The Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities is dramatic and well-known. However, the end
of Mongol rule over what is today the Russian Federation cannot be reduced to a single event,
but a centuries long process of political, economic, military and even environmental shifts
wherein the Golden Horde and its successors gradually ceded control to the rising power
of Moscow. In this video we will see how this process took place across centuries.
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After Mongol rule was firmly established over the western steppes and Rus’ principalities by the
1240s, the successors of Batu were unassailable. While sometimes presented as outside or even
independent of the Golden Horde, the Rus’ principalities were the khan's total vassals,
providing tax, tribute and soldiers as the khan required,
and each Rus’ prince had to receive confirmation for his right to rule from the khan’s yarliq.
Firmly supported by both the Rus’ princes and the Orthodox Church, after the 1250s there was minimal
resistance to Mongol authority in the Rus’ lands. Yet the Rus’ were but one of the subjects of the
Jochid khan, and not where his attention was most directed, for they continued to live as nomads.
Mongol rule reorganized the society in the steppes. They brutally enforced a new
organization, where all the peoples of the steppe were divided into uluses, or patrimonial peoples.
Grouped into units of 1,000 and further subdivided, all of these uluses were allotted to
the new Mongol elite; the altan urag, the princes of the line of Chinggis Khan, and the noyad,
the military leadership. Each ulus was given its own grazing grounds and natural resources;
transfer between units was forbidden, and they were forbidden to use another ulus’ resources.
The revenues from the uluses, in the form of the products of their herds, went to the
Jochid khans. In this way the Mongol rule over the steppe was maintained and the Chinggisid
elite spread amongst the Turkic population. It proved a remarkably effective system for
maintaining stability and preventing native rebellion. The Jochid khan in this way could
keep track of his manpower and resources of the khanate, and trade could travel easier without
fear of being raided by a Qipchap chief. Another byproduct was the steady growth in the population
of the steppe and the Rus’ principalities. Under Jochid rule numerous settlements were
established; over 100 are known archeological and from written sources. While many of these must
have been initially quite humble, and the capital of Sarai at its inception perhaps just thousands
of felt tents, gers, as the population grew, nomadic encampments turned into permanent cities,
with rectangular districts of suburbs and craftsmen emanating from central squares.
The archeological remains of the largest of these, Sarai al-Jadid, stretches for 7 kilometers along
the Akhtuba River, and at its height in the mid 14th century may have held some 75,000 people.
The thirteenth century was a climatic optimum in the steppe,
of warm and wet temperatures. Political stability allowed an expansion in agricultural production
to supply these massive cities. In addition to the millions of sheep, goats, cattle and
horses the nomads supplied cities with, so too were more lands cultivated. Various kinds of
wheat and millet were extensively cultivated in the Ukrainian steppes, and the Golden Horde was
a primary regional exporter. Slaves and horses were also important exports for the Jochid state;
the excellence of the Jochid horses saw many thousands sold yearly from the Rus’
to India. The Golden Horde was further enriched by the great overland trade.
Wares from China and Egypt are found in the remains of Horde cities, and industries within
these cities developed around supporting and providing for the merchants who led this caravan
trade across the Mongol Khanates. Jochid Khans encouraged trade through low customs duties,
and transplanting Rus’ and Qipchaps to rivers to permanently man ferry crossings.
The Golden Horde’s golden age was reached in the first half of the fourteenth century, during the
thirty year reign of Khan Özbeg. In the final years of his life the good fortune of the Jochid
khanate began to ebb. Environmental data indicates a steady decrease in precipitation in the steppe
beginning in 1280 and dropping precipitously after 1320. In already dry steppe grasslands, this led
to less productive pastures and desertification. For an economy and population that still relied
on their great herds of livestock, an upset to the steppe biome pushed many into destitution,
and sought shelter in the Horde’s great cities. Further woes came as the Caspian Sea rose;
the Italian geographer Marino Sanuto wrote in 1320 that it rose by hand’s breadth every year.
Low lying farmland and communities in the Volga Delta were destroyed,
driving yet more people to the cities. The disintegration of the Ilkhanate and Chagatai
Khanate in the 1330s unraveled the overland trade which had helped enrich the Jochid’s cities.
The greatest disaster came just after Özbeg’s death, when the Black Death struck. Overpopulated
and undersupplied cities were ravaged; in Crimea, one source speaks of 85,000
dying of plague there. It was there in 1343 that Özbeg’s son Jani Beg, while besieging Caffa,
infamously is alleged to have thrown plague bodies into the city, which brought it to Europe. Rounds
of plague would strike repeatedly for the remainder of the Horde’s history. The nomadic
population suffered less than the urban, while the steppe itself could act as a barrier; the
plague only came to the Rus’ lands in the 1350s, from contacts with Europe rather than the Horde.
On Jani Beg Khan’s death in 1357, the dynasty’s luck ran out. In quick succession his sons killed
each other and by the start of the 1360s the line of Batu was extinguished. The door was opened
to any claimant descended from Jochi. During the next twenty years, over 25 men claimed the throne;
some are only known from coinage minted in their name. Some ruled little more than weeks, until
pushed out by another contender or power broker; of these, the most famous was the general Mamai,
who from his base in Crimea became the most powerful individual kingmaker.
While the Jochid wasted their energies in two decades of anarchy, its hold over the border
regions weakened. Lithuania seized the far west, taking Kiev and pushing to the Black Sea coast;
the eastern wing of the ulus became independent. In the Rus’ lands, princes stopped making the
treks to the Horde for confirmation. The Rus’ princes grew bolder, and the Prince of Moscow,
previously the Khan’s favourite tax-collector, grew in might, culminating in Prince Dmitri’s
victory over Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380, when Mamai came to chastise Dmitri for
his failures to provide tribute. Shortly after, Toqtamish, a descendant of Jochi’s son Tuqa-Temür,
succeeded in overcoming Mamai and the other khanmakers, and re-established central authority.
Angered at the Rus’ princes’ tardiness with in-person submissions and tribute,
Toqtamish took his army into the Rus’ lands, sacking Moscow in 1382 and sending
Dmitri Donskoi fleeing. The battle of Kulikovo, despite its standing in Russian popular memory,
did not alter the dynamic between the Rus’ and the Horde. Yet Dmitri’s policies over his reign
solidified Moscow as one of the most preeminent cities of the Rus’. On his death in 1389 his son
was accepted as Grand Prince with little issue, though the Rus’ were still vassals of the khan.
Toqtamish enacted reforms to strengthen his power, combat inflation and reset the Horde’s diplomacy.
To the Mamluks, Ottomans, Jalayirids and Moghulistan
he renewed friendly relations while in the west made Lithuania and Moldova vassals of the Horde.
His vision was a renewal of the preeminence of the Golden Horde; not only did he seek
to revive the overland trade routes, which had further been undone by fall of the Yuan, but he
also presented himself as the heir to Chinggis Khan. His pretensions put him on a collision
course with the master of Central Asia and his former ally, the great conqueror Aksak Temür;
Tamerlane. Toqtamish wanted Khwarezm and the Caucasus back under Jochid suzerainty; Tamerlane
desired both. The two great generals went to war in 1391 and 1395, and narrowly was Tamerlane the
victor. Over 1395 Tamerlane systematically sacked the major cities of the Horde. The destruction
ensured the near total dismantling of the urban economy and overland trade through the steppe.
After Tamerlane’s withdrawal, Toqtamish and his sons could not overcome the Horde’s new master,
Edigü. As he was not a descendant of Chinggis Khan, Edigü could not become khan, but as
beylerbeyi empowered by Tamerlane he controlled the succession. For the next two decades Edigü
reduced the khans to puppets, removing those who challenged him and had some success
in strengthening the Horde, even retaking Khwarezm after Tamerlane’s death and besieging Moscow
in 1408. Some economic recovery is indicated from the restarting of mints in major cities.
To help legitimize himself he also furthered conversion to Islam of the Horde’s nomadic
population, continuing the process begun by Özbeg. But Edigü’s power was never secure;
rival factions put up their own khans, and the sons of the late Toqtamish continued to fight him.
In 1419 Edigü was finally killed by one who had been declared khan, and with him
died the final figure who had the capability of holding together the Horde’s constituent parts.
The 1420s saw another decade of khans who ruled only briefly, and often at the same time. The
situation stabilized slightly over the 1430s and 40s into three main powers; Abu’l Khayr
Khan in the east, Küchük Muhammad in the Volga steppe, and Sayyid Ahmed west of the Don River.
Küchük Muhammad’s nearly twenty year reign is when scholarship and the Rus’ sources call
the state the Great Horde. The Rus’, who spent most of these years locked in their civil wars,
still paid tribute to the Khan of the Great Horde. Each khan saw himself as the legitimate ruler, and
new claimants continued to arise. One Khan, Ulugh Muhammad, made himself independent at Kazan after
being ousted from Sarai; on the Ural River emerged the Nogai Horde under the descendants of Edigü;
when Küchük Muhammad’s son Mahmud was ousted by his brother, Mahmud’s heirs took over Astrakhan;
and in 1442, Crimea and the surrounding steppes came under the rule of Sayyid Ahmad’s nephew,
Hajji Giray, establishing Crimea’s long ruling Giray Dynasty. Hajji Giray, and his son Mengli
Giray, dedicated their lives to fighting the heirs of Küchük Muhammad, the khans of the ever
declining Great Horde. In a twenty year struggle, Küchük Muhammad’s son Ahmad Khan enjoyed few
successes, overrelying on useless Polish allies and denied tribute by the Russian Grand Princes.
Ivan III continued the domination of Moscow over the other principalities and like his predecessors
recognized the overlordship of the Khan, though maintained diplomacy with the other emerging
khans. From the 1440s onwards Rus’ tribute to the Horde lagged, and in 1471 Ivan ceased it algother.
Ahmad Khan frequently sent messengers demanding its resumption, or for Ivan to come and reaffirm
his submission in person. The ever more frustrated Ahmad Khan, who had aborted a march on Moscow
in 1472, ordered another attack in 1480 in cooperation with his Polish ally Casimir IV.
Ivan marched against him, and the armies faced off across the Ugra River over the
summer and into the autumn. Ahmad waited in vain for Casimir, who never arrived. Arrows were shot,
arquebuses were fired; Ivan worried the river would freeze and allow Ahmad free passage.
Ahmad retreated first, downtrodden his ally had failed to show, and was murdered the next year.
So ended the Great Stand on the Ugra River, a glorified staring contest. Only centuries
later did Rus’ chronicles see it as marking the independence of the Rus’.
It did not directly affect either parties’ standing. Twenty years later,
Ivan sent a message to Ahmad’s son and successor, Shaykh Ahmad Khan, inquiring about resuming their
earlier relationship in the midst of a fierce round of struggle with Lithuania,
while tribute, under different names, would continue to the Crimean Khans.
After Ahmad Khan’s death, his sons attempted to act as co-rulers but were soon at each other’s
throats. Shaykh Ahmad emerged the victor, with futile dreams of reuniting the Horde. His cousin
in Astrakhan defied him; Ivan III of Moscow allied with Mengli Giray of Crimea against him;
efforts to bring Lithuania into a military alliance failed. Rounds of plague and bad seasons
brought further misery; harsh winters and poor grazing killed thousands of livestock every
year of the 1490s. Famine weakened his forces, destroyed his herds and caused thousands to flee
to neighbouring khanates. Shaykh Ahmad led his underfed and weakened army in one last gamble,
seeking to push west of the Dnieper for greener pasture in winter 1501.
Trapped by a vicious snowstorm, his demoralized army suffered for months, and many deserted to
Mengli Giray. Already depressed from the failure of the Lithuanians to arrive,
Shaykh Ahmad watched the last of his brothers fall ill and die. As Mengli Giray summoned the entirety
of his forces, the last of Shaykh Ahmad’s will broke when his own wife abandoned him with much of
his family and remaining troops. When Mengli Giray met Shaykh Ahmad near the Dnieper in June 1502,
the Khan of the Great Horde was caught with a paltry 20,000 men. Chased from the field, his ordu
looted, Shaykh Ahmad Khan spent most of the next twenty years in Lithuania a political prisoner.
So, according to traditional scholarship, did the humiliating
career of the final Khan of the Golden Horde end. Historians like Leslie Collins have demonstrated,
though, how Mengli Giray began to style himself as Great Khan of the Great Horde;
a claim recognized in diplomacy by his Ottoman overlord, the Rus’, the Poles and
Lithuanians. It seems to contemporaries, the Great Horde did not end in 1502;
the throne was simply taken by another branch of the dynasty, as it had been dozens of times
before, only now based in Crimea. The power of the Giray Khans grew considerably, and by 1520s
Mengli’s son, Mehmed, raised candidates onto the thrones of Kazan and Astrakhan.
The brief rise was cut short by Mehmed’s death by Nogais, launching a succession struggle that
led to the Ottomans taking greater control over the Crimean succession.
Meanwhile the alliance with Moscow frayed, and the Princes of Moscow, particularly Ivan IV and his
crusade-minded advisers, were now masters of the Rus’ and were eager to gain access to the Volga
trade, taking advantage of the weakness of the Volga Khanates. In 1552 the first khanate, Kazan,
fell to Ivan’s armies; Astrakhan followed in 1554. The powerful Crimean Khan Devlet I Giray
sought to halt Moscow’s expansion, with yearly raids and in 1571, even succeeded in capturing and
burning down Moscow, but this was followed by a humiliating defeat the next year.
The Crimean Khans reluctantly ceded control of the former Golden Horde to Moscow, which soon
stretched deep into Siberia. Over a century of continuous warfare had left the Russians
nothing but depopulated, weakened khanates to pick off one by one; only to the south did the
Crimean Khan’s armies stop Russian expansion. Not until 1783 was the Khanate finally annexed,
thus ending the last vestige of the Golden Horde, and the Mongol Empire. More videos
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