33. Pero Tafur, Andanças é viajes de Pero Tafur por diversas partes del mundo avidos: 1435–1439, ed. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (Madrid: Imprenta de Miguel Ginesta, 1874), 166–167; Uli Schamiloglu, “The Qaraçi Beys of the Later Golden Horde: Notes on the Organisation of the Mongol World Empire,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 4 (1984): 283–297; Christopher Atwood, “Ulus Emirs, Keshig Elders, Signatures, and Marriage Partners: The Evolution of a Classic Mongol Institution,” in Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth–Twentieth Centuries, ed. David Sneath (Bellingham: Western Washington University, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, 2006), 141–173, 158.
34. Trepavlov, The Formation, 15, 47; Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate, 7–8.
35. Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate, 9. The expression of friendship appears in doc. 7 on page 554 and doc. 10 on page 584. On Lipka Tatars, see M. Połczyński, “Seljuks on the Baltic: Polish-Lithuanian Muslim Pilgrims in the Court of Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I,” Journal of Early Modern History 19, no. 5 (2015): 409–437.
36. DeWeese, Islamization, 340–341, 343; Trepavlov, The Formation, 2–3.
37. Edigü was said to have around twenty sons. Vadim Trepavlov, Istoriia Nogaiskoi Ordy (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2001), 85–97; Trepavlov, The Formation, 20, 24–32.
38. DeWeese, Islamization, 344–347; Trepavlov, Istoriia, 97–100. Toqtamish’s people are often called “Uzbek” in Persian sources.
39. Yuri Bregel, “Uzbeks, Qazaqs and Turkmens,” in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen Frank, and Peter Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 223–225; Joo-Yup Lee, Qazaqlïq, 102–109; Joo-Yup Lee, “The Political Vagabondage,” 80–84.
40. Kamāl al-Dīn ‘Alī Bīnā’ī, “Shaybani Nama,” in Materialy po istorii Kazakhskikh khanstv XV-XVII vv. Izvlecheniia iz persidskikh i tiurkskikh sochinenii, trans S. G. Ibragimov and K. A. Pishchulina (Alma Ata: Nauka, 1969), 104; Trepavlov, The Formation, 38; DeWeese, Islamization, 348–352; Joo-Yup Lee, Qazaqlïq, 109–120; Joo-Yup Lee, “The Political Vagabondage,” 84–87.
41. Mária Ivanics and M. A. Usmanov, Das Buch der Dschingis-Legende (Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä) (Szeged: Department of Altaic Studies, University of Szeged, 2002), 52–53 (folio 19r.); Mária Ivanics, “Der Sippenbaum im Buch der Dschingis-Legende,” in Man and Nature in the Altaic World, ed. Kellner-Heinkele Barbara, Boykova Elena, and Heuer Brigitte, Proceedings of the 49th Permanent International Altaistic Conference, Berlin, July 30–August 4, 2006 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2012), 179–191.
42. I am grateful to Mária Ivanics for bringing this allegory to my attention at a conference in Leiden in 2016. For related discussions, see Beatrice Manz Forbes, “The Clans of the Crimean Khanate 1466–1532,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 3 (1978): 282–309; Trepavlov, Istoriia, 87–88; Trepavlov, The Formation, 22.
43. See, generally, Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942); Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 9.
EPILOGUE
1. Allen Frank, “The Western Steppe: Volga-Ural Region, Siberia and the Crimea,” in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen Frank, and Peter Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 253; Ilia Zaitsev, “Pis’mo khana Bol’shoi ordy Akhmada turetskomu sultanu Mekhmedu II Fatikhu 881 goda khidzhry,” Vostochnii Arkhiv 2–3 (1999): 4–15.
2. On the 1479 episode, which may be apocryphal, see Edward L. Keenan, “The Jarlyk of Axmed-Xan to Ivan III: A New Reading,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 12 (1969): 31–47, 33–46.
3. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 78.
4. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 80.
5. On the Russian and Soviet historiography of the Horde, the Stand on the Ugra River, and the Tatar yoke, see Charles Halperin, “Soviet Historiography on Russia and the Mongols,” Russian Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 306–322; Charles Halperin, “The Tatar Yoke and Tatar Oppression,” Russia Mediaevalis 5, no. 1 (1984): 20–39; Charles Halperin, “Omissions of National Memory: Russian Historiography on the Golden Horde as Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion,” Ab Imperio 3 (2004): 131–44; Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–248.
6. On the battle between Mengli Giray and Ahmad Khan’s son and successor, see Leslie Collins, “On the Alleged ‘Destruction’ of the Great Horde in 1502,” in Manzikert to Lepanto: The Byzantine World and the Turks, 1071–1571, ed. A. Bryer and M. Ursinus (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1991), 361–399.
7. See Vadim Trepavlov, “The Takht Eli Khanate: The State System at the Twilight of the Golden Horde,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 235–247.
8. Thomas Allsen, “Technologies of Governance in the Mongolian Empire: A Geographic Overview,” 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), 164.
9. On various possible interpretations of Simeon’s enthronement, see Charles Halperin, “Ivan IV and Chinggis Khan,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, no. 4 (2003): 481–497.
10. David M. Robinson, “The Ming Court and the Legacy of the Yuan Mongols,” in Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644), ed. David M. Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 366–369.
11. Some of these words, like bumaga, have a Turkic origin but entered Russian during the Mongol period. Donald Ostrowski, “The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions,” Slavic Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 534.
12. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. 326.
13. Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis, trans. Charles Issawi (London: J. Murray, 1950), 309.
14. Nicola Di Cosmo, “Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (1994): 1092–1126.
15. Christopher Atwood, “The Political Economy of the Mongol Empire: Placing Cultural Exchange in Its Economic Context” (lecture, “The Mongols and Global History” conference, Villa I Tatti, Florence, December 10–11, 2018).
16. Allsen, “Technologies of Governance,” 129.
17. Pekka Hämäläinen, “Dark Matters of History: Uncovering Nomadic Empires” (lecture, Institute for History at Leiden University, December 6, 2019).
18. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, 36–63.
Acknowledgments
A book is always a collective work, and this one is born from several encounters that decisively changed my vision of the Mongol Empire. The book began when Pekka Hämäläinen invited me to take part in his five-year project on nomadic empires in world history. I have been fortunate to work with him and am grateful for his generous feedback, frank advice, and unwavering support. His scholarship has been an endless source of inspiration, and the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, the project’s academic home, offered a provocative and lively space for discussion that never failed to stimulate me. I would like to thank as well the other members and associates of the project: Julien Cooper, Mandy Izadi, Bryan Miller, Maya Petrovich, and Irina Shingiray. Very special thanks go to Briony Truscott, the project administrator, for her help and patience. Also at Oxford, Veera Supinen worked with me on the manuscript at various stages, improving it greatly. This book would not exist without her sharp insight and warm encouragement. My debt to her is huge.
I owe an enormous intellectual debt to a number of scholars with whom I’ve shared inspiring conversations and debates: Ilya Afanasyev
, Reuven Amitai, Andrey E. Astafiev, Chris Atwood, James Belich, Maaike van Berkel, Romain Bertrand, Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, Elio Brancaforte, Anne Broadbridge, Isabelle Charleux, Erica Charters, Nicola Di Cosmo, John Darwin, Jeroen Duindam, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Liesbeth Geevers, Jos Gommans, Monica Green, Marek Jankowiak, Anatoly Khazanov, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Julien Loiseau, Beatrice Forbes Manz, David Morgan, Sergei Panteleev, Andrew C. S. Peacock, Pavel N. Petrov, Evgeniy Pigarev, Michael Połczyński, Jonathan Shepard, Naomi Standen, Luke Treadwell, Vadim Trepavlov, and István Vásáry. In addition, the generous anonymous colleagues who read my manuscript for the press saved me from many omissions and mistakes. Any that remain are mine exclusively.
I have presented parts of this book at many seminars and conferences, including at the Centre d’Études Mongoles et Sibériennes in Paris; the Forum on the Golden Horde organized by the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences in Kazan; the Empires to be Remembered conference in Vienna; a conference organized by the Mangystau State Historical and Cultural Reserve, Aktau, Kazakhstan; and The Mongols and Global History conference at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University, in Florence. I wish to thank the conveners and participants for their comments and advice. I wish also to extend my gratitude to the Oxford History Department and the University of Paris Nanterre, especially my current research laboratory, the MéMo, for their support. The research informing this book received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 615040.
Several friends and colleagues helped me complete the research for this book during the long closure of archives, libraries, and museums accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. My thanks to Gabrielle van den Berg, Zvezdana Dode, Francesca Fiaschetti, Konstantin Golev, Andrey Maslovsky, Ilnur Mirgaleev, Leonard Nedashkovsky, Yihao Qiu, Sandrine Ruhlmann, Anastasia Tepliakova, and Márton Vér. In addition, I owe special thanks to Debora Fajnwaks for her solid support and astute counsel.
I am grateful to the institutions that house the objects depicted in the book’s illustrations, including the Azov Historical, Archaeological, and Paleontological Museum-Reserve; the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Berlin Staatsbibliothek; the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris; and the University of Edinburgh.
Several people guided me in transforming the manuscript into a book. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Chris Rogers, who believed in my project, supported me all the way, and was always immensely helpful. With great professionalism and sharp determination, Kathleen McDermott at Harvard University Press shepherded the book from idea to reality. I am grateful to Simon Waxman for editing the text with his masterful sense of prose and infallible eye for detail. It was also a great pleasure to work with Anne McGuire, who provided invaluable help. The maps were created by Alexander Kent from Canterbury Christ Church University, and Mara Nakama drew the illustrations. I owe both of them a debt of gratitude for their efficiency and superb work.
My greatest debt is to my family and especially to Julien Doumenjou, who sustained my project by doing everything I could not do while I was writing. Without him nothing would have been possible. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother Georgette Balbarie, who left us while I was writing the last pages.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to maps and illustrations.
Abaqa (ilkhan), 173–176, 185, 193
Abbasid caliph, 60, 134, 153
Abbasids, 142–143, 144, 153, 155–156
‘Abdallāh (Jochid khan), 268
Abū al-Khayr (Jochid khan), 293–294
Abū Sa‘īd (ilkhan), 243–244, 283
Ahmad (Jochid khan), 299–300, 302
Ahrī, Abū Bakr al-Qutbī al-, 245
ak orda. See White Horde
Aktau, 287
Alān (people), 72, 105, 107, 153, 202
Alan Gho’a, 31–32
Alexander (prince of Tver), 228–229
Alexander Nevsky (grand prince), 105, 131–132, 183–184, 227
Alghu (Chagatayid ruler), 148–149
Alghui (Jochid prince), 195, 197–198
Algirdas (ruler of Lithuania), 270
Allah, 162, 222, 280
Allsen, Thomas, 7, 302
anarchy period and beg rule, 12–13, 21; disintegration of Mongol Empire, 250, 272–273; shift of power toward begs, 266–272; and spread of Black Death, 248–257, 255; and succession struggles, 12–13, 21, 250, 261–273; and withdrawal from Yuan dynasty, 250, 257–261
Andrei II (grand prince), 135
Andrei III (grand prince), 193–194, 199, 227
Andronikos II (Byzantine emperor), 194
Arghun (ilkhan), 196
Arigh Böke (great khan), 146, 148, 159
artwork and artifacts: belt element, 121; buckle, 140; Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane (painting), 279; ceramic bowls, 5, 176; court scene (painting), 235; gerege (tablet), 260; Ghazan Khan seated on his throne with his wife (painting), 216; helmet (drawing), 71; Hülegü chases Berke (painting), 148; Jochid bracelet, 42; metal bowl with dragon handle, 113; Mongol (pottery figure), 4; Mongol archer on horse (drawing), 67; Mongol couple (painting), 101; Mongol execution of captives (painting), 58; Mongol men studying the Quran (painting), 222; Mongol ruler on campaign (painting), 200; Stand on the Ugra River (painting), 301; Tatar conquest of Russia (drawing), 82
Ashraf Musa, al- (Ayyubid prince), 145
assimilation of captives: to achieve economic efficiencies, 107–108; under Chinggis, 57–58, 60; to forge new loyalties, 99–100, 105; from sedentary cultures, 119; separation of family members, 41; supported craftsmen, 119; into tammachi, 80; warriors and tümen system, 38–39, 66
Astrakhan. See Hajji Tarkhan
‘Aynī, al- (Mamluk scholar), 256
Ayyubids, 143, 144, 151
Azaq, 287. See also Tana
Azerbaijan, 151, 213, 215, 261, 285
Baghdad, 153–154, 261
Baiju (Mongol general), 134, 147, 151
Baraq (Chagatayid khan), 173–177, 193
Barbaro, Josafa, 289
Barqūq, al-Zāhir (Mamluk sultan), 284–285
Bashman (Qipchaq chieftain), 77–80
Batu, 140, 160; assimilation of Russians, 137; census-taking by, 132, 135; constructed Sarai, 118–119; death of, 140, 336n2; descendants of, 162–163; established Saraijuq as spiritual site, 117; generosity of, 114; illnesses of, 113; as Jochi’s heir, 76–77, 94; as leader of White Horde, 17–18, 116; led Hungarian campaign, 86–88, 92; led Russian campaign, 80–85, 85, 131; lower Volga residence of, 106–107; Mamluk slave trade, 151; management of pastoral economy and politics, 108–109; marriages of, 124; mother of, 102; organization of keshig, 103, 104, 105; seasonal mobility of horde, 126; supported Alexander Nevsky, 132; territory of, 107, 125, 130; Volga region campaign, 79
Batuids: extinction of, 21, 263; during Pax Mongolica, 164–165; as related to Ordaids, 166–167; territory of, 99, 100
Bayalun (Jochid khatun), 217, 218
Bayan (Ordaid prince), 212
Baya’ud, 38
Baybars (Mamluk sultan), 145, 151–154, 161, 185, 193
Bayezid (Ottoman sultan), 287
beglerbegs, 219, 268, 287, 292, 293
begs: during civil war, 202, 203, 204–205; defection to Toqtamish, 281; Özbek’s reforms to rank of, 219–221; qarachu, 104–105; shift of power toward, 12–13, 20, 140, 165, 266–272, 292, 295. See also anarchy period and beg rule
Béla (king of Hungary), 86–89, 125
Berke, 171; converted to Islam and alliances, 139–140, 153, 159–160; death of, 140, 162, 164; enthronement of, 141; as Jochid leader, 6, 19–20, 102, 127, 138–141; Mamluk alliance, 139, 149–154, 161; and Middle Eastern campaign, 143, 144; succession struggles and conflict with Hülegü, 146–147; territory of, 144; Volga region campaign, 81
Berkecher (Jochid prince), 174–17
5
Besarab (Romanian leader), 224
Bilge Kagan (Gök-Türk ruler), 35, 36
Biran, Michal, 7
Birdibek (Jochid khan), 245, 261–262, 266, 268, 275
Black Death, 21, 248–257, 255
Black Tatars, 223
boats, 127
Böchek (Toluid prince), 79
Bodonchar (Chinggis’s ancestor), 32
bones, symbology of, 79, 223
bo’ol, 32, 37–38, 39, 41, 80
Borjigids, 102
Börte (Chinggis’s wife), 12, 33–34, 65, 102, 199
bubonic plague, 252–253
Buddhism, 27, 217, 308
Bukhara, 54
Bulgar (city), 75, 76, 78, 79, 156–158, 256–257
Bulgaria, 80, 154, 188, 223–224
bulqaq. See anarchy period and beg rule
Büri (Chagatayid prince), 116, 193
burial sites, 116–118, 331n42
Burqan-Qaldun, 116–117
Byzantine Empire, 154, 184–185, 186–187, 189, 192
Caffa, 186, 232, 247–248, 287
Cairo, 153
camp ring-formations, 122–123
census-taking, 132–136
Chagatay: battles in Khwarezmian Empire, 61; battles in northern China, 48; descendants of, 116; as son of Chinggis, 12; territory of, 65; Toluid purge of descendants of, 141; warriors apportioned to, 66
Chagatayids, 8, 250; split into eastern / western polities, 259–260; succession struggles, 212; territory of, 148, 168–169, 221
Cheke (Nogay’s son), 201, 202, 223
The Horde Page 43