The Horde

by Marie Favereau

  Much of the Jochid influence on Russia derived from the Horde’s trade policies, which helped to create the largest integrated market in premodern history, a network that connected the circuits of the Baltic, the Volga, the Caspian Sea, and the Black Sea in a single operative system, which was itself linked to Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. Against the enduring stereotype of parasitical nomads, we find that the Horde generated wealth. Consummate generalists, nomadic leaders repurposed military logistics to enhance long-distance trade, drawing on the army’s messenger system (the yam) to ship goods and commercial orders. And while the Horde and other Mongols were primarily herders, they also learned to manipulate their environment and exploit natural resources such as salt, medicinal herbs, and wood. They planted millet and organized extensive fish farming. They firmly controlled access to grasslands, trade routes, and marketplaces and enticed foreigners to trade near their headquarters. The Mongols also took advantage of the skills and capacities of those they conquered. Hordes expanded their commercial networks in part by taking over existing nexuses of craft and trade. The goal was not to pillage these locations—although the Mongols sometimes did pillage—but to encourage the inhabitants to continue the work at which they already excelled so that the Mongols could reap the rewards through taxation. Thus even if few Jochids settled in the subjugated port towns and salt-mining villages of the Black Sea region, the Horde benefited by taxing the merchants and producers plying their trades there. The result was dramatic, as the Horde filled in the gap between markets east and west, north and south, enabling a continental economic order.

  The Horde’s social, political, and economic systems were products of both continuity and change. All were in fact processes, malleable and subject to adjustment as circumstances dictated. Most basically, day-to-day life involved movement, as hordes rarely stayed long in one place. The nomads migrated across their territories, following seasonal changes to ensure their herds’ access to pasture and their own access to suitable campsites. The seasons also dictated when the Mongols made war. Foreign policy, a critical dimension of Mongol-led globalization, was in constant flux. The Jochid khans were especially agile in their diplomacy, forming a complex web of multilateral relations driven by trade and shifting alliances. Mamluk Egypt, Byzantium, Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy, Venice, and Genoa were all involved in commercial exchanges with the Horde; all were at times its allies and at other times its enemies. What looks like political inconsistency was in fact calculated strategy. Even identity was a fluid process, as the Jochids turned to Islam while still embracing the law and spiritual sensibilities of the steppe—law and sensibilities that were themselves the products of generations of development.

  The wonder is that the Horde managed to maintain a distinctive social and political order devoted to assimilation and globalization. How? How did it adopt others and adapt to them? How, as the central Mongol Empire collapsed in the second half of the thirteenth century, did the Horde keep alive a system of commercial exchange driven by Mongol methods of governance? Even the best-documented works on the Black Sea trade and the Horde have not properly answered these questions.

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  “Horde,” when it was applied to the people of Jochi, was an old word for a new regime. The term itself has a long history that can be traced back to the time of the early Han in China (207 BCE–9 CE).8 Most historians equate the Mongolian term orda with a khan’s court and his main military headquarters. Wherever there was a khan or other nomadic leader—whether the great khan, the ruler of the Mongol Empire; the khan of the Horde or another ulus; or the chiefs heading each of the migratory masses in a given ulus or territory—there was a horde. To the Mongols themselves, “horde” had a wide and complex meaning. A horde was an army, a site of power, a people under a ruler, a huge camp. These meanings did not exclude one another; in concert, they captured the sense that the regime was coextensive with its mobile people. A horde did not have to be in one place in order to govern itself or sedentary subjects; hordes migrated, dispersed, and gathered anew, all while exercising control. Mongols embedded mobility into their strategies of rule, as I discuss in detail in chapter 3.

  Much of the literature about the Horde—and other Mongol regimes—uses the word “khanate” to denote the imperial formations that emerged from the Mongol Empire. This term comes from the Persian khānāt. Struggling to understand the alien political institutions the Mongols created, Persian administrators coined “khanate,” modeling it on their own “sultanate.” Persians thus emphasized the position of the khan. But while the khan was a leading figure, each regime was a collective power. Jochi’s ulus, Tolui’s ulus, and all the other uluses were jointly ruled. They had a single overarching leader who also led his own horde, while other hordes within the ulus had their own administrators. Major decisions were made by the khan in consultation with advisors and elites, including the administrators of the hordes the khan did not oversee directly. And the ulus’s wealth was shared among all its people, albeit unequally. Given the distributed nature of authority in Mongol society, terms such as “horde” and “ulus” are more useful in describing nomadic power formations than is “khanate.” And many contemporaries writing about Mongol rule did use the term “horde” to name this changeable sort of empire built on mobility, expansion and assimilation, diplomacy, and trade. A power of a different kind required a different kind of name.

  The term “horde” entered Persian, Arabic, Russian, and all European languages following the Mongol conquests, and it is widely used today to denote a large crowd of unruly or uncontrollable people. This usage is a distant echo of “horde” as it appears in medieval sources written by travelers, many of them religious men otherwise accustomed to sedentary lives. These observers saw the Mongol power as brutal yet socially constructive. Foreign witnesses admitted the difficulty they faced in grasping who the Mongol newcomers were and what they wanted, and often travelers were scared by what they encountered. From these medieval accounts, permeated by the awe and fear of their authors, we get the modern sense of a horde as a powerful and frightening mass.

  When discussing the people of Jochi, I used the term they used for themselves—Horde, with a capital H. I also use the Mongolian appellation ulus Jochi. “Ulus” bears various meanings in the medieval sources, but mostly it refers to the peoples descended from and conquered by Jochi, Chagatay, Ögödei, and Tolui, the four sons of Chinggis and his chief wife, Börte. In the course of his conquests, Chinggis came to rule many subjects, whom he bequeathed to his heirs. These peoples included warriors and their families, craftsmen, merchants, and farmers. They were nomads, including Mongols and other steppe dwellers, and sedentary peoples. All these people comprised an ulus. Although historians may translate “ulus” as “state” or “empire,” according to contemporaries, an ulus was not primarily a territorial entity but instead bore the sense of a sovereign political community. Ulus Jochi, then, refers the descendants of Jochi together with all their subjects—whether nomadic subjects who fully assimilated, such as the Qipchaqs or Mongols of non-Jochid lineages, or sedentary subjects who maintained a separate ethnic identity, such as the Russians.

  As such, ulus differs from horde. A horde is more precisely a nomadic regime or power. An ulus, by contrast, encompasses the people—both the sovereign and all his subjects. The historian and anthropologist Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene points out that, in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sources, the meaning of ulus was close to that of the common Mongolian word for people, irgen. “The Medieval Mongol ulus was a category of government that was turned into a ‘community of the realm’ and as such it was assumed to be ‘a natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law and descent’, a ‘people’ or irgen,” he writes.9

  The Horde was socially diverse and multiethnic, but its leadership came from a core of dominant steppe clans, most of them Mongol subgroups: Qonggirad, Kiyad, Qatay, Manghit, Saljut, Shirin, Barin, Arghun, and Qipchaqs. The heads of these groups bore
the title of beg. As the Horde became increasingly oligarchic in the late thirteenth century, power devolved from the khan to the begs, the nomadic leaders who joined the khan in a governing council. The begs acknowledged the khan’s primacy because he was a descendent of Chinggis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi. But that status did not make a khan all-powerful. To be elevated on the felt rug—the procedure for enthronement—an aspirant had to associate himself with powerful begs. Similarly, to rule effectively, a khan needed the begs on his side. They supported him and, if he failed, deposed him. This was especially the case after the 1350s, during and following a period known as the bulqaq—anarchy. In the course of this period, several pretenders to the Jochid throne struggled to take and keep power. While they foundered, the locus of authority shifted definitively to the begs. They maintained the Horde’s governing traditions, sought to elevate new khans who could rule in the image of Chinggis and his descendants, and pursued power for themselves.10

  No single study has heretofore treated the Horde as a case of effective empire building, but historicizing this specific form of collective power is essential for understanding post-Chinggisid steppe societies and the nomads’ role in Eurasian history. I hope that this book will serve as a model for grasping the impact of nomadic empires on world history—and that the book will help readers rethink the conventional view of empires as invariably sedentary powers. Historically, sedentary powers have indeed erected powerful empires, often dominating nomads in the process. But nomads have also established sovereignty over sedentary peoples. By capturing the notion of a moveable state, this book offers a new perspective on collective power and on the fascinating shapes it can take.11

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  If the Horde were projected on today’s maps, it would stretch across a region occupied by Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Russia, including Tatarstan and Crimea. The history of the Horde is therefore a shared legacy. That legacy does not belong exclusively to the national narratives of any of these nation-states, narratives centered on linguistic, ethnic, and religious communities that had very different experiences with the Horde and today invest those experiences with a range of meanings. As a result, the historiography of the Horde has tended to depend very much on the standpoint of the historian. Where nationalisms solidified in opposition to Mongol rule, historians have told one kind of story; where nationalisms presume continuity with the Mongol past, historians have told another kind of story.

  In Russian nationalist scholarship, the Horde is an alien entity with disruptive effects on the formation of the Russian nation. In the Soviet Union, the Russian experience of vassalage to the Horde was distorted, marginalized, and often simply erased from textbooks. Historians and archaeologists were not allowed to use the terms “Horde” or “Golden Horde.” Instead, the Mongol regime that conquered the medieval Russian principalities was called the “Tatar yoke.”12 But Tatars—a group often conflated with Mongols—and other Muslim peoples now living in the Russian Federation see the Horde’s rule as a formative period in their history. Indeed, the Islamization of the Eurasian steppes, Crimea, and Eastern Europe is one of the Horde’s most important legacies. Islam, as practiced in the Horde after the mid-thirteenth century, was a unifying force in Central Asia.13

  The sweep of the Jochids across so many different peoples was enabled in part by their liberal style of rule. Like most empires, the Horde accommodated diverse religious communities. The toleration practiced by nomadic leaders reflected their respect for wide-ranging approaches to belief and superstition. Indeed, the Mongols readily adopted the spiritual practices of other steppe peoples before striking out into Eurasia with their eyes on conquest, so the idea that a single polity might accommodate multiple belief systems was not unfamiliar to them. Thus the Horde’s steppe descendants could embrace Islam even as they continued to practice their old spiritual traditions, conquered peoples faced no obstacles in practicing their traditions, and religious dignitaries visiting the Horde enjoyed protected status whether they were Muslims, Jews, Armenian Christians, Catholics, Russian Orthodox, or Pagans. Toleration was a pragmatic option. As the Franciscan friar Iohanca put it in 1320, the Jochids “could not care less to what religion someone belongs as long as he performs the required services, pay tributes and taxes and satisfies his military obligations according to their laws.” Toleration also served power aims. In addition to allowing free practice of diverse religions, the Jochids provided special financial and legal protections for Christian and Muslim clergy because the Horde’s leaders knew that the support of religious elites would enhance Jochid legitimacy in the eyes of conquered peoples.

  Some of the most significant beneficiaries of Jochid protections were Russian Orthodox clergy and institutions, which blossomed under Mongol rule. Russian scholars—whose work dominates historical writing about the Horde—have lately paid more attention to this process of development, moving beyond nationalist biases by asking questions that do not presuppose the oppressiveness of the supposed Tatar yoke. These scholars are reconciling Russia with the Islamic dimension of its past: their question is not how Russia survived the Horde, but how the Horde helped to create modern Russia.

  English-language scholarship has been more likely to take for granted the Horde’s contributions to Russia’s development. In particular, the question of the Horde’s legacy has often been linked to the rise of Muscovy, the Grand Duchy of Moscow.14 The goal of this scholarship is to understand how the Horde influenced the institutions of Muscovite power and therefore of Moscow’s successor, imperial Russia. Yet, as exciting as this discourse is, it leads to dead ends. Because this scholarship is based primarily on Russian sources, it is limited by the contents of those sources, which are in many ways rich but do not include much information on the Horde’s administrative systems. I therefore turn to a range of other sources in order to show how the Horde functioned administratively and how it handled relations with its Russian vassals. When we take as our subject the Horde, rather than the Russians, the Mongol influence on the emergence of Moscow and the development of the Russian imperial state comes into sharper focus.

  The Russian principalities experienced extraordinary economic vitality during their vassalage to the Horde. New cities were built—as many as forty in northeastern Russia during the fourteenth century. Artisanal production grew dramatically and trade developed rapidly, bringing Eurasian long-distance commerce to the Baltic sphere, the far north, and small towns such as Moscow itself, which burgeoned only after the Jochids bestowed favor on Moscow’s leading family. But while scholars have acknowledged all this, they have struggled to properly explain it.15 I argue that Russia’s economic growth was a product of the Horde’s political agenda. The Jochid khans prioritized fluidity in commercial markets and used their foreign policy to ensure the productivity of the fur and silver trades, which were essential to the development of Novgorod, one of the economic centers of the Russian principalities. When Russian princes and boyars objected to granting foreign traders access to their territory, the Jochids forced the Russians to relent, a move that proved extremely valuable to Russian development. At the same time, the Jochids granted Russian elites financial and legal protections that facilitated production in the orchards, fisheries, farms, and craft workshops those elites owned. The Jochid-dominated Eurasian trade network was a source of Russian wealth and therefore power.

  If historians have so far failed to appreciate the influence of the Horde on the development of Russian power, they have also misunderstood the political relationship between the Horde and the Russians. Scholars have perceived the Russians as members of a “steppe frontier,” at the periphery of Jochid power, whereas in fact Russians were deeply enmeshed in the nomadic state.16 The Jochid khans considered the Russian principalities part of their dominion. The Horde took censuses of the people living in the principalities and taxed them. The Jochids did not impose direct rule over the Russians but did closely supervise the grand
prince of Vladimir, the highest-ranking figure in the Russian principalities. The principalities benefited from the khans’ military support, land grants, and tax exemptions. Protection for the Russian Orthodox clergy was a constant feature of Jochid politics. The clergy affirmed Jochid sovereignty and in return received lucrative financial benefits that contributed to the church’s thriving. Marriages between Jochid princesses and Russian princes strengthened connections between the Horde’s rulers and their vassals. The Jochids also rewrote the process of succession to the position of grand prince and eventually placed his throne in the hands of the Muscovites. The Jochids in many ways created Moscow’s authority, fundamentally altering the course of Russian history.

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  This story begins in the East Asian steppe in the late twelfth century. The steppe was divided among the Mongols and other nomadic groups. Only the most prominent of the groups, such as the Tatars, Kereit, and Naiman, claimed collective names and were recorded in the Persian, Chinese, Russian, and other sources available to historians today. Steppe nomads were not all cut from the same cloth, but they did share a number of political, social, spiritual, and economic institutions. The first chapter provides a broad picture of the complex and dynamic relations among these nomadic groups.

  Chapter 1 also traces Chinggis’s rise to power in 1206 and the violent process whereby he and his followers unified the steppe nomads under the banner of the Mongols. I describe the Mongol conquests in Central Asia, a process that was completed in 1221, and uncover the causes of the Mongol expansion. I show that, contrary to the prevailing view, the Mongols did not seek the annihilation of sedentary civilizations. Rather, Chinggis Khan and his sons’ primary goal was the submission of other steppe nomads.