Qipchaq survivors took refuge in the northern lands of the Russians and in Crimea, where the Qipchaqs had their main trading post at the fortified harbor of Sudak. The Westward followed them and plundered the town. Its inhabitants sailed to the other side of the Black Sea to hide in the Seljuq Sultanate. By emptying Sudak of its merchants, destroying their businesses, and isolating the peninsula, the Mongols struck at the heart of the Qipchaq world. The Qipchaqs had no supreme leader to kill and no capital city to seize, but they did have a prosperous commercial nexus to crash. Sudak connected the Dnieper, Don, and Volga arteries to the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuq Sultanate, Bulgaria, and even the Syrian-Palestinian coast. It is no accident that travelers used to call the Black Sea the Sea of Sudak. The region was a commercial hub, with a mixed population of Greeks, Venetians, Armenians, Jews, and Turkmen engaged in agriculture and trade. Before the Mongol assault, the Qipchaqs controlled the Sudak markets, where merchants traded slaves and furs, and cash and textiles arrived in large quantities from Anatolia. The Mongols shut down the harbor and left, then set up camps in the ample pastures of the Qipchaq steppe.14
Seeking partners in the fight against the Mongols, Khan Köten, a Qipchaq chief, went to Kiev to negotiate with the kniazia, the Russian princes. Such alliances were not unheard of; being neighbors, Qipchaqs and Russians occasionally joined forces against common enemies. This time the Qipchaqs came in large numbers and brought gifts, “horses and camels, buffaloes and girls.” The Chronicle of Novgorod, one of the earliest Old Russian histories, reports that the Qipchaqs also brought the kniazia a warning about the Mongols: “Our land they have taken away today; and yours will be taken tomorrow.” Kniaz Mstislav Mstislavich of Galicia, Khan Köten’s son-in-law, sided with Köten and summoned his Russian “brothers” to do the same. But the kniazia dithered and bickered. They had no clear leadership and constantly contested with one another. Ultimately they separated into two camps, southerners and northerners. Mstislav Romanovich, the kniaz of Kiev and the supreme ruler of the southern lands, sided with Mstislav Mstislavich and the Qipchaqs. They were joined by the princes of Chernigov, Smolensk, and Volhynia. The senior princes of the northern lands refused to join the alliance; they were engaged in other conflicts closer to their area. The kniaz of Vladimir-Suzdal, the dominant principality in the north, was levying troops against the Livonians. One source reports that the kniaz did send his nephew, the kniaz of Rostov, with troops, but they moved too late to rendezvous with the southern Russian forces.15
The meeting point for the Russian and Qipchaq armies was thirty miles south of Kiev. For months, men, horses, provisions, and weapons came by land convoys and riverboats. Food and military equipment were loaded on carts to follow the massive army as it moved slowly down the western bank of the Dnieper River. In May 1223 the Russians gathered with the Qipchaq archers. A high estimate holds there were around 80,000 men, but only 15,000 of them were well-equipped warriors. The Russian and Qipchaq cavalrymen wore similar armor: a mail hauberk with short sleeves designed for horse riders, a tall helmet, and a complete or partial iron facemask with nasals and holes for the eyes.16
Preparing for war, the Mongols sent their first delegation to the kniazia. The delegation was tasked with carrying out diplomacy in the Mongol style: offering peace, with the expectation that they would be turned down. As ever, the Mongols believed it was crucial to create a narrative in which the opponent was the aggressor and themselves the hurt party. They would not engage in a fight without first being scorned, for it was the enemy’s offense that convinced the Mongols they had moral justification to use lethal violence. The Russian sources report that the Mongol envoys claimed they were interested in war only with the Qipchaqs and that the kniazia could still withdraw from a conflict that was not theirs. “We have not occupied your land, nor your towns, nor your villages, nor is it against you we have come,” the envoys said, according to the Chronicle of Novgorod. “We have come sent by God against our serfs, and our horse-herds, the pagan Polovets men.” (Polovets was a common Russian term for the Qipchaqs.) The Mongols asked the Russians to chase out the Qipchaqs and seize their goods. The kniazia answered by killing the Mongol ambassadors. Now the Mongols could declare war, having satisfied their moral code. They sent a second delegation. “Since you have listened to the Polovets men, and have killed all our envoys, and are coming against us, come then, but we have not touched you,” the delegation announced. “Let God judge all.”17
Soon after, around mid-May, Mstislav Mstislavich forded the Dnieper with a detachment of a thousand men, including Qipchaq warriors, and ran into a small Mongol outpost under what was likely Jebe’s command. The outnumbered Mongol warriors had to flee into the steppe. To protect their commander, they hid him inside a Qipchaq burial mound. Yet he was caught by the enemy, and Mstislav allowed the Qipchaq warriors to execute him. If the commander was indeed Jebe, it was an inglorious end for a warrior of his stature. At this stage Russians and Qipchaqs were confident of imminent victory, but they would soon be thwarted, even without Jebe to defeat them.18
The decisive battle was fought on May 31, 1223. Sources do not say exactly where, but we know for certain that the Mongols chose a spot somewhere on the banks of the narrow Kalka River, north of the Azov Sea, and drove the kniazia there. The Mongols suddenly attacked while the Russian vanguard was crossing the river, precluding an organized defense.19 The Russians suffered massive losses, including a number of voivodes—senior military officers—and princes. Among those lost was the kniaz of Kiev, whom the Mongols executed. The kniaz of Chernigov and his son died while retreating. The withdrawal was slow and painful, and the Kievans panicked. Rich families and merchants took their belongings on boats and abandoned their houses. Ibn al-Athīr writes that some of the refugees reached “the lands of Islam”—most likely a reference to the Seljuq Sulantate. The Qipchaqs retreated by the thousands “to the woods and the mountain tops, abandoning their lands.” The Chronicle of Novgorod blames the Qipchaqs for the defeat, claiming that their advance cavalry withdrew too early and in great confusion and that the Qipchaqs turned against their Russian allies and killed them for their horses and clothes. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Mongols plundered villages all the way up to the Dnieper, where Qipchaq territory ended, before turning to the Volga and onward to the east.20
Near the Volga, the Mongols took an opportunity to conquer the Muslim Bulgars, who had a small but old and prosperous kingdom in the region of the modern Tatar city of Kazan. The Bulgars had heard about the Russian and Qipchaq defeat and prepared a new strategy to fight back. The Bulgars grasped that the Mongols excelled at sieges and open battles, so they refused to engage on these terms. Instead they ambushed the Mongols, constantly assaulting and harassing them, and prevented them from deploying their cavalry. Having already lost thousands of men, Sübötei’s forces were quickly spent. They gave up and turned away down the east bank of the Volga River.21 In fall 1223 or early 1224, the Westward headed back to Mongolia, a march of thousands of miles. Along the way, they merged with Jochi’s mass army. Strengthened by these fresh forces, they crossed the Ural region, met with their “old friends” the Qangli, and killed their chief, the Ölberli khan.22
Popular histories, and global histories touching on the Mongols, often see the Westward’s mission as an unqualified success. The Mongols covered more than 5,000 miles, apparently winning battle after battle, effortlessly. However, specialists paying close attention to the original sources have shown that the campaign was in fact frustrating and hard-fought. It lasted three and a half years, and the Mongols often met strong local resistance. They lost many men—according to Ibn al-Athīr, only 4,000 of the Westward survived. The Volga Bulgars not only repulsed them but also found a weakness in Mongol warfare—a weakness that other enemies would later exploit. And the Mongols gained only short-term surrenders; not a single defeated enemy agreed to pay tribute. The Westward severely disrupted the fragile economic and political balance of the Caucasus
, Crimea, and southern Russia, but as soon as the warriors turned their backs, “the route[s] opened up and goods were exported as before,” Ibn al-Athīr reports. In 1224 trade had already restarted and reconstruction commenced throughout the Georgian kingdom, the Qipchaq steppe, and the Russian villages that had been sites of combat.23
The Deaths of Jochi and Chinggis
When the returning army reached Mongolia, a great quriltai assembled and celebrated the success of Sübötei and his men. But Jochi was not there; he went instead to his camp on the Irtysh River. He was ordered to continue the pursuit of the Qipchaqs, yet he did not prepare any new campaigns. When his father asked him to come to Mongolia to explain his defiant attitude, Jochi said he did not feel well and begged to be excused. No one in Chinggis’s entourage believed Jochi. Someone passing by his tents reported that he was, in fact, leisurely hunting during the time of the proposed meeting. Finally, in winter 1226–1227, Chinggis himself, accompanied by his other sons Chagatay and Ögödei, took off to summon Jochi. But Jochi died in February 1227, before his family reached him. He was less than forty years old. According to Rashīd al-Dīn, Chinggis “was sorely grief-stricken” when he heard the news of Jochi’s death, all the more so as “the report” of Jochi’s insubordination “was proven false and it was established that Jochi had been ill of the time and not on the hunting field.” Crippled with guilt, Chinggis designated a new heir to the ulus of his eldest: Jochi’s son Batu would take over.24
Chinggis followed Jochi into the afterlife. Chinggis’s death came in the context of renewed war with longtime enemies. While the Westward was fighting in the Qipchaq steppe, the Mongols were also fighting in the east, against the Jin. The Tangut, reluctant allies of the Mongols since their 1210 pact, were supposed to send siege experts to aid the khan’s army. But the Tangut reneged on their promise. In 1223 Muqali, the Mongol commander in the war with the Jin, died in battle, and the Tangut withdrew. In 1225 the Tangut even signed a separate peace with the Jin.
In autumn 1226 Chinggis Khan marshaled his armies to punish the Tangut. But he was struggling at the time from a bad wound—perhaps one he had suffered during a hunt two years earlier. His sons and commanders wanted a temporary withdrawal, arguing that the Tangut would wait. “They won’t leave, carrying off their towns with pounded-earth walls,” Chinggis’s advisors told him. “They won’t leave, abandoning their permanent camps.” Yet Chinggis decided not to delay his revenge. He ordered his armies to fight and died while they were attacking the enemy. The Tangut surrendered, but the Mongols plundered, enslaved, and killed them with no mercy. It is not clear exactly how Chinggis’s life ended, but the Mongols made the Tangut pay for the death of their khan.25
After Chinggis Khan died, large-scale military operations were suspended for nearly two years. In 1229, at the quriltai enthroning Ögödei as Chinggis’s successor, the attendees agreed to carry out a new onslaught on the Qipchaq steppe. But for the time being, only scout troops set out. The mass army would follow after the end of the Jin campaign, which was still in full swing. The pacification of northern China did not evolve as expected, and the Jin posed a continuous threat. Sübötei himself was sent to fight. Chinggis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui, died on the Jin front in 1232, before the Jin definitively succumbed two years later.26
The Qipchaq Guerrillas
The scouts Ögödei sent west after his 1229 enthronement learned that a new threat was rising among the Qipchaqs. His name was Bashman. A chieftain and member of the Ölberli elite, Bashman garnered the support of warriors and the wider public. From his territory along the Akhtuba River, an eastern branch of the lower Volga, he built a loose alliance with Alans, Russians, Bulgars, Bashkirs, and others committed to beating back the Mongols.
When the Mongol scouts arrived in the Volga region, Bashman and his supporters began to attack their positions. The Mongols failed to force the Qipchaqs to face them in open battle and therefore could not use their cavalrymen properly. Bashman was more mobile than the Mongols and he knew the terrain better. He also had mastered the techniques of guerrilla warfare that the Bulgars had successfully implemented some years earlier. According to the Persian historian Juvaynī, who provided one of the key sources on the Mongols,
having no lair or hiding-place to serve as a base, [Bashman] betook himself every day and night to a different spot. And because of his dog-like nature he would strike wolf-like on every side and make off with something. Gradually his evil grew worse and he wrought greater mischief; and wherever the [Mongol] army sought him they could not find him, since he had departed elsewhere. Most of his refuges and hiding places were on the banks of the [Volga]. Here he would lie concealed in the forests, from which he would spring out like a jackal, seize hold of something, and hide himself once again.27
Bashman became a local hero and more people joined his forces. This alarmed the Mongols because Bashman’s actions prevented any new operations in the west. The lower Volga was a crucial nexus on the route to Europe; the Mongols needed to secure direct land communication between Qaraqorum, their newly established seat of power, and the western steppe, and Bashman was in the way. What is more, under Bashman, the Qipchaqs were in a position to create mass unrest. Chinese sources report that the Mongols responded by putting massive forces into a new campaign to annihilate the “rebels” out of fear that “an uncontrollable fight might break out in the steppe.” After a quriltai on the banks of the Onon River in 1235, the Mongols launched large-scale operations to control the Volga-Ural region and the basin of the Volga. They decided that their first targets would be Bashman and the Bulgars whom the Mongols had earlier failed to conquer. The next target would be the Russian principalities. The Mongols had kept their sights on the kniazia since the Westward mission. The Mongols knew the Russians could be dangerous, though nothing like the Qipchaqs, who had been reborn from their ashes.28
Sübötei, whose knowledge of the Volga region and whose expertise in Qipchaq warfare were indisputable, led the shock troops. He was probably the strategist behind the whole campaign, although he was not the high commander of the army. That job fell to Batu. Princes from the four branches of the golden lineage assisted him. By 1236 Sübötei had killed or enslaved Bashman’s followers, wives, and children, but Bashman himself was still at large. He took refuge on an island in the Volga estuary and disappeared. Möngke, Batu’s cousin, took charge of the search. His Mongols built 200 boats and scoured the river. The search party interrogated locals on both banks until they found an old woman left behind in a hastily abandoned camp. She gave up her chief’s lair, and soon enough the Mongols had captured him. Once caught, Bashman asked Möngke to carry out his execution, but the Mongol refused. Instead, he entrusted the task to his brother Böchek as a reward, for Böchek had proven staunchly committed during the chase. Bashman was cut in half, which meant the Mongols were denying him the noble death they usually granted to enemies of high status. In the Mongol belief system, bones symbolized descent through the male line, so Mongol executions typically were carried out by strangulation or another method that left the victim’s bones intact. To break bones, as Böchek did Bashman’s, meant destroying an entire lineage.29
At roughly the same time Möngke and Böchek were hunting Bashman, Sübötei was focused on the Bulgars and other remaining unconquered groups of the lower Volga. He had a large force at his disposal, far larger than he had commanded in the Westward. Drawing on intelligence gathered during the Westward’s last mission in the region, Sübötei marched against Biliar, Suwar, and Bulgar, the key settlements of the area. This time the inhabitants could not repulse the Mongols and offered to surrender. Some locals fled to the northern forests or to Russian cities and villages; those who stayed were soon forced to work and fight for the Mongols. In 1236 Sübötei stormed Saqsin and Summerkent, close to the Volga delta, and gained control of the Bashkirs’ land, also known as Great Hungaria.30
Over the subsequent years, the Mongols brutally subjugated the Qipchaqs. Many were tak
en to Mongolia and reduced to bo’ol. The Qipchaq herders who stayed in the lower Volga were required to surrender to Mongol masters if they were to survive in what had once been their land. According to the Secret History, Sübötei created a special force of Qipchaqs, Merkit, Naiman, and Bulgars to watch over the peoples of the Volga. They shaped the first tammachi of the western territories. Tammachi were permanent or semi-permanent garrison troops who dealt with revolts, protected tax collectors, and sometimes collected taxes themselves. They were more than an army; they established a preliminary administrative and coercive structure that paved the way for long-term occupation. Just as the keshig was the key institution for of governance, the tammachi was the key institution of settlement.31
Diverse fates awaited the Qipchaqs who escaped Mongol domination. Several hundred Qipchaq families left the lower Volga, crossed the Black Sea, and resettled in Central Europe, where they were welcomed by Hungarians and European Bulgars. The rulers of these groups had old ties with the Qipchaq elite. However, most Qipchaq refugees ended up in captivity and served as domestic slaves in Europe or as mamluks in the Ayyubid armies. Alans, Bashkirs, and Volga Bulgars had similar experiences. After nearly two decades of warfare, the Qipchaq steppes and the Volga-Ural region had fallen into Mongol hands. Only the Russians remained in resistance.32
Into the Russian Lands, the Snow, and the Mud
Batu amassed the army south of Ryazan principality, near the modern Russian city of Voronezh. From there, the Mongols launched exploratory and raiding expeditions. It was the cold season; in the Russian lands warfare was on hold and the kniazia were not prepared to face Batu’s onslaught. According to Friar Julian, a Hungarian of the Dominican Order who encountered the Mongols in his eastward travels, the Mongols “waited for ground, rivers, and marshes to freeze” and then attacked.33 In December 1237, the submission of the Russians began with the conquest of the fortified city of Ryazan. Its inhabitants had refused the Mongols’ demand for a tithe: one-tenth of everything, including people. The next target—the neighboring city of Vladimir, the capital of Vladimir-Suzdal and seat of the grand prince—was in Batu’s sight.
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