Golden Horde

Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis, turned the western inheritance of the Mongol Empire into the Golden Horde around 1242, after the campaigns that burned Kyiv in 1240. From a capital at Sarai on the lower Volga he ran the Eurasian steppe from the Carpathians to Siberia and bound the Russian principalities into a system of tribute. Russian princes travelled to Sarai for the patent to rule, collected taxes for the khan, and paid for two centuries. Tatar punitive raids enforced the arrangement; the worst struck in 1252, 1293, and 1382, when Tokhtamysh sacked and burned Moscow to reassert the Horde’s hold. Under Öz Beg Khan (r. 1313–1341) the Horde made Islam its state religion, and Sarai grew into one of the larger cities of the medieval world.

The collapse ran through war and partition. In 1395 the conqueror Timur stormed the Horde, sacked Sarai, and broke its army; the economy never recovered. Through the 15th century the khanate fell apart along its own seams — Crimea split off in 1430, Kazan in 1436, Astrakhan in 1462 — each a separate khanate with its own khan. The Great Stand on the Ugra in 1480 ended Moscow’s tribute payments. The rump that called itself the Great Horde lasted until 1502, when Mengli Giray’s Crimean Tatars sacked Sarai, defeated the last khan Sheikh Ahmed, and ended it. Moscow did not defeat the Horde so much as outlive it: the principality that once carried tribute to Sarai went on to swallow Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, absorbing the heirs of the khanate that had taxed it. The Horde’s successors were conquered one by one, and the Horde itself was gone.