The settlements near the mouth of the Don also survived Tamerlane’s onslaught. Tana continued to operate as a trade harbor; according to Josafa Barbaro, a Venetian merchant based in Tana, there were hundreds of thousands of nomads living in the lower Volga in the 1430s:
As soon as the horde is lodged, incontinently they unlade their baggage, leaving large ways between their lodgings. If it be in the winter the beasts are so many that they make wonderful moor and if it be in summer spreading much dust.… In this army are many artisans, as clothiers, smiths, armourers, and of all other crafts and things that they need. And if someone demanded whether they go like the Gypsies or not, I answered, no. For [their places of residence], saving that they are not walled, seemed very great and faire cities.31
Yet, if it is wrong to claim that the Horde ended with Toqtamish’s 1395 defeat at the Terek River, it is true that much changed in the wake of Toqtamish’s wars with Tamerlane and the Manghit. In the late fourteenth century, the Kiyad and the Qonggirad had been the most powerful Mongol clans in the Horde, but with the rise of Tamerlane and the Manghit, they were evicted from the political scene. Tamerlane conducted a total of five campaigns in Khwarezm against the Qonggirad, sapping their military strength, draining their treasury, and eventually extinguishing their leadership class. Qonggirad survivors integrated into other clans according to the familiar social process of the steppe. Indeed, the descendants of Tamerlane and the Manghit absorbed many Qonggirad. They would never return to power.32
Another area of change was the Horde’s political system, on which Toqtamish left a deep mark. Most importantly, he created new institutions. The keshig took on a new shape as the ordo-bazaar. It was still a huge mobile administration that accompanied the people and their herds and governed the regime. But the heads of the administration were now the khan’s hereditary peoples; the governing council, taking the place of the keshig elders, comprised four qarachu begs, one each from the Shirin, Barin, Arghun, and Qipchaqs. This governing council had remarkable new powers: its decisions could supersede even those of the quriltai. In effect, a council of qarachu begs had become sovereign. They could depose the khan when it suited them, so that suddenly the keshig-equivalent (the ordo-bazaar) was permanent, while the khan was replaceable.33
Toqtamish also introduced change by redirecting tarkhan privileges away from the clergy. The purpose of the status was unchanged: it was still used to win the loyalty of influential people by giving them benefits that ensured their investment in the regime. But tarkhan status was no longer primarily for faith leaders. Toqtamish was the first khan to dispense tarkhan privileges mainly to local elites. Toqtamish’s generosity recalled that of Batu and Ögödei. To appease the Manghit, Toqtamish gave Edigü tax immunity and vast herding grounds east of the Volga, which only further enriched an entrenched enemy. To conciliate the Genoese, Toqtamish gave them lands in southern Crimea and much more, and, in return for military help, he granted Vytautas all the southern lands inhabited by the Ruthenians, Eastern Slavic peoples. In these cases, Toqtamish was not simply granting land-use rights: he was giving away sovereignty over the land. The Polish-Lithuanian rulers would rely on the khan’s land grant in the course of their competition with Moscow over the Ruthenian lands. The Russians claimed the territory was theirs, yet the Polish-Lithuanians could point to the khans’ land donation.34
Despite the failure of the Vorskla battle, the alliance between Toqtamish, Jagiello, and Vytautas shaped a “loyal brotherhood and eternal friendship,” as Polish-Lithuanian and post-Jochid rulers put it in the letters and treaties they would regularly exchange in the sixteenth century. Under Vytautas’s rule, thousands of Muslim nomads that belonged to Toqtamish’s hereditary peoples settled in Lithuania. The French diplomat Guillebert de Lannoy, visiting the region in the early fifteenth century, saw “Tatars” in and around the city of Trakai. These became the Lithuanian Tatars, the Lipka community, whose descendants still live today in Europe.35 The alliance with Poland-Lithuania was also critical to maintenance of the economic exchange with Europe. The nomads exported animals to Persia and parts of Europe along the via de Polonia, the land road tracing the northern littoral of the Black Sea through Poland and Moldavia. Indeed, after 1453, the connection with Poland-Lithuania became the Horde’s key trade artery, for in that year the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, establishing control over the straits and over the connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean world.
The natives of the western steppe remembered Toqtamish as a unifying figure. In particular, he was seen as bringing together the Blue and White hordes. Until recently historians looking back on the history of the Jochids regarded the Blue and White hordes as having been thoroughly separate regimes until Toqtamish brought them together. This view was inaccurate; other leaders had also commanded the whole ulus of Jochi. But it is true that Toqtamish overcame generations of accrued animosity in knitting the Horde back together. For this reason, it is not hard to see why many in the western steppe considered Toqtamish a founding figure.
Perhaps Toqtamish’s most important legacy is that he left power while still living. In the thirteenth century, the khan remained on the throne until he died, after which there might be a lengthy interregnum followed by a quriltai, which established a successor on the basis of the consensus-driven governing traditions established by Chinggis Khan. Throughout the fourteenth century, too, the khan died on the throne, but his death would be followed by acrimonious disputes and political purges instead of an election based on negotiation. By the end of the fourteenth century, however, the khan could experience political death while still breathing air and even dreaming of a return to the throne. This was a true novelty of Toqtamish’s reign, one that solidified the shift in the balance of power from the khan to the begs. Under the previous, lineage-focused approach, the office of the khan was identical with the person who occupied it, and only when unoccupied could the throne be legitimately taken by another. Begs could help seat a khan, but they couldn’t unseat one without instigating a blood feud. Now, with legitimacy determined primarily by begs rather than lineage, a khan could be removed from power and the throne transferred to another, theoretically without violence.
In fact Toqtamish was removed violently, but it is critical to keep in mind that, after the battle of the Vorskla River, Edigü felt no urgent need to kill Toqtamish. The khan’s political death was enough, as the throne did not need to be physically vacant in order for a succession to occur. This proved to be the durable solution to the problem of political purges. From Toqtamish’s time onward, the Jochids avoided fratricide. By acknowledging the principle of their leader’s symbolic death, they enabled constructive institutional innovations. The Toqa Temürids and the Shibanids would remain the principal ruling houses in Central and Western Asia until the nineteenth century, in no small part because they avoided hollowing out their lineages as the Batuids had.
A New Generation
Toqtamish dueled with Tamerlane, but the winning party was the Manghit. Edigü’s influence grew and spread across the majority of the Jochid hordes. His prestige was based in part on his status as beglerbeg, a role that he earned through demonstrated command skill; in part on his proximity to the Toqa Temürids; and in part on his appeal as a devout Muslim. Edigü’s wife made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1416 with a retinue of 300, and Edigü surrounded himself with Sufis throughout his life. His career as a major politician lasted three decades.
Edigü left an enduring legacy. Peoples tracing themselves to him carried the ways of the Jochids forward in time, forming a key link between the Horde and the states that came after it. It is due to the cultural and political transmission effected by Edigü and other leading begs that, in important respects, the Horde never truly fell, even if its name was eventually erased from maps. One of the vehicles for the endurance of Jochid political and social life was Edigü’s horde, which, after his death in 1419, became known as the Nogay horde. Historians do not know how to explain the conn
ection between the names Manghit and Nogay. We don’t know what ties the Manghit to Nogay, the first Jochid beglerbeg and one of the transformative figures in the Horde’s history. Yet the equation of the Manghit and the Nogay horde is clear in the fifteenth-century sources.36
The zenith of the Manghit-Nogay horde came in the late fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. The horde’s authority was strongest north and east of the Caspian, including in the northern Khwarezm region. Edigü’s descendants inherited the title and position of beglerbeg and had substantial impact on the nomadic powers that took shape in the lower river valleys and the areas of the Jochid cities between the 1430s and the 1460s. Edigü’s heirs took part in the leadership of a new generation of hordes: more numerous than their predecessors, more autonomous, and even more mobile.37 The hordes included the trans-Volga horde (sometimes known as the Great Horde), and the hordes of Kazan, Astrakhan, Qasimov, Siberia, Crimea, and Khiva. Later these hordes were known as Tatar khanates. The hordes were led by khans in association with qarachu elites bearing the titles of beg, emir, and mirza. Collectively the hordes counted themselves members of the same ulugh ulus—great ulus. Their people considered Batu, Özbek, Janibek, Toqtamish, and other prestigious Jochids their founders. All of the post-Jochid hordes were primarily Muslim.
One of these hordes, that of the Uzbeks, emerged from the Shibanids, with the support of the Manghit-Nogay. The first leader was the Shibanid Abū al-Khayr, who founded his own ulus in the former lands of the Blue Horde and was elected its khan in 1429. Edigü’s grandson Waqqas Bey was a major backer of Abū al-Khayr and became the khan’s beglerbeg. Waqqas Bey and Abū al-Khayr shared a key objective, as both sought to restore northern Khwarezm to the Jochids. They worked together to take the region back from the descendants of Tamerlane.38 With the assistance of the Manghit, Abū al-Khayr occupied northern Khwarezm in 1430. In 1446 he conquered the cities of the lower and middle Syr-Daria and made Sighnaq his winter capital.
Abū al-Khayr was not the only one building a regime in the region, and his Uzbeks faced considerable competition and flux. In 1457, after Abū al Khayr was defeated by the Mongol Oyirad, another rising force, the Manghit abandoned him. Thousands of Abū al-Khayr’s former supporters, including Manghit, moved eastward to join two Toqa Temürids, Kiray and Janibek, who were establishing themselves in the Chu Valley. Kiray and Janibek later conquered the Qipchaq steppe and, in the early sixteenth century, their peoples became known as Qazaqs, a name that endures among the modern Kazakhs.39 The abandonment of Abū al-Khayr left the Shibanid-Uzbek ulus in a precarious position, but the ulus did finally consolidate in 1500 under Abū al-Khayr’s grandson, Muhammad Shībānī. Thus, by the early sixteenth century, the two chief lineages of the late Horde—the Shibanids and the Toqa Temürids—had founded two enduring peoples under new names. From the Shibanids arose the Uzbeks in northern Khwarezm and Transoxiana and from the Toqa Temürids arose the Qazaqs in the Chu Valley and Qipchaq steppe.
As for the Manghit-Nogay, they continued to flourish as an independent force, playing a power-balancing role reminiscent of the Horde’s over the centuries. The Manghit-Nogay had a powerful army and were therefore valuable allies, but they husbanded their allegiances carefully, ensuring that partnerships would not undercut their own autonomy. Like the Horde under Möngke-Temür, Özbek, and Toqtamish, the Manghit-Nogay were canny diplomats. The Manghit-Nogay had abandoned Abū al-Khayr in the 1450s, but in the early sixteenth century the Manghit-Nogay agreed to ally with Muhammad Shībānī and support him as khan, while warning that their support would last only as long as Muhammad Shībānī allowed them “full freedom in affairs of state.” As one of the strongest political and military forces in the Volga-Ural and Crimean regions, the Manghit-Nogay were sovereigns and kingmakers, not vassals. They operated an independent foreign policy and interacted closely with both the Russians and the Ottomans before splitting into the Great and Little Nogay Hordes, the former associated with Moscow and the latter with the Ottomans. The Manghit-Nogay, in their various guises, continued to be influential powers north and east of the Caspian into the eighteenth century, before they were absorbed by the expanding Russian Empire.40
The descendants of all the post-Jochid groups—including the Uzbeks, Qazaqs, and Manghit-Nogay—never stopped telling the stories of their forebears, influencing the cultures of Eastern Europe and West and Central Asia unto this day.
* * *
In a seventeenth-century tale from the Chinggis Nāme, the natives of the Volga-Ural steppe reformulated the biography of Chinggis Khan to better reflect the politics of their own communities. According to the tale, Chinggis’s elder brothers threatened his life and forced him into hiding. Ten begs decided to search for him and to invite him to be their ruler. After a long ride, they finally found Chinggis, and, overcome with joy, celebrated by releasing their horses. To bring the khan home to his people, the begs built a cart for him to sit on and hitched themselves to the cart as if they were the horses. One beg, who was crippled and could not pull, sat next to Chinggis and drove the rest.41
The allegory of the begs illustrates the principle of nomadic government that emerged in the fifteenth century. Now it was the begs who chose their ruler, and his power came from exclusively from human exertion rather than supernatural power. The khan’s authority came not from the favor Allah or Tengri showed his lineage but from the begs’ support, which the khan maintained through the old Mongol ways: distribution of gifts and regular opportunities to accrue booty. If the khan failed to keep the begs on his side, they could depose him without fear of divine punishment. The story is one of shared governance, with the khan as the chief but unable to navigate the ship—or cart—of state by himself. As Mária Ivanics has shown, the cart driver in the story refers to the beglerbeg, a position that did not exist in Chinggis’s time yet was written into the legend in light of later political developments. The cart, Ivanics argues, refers to the steppe peoples themselves.42
Historians commonly describe the fifteenth century as the period when the Jochid central power declined and fragmented. This is accurate as far as it goes. The problems that arise are interpretive. What does it mean when a central authority breaks down? The fifteenth century certainly looks like the end of something—both the Jochid and the wider Mongol order. Yet we need not see the downfall of a lineage as a kind of failure; in the steppe world, the Jochids and the Mongols were leaders in a long line of them, intersecting with other lines, all of them participating in the social vitality and political ingenuity of nomadic peoples. The dissolution of Jochid power did not mean the nomadic world was falling apart; it was just one of many ways that the nomads responded to the absence of the larger protecting framework of the Mongol Empire. Jochi’s ulus had to transform so as to solve its crisis and enable a return to security and prosperity. Dissolution was an organic mutation, analogous in some ways to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Pekka Hämäläinen describes a similar process in his analysis of the Lakota people of North America, whom he calls “shapeshifters with a palpable capacity to adapt to changing conditions around them and yet remain Lakotas.” The ulus of Jochi followed a related historical course.43
The transformation of the Horde into several hordes and so-called khanates in the fifteenth century, including the Qazaqs, Uzbeks, and Manghit-Nogay.
After the Horde dissolved, the nomads continued to sustain themselves through expansion and ethnic incorporation. Various nomadic groups had always joined the Mongols and broken away, and the Mongols themselves had constantly evolved culturally and socially in the course of assimilating others. The nomadic successors of the Horde also continued to develop new forms of hierarchy and decision making by adapting the models they inherited, just as Chinggis, Batu, Berke, Özbek, and Toqtamish had. It is true that the fifteenth century saw the end of something important: Mongol domination. But the steppe tradition outlived the conquerors who called upon it. The commercial infrastructure
of the Mongol exchange also outlasted its creators, a patrimony that preserved trade between east and west and enabled the continuing dissemination of ideas and narratives across Eurasia. Nomadic concepts of rule and social and economic organization predated and survived both the Mongol and Jochid regimes, their durability resulting from the appreciation for change built into those concepts. For a time it was the Mongol Empire and its components—the Yuan, the Ilkhanids, the Horde, the ulus of Chagatay—that stewarded nomadic ways of life and governance. These political entities disappeared, but nomadic life and governance continued.
An ethos and culture built on movement must be flexible. It must adapt to the novel conditions the earth offers. The migration round means constant change: every few days a new scene, new terrain. Another river to cross. Another encounter with people different from oneself, with their own sense of what the world is and what their place is within that world. Nomads know this, and their empires embodied that knowledge.
Epilogue
THE HORDE’S MIRROR
Since his enthronement in 1462, Grand Prince Ivan of Moscow had not paid the tribute to the Horde. By the late 1470s, Ahmad Khan was ready to punish him for his neglect. Ahmad led the Volga horde, the symbolic center of the Jochid realms but no longer the focal point where the various hordes met for collective gatherings. Ahmad had a clear ambition to change this situation—to reunify ulus Jochi and to revive the imperial policy of previous khans, as demonstrated by his energetic diplomacy: Ahmad allied with Venice and the Lithuanians against the Ottomans, who were threatening Jochid positions in Crimea and the lower Danube.1 But internal conflicts were keeping Ahmad from accomplishing his objectives. In 1478 Crimea fell into the hands of Mengli Giray, another Jochid khan, who was backed by the Ottomans. And Ivan was working to unify the lands north of the Oka River in order to strengthen Moscow’s position. Ahmad needed to act quickly, lest his aspiration go unfulfilled. In 1479 he sent his tax collectors to Moscow to take what belonged to him, including arrears, but the grand prince refused to obey.2 It would take a war to bring Ivan back into line. The lines of allegiance were drawn: Moscow and Crimea against Ahmad and Poland-Lithuania.3
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