The Horde

by Marie Favereau

  In spring 1480 Ahmad and his warriors made camp on the banks of the Ugra River, about 150 miles south of Moscow, to await reinforcements promised by Kazimierz, the king of Poland-Lithuania. A Russian army arrayed on the other side of the river. The two sides waited for months; then, in November, Ahmad’s forces departed. Ahmad Khan had learned that the princes of southwestern Russia had rebelled against Kazimierz and, led by Mengli Giray, were heading toward Sarai. Fearful of being trapped between Ivan’s army and the southwestern princes, and recognizing that the approaching winter would subject his troops to shortages of food and clothing, Ahmad chose to withdraw. Yet, as was so often the case when Mongols retreated, there was a strategy at work. Ahmad believed he had in fact accomplished what he needed to: that he had so intimidated Ivan that the grand prince would pay the tribute and beg for peace. And Ivan was indeed worried. He wrote to his ally Mengli Giray in 1481, “Ahmad Khan came against me, but all-merciful God wanted to save us from him and did so.”4

  In Russian scholarship the “Stand on the Ugra River” is often presented as the event that ended the Tatar yoke in the Russian principalities. Yet, interestingly, in 1480 no Russian source claimed to be freed from the Tatar yoke. In the fifteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Moscow did not reject the political legacy of the Mongols. Quite the opposite: Moscow was an expanding state that looked to the Horde as a source of its legitimacy and its power. It would be another three-quarters of a century before the Stand on the Ugra River was perceived as a significant date in Muscovite history. Only in distant hindsight, after much political change in Russia, did Russians come to see the stand as the moment when their nation at last turned back the Mongols’ supposedly damaging and ideologically suspect form of rule. Later historians even understood the stand as the end of the Horde.5

  Next to the Ugra River event, historians have pointed to other dates that signified the end of the Horde: 1502, when Mengli Giray defeated Ahmad’s son and successor in battle, and 1552–1556 when Ivan IV annexed Kazan and Astrakhan and thereby asserted a tenuous control over the Volga Valley.6 The 1502 battle, however, was a contest among Jochids for control of the area around Sarai, which the nomads knew as Takht eli, the region of the throne and a sacred place.7 A fight among Jochids, by itself, could hardly signify the end of the Horde. As for Ivan IV’s precarious conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s, by that time, ulus Jochi had already left the lower Volga. The expansionist Jochid hordes of the sixteenth century may have recognized the sülde of the lower Volga, but they had moved to different terrain.

  The 1480 stand on the Ugra river, from Litsevoi Letopisnii Svod, the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible (c. 1567). Russian nationalist historiography understands this event as the end of the Horde’s domination in West Asia (the “Tatar yoke”), yet contemporaries neither perceived the standoff as a victory for Grand Prince Ivan of Moscow nor viewed the period of Mongol rule as a time of oppression. (National Library, St. Petersburg, Russia / Sputnik Bridgeman Images)

  Whatever date we choose to mark the end of the Horde, its lingering influence was clear even among the Muscovites. As Thomas Allsen puts it, “The Moscovite embrace of the Mongol legacy … was fraught with contradiction.” On the one hand, Russians learned to disdain the Tatar yoke. On the other hand, Russian rulers never hesitated to call upon the Horde as its predecessor under the rubric of translatio imperii—the idea that the legitimacy of one empire may be passed to the next. Much as German kings saw their Holy Roman Empire as a successor to Rome and Byzantium, the Muscovites claimed to inherit the Horde’s imperial right of conquest. Thus it was only when Ivan IV conquered the Volga Valley that he began to call himself an emperor. Specifically, he took the title of tsar, which Russians had hitherto used to describe and address the Horde’s khans. Indeed, to further Moscow’s claim as successor of the Jochid empire, Ivan IV always asked European rulers to include among his titles “tsar of Kazan and Astrakhan.”8 In the burgeoning Russian Empire, the Horde lived on as an important political force.

  Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovite leaders respected the political legitimacy of individual Jochids and sought them out as governing partners. Around 1452 Ivan IV’s grandfather granted lands on the left bank of the Oka River to Prince Qasim, a Toqa Temürid. The site became known as Qasimov City, the capital of a khanate created by the Russians. Ivan IV also sustained the Khanate of Qasim, which he used to interfere in the politics of the “Tatars.” In 1575, when Ivan IV suddenly decided to abdicate the grand princely throne, he assigned Simeon Bekbulatovich, the khan of Qasimov and the great grandson of Ahmad Khan, as his successor. Ivan had no intention of leaving power permanently and retook the throne a year later. But it is not by coincidence that he chose a Jochid as the throne’s caretaker. Simeon’s status still embodied ruling legitimacy some two hundred years after Toqtamish had established the authority of the Toqa Temürid lineage. Ivan was acting like the begs who sat a khan on the throne and dismissed him when needed. After Ivan retook the throne, Simeon became kniaz of Tver and Torzhok for almost a decade.9

  The Russian experience was mirrored across formerly Mongol-dominated lands. The political practices and concepts developed by Chinggis Khan and his descendants supplied the symbolic and institutional framework of the state in early-modern Iran, China, and Central Asia, along with Russia. Expansionist regimes such as the Ming, Safavids, Polish-Lithuanians, and Ottomans saw the Mongols as their imperial model.10 But this legacy was eventually lost in transmission because of the anti-nomadic policies and ideologies that marked the Eurasian imperialism of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Latter-day empires understood agriculture and industry as superior to nomadism, economically and morally, and asserted that only from sedentary and urban circumstances could cherished notions of political consensus and religious freedom emerge. In the historical imagination fostered by liberalism, nationalism, and humanism—cast in Christian and Islamic terms—consensus-building and toleration were the exclusive province of the “civilized” and the “modern,” leaving the Mongols mere pirates of the land. That Mongol rulers developed unique, effective, and humane approaches to political negotiation and social integration became unthinkable.

  These qualities of Mongol rule were most obvious in the Horde, the region of the Mongol Empire that interacted most intensively with the future imperial powers. Why did these powers look longingly to Athens, Rome, Constantinople, and Baghdad while ignoring the Horde? The answer is implicit in the framing of the question: it was city life that nurtured empire and cultivated the virtues of imperial citizenship. Density brought people together, enabling the sparks of creativity that in turn produced progress and greatness. Never mind that the Mongols enabled, maintained, and grew the most extensive exchange in people, goods, and ideas in the premodern world.

  If the Horde was forgotten, it was also because the Jochids left few obvious architectural and lexical markers of their imprint on the world. There was so much to learn from and admire in the ruins and the endurance of the great cities, whereas the Horde imparted to posterity scant signifiers of its dominance and grandeur. The Horde’s cities, though significant for purposes of governance and economic growth, were more ephemeral than those of the Mediterranean and Africa. Lacking fortifications and built more of earth than of stone, Jochid cities left only meager ruins at which to marvel. Some Jochid sites did prove durable, but they were absorbed into Russia, their past overwritten. And there were no court chronicles to magnify the reign of the Jochid khans, which helps explain why the Horde has been less studied and celebrated than the Yuan and the Ilkhanids. The Toluids ensured a copious record of their deeds, inspiring centuries of subsequent research in China and the Middle East. With a bit of digging, though, the Jochids’ legacy also becomes palpable—in the lands they once governed and in the wider world they touched. Even today, sites all over Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe bear names that connect them to the Horde. And numerous Mongol words entered the Russian language in the th
irteenth and fourteenth centuries and are still used: dengi (money), tamozhnik (customs officer), tovar (commodities), bumaga (paper). And, of course, “horde” exists in many languages.11

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  With this book, I wanted at first to challenge the typical “Manifest Destiny” narrative of the westward Mongol campaigns initially. It seemed impossibly simplistic that the Mongols were motivated by an unalloyed desire for conquest. In fact, Chinggis Khan had no grand design to conquer the world. Furthermore, it was never his goal to attack and loot cities but rather to submit the steppe nomads. The presumed rapine of Mongol conquest also had to be contested, because the available evidence shows that Chinggis was not a mass murderer. Instead, he assimilated dominated people into his Mongols. What mattered to Chinggis was to subjugate the Felt-Walled Tents, the nomadic peoples of East Asia. The strongest resistance Chinggis faced came not from cities and sedentary areas but from inside the regime he built in the steppe. This was the drama that shaped Chinggis, his people, and his descendants. The conquests of China, Iran, and Russia were side effects of an nomad-on-nomad war in which sedentary neighbors had interfered.

  From these side effects emerge fascinating and novel interpretations of history. For one thing, nomadism is not necessarily resistant to state-building; in the case of the Jochids, the opposite is true: nomads built a complex and durable empire precisely in order to accomplish the goals inherent in their political theory. The Mongols wanted a regime that—analogous with their own communities and kinship groups—could absorb and harmonize everything social. But in the process of growing, they found themselves butting up against resistant populations. Rejecting the Mongols’ all-embracing attitude toward religion, the military, work, and family, rebels arose against conscription and the Mongol labor and taxation regimes. This is a historical constant: every state-making project has its twin, the population that resists state power.12 During the early Mongol Empire a number of Felt-Walled Tents refused incorporation in Chinggis’s imperial matrix; their defiance triggered the conquest of West Asia and then Eastern Europe, provoking more resistance. Thus did settled people become antistatist rebels.

  Importantly, that state was an equestrian one, constantly in motion. The Mongols defied the assertion that “an empire cannot be ruled on horseback,” an old piece of advice given to Chinese conquerors and found in the Shiji, a monumental history composed in the late second and early first centuries BCE. The conception of nomads as warriors and settlers as administrators was widespread in Islamic political theory too. The fourteenth-century Arab historiographer Ibn Khaldun—a contemporary of Toqtamish and Tamerlane and one of the most cited medieval scholars—developed a philosophy of the history of dynastic states in which nomads became rulers, settled, and thereby lost their ‘asabiyya: their sense of solidarity or “group feeling.” “The rulers of a state, once they have become sedentary, always imitate in their ways of living those of the state to which they have succeeded and whose condition they have seen and generally adopted,” Ibn Khaldun wrote.13 In other words, nomads could conquer, but their distinctiveness would soon dissolve as the conquerors took on the character of their settled subjects.

  The Mongol trajectory, however, does not fit Ibn Khaldun’s theory. The Mongols did not settle and did not become like their subjects; on the contrary, they absorbed foreign cultures into their own. The Mongols’ power was mostly based on their ability to synthesize diversity. For the Jochids in particular, cultural change was not a one-way phenomenon. They did not become Slavs or Islamic-style rulers, even as they adopted Slavic peoples and Islamic principles. Nor did Jochid subjects necessarily become indistinguishable from Mongols, even though the Horde profoundly changed the peoples it dominated. The Jochids reinvented themselves without losing themselves. If we take Ibn Khaldun literally, then he was surely wrong—the dichotomy between nomadic and settled peoples does not exist. But there is merit in his sense of power as something mutable. Both ruler and ruled are changed by their relationship, or else the ruler does not last long.

  One might defend the literal version of Ibn Khaldun on the grounds that, after their encounter with settled people, the Jochids did build cities, albeit less dense cities than those found in Egypt and Central Asia. This is true, of course, but Jochid city-building was not a form of sedentarization. Even as the Jochids built cities, powerful nomadic leaders still migrated seasonally. City-building reflected less cultural change than geopolitical strategy. The Jochids were not adopting a sedentary lifestyle but rather were using their cities to impose their laws on settled subjects and neighbors.14 One lesson, then, is that pastoralism is not a primitive stage on the path to modernization. Pastoralism is a different choice, one that enabled the Jochids to fashion a unique imperial entity that mimicked no sedentary model. It is not by chance that the Jochid style of rule outlived the Horde in much of its former territory. The Manghit-Nogays, Tatars, Uzbeks, Qazaqs, and other heirs of the Horde kept nomadism alive, practicing its approaches to consensus, lineage, hierarchical sharing, and mobility not because these peoples were hidebound traditionalists or ignorant of the ways of settled peoples but because these approaches were proven to work.

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  One of the benefits of focusing on the Horde is the opportunity to emphasize its distinctiveness within the Mongol Empire. The Horde shared many common features with the other Chinggisid domains but showed significant differences too. These differences were among the sources of the Horde’s endurance and of its special impact on the non-Mongol world.

  What contributed first to the distinctiveness of the Horde was the location and ecology of the Jochid territories. The homeland of the Horde lay at the intersection of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Jochids were a bridge between the Mongol Empire and the western frontier of the Eurasian steppe. From their unique position, the Jochids attracted exchange and allegiance with Hungarians, Bulgarians, Byzantines, Italians, Germans, Russians, Mamluks, and Greeks and later Ottomans, Poles, and Lithuanians. Other Mongol regimes were also trade-oriented, but not to the same extent as the Horde.

  The Horde also was the most northerly of the Mongol uluses, which had dramatic effects on its development. As a northern power, the Horde dominated the fur trade; other Mongols took part, receiving and shipping furs in their territories, yet only the Jochids were able to extract wealth from fur production itself. But northerliness also came with constraints, and these too contoured the development of the Horde. The economies of northern societies under Jochid domination were less driven by human labor than those of the southern societies controlled by the Toluids, mainly because the north was less populous. In China and Iran, large labor forces were devoted to agriculture, while the economics of the Horde derived more from trade and capital.15 Governance strategies in the north were correspondingly unique. The Horde could not simply tax its subjects; they were too few and their baseline productivity too minimal. Instead, the Horde invested in its subjects by means of land grants, legal protections, and urbanization projects, thereby enhancing the production of tradable commodities such as livestock, fur, salt, fish, wax, silver, and other nonagricultural goods.16 For the Jochids, tribute was a transaction, with investments yielding productivity yielding tax revenue, enabling further investments. It is not clear that other Mongol regimes had a similarly transactional approach to tribute, although more study is needed in order to understand the breadth of Mongol tribute dynamics.

  Most importantly, the Jochids developed distinctive technologies of governance. While the Toluids preferred direct rule, the Jochids ruled indirectly. As Pekka Hämäläinen notes, comparing Mongols to Comanches, the Jochids were able “to control resources without controlling societies and possess power without possessing space.”17 The Jochids’ relation to the eastern Slavic peoples is a case in point. The khan administered his Russian principalities through local princes who interacted with his officers and his court only as needed. Thus there was no permanent Mongol administrative presence among the Russian popul
ation, and the political subordination of the principalities was relatively invisible on a day-to-day basis. This system nonetheless enabled political interaction when valuable and kept economic avenues open. Princes, clergy, officials, messengers, and merchants could easily travel back and forth between the principalities and the hordes for purposes of politics and trade.18

  The relationship between the Jochids and their sedentary subjects is key to understanding the longevity of the Horde as compared to the Yuan and the Ilkhanids. Jochids and settlers typically were physically separate, but they were not alien to each other. They had frequent contacts during the seasonal rounds, when the hordes approached northern cities such as Bulgar and traversed the settlements along the river valleys. And though the Jochids and their subjects saw the world differently, they found ways to communicate, for instance through religious figures welcomed into the khans’ courts and by preserving good relations with the boyars. The Horde headed off possible resentment among sedentary outsiders by providing them opportunities in Jochid settlements and at home. Artisans and traders from all over found work in Sarai and New Sarai, while monks, priests, and lay elites in the principalities owed their financial success to the khan’s protection.