The Mongols maintained their old sharing system until the end of Möngke’s reign in 1259. While the system was in force, the descendants of Jochi had to share the Russians, Bulgars, Alans, Armenians, Georgians, and Qipchaqs with other members of the golden lineage. They also shared their three most lucrative sources of income, including the per-household tax and the yam supplies. In exchange the Jochids received revenues from China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan, which more than compensated for their losses. In addition to redistributing wealth and manpower, administrative undertakings coordinated at the level of the entire empire, like the censuses, helped to knit the empire together. The census also created new linkages on the ground between the hordes and their sedentary subjects, as the Jochids’ relationship with the kniazia revealed.
The Beginnings of Mongol Domination in Russia
Before the Mongol conquests, both Kiev and Novgorod enjoyed special status. Unlike the other Russian principalities, they had no local dynasty of princes. The Russians were bound to a centuries-old system in which Kiev was granted to the senior kniaz, according to the lateral succession system that determined the hierarchy of the kniazia. The rivalry over rulership in Kiev governed the kniazia’s political agendas and fostered fierce conflicts among them. The Novgorodians, meanwhile, distanced themselves from the other Russian principalities. Having established their own sophisticated system of governance, they hired a prince to rule them but granted him only limited powers and forbade him from levying taxes on Novgorod and its lands. The free artisans, merchants, and boyars of Novgorod collected their taxes themselves and fixed the amount they paid, in the form of furs, to their kniaz.83
The Mongols brutally terminated the old order of succession in Kiev as well as the freedom of the Novgorodians to choose their own kniaz. Now Batu’s horde was the capital. Batu signed off on the kniazia’s selection for grand prince, who technically had authority over all the kniazia, and the grand prince was, in turn, supposed to appoint governors to rule Novgorod. By disrupting the Kievan regime, the Mongols broke the Russians’ system of tax collection to create a new one. Novgorodians resented the enforcement, all the more as they had not been militarily defeated. After Alexander’s death in 1263, they negotiated relentlessly to regain their unique status until Alexander’s brother Iaroslav, the new grand prince, agreed to let the Novgorodians organize tax collection themselves. The Mongols allowed this as long as they received their own payments. In less than twenty years, a new structure of government had emerged in the Russian lands. This structure drastically changed the balance of power among the kniazia, as now it was the favor of the Mongols that decided who would be designated as grand prince and granted authority to collect taxes.
Hordes had multiple ways to incorporate dominated people, and the Jochids managed to navigate between political centralization and local autonomy. They tolerated Russian micropolitics as long as it sustained their own politics, which played out on a grander scale. The Russian principalities were at the margins of the Jochids’ domain, sedentary societies that bordered the steppe, which was the Horde’s center. These clusters of outlying villages and towns were nonetheless integrated into the empire through the yam and trade routes. For peasants and citizens, taxation was more acceptable than violent domination. The Mongols initiated a longstanding social, cultural, and political entanglement with the Russians, who understood that the Mongol regime would be more supple and stable than the Kievan. That engagement would have profound consequences for the development of Russia.
4
The Great Mutation
The Mamluk emissaries had been on the road for more than two months. Starting in Cairo, they sailed the Nile to Alexandria and crossed the Mediterranean, where they entered the Byzantine Empire. Just two years earlier, Emperor Michael Palaiologos had taken Constantinople back from the Crusaders. An ally of the Mamluks—the warrior-dominated sultanate encompassing Egypt and Syria—Michael gave the Mamluks his blessing and allowed them to pass the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. From there the emissaries crossed the Black Sea and reached the southern Crimean coast, arriving in the fortified harbor of Sudak. Soon the Jochids learned that foreign envoys were in town. A deputy of the khan came to see the emissaries and provided them horses from the yam, armed escorts, and a guide, for the Mamluks were traveling deep into the steppe to a place they had never seen.
As the envoys approached the banks of the Volga, the number of tents, people, and herds kept growing. Russian boats and caravans from many corners of the world, loaded with food, drink, and goods, were slowly converging on a single point. That point was the envoys’ destination, too: the horde of Berke Khan. As the envoys approached, a high official welcomed them. They were assigned a tent and given food. Soon they were taken to the khan’s precinct and instructed on proper behavior in the ruler’s presence. They were to leave their weapons, including knives, outside the tent, and they were not to keep their bows in their cases, leave them strung, or put arrows in their quivers. On pain of death, the Mamluks were not to touch or walk on the threshold of the khan’s tent.
Berke’s tent was lavishly decorated, its white-felt walls lined with silk and carpets embroidered with gems and pearls. The tent was also enormous and packed with people—as many as five hundred horsemen, according to the envoys’ reports. The guests entered the tent from the left side and found Berke sitting on a throne. He wore a Chinese silk robe and donned, by way of a crown, a Mongol hat. The envoys made a note of his thin beard and his hair gathered in braids, revealing the precious stones set in gold rings in his ears. His belt, too, was inlaid with gemstones. The envoys saw no sword on his side; instead Berke was adorned with black horns hooped with gold and a purse of green leather. His boots were made of red velvet, and his feet rested on a cushion, as if he were suffering from a gout attack. His chief wife and two other ladies were beside him. More than fifty begs were seated in a semicircle, all staring at the visitors.
The emissaries handed over their letter. The khan seemed intrigued and asked the high official to translate it. Only then did the khan allow the envoys to pass to the right side of the tent, where they kneeled down against the felt walls. This was likely an indication of their acceptance. Berke questioned the envoys about Egypt and the Nile. Satisfied with the answers, he ordered his servants to bring the foreigners kumis, meat, fish, and mead. The Mamluk envoys stayed in the khan’s horde twenty-six days. They were invited several times to be in the presence of the khan and his chief wife. The ruling couple offered them food, drinks, gifts, and cash and kept enquiring about elephants, giraffes, and the Nile and its floods. Finally Berke gave them an answer to bring to the sultan.
The emissaries headed back to Cairo with joyous news, confirming what the sultan had heard through merchants: the khan, together with his wives and horsemen, had indeed converted to Islam. Berke’s horde hosted muezzins, imams, and shaykhs, and it had mobile schools where children learned to read the Koran. The rest of the khan’s reply was perhaps even more consequential, for the khan agreed to an alliance with the sultan and promised to sell slave warriors to the Mamluks.1
Berke was a transformative figure in the Horde. He was the first khan installed exclusively by the Jochid begs, without confirmation by the great khan. This was a signal of what was to come, as Berke solidified the Horde’s independence from the Toluid-dominated Mongol center. He also redirected the Horde toward Islam, dramatically altering its internal culture and politics and reorienting its place on the world stage by pivoting toward Muslim rulers and traders. Yet, for all his divergence from Mongol traditions, Berke maintained a distinctively Mongol regime, one that prioritized commerce and redistribution, acceptance of diversity, and rule through vassalage. It was not always easy. Competition with other Mongols, in particular the Ilkhanids to the south, nearly suffocated the Horde economically. Yet the Jochids persevered, thanks in large measure to their engagement with the Mamluks and other new trading partners. In his person and his policies, Berk
e epitomized the adaptiveness of Mongol ways of life and rule.
Illustration of a silver buckle depicting a fantastic creature (Horde, thirteenth century), which was part of a rawhide belt including twenty-nine decorative pieces that are still preserved. Such belts were produced in Jochid workshops until the mid-fourteenth century.
Berke
Batu died in 1255, most likely. He had lived on the banks of the Volga for ten years, was nearly fifty years old, and had become one of the most influential figures of the Mongol Empire. He had succeeded his father early. When the other grandsons of Chinggis Khan came to rule, Batu was the oldest khan in the empire, which granted him an unquestioned authority. Mongol official sources reported that during quriltai nobody dared to oppose him. Yet he had always been second after the great khan.2
Batu entrusted the throne to Sartaq, his first-born, but Sartaq died soon after the great khan had confirmed his position. Möngke then nominated Ulaqchi, a direct descendant of Batu, to lead the ulus of Jochi. Ulaqchi was either Batu’s fourth son or the son of Sartaq. But Ulaqchi, too, lasted just a short time as khan. A year after Batu’s death, the Horde had lost two more leaders, leaving the job to Berke, who was enthroned in 1256. Berke was Batu’s half-brother. Already in his forties, Berke had the status of an elder. But he was a controversial choice, both within the Horde and beyond it. A Muslim and the grandson of the Khwarezmian shah, Berke had forged deep ties with fellow Muslims in Central Asia and Anatolia. Even Batu had grown to fear his brother’s influence. And nothing indicates that Berke visited the great khan before he sat on Batu’s throne.3
Berke took Batu’s penchant for independence to a new level. While Batu enhanced the Horde’s autonomy, he never openly contested Toluid power. Berke, by contrast, resisted the Toluids, even though they were the most powerful branch of the golden lineage. The Toluids had been ascendant since the death of Güyük, when they mobilized against the Ögödeids in an effort to wrest control of the throne. Batu, with the support of Orda and fellow Jochids, had sided with Tolui’s line and supported Möngke for the office of great khan. On the other side, the candidate was Ögödei’s grandson Shiremün. After the Toluids discovered a conspiracy against Möngke, they carried out a massive purge against the descendants of Ögödei and Chagatay. One generation after the Jochids lost their claim to the supreme office of great khan, two other branches of the golden lineage were also pushed out. Only the Toluids remained in the race for the imperial throne. But throughout the 1250s, the Jochids were emerging as a counterweight, and more forcefully under Berke.
The 1260s finally brought the clash between the Jochid and Toluid lines, leading to the partition of the old empire. This was the consequence of a series of disagreements concerning succession and conquest. The empire grew explosively in the 1260s, but the growth was uneven. The Toluids maintained an aggressive expansionist posture, but the Jochids did not. Having left their native valleys and mountains for a flat country and more temperate climate, the Jochids were busy making the Qipchaq steppe their own and needed time to acclimate to their new environment. Around the same time, the Toluids, still centered on Mongolia, prepared large-scale attacks against China, northwestern Iran, and the Middle East. The empire suddenly was riven by clashing political dynamics. In the west continued conquest was in Toluid interests but endangered the consolidation of Jochid power; in the east conquest was a necessity for consolidating Toluid power but offered the Jochids no benefits. Eventually this divergence split the Mongols. Their empire assumed a new shape, with the Horde de facto autonomous and stronger than before, and a new Toluid ulus, referred to as the Ilkhanate, in parts of the Muslim world. The Ilkhanids were established and first ruled by Hülegü, Great Khan Möngke’s brother and Chinggis’s grandson. Hülegü was a formidable political figure and warrior, whose war with the Jochids precipitated the first great transmutation of Chinggis’s empire since 1206.
The Dismemberment of the Central Islamic Lands
In 1251 Möngke entrusted Hülegü to finish the work Chinggis had started when he sent Jochi, Sübötei, and Jebe to take over the Khwarezmian Empire and pursue the Qipchaqs. Now it was time to press even farther west, to Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Greater Armenia, Anatolia, and Egypt. Möngke ordered two in every ten Mongol warriors to enroll under Hülegü’s command. Historians have estimated that there were between 70,000 and 170,000 Mongols in Hülegü’s army of 300,000 fighters; even the lowest estimate demonstrates that the Mongol leaders had mobilized their manpower on a vast scale. In addition the number of siege engineers had increased from Chinggis’s times, and the siege engines had improved.4
The Middle Eastern campaign began in 1256. First, the Mongols targeted eastern Iran, where they dismantled the fortresses associated with the sect of Nizari-Isma‘ili and captured the group’s master. Next they subjugated the Lurs and the Kurds, nomadic peoples living in the western part of the region. In the winter of 1257–1258, the Mongols moved on to the Abbasid Caliphate based in Iraq. The conquest of Baghdad took them less than a fortnight. The Abbasids were supposed allies of the Mongols, and Caliph al-Musta‘sim had sent envoys and gifts to Güyük a few years earlier. But al-Musta‘sim rejected the Mongols’ demands for formal submission and refused Hülegü’s request for military support against the Nizari-Isma‘ili, Lurs, and Kurds. The caliph simply could not support operations against Muslims anywhere, even though he formally controlled only Baghdad. Owing to his position, which implied universal sovereignty over Muslims, he felt moral obligations far beyond his domain. Spurned by al-Musta‘sim, Hülegü sacked Baghdad and had the caliph executed.5
Berke’s men took an active part in the siege of Baghdad but not in the looting of the city or the execution of the caliph. Historical records also indicate that Hülegü never consulted Berke on these actions, neither of which appears to have been included in the plan the two leaders had agreed to. Whether Berke disagreed with Hülegü’s violent moves is, however, unclear. As a Muslim Berke may have opposed executing the caliph, who was understood to be a sanctified person and the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. But as a Mongol prince, Berke perhaps respected Hülegü’s right to punish al-Musta‘sim, who had broken his promises to his Mongol allies. What we can say is that Berke’s supporters claimed he opposed the looting and execution, although this might well have been an attempt to clear the khan’s name in front of a Muslim audience that was critical to his popularity and power.
After the submission of Iraq, Hülegü enjoyed the milking season in Azerbaijan and wintered in the Mughan steppe. He concentrated his next campaign on the Muslim Ayyubid dynasty that Saladin had founded nearly a century earlier in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. By the time Hülegü attacked the Ayyubids in 1259, they had lost control of Egypt to the Mamluks, but Hülegü had his sights on the Mamluks as well. The central Islamic lands, including the still-Ayyubid areas of Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama, held enormous geopolitical and symbolic significance. Hülegü quickly dispatched the Ayyubids, elevating Mongol power to a new level.6
Hülegü’s conquests strengthened the empire, bringing in new subjects and their wealth. But the gains were concentrated in Toluid hands, often at the expense of the Jochids. Möngke had reoriented imperial policies to strengthen Toluid interests. For instance, while spoils were still shared according to the traditional qubi system, the process was directly supervised by the Toluids through a new central secretariat they created. Möngke also turned over Jochid lands to members of his own lineage; after entrusting the Caucasus to Berke in 1251, the great khan reassigned the territory to Hülegü in 1254. Not only that, but the new conquests limited the Jochids’ potential future expansion into the dominions Chinggis Khan had set aside for them. Hülegü’s armies took position in Khorasan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, and east Anatolia, preventing the Jochids from pushing outward their southern borders.7
It seems that, in spite of all this, Berke remained on peaceful terms with Möngke throughout the 1250s. As a senior member of the golden lineage, Berke had to tak
e an active part in the Middle Eastern campaigns, and Jochid troops contributed to the onslaught against the Lurs, Kurds, Nizari-Isma‘ili, Abbasids, and Ayyubids. Berke expected to receive a substantial share of the spoils and, being Jochi’s heir, to rule at least some portions of the new conquered territories: after all, Chinggis Khan had entrusted the West to his eldest son and his descendants. Thus when the Syrian campaign began in fall 1259, Berke was still supporting Hülegü’s war efforts.8
The sudden destruction of the Ayyubids put the rest of the Middle East on notice, and shockwaves quickly reached the Mamluk sultan in Cairo. With the age-old Ayyubid power extinguished, the regime in Cairo became the last defender of the Muslim faith. The Mamluks were also the Mongols’ next target. But before the Mongols could begin their assault, Möngke died, and Hülegü departed eastward to take part in the election of the next great khan. He ordered Ked-Buqa, his most trusted general, and a contingent of scout troops to hold the newly conquered peoples in Syria and Palestine and wait for the return of the mass army.9 In 1260, before leaving for the east, Hülegü sent envoys to Cairo to inform the Mamluks that they must submit or be destroyed. His message boasted that no one could escape the Mongols, who had received from Tengri the right and the task to rule the world. It was a deep insult to the Mamluk sultan, Qutuz, who was a respected warrior and who of course did not recognize any right granted by Tengri. The message also mocked Qutuz personally, recalling his origins in the Khwarezmian Empire, where he had been sold into slavery following the Mongol conquest. Finally, Hülegü denigrated Qutuz as the usurper of the Ayyubid throne in Egypt.10
The Horde Page 16