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The southwest. The Mongol period. The Mongol invasion. Tatar rule
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The southwest
The lands of Galicia and Volhynia were always ethnically and economically distinct from the Kievan region proper, as well as from more distant regions. Agriculture was highly developed, and trade, particularly in the valuable local salt, tended to take westward and overland routes. Galicia, already a separate principality by 1100, grew as Kiev declined. Later, Roman Mstislavich of Volhynia (ruled 1199–1205) conquered Galicia and united the two principalities. Under his son Daniel (Daniel Romanovich) (1201–64), difficulties with the Galician landed magnates and the interference of the Hungarians weakened the principality, and it was subjugated in 1240 by the Mongol invasion. Eventually this region came under the domination of Lithuania (Volhynia) and Poland (Galicia).
The Mongol period
The Mongol invasion
In 1223, when the first Mongol reconnaissance into former Kievan territory led to the disastrous defeat of a Volhynian-Galician-Polovtsian army on the Kalka River, the Rurikid principalities had for generations been intermittently at war. Kiev was in ruins, Novgorod was preoccupied with commerce and with its northern neighbours, Galicia was being torn internally and drawn increasingly into Polish and Hungarian dynastic affairs, and Vladimir-Suzdal (Suzdal), apparently the leading principality, was unable to resist the finely organized and skillful mounted bowmen of the steppe, the greatest military force of the age.
Pious tradition, born of the works of monkish annalists and court panegyrists, has exaggerated both the destructiveness of the first Mongol conquests and the strength of the resistance. The Mongols aimed to revive, under a unified political system, the trade that had traditionally crossed the Central Asian steppe and vitalized the economy of the pastoral nomads. As they moved westward, they gained the collaboration of groups of Turkic nomads and the predominantly Iranian and Muslim traders in the towns of the old Silk Road; they encountered the greatest resistance in sedentary political centres and among landowning elites. The lands of the Rus presented numerous similarities with the Central Asian areas that the Mongols had already conquered. There too, a former commercial empire had fallen apart into an aggregation of warring principalities. There too, ready recruits were to be found—in the Polovtsians, who controlled the lower Dnieper and Volga and Don, and in the Muslim merchants, who dealt in the towns of the Crimea (Crimean Peninsula) and the upper Volga. These merchants showed the way, first (1223) to the Crimea and up the Volga to the old centre of Bulgar (Bolgary), later to Ryazan, Rostov, and the Suzdalian towns, and still later (1240) to Kiev and Galicia.
Many of the conquered cities made a striking recovery and adjustment to the new relationships. Some towns, such as Kiev, never fully recovered in Mongol times, but the cities of the Vladimir-Suzdal region clearly prospered. New centres, such as Moscow and Tver, hardly mentioned in any source before the Mongol period, arose and flourished in Mongol times.
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Thus, the Mongol invasion was not everywhere a catastrophe. The local princely dynasties continued unchanged in their traditional seats; some princes resisted the new authority and were killed in battle, but no alien princes ever became established in Slavic territory. Few Mongols remained west of the Urals after the conquest; political and fiscal administration was entrusted to the same Turkic clan leaders and Islamic merchants who had for generations operated in the area. The whole of the Novgorodian north remained outside the sphere of direct Tatar control, although the perspicacious burghers maintained correct relations with the khans.
Tatar rule
After a brief attempt to revive the ancient centres of Bulgar and the Crimea, the Jucids (the family of J& #246; chi, son of Genghis Khan, who inherited the western portion of his empire) established a new capital, Itil. (It was moved to New Sarai, near the site of Tsaritsyn, modern Volgograd, about 1260. ) These towns became the commercial and administrative centres of what was later to be called the “ Golden Horde” (the term is probably a Western invention). Its East Slavic territories were tributaries of an extensive empire, including, at its height, the Crimea, the Polovtsian steppe from the Danube to the Ural River, the former territories of the Bulgar empire (including the fur-rich Mordvinian forests and parts of western Siberia), and in Asia the former kingdom of Khw& #257; rezm, including Urgench, the cultural capital of the Jucids. Control of the Slavic lands was exercised through the native princes, some of whom spent much of their time at the Mongol capital, and through agents charged with overseeing the activities of the princes and particularly the fiscal levies.
This multinational commercial empire was unstable. Early in the history of the Golden Horde, the khans of Sarai, who tended to reflect the interests of the Volga tribes, were challenged by the tribal princes of the west, whose control of the Danube, Bug, and Dnieper routes and of the access to the Crimea gave them considerable political and economic power. As early as 1260, Nokhai, one of these western chieftains, showed his independence of Sarai by establishing his own foreign policy, and toward the end of the 13th century he seized control of Sarai itself. At his death the eastern tribes reestablished their control in Sarai, but, in the reign of the great & #214; z Beg (1313–41), the high point of Golden Horde power, the west was again ascendant. & #214; z Beg based his power upon firm control of the Crimea and had extensive relations with the Genoese and Venetians, who controlled the main ports there. After the death of & #214; z Beg's son Jani Beg in 1357, however, the empire began to reveal serious internal strains. The tribes of the west paid little heed to the khans who appeared in dizzying succession in Sarai; the northern Russian princes fell to quarreling and to maneuvering for their own advantage in the internecine politics of the Golden Horde; the Volga Bulgar region was detached by a dissident Tatar prince; and the lands of the east were drawn into the orbit of the Turkic conqueror Timur(Tamerlane).
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The Golden Horde's last cycle of integration and dismemberment was closely linked with events in Timur's domains. Tokhtamysh, son of a minor Tatar prince, had been unsuccessfully involved in the skirmishes around the throne of Sarai in the 1370s and had fled to the court of Timur, with whose aid he returned to Sarai and vanquished the tribal leaders who had opposed him. Having defeated and made peace with them, he now turned to defeat Mamai (1381), who had the previous year been defeated by Prince Dmitry Donskoy (Dmitry (II) Donskoy) (grand prince of Moscow, 1359–89). Mamai's western tribal allies went over to Tokhtamysh, and, for a brief time, the major components of the tribal structure of the Golden Horde were reunited. Tokhtamysh successfully attacked Moscow (just as Mamai had hoped to do) and set about consolidating his gains. As his power grew, however, Tokhtamysh was drawn into a struggle with Timur, who had conquered much of Iran, the south Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia. After a number of encounters in the northern Caucasus, Timur, who apparently was intent upon diversion of east-west trade through his own Transoxanian and north Iranian territories, set out to destroy Tokhtamysh and the latter's commercial centres. In 1395–96 Timur's armies systematically annihilated Sarai, Azov, and Kaffa. The Golden Horde never recovered; its subsequent history is a record of struggles among its erstwhile subjects for supremacy and attempts to restore political and commercial stability to the steppe.
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