The fur trade was particularly hazardous, as it put the Mongols and other steppe and forest peoples into proximity with a huge variety of potentially infected marmots. The gray marmots of the Altai Mountains, steppe marmots, and the Tarbagan marmots of northern China, Mongolia, and southwestern Siberia all could harbor plague. Humans could contract the disease by eating marmot meat or through flea bites when handling infected animals. Mongols have always hunted marmots, but from the thirteenth century onward, they did so more systematically and on a larger scale, leading to increased exposure to marmot-borne diseases. Hunters also targeted marmot predators, setting the stage for more contacts with potentially infected animals. Because furs were precious, hunters chased the marmots’ predators—wolves, foxes, polecats, and Pallas’s cats—which themselves could become disease transmitters. Other marmot predators such as snow leopards, hawks, and falcons were in high demand at Mongol courts, where they were used in imperial hunts and where they made contact with more humans. Moreover, the methodical culling of marmot predators led to the proliferation of marmots and other plague-bearing rodents in mountains, steppes, and cultivated fields.
These exposures ensured that plague circulated in the steppe and northern forests throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. However, as long as burrowing rodents and humans for the most part lived separately, the risk of a major human outbreak was limited because transmission required repeated close contact. The risk became serious, however, when Y. pestis reached animals like mice, gerbils, and rats that live alongside sedentary human populations. As new scholarship has demonstrated, when domestic rodents and humans eat the same food, the chance of plague transmission explodes. This is why stagnant and dense populations were historically more imperiled than were nomads. But undesired sharing between people and domestic rodents was common during siege warfare, which put Mongols in proximity to possible sources of infection.13
When the plague broke out in earnest in the fourteenth century, contemporaries distinguished it from other major infectious diseases of the time, such as smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. According to various descriptions in Arabic, Latin, and Chinese sources, most people believed that plague was the result of miasma, polluted air, and that it could be airborne or caused by person-to-person contact. Both were true causes of plague contagion, alongside transmission by flea bites. One form of plague, the bubonic variety, was transmitted by flea bites and exposure to the bodily fluids of infected animals. Bubonic plague attacks the lymphatic system; it is an extremely painful condition involving a range of symptoms, from influenza-like fever and chills to explosive pustules, gangrene, and organ failure. According to modern studies, bubonic plague killed about 60 percent of people who contracted it during the peak of the Black Death, between 1346 and 1353. Pneumonic plague, which occurs when Y. pestis penetrates the lungs, is even more dangerous. Researchers estimate that about 90 percent of those infected died. (A third form of plague—septicemic plague, which attacks the blood—is also highly lethal, but it was and remains much less common than the other forms.) Although contemporaries could not have known about the flea-borne transmission responsible for the bubonic form, they recognized that the disease was extremely contagious and that it spread fast indoors. They also understood that even a victim’s belongings could transmit infection. And they grasped that the Black Death was everywhere the same phenomenon—a disease that covered the world.14
By the time the Mediterranean region faced the Black Death, the Mongols knew it well. They had likely experienced the disease in China, while besieging Kaifeng in 1232, and Chinese sources mention devastating epidemics in Yuan territory in 1307–1313, 1331, and 1344–1345. The Mongols learned to respond to contagious disease, developing sanitation practices including quarantines. Recurrent outbreaks of plague and other diseases also inspired new shamanic rituals of protection. This was a common side effect of empire-building, which exposed people to foreign conditions with which their bodies had not learned to cope, often resulting in high susceptibility to contagion. The Mongols fought plague while building an empire in China and Central Asia, just as the Romans faced plague and malaria, the Ottomans were beset with plague and cholera, and the British vaccinated against smallpox in India.15
As for the people of the Horde, they were living with plague some years before the siege of Caffa. Contemporaries speculated that the Black Death emerged from the “land of darkness,” the fur reservoir that lay north of the Ordaid territories and was a natural focus of Y. pestis. The disease likely appeared in the region of Lake Issyk Kul, a major trade station on the border between the Ordaids and the Chagatayids, where a 1338–1339 epidemic decimated a Nestorian community. Records do not establish definitively that the outbreak was plague, but that is the most probable culprit. No one knows the exact routes by which the Black Death made its way to Europe, but we do know that plague circulated all along the northern road and struck its major stations one after another. In spring and summer 1346, plague was reported in Urgench, Sarai, Azaq, and most other Jochid cities. In fall it was in Solkhat, the inland capital of Crimea, before it broke out in the ranks of Janibek’s army at the foot of Caffa, the endpoint of the northern road.16
Possible transmission routes of the Black Death across central Eurasia.
While grain was the main vector of contamination in the southwestern portion of the road, furs were the more likely source in the northeastern portion. Several Russian towns, including the fur hub of Novgorod, were hit by the Black Death between 1349 and 1353. Although incidence waned after 1353, there are reports of outbreaks in 1364, 1374, and 1396 as well. The people of the Horde continued to live with plague until the fifteenth century.17
The impact of the Black Death was both widespread and deep. Above all, it was a demographic disaster—to date, the largest in Afro-Eurasian history. Scholars estimate that more than a third of Europe’s population died. In the Mediterranean region, the mortality rate was even higher, around 40 percent. The Middle East may have suffered even greater depopulation than Europe. The Muslim scholar Al-‘Aynī was told that there were up to twenty thousand deaths per day at the height of the plague in Cairo, a city whose population before the outbreak was about half a million. Traveling across Syria and Palestine in 1348, Ibn Battuta reported that plague killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people a day in the most populous cities like Damascus, which was home to approximately 80,000 people before the plague struck.18
The plague was most devastating in densely populated areas, but clearly it did not spare farmers or herders. A Russian source reported that the plague killed “Tatars” and others everywhere in the Horde. What is more, Sarai and the steppe cities of the Jochids were quite urban, although not as concentrated as European cities. The sources give no figures, yet the Horde must have suffered a significant decline in urban, rural, and nomadic populations during the Black Death. As regions were depopulated, cultivated land, orchards, and herds were left unattended, harming the economy.
Urban decline was particularly striking in the north of the Horde. Bulgar was a case in point. Situated on the east bank of the lower Volga, 600 miles upstream from New Sarai, Bulgar had been settled since at least the seventh century and was among the Horde’s most important economic hubs. But when the fur road became the plague road, the city and surrounding region quickly deteriorated. Disease and the economic downturn combined to kill off a city that was likely already struggling somewhat from the competition with New Sarai. Bulgar’s crowded necropolis provides a glimpse of what the people there experienced. Archaeologists have excavated some three hundred graves, more than half of them containing the remains of babies and young children. Women, too, died young: the burials show a peak of mortality at fifteen to twenty years old, probably due to childbearing.19
The Jochid political system proved resilient for a time. In the early 1350s, while plague killed Grand Prince Simeon and many other Russian elites, Janibek and his close entourage outlived the epidemic and soon were able to c
onquer Tabriz.20 But as a globalized power, the Horde would go on to suffer more serious consequences. The economic shock of the pandemic hit hard in Europe, the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, and the effects would come back on the Horde like a boomerang. The volume of long-distance commerce shrank, as roads were cut off and gaps formed in trade routes, making travel increasingly difficult and dangerous. In the 1350s parts of the northern road collapsed. The Horde was an extraordinarily adaptive regime, but this time the changes it experienced were overwhelming. The Horde was tied to a world that had begun to unravel and could not help suffering as a result.21
When Powerful We Can Invade, When Weak We Can Retreat
The winds buffeting the Horde included not just the pandemic but also the disintegration of the wider Mongol Empire. The 1350s were the beginning of the end for the Yuan, the Mongol dynasty that ruled China.
Starting in 1352, China simultaneously suffered a decade of epidemics and a series of natural disasters, including major flooding of the Yellow River. The public held the Mongols responsible for failing to adequately address their needs, which were exacerbated by political instability within the Yuan regime. People also blamed the government for mismanaging agrarian resources, a consequential problem in light of the floods. Popular revolts spread first along the eastern coast, then to the north of the Yellow River, and finally to the south of the Yangzi. The revolts, led by Han Chinese, coalesced into the movement of the Red Turbans, which became the most tenacious uprising the Mongols had faced since the time of Chinggis Khan.22
The Red Turbans and other rebellious factions struggled for more than fifteen years, but they steadily gained ground until they could push the Yuan out of their Chinese territories. In 1368 Great Khan Toghon Temür abandoned Khanbalik, his winter capital, to the rebels and retreated northward to what today is called Inner Mongolia. The following year, the Red Turbans captured the Yuan summer capital of Shangdu, which was already half-destroyed, and further expanded their control. The movement had become a fledgling regime; its leaders claimed the name Ming, the Bright. It was a title suitable to the rebels’ ambition and was a clear warning to the Mongols: a new dynasty was being born from the ashes of the Yuan.23
The rise of the Ming was undoubtedly alarming for the Mongols, particularly those of the Yuan. But the Yuan Mongols did not consider the great khan’s retreat the end of their regime. The Yuan may have abandoned China, but the Mongols believed they had taken the mandate of Tengri with them, and they continued to control territories north and west of the Ming. The Yuan kept its name, and its leaders maintained that they were the rightful rulers of China; they never recognized Ming sovereignty. The Yuan also remained a powerful threat on the Ming’s borders after their withdrawal from China, a threat the Ming took seriously.24
In retrospect, the withdrawal from China looks like an ejection, but the Mongols understood their retreat as a strategic one—a scheme to refocus the Yuan’s resources and efforts and ultimately restore what had been lost. Abandoning nonvital territories and evacuating to protected areas constituted an old maneuver, used by generations of Mongols and other steppe dwellers when they needed to regroup and face a dangerous adversary. The tenth-century Tangshu, a history of the Chinese Tang dynasty, features a Türk officer advising his khan not to build cities, because the nomads’ strength lay in their mobility: “When powerful we can invade,” the officer advises, “when weak we can retreat.”25 Just as tactical withdrawal was a hallmark of Mongol battlefield operations, regimes, too, would withdraw in times of turmoil. It was a risky strategy, though, demanding discipline, endurance, and faith in Tengri’s blessing.
In the case of the Yuan, withdrawal came with two major costs, both of which the Jochids felt. First, the loss of China dramatically reduced the sphere of the Mongol exchange. For more than a century, the Horde had shared measurement standards with the rest of the Mongol territories. Coins and calendars could be converted across the Mongol realms. The various uluses used Mongol language and script (as well as local languages) and recognized the same gerege—safe-conduct documents, also known as (paiza). Each Mongol regime relied on similar institutions, including the yam, quriltai, keshig, and schemes of religious tolerance, albeit that each had been adapted to local circumstances. After 1368, none of these standards applied to China; it had dropped out of the Mongol world system. We do not possess evidence on how the Jochids perceived the Toluid turmoil, yet we do know that the Jochids stopped issuing gerege after 1370.26
A second major cost of withdrawal lay in the opportunity it presented to the Mongols’ competitors. The gradual collapse of the Yuan in China signaled to subjects across the Mongol Empire that it was time to realize their own ambitions. Warlike groups emerged within the hordes, some loosely organized and short-lived, others more durable. These groups did not necessarily seek to overthrow the Mongol system but rather to obtain a share of its benefits. Thus groups outside the golden lineage began to act with increasing autonomy and to claim resources distributed through the tümen. Alongside the Ming, then, a constellation of new powers took shape from China to Hungary. As we will see, something similar happened in the Horde, as it split into three sectors, two of them ruled by non-Jochid begs—although it must be stressed that these begs, unlike the Ming, wished to preserve the authority of a wavering Mongol regime, not to undermine and replace that authority.
Indeed, the breakup of the uluses preceded the downfall of the Yuan, which speaks to the fundamentally political nature of the problems facing the Mongol Empire in the mid-fourteenth century. As much pressure as the pandemic and its economic fallout created, neither could be blamed for the collapse of the Ilkhanids. Nor was the pandemic primarily responsible for the schism in the ulus of Chagatay, which in 1347 broke into eastern and western polities. The eastern half bordered the Yuan and later the Ming in the east and the Syr-Daria in the west, covering a huge territory that Persian and Turkic speakers called Moghulistan, “Mongol country.”27 The other half, extending westward from the Syr-Daria, was centered on Transoxiana. Both portions were ruled by Chinggisids, but the prestige of the golden lineage remained especially high in the western area, where the nomads claimed the name of Chagatay, which they denied those in the eastern area.
Illustration of a gerege (c. 1360s), a tablet guaranteeing its carrier safe passage through Mongol territories and access to yam facilities. This tablet is the last known gerege produced in the Horde and contains an Uighur inscription and a taotie mask. The mask is a Chinese representation of the face of a monstrous animal with powers said to ward off evil.
The ongoing embrace of the Chinggisid legacy, even as the uluses broke down, should give us pause. Was the second half of the fourteenth century marked by the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, or by its revision and adaptation to new conditions? Some regions, like China, did break away, but in others, new leaders arose with the goal of taking part in the Mongol system, not of destroying it. One of the regions where the Mongol system was embraced by leaders outside the golden lineage was the Horde. As the Horde fragmented and fell under the control of qarachu begs, its component parts continued to associate themselves with the prestige of the Jochid line. Not only that, but the Horde’s leaders ruled their territories much as Batu, Berke, and the others had. Mongol institutions were designed for flexibility, and they showed it by surviving deep struggles within the Horde.
Anarchy
The conquest of Tabriz in winter 1356–1357 marked the culmination of Jochid expansion. For a century, Jochid rulers had dreamed of possessing Tabriz. Janibek finally realized that ambition, but he did not have much time to enjoy the accomplishment. On his way back from battle, he fell ill and died in the Sarai area in July 1357. When Birdibek, who was still stationed in Tabriz, heard the news of his father’s death, he gathered his troops and prepared to leave the city at once. While Tabriz may have beckoned Birdibek’s ancestors, the greater prize—the Jochid throne—still lay in the lower Volga. Birdibek appointed a governor to superv
ise the Tabriz area and set off for the heartland of the Horde.
Local powers in Tabriz took advantage of the conquerors’ unexpected departure. As soon as the Horde’s warriors left, various would-be sovereigns arose, including Birdibek’s governor. The city and surrounding Azerbaijan region quickly fell to the Jalayirids—non-Chinggisid Mongols who claimed the Ilkhanid legacy. Deeply rooted in Iraq, the Jalayirids already controlled Baghdad. Even the Shirvan shah, who had watched the Derbent-Shirvan pass for the Horde, submitted to the Jalayirids. Like most of the Caucasians, the Shirvan shah sided with the strong, for no one expected to see the Jochid troops back any time soon.28
In the Horde the khan’s succession was monopolizing everyone’s attention. Rumors held that Janibek had been killed: Muslim sources claimed that his begs strangled him, while the Russians insisted the khan had been killed on Birdibek’s orders.29 No one knew for sure, yet all seemed convinced that foul play was involved. Birdibek ultimately took the throne with the support of several powerful begs and his grandmother Taidula, who had been Özbek’s chief wife and remained a leading political figure after his death, just as Bayalun had in her own time.
Insecure in his new position, Birdibek purged his potential competitors. He targeted every male descendant of Özbek for elimination, regardless of age and position within the family. The purge was extraordinarily violent even by what had become Jochid standards; Birdibek ordered the murder of his twelve brothers and his own son.30 In response, most of the begs and Jochid princes refused to support Birdibek. In 1358, while Birdibek was still on the throne, at least three others claimed his office. Soon there would be many more aspirants, as Birdibek’s tenure at the pinnacle of Jochid power proved brief. He died in 1359, probably by another’s hand, but the exact circumstances are not clear. Evidence suggests that Taidula knew the cause and precise date of Birdibek’s death but kept them secret.
The Horde Page 29