The Horde Read online

  The

  Horde

  HOW THE MONGOLS CHANGED THE WORLD

  MARIE FAVEREAU

  THE BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  London, England

  2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Marie Favereau

  All rights reserved

  Cover design: Brianna Harden

  Cover art: © Ton Koene / Alamy

  978-0-674-24421-4 (cloth)

  978-0-674-25998-0 (EPUB)

  978-0-674-25999-7 (PDF)

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Favereau, Marie, 1977– author.

  Title: The Horde : how the Mongols changed the world / Marie Favereau.

  Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020043301

  Subjects: LCSH: Golden Horde—Civilization. | Golden Horde—History. | Civilization, Mongol. | Mongols—History.

  Classification: LCC DS22.7 .F37 2021 | DDC 950/.2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043301

  Contents

  Introduction: A Power of a New Kind

  1    The Resilience of the Felt-Walled Tents

  2    Into the West

  3    New Hordes

  4    The Great Mutation

  5    The Mongol Exchange

  6    The Northern Road

  7    Withdrawal

  8    Younger Brothers

  Epilogue: The Horde’s Mirror

  GLOSSARY

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Note on Transliteration

  This book includes many terms originating in non-English languages. Most of these terms have numerous acceptable English spellings. I have attempted throughout to prioritize both accuracy and legibility.

  Spellings of persons’ names follow well-established English-language forms (e.g., William of Rubruck, Michael Palaiologos). The common spelling of Genghis Khan, however, is given here under its historically correct form of Chinggis Khan, a usage shared by most historians of the Mongol Empire. I use common Europeanized spellings of titles such as caliph and emir. Place names are also given in common anglicized forms when these are available (e.g., Caucasus, Herat). I sometimes reference current geographic terms (e.g., China, Europe) that may appear anachronistic in context; however, these terms are useful for orienting readers and hopefully won’t offend specialists.

  For the spelling of Mongolian terms and names, I largely follow the system employed by Christopher Atwood in Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. These spellings are based on the Uighur-Mongolian script, as pronounced in the Mongolian language of the relevant time period. In some cases, however, I use more common forms (e.g., Hülegü instead of Hüle’ü). And in some cases Mongolian terms are given in their Turkic and Russian forms (e.g., tarkhan, yarlik), in accordance with common usage in the sources and in scholarship.

  Arabic words and names have been transliterated according to the system used in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, except that I omit the dot diacritic (e.g., I use h instead of ḥ). In most cases the transliteration of Persian and Turkic words follows the same simplified system. Russian has been transliterated according to the system of the Library of Congress, without diacritics. For Chinese names I have employed the pinyin system.

  Introduction

  A POWER OF A NEW KIND

  The Horde was neither a conventional empire nor a dynastic state, even less a nation-state. It was a great nomadic regime born from the Mongol expansion of the thirteenth century, an equestrian regime that became so powerful it ruled virtually all of today’s Russia, including western Siberia, for almost three centuries. The Horde was the most enduring regime of all those that descended from the Mongol conquerors. Yet, despite the rich evidence we possess about the Horde, it remains little understood. Far more has been written about the Ilkhanids, the Mongol rulers of the Middle East, and the Yuan, the dynasty inaugurated in China by descendants of Chinggis Khan. The fascinating tale of the Horde remains as though behind a veil.

  This book reveals the Horde’s story, which begins in the East Asian steppe where, in the early thirteenth century, Chinggis Khan united the nomads—Mongols and other steppe peoples—and began building the largest contiguous empire in the world. Chinggis gave four of his sons each his own ulus, his own people, and territory in which to establish themselves. Key to this history is the inheritance of Jochi, Chinggis’s eldest and chief heir. Jochi was entrusted with the conquest of the steppe west of Mongolia, a vast region that reaches its ecological limits in Hungary. Jochi, however, slighted his father, and Chinggis stripped his priority to the throne. The consequences were profound. In the 1240s, after Jochi died, his sons, warriors, and their families moved to the temperate zone between the Volga-Ural region and the Black Sea where they established a new kind of Mongol administration, largely independent of the empire. The Jochid pioneers maintained Mongol practices but would never go back to Mongolia. In less than three decades, a few thousand people became hundreds of thousands, creating a sophisticated social organization able to sustain their own imperial formation. This multitude recognized itself as ulus Jochi and referred to their empire as Orda—the Horde.

  The Horde was a flexible regime, able to adapt to internal changes and external pressures. The Horde was also wealthy and powerful enough to rule its neighbors and secure autonomy from the Mongol center. Jochid leaders recalibrated relations with the other descendants of Chinggis to maintain stability, and they kept control of the cities and trade routes between the Aral and Black seas, securing critical commercial avenues. Indeed, the Horde dominated Eurasian continental trade and, in the process, shaped the trajectories of Russia and Central Asia until the sixteenth century.

  Historians know this mighty and influential regime as the Golden Horde or the Qipchaq Khanate, a reference to the Qipchaq people, prior inhabitants of the lands the Horde took over. These scholars increasingly have recognized the Horde’s historical significance and yet rarely have attempted fully to explain it. This book seeks to examine the Horde on its own terms, to grasp how this regime emerged, developed over the centuries, adjusting and transforming while keeping its nomadic character. Importantly, we need to put native concepts, such as ulus, sarai (sedentary cities the nomads built, including a major one called simply Sarai), khan (ruler), and beg (nomadic leaders) front and center to explain the Horde from within.

  This book not only captures the obscured social and political nature of the Horde, it also reconsiders the Horde’s legacy—its impact on global history. In the second half of the thirteenth century, economic exchange intensified, integrating almost all of Eurasia. Today most historians have accepted the notion of a Mongol world empire, coalescing in one economic system the main subsystems of the Eurasian landmass, roughly divided into East Asia, the Islamic world, the Slavic world, and Europe.1 Under Mongol domination, faraway regions of the globe came into contact more than superficially and, for at least a century spanning the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s, these regions were linked in a common network of exchange and production. For the first time, people and caravans could travel safely from Italy to China.

  Historians used to call this unprecedented commercial boom Pax Mongolica, the Mongol Peace, in reference to the post-conquest stability of the Mongol dominions and the far-flung exchange that stability enabled. Yet, as recent scholarship notes, relations among the descendants of Chinggis Khan were not peaceful. Nor was there peace, exactly, between the Mongols and the peoples they con
quered. The notion of peace here should be understood more clearly as conquered peoples’ acceptance of Mongol domination. But we need not discard the concept just because the word “peace” is not entirely appropriate. Here I reexamine the Pax Mongolica as the Mongol exchange: a macro-historical phenomenon on par with such world-shaping phenomena as the Trans-Saharan trade or the Columbian exchange. Understood as the Mongol exchange, the global moment created by Chinggis Khan’s successors comes into focus.2

  The Mongol exchange is a monumental shift that facilitated the flourishing of art, the development of skilled crafts, and the progress of research in various areas such as botany, medicine, astronomy, measurement systems, and historiography. The increased production and circulation of manufactured objects, often driven by Mongol leaders themselves, is another major effect of this world phenomenon. Ceramics, manuscripts, textiles, music, poetry, weapons: the Mongols wanted everything to be produced and distributed inside their territories. The Mongols also imported goods and enacted policies to attract traders. The khans valued merchants, granting them lofty distinctions, legal privileges, and tax exemptions. Nomads invested in travel equipment, weaponry, and fashionable clothing, and they craved furs, leather, and imported luxury fabrics made of silk and cotton. The steppe had its understood social markers, some of which necessitated manufacture and trade: carrying expensive weapons indicated status; so did wearing jewels, belts, hats, fine robes, and leather boots. High-ranking women had a distinctive way of dressing and wore a conical headdress (ku-ku or boqta) as a widely recognized symbol of their status. The “Mongol fashion” made an impression on foreign travelers, who noted that many people, even Europeans, wanted to look like them.

  Pottery figure of a Mongol man (China, fourteenth century). Mongol herders, male and female, wore a deel, a large overcoat made from cotton, silk, or wool. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Gift of Elizabeth V. Cockcroft, by exchange, 2008)

  In some senses, manufactured objects were luxuries for the nomads, yet the nomads were not frivolous. Luxuries were vital to the Mongol political economy. Long-distance exchange and circulation of manufactured goods were not essential to subsistence, yet they were the backbone of the social order. Mongol economics relied on the circulation of these goods, in particular their redistribution from the khan to the elites to the commoners, a system that simultaneously reinforced social rank, created bonds of dependence, and gave even the least in society a reason to feel invested in the success of the regime. Steppe nomads further understood circulation as a spiritual necessity. Sharing wealth mollified the spirits of the dead, the sky, and the earth.

  Across Eurasia, the Mongols enjoyed clear hegemony over the circulation of goods from the mid-thirteenth until the mid-fourteenth century, and while some of the Mongol regimes faltered in this period, the Horde continued to facilitate long-distance trade. The Mongols built dense economic connections from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea to China. This was due in part to their integrative policies: the Mongols welcomed new subjects into their societies, regardless of those subjects’ origins, religions, and ways of life. Even freshly defeated enemies were brought into the fold. The Mongols shrewdly combined state power—over treaties, currency issuance, taxation, supervision of roads—with liberal exchange policies. Although tributes were a key source of revenue, the Mongols provided tax exemptions in order to encourage commerce. And the Mongols approached partnerships fluidly, making alliances on the basis of common interest rather ethnic or religious affiliation—although they exploited such affiliations as well. In the 1260s the Jochid elite even converted en masse to Islam in order to win powerful friends and trading partners in Muslim-ruled lands. Berke Khan, the Jochid leader at the time, did not lack true religious conviction, but nor were he and his top advisors blind to the realpolitik benefits of their decision and nor did they scorn non-Muslim partners.

  Illustration of a bowl with an image of a panther (Horde, fourteenth century). Big cats were symbols of rule; khans collected them for prestige and for hunting.

  The Jochid conversion solidified links between Mongol imperialism and Mamluk Egypt, one of many relationships that made the Mongol exchange a global phenomenon. The Jochids also established trading relationships with Russians, Germans, Genoese, Venetians, Byzantines, and Greeks, and their trade network at times could reach as far as Flanders. In truth, the Columbian exchange should be seen in part as a legacy of the Mongol exchange, as historians have established that Christopher Columbus was looking for a quicker, safer route to India, possibly after he had heard of Marco Polo’s travels to the Mongol imperial center in the Far East.3 The Mongol exchange, on this view, is not really a historical turning point from the medieval to the modern, although the Pax Mongolica tends to be perceived this way. Rather, the Mongol exchange transcends the separation between medieval and modern. The Mongol exchange bridges the gap between the ancient world’s Silk Road and the modern world’s Age of Exploration, transforming our historical perception of both.4

  We must distinguish between the Mongol exchange and the Mongol Empire, as they are not the same thing. Certainly it is important to note their mutual influence: how they produced each other, how they interacted with each another, and how they finally parted ways, as the dynamics and effects of the Mongol exchange lasted long after the collapse of the empire. One of the remarkable dimensions of the interaction between empire and exchange is that the empire did not disrupt the exchange. The Mongols interfered with the economic organization of their subjects and projected their power farther than any other imperial formations of their time. Yet the Mongols understood that control over craft production, currency, traders, harvests, and crops had to be flexible and supple, and respectful of the practices and traditions of dominated peoples. Thus, for instance, when Mongols conquered new territories, they usually minted coins that were familiar to the locals and were easily accepted in existing circuits of exchange. Furthermore, the Mongols did not try to extract value from subjects no matter the cost to the subjects—that is, the Mongols did not enslave their subjects and work them to death, as much later colonial regimes in the Atlantic world did. Rather, the goal of Mongol imperial oversight and intervention was to motivate and empower subjects to produce and trade across the empire, thereby enriching their Mongol overlords. Why was there no clash between globalization and empire building during the height of Mongol domination? This is a phenomenon that needs explaining, and I believe the explanation lies in the unique imperial policies of the Mongols.

  Over the past several decades, scholarship on the Mongols has developed tremendously. Thomas Allsen’s work is especially important.5 He was the first to demonstrate that the Mongol Empire must be understood as an integrative system beyond the regional divisions—the Chinese territory, the Middle Eastern territory, the Qipchaq steppe, and so on—that formed in the wake of Chinggis Khan. Drawing on Allsen’s work, a new generation of historians has reinterpreted the history and legacy of the empire. Masterfully conducted by Michal Biran, Nicola Di Cosmo, Peter Jackson, Hodong Kim, Timothy May, David Morgan, and others, new research demonstrates that a holistic view is necessary to understanding the functioning of the Mongol Empire.6 What happened in Qaraqorum, the Mongol imperial capital, resonated deeply in Sarai, the Jochid capital on the lower Volga River. (Readers should not be misled by terms such as “capital.” These cities were built and favored by the khans, but the khans did not live in them except during annual festivals and on other special occasions. As I detail throughout the book, khans lived on the road, migrating with their people and herds.)

  Scholars have begun to sweep away old stereotypes of marauding plunderers showing instead that the Mongol Empire was a complex political, social, and economic entity resembling a federation or a commonwealth. Our challenge now is to combine the bird’s-eye view with a microhistory perspective of Mongol Eurasia. The idea of global microhistory is to connect the local and world registers, in order to deepen our understanding of both. The small scale, the v
oices of individual people and the scenes of their lives, provides details that inform worldwide history. The voices of individual people may be hard to track down, especially from early periods. But the task is not impossible, especially when the voices are those of the Horde—a well-documented case, if not one that has otherwise received comprehensive treatment.7

  Holism has shown us that the Chinggisid empire was full of mutual influences, as its various portions shaped each other. But that does not mean the empire was a monolith. Its diversity emerges in microhistorical accounting. The empire fostered several enduring nomadic regimes led by the Jochids, Chagatayids, Ögödeids, and Toluids, named for four sons of Chinggis Khan. Each of these regimes deserves to be studied separately, in detail. This study focuses on the Jochid regime—the Horde—illuminating its particular implementations of and departures from Mongol styles of rule and examining the longstanding effects of Jochid policies on global history.

  While scholars have recognized that nomads could create complex political structures, scholars also have yet to fully grasp the nomads’ level of agency in the Mongol exchange, in particular the Horde’s impact on Eurasian geopolitics. Large questions remain. In what ways did the Mongols, the Horde in particular, shape the world around it? How were the Horde and other Mongols shaped by their encounter with the outside world? How did Mongol rulers adapt their inherited traditions of governance without losing their nomadic and historically anchored identities?

  * * *

  The Horde transformed as the world around it changed. As such, the Horde was also a product of the Mongol exchange. This raises the question of the weight of the Horde’s agency on the global system, especially on the so-called peripheries of northern Eurasia and Siberia. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the Mongol integrative system lies in the rise of northern Eurasia, specifically Russia. The political and economic development of the Russian principalities under the Horde’s domination also enabled the Horde to grow out of the Mongol matrix. Russian vassalage was a relationship that influenced both partners—the Russians and the Jochids—decisively.