The Horde

by Marie Favereau

  23. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 41–42, 52, 91, 116, 210.

  24. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Why Qara Qorum? Climate and Geography in the Early Mongol Empire,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 21 (2014–2015): 67–78, 76; Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, “The Role of Mongolian Nomadic Pastoralists’ Ecological Knowledge in Rangeland Management,” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1318–1326.

  25. See Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” esp. 333–334.

  26. Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 328–329; Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 312–314; John Masson Smith Jr., “Dietary Decadence and Dynastic Decline in the Mongol Empire,” Journal of Asian History 34, no. 1 (2000): 35–52; Di Cosmo, “Why Qara Qorum?” 73.

  27. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 210; Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 295–296, 327.

  28. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 129, 184.

  29. Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 295.

  30. Sandrine Ruhlmann, Inviting Happiness: Food Sharing in Post-Communist Mongolia, trans. Nora Scott (Brill: Leiden, 2019), 49, 54, 193–195; Grégory Delaplace, “The Place of the Dead: Power, Subjectivity and Funerary Topography in North-Western Mongolia,” in States of Mind: Power, Places and the Subject in Inner Asia, ed. David Sneath (Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University), 54–55.

  31. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 99.

  32. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 28.

  33. Ringhingiin Indra, “Mongolian Dairy Products,” in Mongolia Today: Science, Culture, Environment and Development, ed. Dendeviin Badarch, Raymond A. Zilinskas, and Peter J. Balint (Richmond, UK: Routledge, 2003; repr. London: Routledge, 2015), 80; E. Neuzil and G. Devaux, “Le Koumys, hier et aujourd’hui,” Bulletin de la Société de Pharmacie de Bordeaux 138 (1999), 99; Sandra Olsen, “Early Horse Domestication on the Eurasian Steppe,” in Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, ed. M. A. Zeder, D. G. Bradley, E. Emshwiller, and B. D. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 264.

  34. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 202. Dawson’s translation erroneously indicates 105 carts, while the original specifies 500. Guillaume de Rubrouck, Voyage dans l’empire mongol, trans. Claude Kappler and René Kappler (Paris: Editions Payot, 1985), 222; Indra, “Mongolian Dairy Products,” 73, 80.

  35. J. S. Toomre, “Koumiss in Mongol Culture: Past and Present,” in Milk and Milk Products from Medieval to Modern Times, ed. Patricia Lysaght, 130–139 (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994); Olsen, “Early Horse Domestication,” 264–265.

  36. Indra, “Mongolian Dairy Products,” 80–81; Neuzil and Devaux, “Le Koumys, hier et aujourd’hui,” 100–105.

  37. Juvaynī, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 267; see also Jūzjānī, Tabakāt-i-Nāsirī: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindūstān, from A.H. 194 [810 a.d.], to A.H. 658 [1260 a.d.], and the Irruption of the Infidel Mugẖals into Islam, trans. H. G. Raverty, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881–1897; repr. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1970), vol. 2, 176.

  38. Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 338–339.

  39. Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 338.

  40. Marie Favereau “The Mongol Peace and Global Medieval Eurasia,” Comparativ 28, no. 4 (2018): 54–57. On the modern Mongol understanding of happiness, see Ruhlmann, Inviting Happiness.

  41. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 135.

  42. Thomas Allsen, “Spiritual Geography and Political Legitimacy in the Eastern Steppe,” in Ideology and the Formation of Early States, ed. H. J. M. Claessen and G. J. Osten (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 117–118, 120–121, 124, 129; Tatiana Skrynnikova, “Mongolian Nomadic Society of the Empire Period,” in Alternatives of Social Evolution, ed. N. N. Kradin, A. V. Korotayev, et al. (Vladivostok: Far Eastern Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2000), 298–299; Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 83–84. The location of Chinggis’s “grave” was purposely hidden and remains a matter of controversy. Burqan Qaldun must not be confused with Ejen-Khoro, in the region of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, where, according to a fifteenth-century tradition, the relics of Chinggis Khan are preserved.

  43. According to the seventeenth-century source Abū’l-Ghāzī, Shajarat-i Turk, Batu founded the city of Saraijuq: Histoire des Mongols et des Tatares par Aboul-Ghâzi Béhâdour Khân, trans. and ed. Petr I. Desmaisons (St. Petersburg, 1871–1874; reprint Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1970), 181. Bartold, Sochineniia, iv, 395, translated into English by J. M. Rogers, “The Burial Rites of the Turks and Mongols,” Central Asiatic Journal 14, no. 2–3 (1970): 195–227, 221–222; John A. Boyle, “The Thirteenth-Century Mongols’ Conception of the After Life: The Evidence of Their Funerary Practices,” Mongolian Studies 1 (1974): 5–14, 8; Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), 193–199; Vadim Trepavlov, Istorija Nogajskoj Ordy (Vostochnaia literatura, RAN: Moscow, 2001), 589; Jūzjānī, Tabakāt-i-Nāsirī: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, vol. 2, 1173. See also John A. Boyle, “A Form of Horse Sacrifice amongst the 13th and 14th-Century Mongols,” Central Asiatic Journal 10, no. 3–4 (1965): 145–150, 145.

  44. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 13–14; Friar C. de Bridia, Tartar Relation §47 in Dans l’empire mongol, 190; The Vinland Map, 94–95.

  45. Juvaynī, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 267. The word sarāy has a Persian origin but was commonly used by Turkic speakers. It was not a common term for Mongolian speakers and East Asian people in general. According to both written sources and archaeology, the site was new. Today it is known as Selitrennoe Gorodishche. Like Great Khan Ögödei, Batu probably had several seasonal palaces along his horde’s migration route, but Sarai was the most important or at least was seen as such by contemporary witnesses.

  46. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 207, 210.

  47. Allsen, “Spiritual Geography,” 121; Isabelle Charleux, “The Khan’s City: Kökeqota and the Role of a Capital City in Mongolian State Formation,” in Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries, ed. David Sneath (Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 2007), 178–179; Di Cosmo, “Why Qara Qorum?” 69–70; Francis Woodman Cleaves, “The Sino-Mongolian Inscription of 1346,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 15, no. 1–2 (1952), 25, 69; Francis Woodman Cleaves, “The Sino-Mongolian Inscription of 1362 in Memory of Prince Hindu,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12, no. 1–2 (1949), 1–133, 13; Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 328–329; Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 59, 183–184; Mongolian-German Karakorum Expedition, vol. 1: Excavations in the Craftsman Quarter at the Main Road, ed. Jan Bemmann, Ulambayar Erdemebat, and Ernst Pohl (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2010).

  48. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 40, 129, 133, 156, 209–210; Charleux, “The Khan’s City,” 185–186. After five weeks marching with Batu’s horde, Rubruck’s companion cried of exhaustion.

  49. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 56–57.

  50. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 95, 102–104; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 1, xli, 224, 256–263.

  51. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 94–95.

  52. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 108.

  53. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 52; Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. 1, book 1, 262; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 2, 1297.

  54. Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 1, esp. xxxiv–xxxv; on the village as a “microcosmos,” see Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 229–284.

  55. Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 160; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol
. 1, 519–530, esp. 523; Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 56, 126.

  56. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 18, 95, 103–104; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 1, 387. See also Mengda beilu, a Chinese source composed in 1221, which describes a Mongol camp in East Asia, a useful point of comparison: Men-da bey-lu: Polnoe opisanie Mongolo-Tatar, Faksimile ksilografa, trans. and ed. N. Ts. Munkuev (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), 79–80.

  57. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 17–18, 95, 117.

  58. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 14–15, 117. Camps included yam-houses, which were made available to envoys.

  59. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 14–18, 61; Peter Jackson, “The Testimony of the Russian ‘Archbishop’ Peter Concerning the Mongols (1244 / 5): Precious Intelligence or Timely Disinformation?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, no. 1–2 (2016): 65–77.

  60. Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 1, 227; Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 57, 61–65, 94–95.

  61. Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 44–53; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 2, 1291–1294; Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 298–299; Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 55–56. Andrews suggests that Volgograd was the northern limit of Batu’s route, but archaeological evidence places the limit 200 miles north of Volgograd, in the vicinity of Ukek, which is also where Rubruck marked the northern bound. Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 114–115, 126.

  62. Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 302–303; Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 94–95, 129. These numbers are based on my calculations. See also William Rockhill, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55 (London: printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1900), 127n1; and Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 2, 1296–1297, which suggests a maximum speed of twelve miles per day, based on the recorded speed of oxen drawing heavy loads in Australia today. Historians calculate that Ögödei’s horde covered almost the same total annual distance in the area of Qaraqorum. Charleux, “The Khan’s City,” 187, based on Shiraishi Noriyuki, “Seasonal Migrations of the Mongol Emperors and the Peri-Urban Area of Kharakhorum,” International Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 105–119. For a comparison of the early khans’ routes, see Atwood, “Imperial Itinerance,” 293–349.

  63. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 55, 114, 124, 209.

  64. Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 35–36, 126; Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, vol. 2, 1297.

  65. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 55, 59–60.

  66. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 60; Secret History, § 279–281, 297; Juvaynī, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 33; Allsen, “Princes of the Left Hand,” 12–13. For more on the yam, see Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1963–1975), [vol. 4] 110–118, nr. 1812; Didier Gazagnadou, The Diffusion of a Postal Relay System in Premodern Eurasia, trans. L. Byrne (Paris: Editions Kimé, 2016), 47–63, translation of Gazagnadou, La Poste à relais. La diffusion d’une technique de pouvoir à travers l’Eurasie. Chine, Islam, Europe (Paris: Kimé, 1994); Adam Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), reviewed by Thomas Allsen, “Imperial Posts, West, East and North: A Review Article,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 17 (2010), 241–242; Márton Vér, “The Origins of the Postal System of the Mongol Empire,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 22 (2016), esp. 235–239; Márton Vér, “The Postal System of the Mongol Empire in Northeastern Turkestan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Szeged, 2016); Márton Vér, Old Uyghur Documents Concerning the Postal System of the Mongol Empire (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019).

  67. Michael Weiers, “Mongolische Reisbegleitschreiben aus Čaγatai,” Zentralasiatische Studien 1 (1967): 7–54; Vér, “The Postal System of the Mongol Empire,” 53–58; Dai Matsui, “Unification of Weight and Measures by the Mongol Empire as Seen in the Uigur and Mongol Documents,” in Turfan Revisited: The First Century of Research into the Arts and Cultures of the Silk Road, ed. Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst et al., 197–202 (Berlin: Reimer, 2004).

  68. Peter Olbricht established this typology in Das Postwesen in China unter der Mongolenherrschaft im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1954), 45–101; Rashīd al-Dīn, Compendium of Chronicles, 328–329.

  69. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 58.

  70. The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016–1471, trans. Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes (London: Offices of the Society, 1914), 95–96; The Nikonian Chronicle, ed. and trans. Serge A. Zenkovsky and Betty J. Zenkovsky, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press, 1984–1989), vol. 3, 34–35.

  71. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 65.

  72. The Chronicle of Novgorod, 95–97; Thomas Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking in Rus’, 1245–1275,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 1 (1981): 32–53, 43.

  73. Paul Buell and Judith Kolbas, “The Ethos of State and Society in the Early Mongol Empire: Chinggis Khan to Güyük,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26 (2016): 43–56, 58; Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 34.

  74. Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 37; Plano Carpini and Rubruck in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 37–38, 212.

  75. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 38–39; Marie-Félicité Brosset, Histoire de la Géorgie depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’au XIXe siècle (St. Petersburg, 1849–1858), vol. 1, 551.

  76. The new gold coinage of Ögödei is dated 630 H. / 1232–1233 CE. The first known Qaraqorum silver coinage is dated 635 H. / 1237–1238 CE. Buell and Kolbas, “The Ethos of State and Society in the Early Mongol Empire,” 57–58, 60.

  77. Plano Carpini in Dawson, The Mongol Mission, 41; Vardan Arewelts’i’s Compilation of History, trans. R. Bedrosian (Long Branch, NJ: Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2007), 88; Judith Kolbas, The Mongols in Iran: Chingiz Khan to Uljaytu, 1220–1309 (London: Routledge, 2006), 124–128, 134; Buell and Kolbas, “The Ethos of State and Society in the Early Mongol Empire,” 57–58, 63.

  78. Juvaynī, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 21, 517–521, 525; Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 39. For an extensive description of the census led by Arghun and Batu in a contemporary source, see Brosset, Histoire de la Géorgie, vol. 1, 550–552.

  79. Juvaynī, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 268; Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 41–42.

  80. Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 44, 51.

  81. Allsen, “Mongol Census Taking,” 49, notes that it was a nomad custom to express the size of their community in terms of the number of tents. In a sedentary context, the Mongols probably counted houses rather than households. See also Thomas T. Allsen, “Ever Closer Encounters: The Appropriation of Culture and the Apportionment of Peoples in the Mongol Empire,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 1 (1997): 2–23, 4.

  82. Brosset, Histoire de la Géorgie, vol. 1, 552; Christopher Atwood, “Validation by Holiness or Sovereignty: Religious Toleration as Political Theology in the Mongol World Empire of the Thirteenth Century,” International History Review 26, no. 2 (2004): 237–256; Marie Favereau, “Tarkhan: A Nomad Institution in an Islamic Context,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 181–205.

  83. Martin Dimnik, “The Rus’ Principalities (1125–1246),” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 98–126; V. L. Ianin, “Medieval Novgorod,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, 188–200.

  4 • THE GREAT MUTATION

  1. Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir, al-Rawd al-zāhir fī sīrat al-malik al-Zāhir (al-Riyād, 1976), 215–216, translated in Fatima Sadeque, Baybars I of Egypt (Dacca: Oxford University Press, 1956), 354–355. A later and more compl
ete version of the Mamuk envoys’ report appears in Ibn Abī al-Fadā’il, “al-Nahj al-sadīd wa-l-durr al-farīd fīmā baʿd Tārīkh Ibn al-ʿAmīd,” in Histoire des sultans Mamlouks, trans. and ed. Edgard Blochet, Patrologia Orientalis 12 (1916): 456–462. See also Marie Favereau, La Horde d’or et le sultanat mamelouk. Naissance d’une alliance (Cairo: Institut française d’archéologie orientale, 2018), 19–40.

  2. Sources disagree on the location and timing of Batu’s death. According to Mu‘izz al-ansāb. Proslavliaiushchee genealogii, ed. A. K. Muminov, trans. Sh. Kh. Vokhidov (Almaty, 2006), 40, Sartaq ruled for a few months from 650 H. / 1252–1253 CE to 651 H. / 1253–1254 CE, indicating that Batu must have died before this time. And Rashīd al-Dīn claims Batu died in Sarai at the age of forty-eight. Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s-Jamiʿu’t-tawarikh. Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Cambridge, MA: Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1998–1999), 361. But these accounts must be mistaken, as Rubruck saw Batu at the end of 1254. William of Rubruck in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Christopher Dawson (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 125–129.