The Jochid reaction was immediate and brutal. Nogay, Berke’s general, led the attack against the Byzantine Empire. As the son of Tutar, the senior commander Hülegü had executed about four years earlier, Nogay considered any ally of Hülegü’s a personal enemy. Michael Palaiologos may not have been a treaty partner of Hülegü’s, but the Byzantine emperor was at the very least appeasing Hülegü. With the cooperation of the Bulgarian king, Nogay destroyed several villages and cities in the Byzantine territory of Thrace. Eventually Michael agreed to free ‘Izz al-Dīn and pay a heavy tribute to the Jochids. ‘Izz al-Dīn was then relocated to Crimea, where Berke created a micro sultanate under ‘Izz al-Dīn’s patronage.26
Nogay’s task was not only to rescue ‘Izz al-Dīn and impose a tribute on Michael Palaiologos. Nogay was also to bring under firm control the lower valleys of Central Europe, and he accomplished this, his horde colonizing the area from the mouth of the Danube to the Dniester. Nogay thus brought the Jochids geographically nearer to the Byzantines, so the Horde’s warriors could watch the Dardanelles and Bosporus and intervene in any activities that might foreclose access by the Jochids and their trade partners. Nogay also took control of the land route through Bulgaria, which compensated for Hülegü’s closure of the roads through the Caucasus and northern Syria.
Fighting for Economic Independence
Nogay’s conquests extended and reinforced Jochid authority over the lands north of the Black Sea, fulfilling crucial economic goals. The primary objective was to assert control over salt extraction. West of Perekop, the isthmus connecting Crimea to the mainland of what is now Ukraine, salt was produced in large quantities. Salt was critical to nomads and sedentary people alike. They used the stuff to preserve food, enhance its flavor, and cure diseases. They also understood that adding small amounts of salt to water could prevent dehydration. People came from the Russian lands to purchase salt at the Perekop Isthmus, as Rubruck noticed in 1253:
At the far end of this province there are many large lakes, on the shores of which are salt-water springs; as soon as the water from these runs into the lake it turns into salt, hard like ice. Baatu and [Sartaq] draw large revenues from these salt springs, from men come thither from the whole of Russia for salt, and for every cartload they give two lengths of cotton valued at half an yperpera [Byzantine gold coin]. Many ships also come by sea for the salt, all giving payment according to the amount each takes.27
Like Batu before him, Berke was keen to keep a firm hand on the salt-extracting regions. The lower Dnieper was one of them, and the only competition within hundreds of miles was the lower Volga, which was also Jochid territory. The Jochids thus established exclusive control over the production and trade of salt from western Asia to southeastern Europe.
As profitable as salt was, furs were even more lucrative. Historians estimate that the people of the far north provided more than half a million pelts a year, including those of sables and other martens, ermines, steppe foxes, beavers, squirrels, and hares. Archeological sites in northern Russia also reveal hunting of polar foxes, lynx, otters, badgers, woodchucks, ferrets, wolves, and wolverines, which provided yet more furs. The lands of darkness, as contemporaries called the far north, was the largest supplier of precious furs in Eurasia. The region was in Jochid hands.28
Fur was vital to survival in cold weather, but its commercial value lay also in its role as a luxury item. Furs were the standard luxury goods of the Islamic world. Already in the eighth century, the Abbasids considered furs a social marker par excellence. The Muslim elite adored Burtasi, the black and red fox furs used for hats, coats, and caftans. In the tenth century, a black Burtasi—so named for the Burtas people who hunted them—could cost more than a hundred dinars, a considerable sum. Wealthy Abbasids commonly had tent decorations and interior walls made of precious pelts. In the thirteenth century, the demand for furs in Iran, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and North Africa was huge.29
When the Jochids took over the Ural and Volga valleys, the fur market was old and dense, featuring a good deal of long-distance trade. The market had always been shared across ethnic groups and was fiercely competitive. Volga Bulgars, Qipchaqs, and Russians from Rostov and Novgorod dominated the traffic. The Volga Bulgars channeled a great part of the trade through their cities and relied on well-established caravan routes to export toward Central Asia. They received furs directly from the hunters, but also from Russians who sailed to the middle Volga to sell pelts they had obtained through raids, tribute collection, and trade.30
The Qipchaqs developed an alternate route, which did not involve the far north and bypassed both Bulgars and Russians. They dealt directly with the Burtasi hunters and transported furs from the hinterlands of Volga Bulgaria to the harbor of Sudak. There, merchants arrived from the Seljuq Sultanate to exchange fabrics for slaves and pelts. Ibn al-Athīr recalled how the Qipchaqs used the harbor to export furs and other items to the Muslim world just before Mongol rule set in. Sudak “is a city of Qipchaqs,” he wrote, “from which they receive their goods because it lies on the shore of the Khazar [Caspian] Sea and ships with clothing come to it; the clothing is sold for girls, slaves and Burtas furs, beaver, squirrel, and other items that are found in their land.”31
The Qipchaqs, like the Volga Bulgars and the Russians, were middlemen. None of them were hunter-trappers. Hunting in the northern forests required specialized skills. Trappers had to master the terrain, ecology, and climate in order to survive the far-northern winter. They learned how to build and manipulate skis, dogsleds, and traps that would kill a target without ruining its pelt. They knew when the best time was to hunt and how best to ship the pelts to the merchant middlemen. The Jochids, for their part, did not need to worry about securing the pelts or even transporting them. Mongol involvement lay in control of the transit routes and markets. Hunters brought their pelts from the forest to the middle Volga; from there the pelts were sent to the lower Volga and finally were dispatched by caravans to Crimea, Eastern Europe, and Urgench—the old Khwarezmian capital that now belonged to the Jochids. Russian merchants also transported furs along the Dnieper to Kiev or along the land route to Sudak. In other words, the top of the fur chain lay at the mouths of the Volga, Don, and Dnieper rivers, were the Jochids ran the ports and markets. Everything shipped by water passed through those ports, and a large volume of land traffic fed through the Horde’s markets. When the Jochids realized that old fairs and regional markets in Volga Bulgaria were still attracting valuable cargo, they took over the markets and turned them into collection spots where furs would be packed and redirected toward their own camps. The Jochids also taxed the middlemen—the collectors and distributors.32
Fur trading routes along the Volga River and its tributaries.
Through the fur trade, the Jochid hordes integrated Volga Bulgaria and the Russian principalities into their own political economy. As in other conquered lands, the Mongols did not destroy local subsistence systems; rather, they appropriated a share of the output. The Jochids intensified the north-south fur traffic, as it was in their own interests that the circulation between the Pechora River Basin and the lower river valleys remained fluid. The political gain lay in the contribution of furs and fur profits to the qubi, the sharing system. The shift men centralized furs, silver ingots, and other kinds of tax revenue, which the khan redistributed during quriltai and court banquets.
The fate of Sudak is indicative of the transformations in commercial life that occurred after Berke’s conflict with Hülegü flared up. Sudak had long been an important harbor and it remained so under Batu’s control. It continued to play that role under Berke, but changes had come. Southern Crimea now was closely linked to Constantinople and the Mediterranean world, turning Sudak into the main gate between the Horde and the West. This was one effect of the agreement among the Jochids, Mamluks, Byzantines, and Genoese, which had assured the Jochids a route through the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits, compensating for the loss of access to Tabriz, Sinope, and other commerci
al centers Hülegü had taken. The trade from Sudak also involved different players than it had decades earlier, with the Qipchaqs no longer in charge. The consequences of the trade alliance were far-reaching, despite its goal having been a short-term one: to circumvent Hülegü’s blockade. Once the Jochids took control, they did not let go, and the core of the Eurasian fur business remained in their hands for a century.33
The Mongol war of succession ended in 1264. Arigh Böke, Berke’s candidate for the office of great khan, was forced to surrender to Qubilai and died in captivity within two years. Qubilai was elected great khan during a quriltai held without Jochid leaders. Toluid sources claim that in 1263 Qubilai had issued a yarlik, a notice of imperial order, bestowing on Hülegü the territory from the Amu-Daria River to Egypt, including Syria. Hülegü’s new status allowed him to create an ulus, although he died just a few months after having fulfilled his ambition. His descendants, who became known as the Ilkhans, would rule over Azerbaijan, Iran, most of Anatolia, and points east extending as far as modern-day Pakistan—a long belt of territory, on the southern border of the Horde. As Toluids, the Ilkhans would show nominal obedience to the great khan.34
The Jochids lost the war against the Toluids, in the sense that their preferred candidate was kept off the imperial throne, while Hülegü took over territory that, per Chinggis’s will, was destined for Jochid control. But the Jochids were able to persevere and even bolster their ulus. By protecting the routes that connected the Horde to Europe, the Mediterranean world, and Egypt, the Jochids managed to evade Hülegü’s blockade, secure new sources of wealth, and assert their control over the lucrative slave, salt, and fur trades. The Jochids did more than stave off economic warfare. They also replaced the loss of income from the old empire-wide redistribution system, enabling lasting independence from the Mongol center.
We Have All Converted to Islam
Berke was steeped in Islam. His mother was a Muslim and a Khwarezmian elite, and, as a young man, Berke’s religious choice was influenced by Sayf al-Dīn Bākharzī, a shaykh from Bukhara and a disciple of the leading Khwarezmian Sufi Najm al-Dīn al-Kubrā. As an adult, Berke continued to forge deep ties with Islamic communities from all over Eurasia. In the early 1250s Berke’s horde dwelled in the Northern Caucasus, “which is on the route of all the Saracens coming from Persia and Turkey,” Rubruck noted, using a then-common European term for Muslims. “On their way to Baatu” Muslim envoys “pass by [Berke] and bring him gifts,” Rubruck observed. “He pretends to be a Saracen and does not allow pork to be eaten in his orda.” Batu took notice of Berke’s popularity among Muslims. At one point Batu had asked Berke to oversee the Seljuqs and the Syro-Palestinian emirates, but the khan soon changed his mind, for he worried that Berke’s Muslim connections would bring him too much power.35
Many of Berke’s contemporaries considered him a Muslim before he assumed the throne, though it was only when he became khan that he officially converted to Islam. Conversion rituals or ceremonies must have taken place in his horde. Adopting Islam was a way to assert his position as a leader of Muslims and orient his foreign policy toward the dar al-islam. Berke sent letters to the various sultans sharing the news of his conversion. His letter to Baybars was read aloud in front of the Mamluk emirs in Cairo. Berke’s letter read, “As for myself, I together with my four brothers, stood up and fought [Hülegü] from all sides for the sake of reviving the light of Islam and returning the abodes of the True Religion to their old state of prosperity and to the mention of the Name of God, the call to prayer, the reading of the Qur’an, prayer, and avenging the Imams and the Muslim community.” No sooner had Berke been elected khan than his court began attracting visitors from Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. Berke quickly gained a reputation as a strong defender of the Muslim faith.36
Other Jochid elites, including khatuns, noyans, keshig elders, and qarachu begs followed Berke in converting to Islam. In his second letter to Baybars, Berke wrote, “We have all converted to Islam, tribes, clans, individuals, soldiers, big and small people, namely: our younger and elder brothers with their sons.” He went on to list the names of the influential Mongols who now followed him. Among them were the leaders who had been part of the Mongol imperial administration in the Middle East before Hülegü shattered it.37
The Islamic turn brought the khan and his regime a new form of legitimacy as well as much-needed allies in the intra-Mongol conflict. Although there was no religious strife among the Mongol leaders, religion became a means for the Jochids to contest the power of the Toluids, who supported Christians in the Middle East. The falls of the caliph and the Muslim rulers had created a power vacuum, which Hülegü exploited by allying with King Het‘um of Lesser Armenia and Prince Bohemond of Antioch, both of whom were Christians. Hülegü also ostentatiously favored Christians over Muslims in Baghdad and Tabriz. His commander Ked-Buqa, a well-known Christian, acted similarly in Damascus. Doquz Khatun, Hülegü’s chief wife, was a fervent Nestorian and was said to support Christian priests. She had a portable church made for her and, when settled, placed the structure at the gate of her precinct. From there, the priests called people for prayer. By contrast, Berke’s chief wife would appear in public accompanied by her muezzin and imam and had her own portable mosque.38
The political effects of the Jochid conversion were enormous. Just a few years after Batu had supported a Toluid war in the Middle East that brought the Jochid armies to the doorstep of the Mamluks, Berke parlayed his Muslim connections into a powerful and durable alliance with the Mamluks. The alliance not only fostered wealth and security for both the Jochids and Mamluks, it also changed the scale of military slavery. The Mamluks now had a direct line to their principal source of military manpower, as their warrior slaves arrived mainly from the Qipchaq steppe. Baybars and his followers called their dawla, their regime, “the armed wing of the Islamic world.” In fact, Mamluk success was a side effect of a Mongol-on-Mongol war.
The political consequences of the Jochid conversion were felt within the Horde as well, not just in its relations with Muslim powers. Among ulus Jochi, Islam became a source of collective identity that bloomed outside the boundaries of Mongol imperial law and culture. The Jochids thereby found a way to overcome their loss of status within the golden lineage, legitimizing their independence from the Mongol center by adopting a faith and practice different from that of the great khan himself. Much as an independent foreign policy and war posture enabled the Jochids to escape the political and economic constraints of Toluid domination, an independent culture buttressed their claims to rule regardless of competition with the Toluids. This is not to say that the Jochids abandoned their Mongol heritage. Islam offered a rich pool of new symbols and rituals that could be added to their old ones. Berke became sultan but remained khan: he governed in accordance with the yasa, Chinggis Khan’s rules, and he upheld the sharia, the sacred law of the Muslims.
Not all the Jochids became Muslims. Sources do not reveal how many of Berke’s herders followed him, but we do know that, for most Mongols, Allah and Tengri were the same: a god whose belief in the Mongols was revealed in the force they possessed—force with which they dominated the world.
Unity
In 1266 or 1267, Berke died at the age of nearly sixty. Members of the Jochid lineage and begs assembled in a quriltai to elect their new khan. Berke had no heir apparent, and the assembly decided to use the opportunity to solidify the Horde under Batu’s line by electing one of his grandsons—not a descendent of Berke. From this point on, only Batu’s lineage would have rightful claims to the throne. Concentrating power in Batuid hands was a play for unity. Ulus Jochi had evolved into a political power in its own right, but its future was still tied to that of the Mongol Empire from which it emerged. It was Batu whom Chinggis Khan had selected to succeed Jochi, and it was Batu’s line that would go on ruling.39
Still, the separation from the Mongol Empire was real and brutal. It was a story that unfolded over many years, beginning whe
n Jochi and his descendants were permanently ejected from the imperial throne. The war between the Jochids and the Toluids could have been the end of the Horde, as Hülegü’s blockade nearly destroyed it. But instead the internecine conflict proved to be another obstacle the Horde overcame, as the Jochids persisted and, in doing so, asserted that much more independence from the Mongol center. This was a seismic moment in global history, as it set up the next century of Jochid influence in Europe and the Mediterranean, detailed in later chapters. From the standpoint of steppe peoples, though, the battle between Berke and Hülegü was no great rupture in history, for nomads often separated and reassembled. They had done so throughout Chinggis Khan’s life, turning against him, siding with him, succumbing to him. Now his descendants were engaged in similar power plays. But the Horde was also different from other Mongols. The Jochids’ level of organization, geographical reach, and internal cohesion set it apart among Eurasian empires. It would go on to outlast the Mongol Empire of which it was an autonomous part.
What emerged from the war of 1260–1264 was both Mongol and not, both Batu’s Horde and something new. Under Batu the Horde had grown tremendously, expanding to at least nine big riverine hordes and incorporating hundreds of thousands of conquered subjects, of whom more than half were sedentary. The Horde’s political economy proved successful, as the regime dominated trade in its region, mastered its environment, and imposed a lucrative taxation and conscription scheme across its territory. Yet, throughout Batu’s time, the Horde remained dependent on the qubi system, which meant that it was still tied financially to the wider Mongol Empire. Under Berke, the Horde broke away economically, politically, and culturally. What came after Berke, after the Mongol-on-Mongol war, was a novel hybrid. The Horde was now culturally both Mongol and Muslim. The Horde practiced Mongol-style economics—focused on subsistence, tribute, trade, and circulation—but without ties to the Mongol treasury. And the Horde traced power to Chinggis’s chosen successor, Batu, yet defied the orders of the Mongol center.
The Horde Page 18