ Dardess, “From Mongol Empire,” 125.

⁴⁸ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 205: “Caravan trade was the foundation of the Golden Horde's state finances.”

⁴⁹ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 3: 541; and see Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 125–126.

⁵⁰ Janabel, The Rise of the Kazakh Nation, 34.

⁵¹ Di Cosmo, “Mongols and Merchants,” 398.

⁵² See Fisher, “Muscovy”; it would remain in Genoese hands until 1475, when it was seized by the Ottomans; see also Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 89; Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 2: 471.

⁵³ Di Cosmo, “Mongols and Merchants,” 396 and passim.

⁵⁴ Allsen, “Technologies of Governance,” 127.

⁵⁵ Martin, “North-eastern Russia,” 1: 129–130.

⁵⁶ Miller, “Monumental Building.”

⁵⁷ Fedorov-Davydov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 26–27; Allsen, “Technologies of Governance,” 133, and see Ch. 1.

⁵⁸ Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 77; the only precise figures available date from 1389, when the tribute amounted to about 5,000 silver rubles.

⁵⁹ See the summary in Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 77; and see the discussion in Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, Ch. 5.

⁶⁰ On the route to Saray, Nasonov, Mongoly i Rus’, 110; Martin, “North-eastern Russia,” 1: 133.

⁶¹ Fennell, “Princely Executions.”

⁶² Vernadsky, Mongols and Russia, 153; Fennell, A History of the Russian Church, 195–196; it is hard to resist analogies with the church's role under the Soviet Union.

⁶³ Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 83.

⁶⁴ Kivelson, “Merciful Father, Impersonal State,” 193; Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 83–84.

⁶⁵ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 2: 482.

⁶⁶ Rubruck, The Mission, 255; Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 10, notes the contrast between the accounts of Carpini and Rubruck; ibid., 76, points out that Rubruck's is the first reference to the existence of Saray.

⁶⁷ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 2: 515.

⁶⁸ Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 115.

⁶⁹ Ibn Battuta, The Travels, 2: 516.

⁷⁰ Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, 125; here Toqta (son of Mengu-Temur) refers to Nogai as the aqa or senior of the Jochid lineage, and promises that “[A]s long as I live I shall be commanded by my aqa and shall not contravene thy will.”

⁷¹ Vernadsky, Mongols and Russia, 180; Fedorov-Davydov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 73, 76; Grekov and Yakubovskii, Zolotaya orda i ee padenie, 84.

⁷² Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 48.

⁷³ Fedorov-Davydov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 103, on the limited influence of Islam in the steppe; on the conversion of Ozbeg, see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 207; the most detailed account of the conversion to Islam is in DeWeese, Islamization.

⁷⁴ Fedorov-Davydov, Obshchestvennyi Stroi, 104.

⁷⁵ Though barely visible in the available records, Schamiloglu argues that this was a crucial political body, for decrees were not enforceable without its consent, and it may even have played a crucial role in the election of khans, one similar to that of the quriltais of the early thirteenth century. Schamiloglu, “The Golden Horde,” 820; Atwood, Encyclopedia, 146.

⁷⁶ On the increase in town building in this era see Egorov, Istoricheskaya Geografiya, 77–78.

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