Around a year ago I released my most popular video, a look at why the Mongols are so often
known as Tatars in historical sources, and their relation to both 12th century and modern
Tatars. The general argument was that the name of the Tatar tribe of eastern Mongolia,
destroyed by Temujin in 1202, was confused by Chinese, Islamic and Europeans as the name
of the Mongols. After the fall of the Golden Horde, the descendents of the Mongols mixed
with local Turkic populations, adopted the name and still today call themselves Tatars.
Overall, in that video I emphasized a distinction between Mongol and Tatar.
Since then, there have been developments: for one thing, the use of Tatar is far more
widespread than I knew. Not only European, Russian, Arabic, Persian and Chinese sources,
but Korean, Armenian, Georgian, Vietnamese and Indonesian materials all used Tatar just as, or more
often, than Mongol, even when recording letters or quotes from the Great Khans. When almost
every single people the Mongol Empire interacted with called them Tatars, we have to wonder
how they could all have confused them with an exterminated steppe tribe. Yet, some sources
do insist upon the usage of Mongol, perhaps none more significant than their very own
Secret History of the Mongols. How do we corroborate these two seemingly inconsistent trends?
An intriguing solution to this issue has been proposed by historian Stephen Pow. Essentially
that the Mongols before Chinggis Khan called themselves, as a general term for their people,
Tatars, with Mongol being a designation for their empire founded in 1206, which is how
the relationship is depicted in missionary and envoy accounts from the early 13th century.
Then around the 1240s, the Great Khans began urging the use of Mongol over Tatar. Especially
after 1250, this is apparent in official histories compiled by the imperial government where
Tatar was eventually restricted to the tribe destroyed in 1202.
Obviously, this interpretation doesn’t fit well with the Secret History of the Mongols,
where Chinggis Khan is only ever called a Mongol. Yet even this ties into Pow’s argument,
and for that we need to discuss sources. First is the matter of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’
sources. Official sources were written on the orders of the Mongol imperial family,
or compiled from imperial documents for an official history. These also happen to be
the most commonly used sources and have strongly influenced views of the Empire:
Although written in Mongolian, Chinese and Persian decades apart, their depictions align
closely, all having used the Secret History and the same now-lost Mongolian sources. Here,
Mongol is almost always used over Tatar, and in the Secret History, Tatar is only used
for the eastern Mongolian group. Part of Pow’s argument is that these official sources were
written after 1250, a period which, especially under Kublai Khan, saw the creation of official
histories to justify the ascension of the Toluids and reflect the interests of these
later Khans, and don’t necessarily reflect how Tatar was used earlier in the century.
In comparison, we have ‘unofficial sources,’ works written outside the empire or not on
imperial order, such as the reports of envoys and missionaries to the Mongols. These writers
record statements which are difficult to align with the old theory, such as quotes from Mongols
identifying themselves as Tatars. They also have the name of the Mongol Empire being taken
from the earlier Khamag Mongol union. One of the earliest is Li Xinchuan, a Jin Dynasty
official who in 1216 reported that the Tatar ruler, Chinggis Khan, had adopted the name
Mongol and declared the ‘Great Mongol State,’ with Jin frontier officials calling them Mongol-Tatars.
Song envoys to the general Mukhali in 1220 recorded this description:
"[the Tatars] admire the Mongol as a heroic state. Therefore, they’ve called their dynastic
name the Great Mongol State... I personally witnessed that their Acting Emperor, Muqali,
Prince of State every time he referred to himself he said: “I am a Tatar.’ All of
these great ministers and field marshals call themselves saying, ‘we are Tatars,’ and
they do not know what type of name is this ‘Mongol’ that they use, neither the name
they use for their kingdom, nor the name of the year.’"
That earlier Mongol state is often called the Khamag Mongol Confederation, a poorly
known entity of the early 12th century destroyed by the Jin Dynasty in the 1150s. We do know
Chinggis Mongols went to some effort to connect himself to this earlier union for reasons
of legitimacy: in the Secret History of the Mongols Chinggis Khan is shown as a descendant
of the Khamag Mongol Khans, and the invasion of the Jin Empire as avenging earlier Jin
atrocities towards the Khamag Mongol. Chinggis Khan may have borrowed the name of this state
to confer greater legitimacy upon himself. Song embassies to Ogedai’s court in the
1230s, likewise record the rulers were Tatars of the Great Mongol State. On the subject
of Ogedei, we have his own words recorded in a letter to the Koreans in late 1231:
“If you want to do battle, you shall know this: in the great nation of the Qa’an,
we Tatars have gathered all of the nations surrounding us in the four directions.
The letter’s English translator, G. Ledyard, noted this letter is in very poor Chinese,
reading like a very direct, hurried translation of Mongolian into Chinese by someone not totally
fluent in the latter. Certainly, not the work of educated scholar-officials, and suggests
the Koreans did little to tamper with it: if they had, they would have tried to fix
the grammar. But it is in line with the quality of Chinese often found in letters associated
with the Mongols. It’s likely that this letter is a good approximation of Ogedei’s
words, and would be rather doubtful that a translator would have snuck Tatar in there
if Ogedei hadn’t used it himself.
These are far from the only examples, but are among the most intriguing. Across Asia,
the earliest materials from interactions with the Mongols follow this pattern, using Tatar
heavily and when Mongol does appear, it is usually in reference to the state itself.
Early western works, such as the those of ibn al-Athir (1220s), Friar Julian (1237),
and al-Nasawi, (c. 1240), all call them Tatars. An Armenian gospel from 1236 calls them Black
Tatars: the Chinese classified the Tatars as White, Black or Wild Tatars, and in this
system, Chinggis Khan was a Black Tatar. Queen Rusudan of Georgia in a 1223 letter to the
Pope described how her Kingdom had been ravaged by the Tatars, while the Rus’, on their
defeat at the Kalka River the same year, called the invaders Tatars. The Rus’ seemingly
got the name from the Qipchaq, who since the 1210s had had dealings with refugees fleeing
Chinggis’ unification of Mongolia, so they likely learned the name right from the source.
In these early sources, Tatar was the most common means to refer to the Mongols. The
few times Mongol is mentioned in these sources, it is usually the name of their state. These
were written across the breadth of Asia, not making this confusion based off one single
author’s misunderstanding. How could so many writers be confusing the Mongols with
a tribe no longer extant? Were the Mongols too polite to correct everyone calling them
the wrong name? It seems likely that Tatar was not a name forced on them, but something
of a general term used by the nomads of Mongolia.
Around 1240 we start to see a shift, though why is unclear. Essentially, Mongol starts
to replace Tatar as the preferred ethnonym. This is seen in the reports of European missionaries
and diplomats to the Mongols in the 1240s and 50s. Travellers to the Great Khans found
that they were actually averse to the use of Tatar. The Francsican Friar John de Plano
Carpini, uses the awkward phrase, “ the Mongols whom
we call Tartars,” repeated several times throughout. A similar phrase is in the Dominican
Simon of Saint-Quentin’s work, an envoy sent to the general Baiju in 1247. They indicate
the Mongol leaders were specifically calling themselves Mongol rather than Tatar, a distinction
never emphasized in earlier works.
William of Rubruck travelled the empire in the 1250s, visiting the courts of Batu, his
son Sartaq and Mongke. In his account Sartaq’s officials instructed him not to call Sartaq
a Tatar, and after describing Chinggis Khan’s unification of Mongolia, wherein he indicates
the Mongols and Tatars as separate tribes, he provides this statement:
"But now on account of their frequent wars [the Tartars] have almost all been wiped out,
and so the Mongols wish to abolish [the Tartar’s] name and bring their own to the fore.”
Past about 1250, we frequently find Mongol instead of Tatar, or even Mongol-Tatar. Not
only is this the period when the aforementioned official sources were beginning to be produced,
but we now have sources by writers born after the initial Mongol invasions. In the late
1250s, we have two major Persian writers, Juvaini, a high official in the Mongol administration,
and Juzjani, a refugee who fled the Mongols to seek refuge in the Delhi Sultanate and
was famous for his hatred of them. Both writers overwhelming use Mongol instead of Tatar,
which makes only a few appearances. Interestingly, Juvaini always uses it for the Mongol peoples
as a whole, never for a specific tribe.
We do not see a total disappearance of Tatar, but its use often seems to be as an insult.
An obvious example is in Europe, where the very word was mutated into a reflection of
the Greek hell, Tartarus, suggesting the Mongols came from hell. Juvaini at one point calls
them Tatar Devils. When the Yuan Dynasty invaded Vietnam in the 1280s, they were angered to
find the forces of Dai Viet had ‘kill the Tatars,’ tattooed on their bodies, which
led the Mongols to kill everyone they found with such tattoos. The Chinese certainly had
rude characters to refer to the Mongols, essentially meaning ‘stinky Tatars,’ but these aren’t
so readily apparent until the Ming Dynasty.
So what do we make of all this? Did the Mongols change their name because their subjects were
being rude to them? That’s unlikely- subjects angry at Mongol rule would find a way to turn
whatever name the Mongols used into a slur. More significant was a matter of timing and
legitimacy. Timewise, the shift could have occurred with the final defeat of their longtime
enemy, the Jurchen Jin Dynasty in 1234. The destruction of their ancestral foe may have
brought on a new sense of legitimacy and identity as a state. By then, an entire generation
had grown since the founding of the empire, with an increasing sense it was Heaven’s
will for them to rule the world. Basically they were adopting the state’s name, Mongol,
as a name for the people who had emerged since 1206. And once we get to the 1250s when the
Toluids began writing official histories to justify their usurpation of power, Mongol
was retroactively forced back, as if it had always been used, with Tatar increasing restricted
to just select tribes. The fact that these are our most commonly used sources for the
period and that Mongol became the name of the homeland and the people still living there
reinforced this division.
Another possible influence is that a variety of sources from the time of Ogedei to Kublai
refer to ‘Water Tatars’ in Eastern Mongolia being rebellious and armies being needed to
suppress them. It might be then, that as Mongol was coming to be seen as referring to the
people of the empire, that the older term came to be used for those unwilling to accept
the Khan’s rule. Of course, that is speculation. It is hardly uncommon for dynasties to ‘fudge’
their histories for a preferred narrative. Genealogies and naming are even easier to
edit when there is no pre-existing literature to combat. And who is there to challenge your
claim when you are Heaven’s appointed rulers of Eurasia?
Tatar as a word does predate the Mongol Empire by centuries, showing up as early as the Orkhon
Inscriptions of the 700s. In contrast, the appearances of Mongol before 1200 are speculative,
and based on reconstructions which could indicate other peoples.
For the Tatars of western Russia, their use of the name was not an adoption of a European
term, but a continuation. The official histories described earlier originated in Persia and
China, quite outside the Golden Horde. A prisoner of Batu in 1241, Rogerius, never uses the
name Mongol, while in 1245 Batu told a Rus’ prince to drink airag as he was “already
one of them, a Tatar.” The children of Jochi were outside of Mongolia since the time of
the Khwarezmian campaign, rarely returning. Sartaq, a son of Batu, did spend time in Karakorum,
and not coincidentally, he is the only one specifically designated as a ‘Mongol’
in the sources. Outside of the internal dealings of the imperial court and the later affairs
of the Toluids and their need to rewrite history, perhaps Mongol never had a chance to replace
Tatar within the Qipchaq Khanate, Tatar becoming too well established as local tribes were
forced to adopt it.
So there we have Pow’s argument and evidence. Tatar was the original endonym of the tribes
north of China over the 12th century, with Mongol perhaps a name of a minor clan, associated
with the Borjigon and the brief Khamag Mongol. Not much more than a military alliance, the
Khamag Mongol had neither the power nor the will to change the name of the tribes. Yet,
their leadership remained a source of legitimacy on the steppe, and when Temujin united the
tribes in 1206 he presented himself as a continuation of his ancestor’s state, only declaring
that his new state was the Great Mongol Empire, Mongol being the state while Tatars were the
people. Overtime, as its leadership grew up within the Mongol Empire and found themselves
answering Heaven’s call for domination, they began identifying themselves by the name
of that state, and Mongol slowly and imperfectly replaced Tatar, at least in the imperial court
and Mongol homeland. The official histories written after this therefore over-exaggerate
the presence of ‘Mongol,’ in the early part of the century. Meanwhile, they were
still Tatars to the people they encountered, and continuing to use Tatar instead of Mongol
was a small form of defiance against Chinggisid pretensions. The branches of the family outside
of the imperial court, or often ostracized from it such as the house of Jochi, never
really adopted it and continued to use Tatar, as their descendants such as the Tatars of
Crimea and the Volga, still do today.
Pow’s argument is hot off the press, so there hasn’t been time for response to it,
but it does offer an explanation to a problem which has long plagued scholars, and similar
ideas have been proposed before, though not as radical. Does this mean that this channel
and everyone interested in the topic should replace the use of Mongol with Tatar? Well,
no. For one thing, that would complicate standard practice. Further, if Mongol was the word
associated with the state founded in 1206 and eventually adopted, then it is perfectly
fine to remark that they were Mongols: thus, demonstrating the all encompassing effects
of Chinggis Khan’s transformation of Mongolia, and his creation of the Mongols.