Seed: “From the 12th century she [Russia] had been given a more distinctive cultural and institutional shape by her origins and the historical forces playing on her. One was her exposure to the Mongols…With Byzantium in decline and the Germans and Swedes on their backs, Muscovy was for centuries to pay tribute to them and their successors, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, another historical experience sundering Russia from the west, shaping its political culture.”
“Tatar domination had its greatest impact in the southern Russian principalities… they had to pay regular tribute to the Tatars in cash, slaves, recruits, and labor… Their emissaries had to go to the Tatar capital at Sarai on the Volga to make arrangements with their conquerers. It was a time of dislocation and confusion and the struggle to survive favored able despots. Muscovy’s princes enjoyed Tatar favor because they were effective tax gatherers… Harassed though it continued also to be by German and Lithuanians, Muscovy hung on, exploiting, when it could, the divisions within the Golden Horde.”
Query: Where did they come from? Where did they go?
They were the Tatar Rome to the Mongol’s Constantinople. They were the western branch of the empire. “Golden” is for the color of the khan’s yurt. “Horde” is an innocent enough term sourced from the Turkish “ordu”, meaning a camp or fief. An inverse of the Roman Empire’s dynamics, the Horde of the west outlasted the Empire of the Great Khan in the east. The Horde had been founded in Russia by a grandson of Ghenghis Khan, and the ruled the land for 250 years.
They were able to rule by fear for as long as they did, giving little in return, because their rule was indirect. The used local princes to keep order and exercise authority so long as the prince was paying his tribute on time. If an area started getting fussy they simply raided it or threatened to raid it.
But where did they go? They were ground down and scattered like ash over time. By the 1440s they were fragmented into several petty khanates. Over time they lost their sense of identity and slowly blended with whatever local people surrounded them. The Mongol language was chipped away and supplanted with Arabic and Tatar. Political fragmentation increased rapidly once the common tongue was lost. The power and reach of the Khans declined as a new state rose in central Russia.
The final nails were hammered mostly by two of the Greats, Ivan III and Catherine. Ivan threw the Horde out in 1480. Catherine finished them off by annexing their last tottering stronghold in Crimea in 1783. By then all trace of Mongol culture was gone from them, what was left were the Tatars. There is a very goofy conspiracy out there concerning a mass cover-up of the existence of the glittering utopian Empire of Tataria that reaches all the way into Red Russia and the World’s Fair.
The Normal Times 