The ecological endowments of the Horde’s territory ensured that it would be a force to be reckoned with when it came to grain sales, but that did not mean the Jochids could simply allow nature to take its course. Özbek used hard power to prevent merchants from diverting to Ilkhanid and Chagatayid markets, going so far as to kill brokers and burn down marketplaces. The Jochids also tried to prevent the Mamluks from dealing directly with the other Mongols and from developing alternative routes. And the Horde prevented the Italians from trading too independently. The Jochids were never able to secure truly exclusive control over the grain and slave trades, though. The Ilkhanids, strong and equally determined, stood in their way.
Court scene, from a 1314 edition of Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh. Court attendants wear Mongol caps and characteristic Islamic signifiers, including beards and turbans. Elements of Byzantine and Chinese traditions round out the multicultural milieu. (With kind permission of the University of Edinburgh / Bridgeman Images)
But, over time, Özbek and his administrators found other ways to hamper the Ilkhanids—and serve their own needs in the process. As the Horde’s population grew in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Jochids needed yet more trade in order to meet the demand for luxury products. That demand would be met by pivoting toward the Venetians and peeling them away from the Ilkhanids.
In 1332 Özbek welcomed the Horde’s first ever ambassador from the Venetian Senate, who hoped to obtain a piece of land where Venetian merchants could build a trading post. Previously the senate had invested in the Ilkhanid route, much to the displeasure of merchants who worried about the insecurity of Tabriz and the road to Hormuz. Eventually the senate changed course, though, and tried find a safer route as well as trade hubs where Venetian traders could enter Mongol markets before any competitors. In particular, the Venetians hoped to set up trading settlements deep in the Horde, allowing them access to goods before the Genoese, who were at the periphery of the Horde on the Black Sea.49 In less than a year, the Horde and Venice finalized the negotiations. The khan permitted the Venetians to rent a large quarter in Azaq, a steppe settlement with easy access to the mouth of the Don River and to the Azov Sea. Azaq was an old Greek harbor; the merchants called their quarter Tana, after the Greek name for the Don. At Tana the Venetians could live permanently, build their churches, grow their own food and wine, and carry out their business. Özbek guaranteed light taxation, and when a transaction took place, both Mongols and Venetians supervised the weighing of goods. The Venetians also received a grant of jurisdictional flexibility: if they were embroiled in trade disagreements, they could choose to have either the Venetian consul or a Mongol deputy intervene, whereas Mongol traders could turn only to Mongol officers. Crucially, the khan guaranteed that the Venetian merchants could be held liable only for their own debts, a promise they had begged for, as the Mongols had in the past made the Venetians pay the debts of other Italians.50
The deal with Venice was but a piece in Özbek’s larger plan. Tana would bring more business to the Horde and more tax money. It would also trigger competition among the Italians by breaking the Genoese monopoly over the Black Sea littoral and southern Crimea. Even more significantly, the agreement would weaken the Ilkhanids and hurt their political economy by diverting the trade northward. Despite the low tax rate, the deal was highly profitable for the Horde, and the Jochids would renew it seven times during the next twenty-five years.51
When it came to trade and the diplomacy surrounding it, Özbek was an avid practitioner of the longstanding Jochid strategy of playing friend against friend, shifting alliances, and retaining flexibility in the face of a changing world. He intermittently blocked key sections of trade networks, resulting in frequent lurching between war and peace. He manipulated Italians, Mamluks, and others, switching from policies of appeasement—treaties, marriages, and diplomacy—to outright extortion, blockades, and military pressure. This explains why even in the most economically active areas of the Horde—including Moldavia, Crimea, the Caucasus, the lower Volga, and Khwarezm—trade traffic never settled into a steady flow. The exchange vacillated between booms and busts according to the Jochids’ political interests.
New Cities
By the 1330s continuing economic growth had transformed Sarai into a huge city. It took half a day on horseback to cross from one end to the other. Sarai had open space but also densely populated districts with uninterrupted rows of gardenless houses. They ran along large streets bordered with aryks, deep irrigation ditches and water pipes most likely serving bathhouses and ceramics workshops. The most crowded part of the city hugged the edge of the Akhtuba River, a tributary of the Volga, for two miles or so. Groups of brick houses and nomadic dwellings also peppered the surrounding plains for several miles, shaping a wide suburban zone.
Located on a cliff, Sarai was safe even when the water level rose. The Volga overflowed sporadically, turning the area into a large gulf connecting to the Caspian Sea. When flooding happened, the landscape of Sarai changed. The roads were inundated and the city became a series of islands connected by riverine channels. During these periods, mostly in spring, Sarai served as an upstream harbor that offered quick access to the Caspian. Indeed, Sarai had a sophisticated water system. Two kinds of pipes ran across the urban settlement: one, made of ceramic, supplied water, while the other, made of wood, carried sewage, which probably discharged into the Akhtuba. The city also had a number of wells that provided water for household use, although not for drinking. Drainage systems were a commonplace in Central Asian cities, likely well before the period of Mongol domination. Under the Mongols, Central Asian urbanites moved to the Volga region and built there the same infrastructure they were familiar with in their hometowns.52
The people of Sarai called the khan’s palace altun tash, Turkic for “golden stone.” The palace sat on the cliff, possibly at its highest point, and the massive solid-gold crescent perched on top of the structure could be seen from far away. As ever, the palace was not the khan’s home, but he stayed there during his annual visits to the city. While the khan was in town, he held a feast with games and collective rituals in which the city’s multiethnic population participated. Following the old Mongol tradition, during the festivities, the khan distributed robes and other gifts to elites, including his Muslim emirs. On the outskirts of the city, the khan hosted archery, wrestling, and horseracing competitions.
Sarai amazed Ibn Battuta. A traveler familiar with the centuries-old cities of the Middle East, he marveled at the well-maintained Mongol metropolis, where there were no indications of ruins. Indeed, every sign pointed to growth and prosperity. Since Batu had ordered the city built almost a century earlier, people had continuously arrived and settled there. In the fourteenth century, Sarai’s population might have exceeded 75,000.53
The city was conspicuously diverse, with a population comprising Mongols, Qipchaqs, Russians, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Alans, Cherkess, and other Caucasians. Ibn Battuta reported thirteen large mosque gatherings on Fridays and countless smaller prayer meetings. There were churches, monasteries, hermitages, and other sorts of temples, too. Muslims coexisted with Christians, Buddhists, and Tengri worshippers. But Sarai was not a melting pot, exactly, as groups of foreigners tended to live in their own clearly demarcated districts. For example, merchants from western Iran, the Baghdad region, the Syrian-Palestinian coast, and Egypt had their own walled neighborhood.
Sarai boasted several marketplaces, but its economy was based on more than trade. The city was primarily a production center, with permanent infrastructure useful to a range of artisans. An industrial complex contained kilns for bricks and ceramics, as well as workshops where craftsmen built wells, assembled drainage piping, glazed ceramics, and prepared glass. Blacksmiths, potters, jewelers, bone carvers, and many other artisans lived and worked with one another in the western part of the city, close to the merchants.54
For all its charms, Sarai was not enough for Özbek. Sometime in th
e 1330s, he began construction on a palatial complex about seventy-eight miles north of the city, on the same side of the Volga. As soon as people heard of the new palace being erected upriver, they started to move there, and a new town emerged quickly. The city was named Sarai al-Jadid, New Sarai, as indicated on the thousands of coins the Jochids minted there. And the city was new indeed, as the site had been a wasteland before the Mongols began building there.
By the time Özbek commissioned the palace, he had sat on the Jochid throne for more than twenty years. Strange though it may seem that a nomadic ruler who already had a palace would build another, this was the decision of a seasoned leader whose wealth had bourgeoned and whose political ambitions had matured. He had his reasons for constructing a new capital. For one thing, the old Sarai had become enormous; it made sense that a new city would more easily accommodate additional cohorts of craftsmen, workers, and traders. And New Sarai was well located. Unlike Sarai, New Sarai required no infrastructure to protect it from sea flooding, because it was more than 155 miles from the Caspian. New Sarai was also, like Sarai, on the route of Özbek’s seasonal round, so the nomads could draw on the developing city as a supply station. Steppe cities provided the Mongols’ necessary food, fodder, water, and people, and New Sarai was no different in this respect. Water was the key; it was essential for most crafts, particularly for the many metallurgists based in New Sarai. The Jochids had workers build a complex irrigation system at New Sarai involving an artificial lake. They also created infrastructure for waste disposal and drinking water.55
Within two decades or so, New Sarai shared the same features as the other cities of the Horde—not just Sarai, which continued to be active, but also major settlements on the khan’s round such as Hajji Tarkhan, Ukek, and Beljamen. In all these places, the Jochids owned craft workshops, sizeable farms, and fruit and vegetable gardens. Most houses were made of bricks and wood, and wealthy people decorated their dwellings with glazed, colored ceramics. On the outskirts of the towns, residents erected temporary wooden structures, such as ceremonial pavilions for the khan and his family to use while passing through town. Many settlements grew during Özbek’s reign, and new ones went up. There were large areas of urbanization and simple hamlets. The Jochids followed a careful plan when building settlements in the Volga Valley. They selected spots at the mouth of the river in the south, on the eastern bank of the Akhtuba up to the Volga elbow, and then on the other bank of the river heading north.
The Jochids also left their mark on the pre-Mongol cities of the Horde, especially those they had conquered in northern Khwarezm. The most notable building boom was among religious sites. The number and variety of Muslim institutions in the region, including mosques, schools, hotels, and bathhouses, amazed Ibn Battuta. In Urgench he visited the 197-foot-tall minaret that Qutluq-Temür had restored and the mosque and mausoleum his wife Turabak Khatun had commissioned.56 The focus on religious buildings spoke to the effects of toleration practices and to the ease with which assorted creeds blended into the nomads’ beliefs, taboos, and rituals. Özbek, himself a Muslim, bestowed tarkhan status on religious elites of every variety, including wealthy Mongols who converted to Christianity and Islam. These converts then financed the construction of churches, mosques, monasteries, and shrines, ensuring that there were more and more places to pray, teach, and rest in the afterlife. The construction of religious sites in turn spurred further urbanization, as people congregated around spiritual centers. While the new cities of the Horde were built mostly with mud, bricks, and clay, their religious buildings were made largely of stone. Sponsored by the highest-ranking Mongols, these structures were built to last.57
By the middle of the fourteenth century, there were more than a hundred riverine and hinterland settlements in the Horde. Most were established on sites that had been useless for sedentary people but were great spots for herders. None of the Jochid towns had fortifications. They had internal walls to demarcate districts and protect sacred spaces—religious institutions, cemeteries, the khan’s moveable headquarters and immobile palaces. But every Jochid city was open to the outside.58
Lords of the Earth
Urban development was closely tied to land ownership, a concept that evolved in the Horde as the Jochids deepened their relations with dominated peoples. Traditionally both the Mongols and their sedentary subjects enclosed lands, but they did so for different reasons. While sedentary people understood themselves as owners of land, building fences and fortifications to mark and defend their holdings, Mongols believed that the spirits were the true lords of the land on which they dwelled. The nomads poured libations over the earth, in hopes that the spirits, duly honored, would protect them and bring prosperity and happiness. When the Jochids fenced off land, their concern was not to protect themselves against burglars or enemies but to repel the souls of the ill-dead.59
The Jochids did not try to impose their vision of the land on sedentary peoples. When called upon to settle disputes, the khan’s judges usually respected local laws, including customary Slavic and Islamic law. The inhabitants of the sedentary enclaves—mainly the Russian principalities, Volga Bulgaria, and Crimea—were free to make private real estate transactions, as long as their acquisitions did not reduce available pasturage or otherwise encumber the herders. Sometimes the khan’s representatives specifically authorized these transactions, and sometimes the Jochid administration was not involved at all.60
Many sedentary landowners were tarkhans, especially those landowners involved in religious institutions. These property holders grew wealthy thanks in part to their tax and service exemptions. In the Jochid realms, tarkhan-owners included Orthodox Christians but non-Orthodox too, particularly Franciscans. The Jewish community benefitted as well, as did Muslim dignitaries. Rich landowners who were not tarkhans could also gain the benefits of the status by hosting or endowing a protected religious community on their property. The result was that religious establishments were braided into agrarian life, developing alongside the farms, vineyards, orchards, and sawmills that provided them food, drink, and fuel. In addition, wealthy Mongols purchased lands in order to found religious institutions and sponsored several monasteries in the Russian northeast, especially in Rostov and Kostroma.61
No overarching law governed transactions between Mongols and sedentary peoples. Instead what was expected was mutual respect of one another’s rules for measuring and selling plots, which involved the exchange of verbal oaths and written contracts and performance of culturally appropriate gestures. The Russians practiced otvod, an alienation ritual in which they might walk the limits of a property and swallow a clump of its soil. Mongols gave offerings to appease Mother Earth and tame the spirits. But though the rituals, oaths, languages, and worldviews were different, both parties shared the general sense that ownership of land did not depend on a single person but on a family or a group of people, including ancestors and unborn generations. Mongols understood that every land transaction was made on behalf not only of oneself but of one’s lineage, including ancestors, those living, and those not yet born. The Russian alienation ritual, meanwhile, indicated the release of traditional familial rights. Ordinarily, Russian families had rights to buy back land even if their ancestors had sold it; an alienation ritual made the sale permanent. When it came to land transactions, whether for religious, spiritual, or legal purposes, all agreed special care was needed.62
While there was no all-encompassing Mongol land law, Mongol administration clearly enabled a development boom, for wherever Mongol law provided financial benefits, predictable kinds of growth followed. The boyars of Novgorod were so driven by the prospect of exchanging church construction for tax exemptions that, at one point in the fifteenth century, the city was home to eighty-three churches, most of them built of stone. More generally, the tarkhan system provided a legal framework that safeguarded people’s estates. The yarlik, the document the khan granted to tarkhans, was considered irrefutable proof of ownership, allowing descendants
to inherit their family estate in its entirety, although each inheritor would have to obtain a yarlik of their own. The Tarkhan system therefore ended up supporting the burgeoning of private landed property in Russia, where the earliest private land ownership records seem to go back to the fourteenth century. Private landed property probably existed as a legal concept in Russia before the Mongol domination, but there can be little doubt that the Mongol approach led to a dramatic expansion in both ownership and development capacity. The result was considerable growth in urban and agrarian areas alike.63
Of course, protecting private property was not the purpose of the tarkhan system. This outcome is simply another demonstration of the evolving nature of Mongol institutions. Mongol law and practice were changed by the encounter with the other, and the other was changed, in enduring ways, by the encounter with Mongol law and practice. Flexibility was the key. The Mongols had no need to encroach on nonthreatening local ways of doing things; the khan could demonstrate his absolute sovereignty when required. In everyday life, then, interactions between nomads and settled people were fluid and negotiable. From the ordinary processes of existence across borders—geographic, cultural, political—unforeseen novelties emerged.
The Collapse of the Ilkhanids
By the 1330s Özbek and the Jochids were riding high. The khan had long since overcome the questions of legitimacy that surrounded his enthronement, and his controversial political reforms had only augmented his power. He had successfully meddled in Russian affairs to the Horde’s benefit, establishing the princes of Moscow as loyal vassals while skillfully using the tarkhan system to maintain the support of the other Russian princes—even as Moscow’s usurpation left them feeling alienated. He had established productive relations with Central European, Russian, and Italian Christians and with Muslims in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East, and he masterfully manipulated the competing trade communities to ensure that the Horde never lacked for tax revenues and the luxury goods indispensable to the Mongol political and spiritual order. Özbek’s aggressive diplomacy ensured continuing Jochid leadership of massive and lucrative commercial networks extending from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, the Volga, Siberia, and on to the Far East.
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