Batu Khan

• 1. Introduction

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  Batu Khan once raised a cup of wine before anyone else at a victory banquet, and his own cousins turned on him. Buri complained that Batu had been handed too vast and fertile a steppe. The Mongol army, with Guyuk among them, mocked their leader as an old woman with a beard, then walked out. This was a man who had directed the burning of cities across the Rus' lands, a grandson of Genghis Khan, and a ruler whose followers feared him even as he treated his own people kindly. Batu Khan lived from roughly 1205 to 1255 and founded the Golden Horde, a part of the Mongol Empire that took shape after Genghis Khan's death. So how did a son of Jochi come to command an army aimed at Europe, why did he turn down the chance to become Great Khan himself, and what made his line outlast every other Mongol khanate? The answers run from a reddish-spotted face described by a traveling friar to a kurultai of questionable validity.

• 2. The Friar's Portrait

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  Giovanni da Pian del Carpine left one of the sharpest descriptions of Batu, calling him kind enough to his own people, but greatly feared by them. The same account judged him most cruel in fight, very shrewd, and extremely crafty in warfare, for he had been waging war for a long time. These were not the words of an admirer but of an envoy who had crossed the Mongol world to see the man for himself. William of Rubruck added a stranger physical detail. He compared Batu's height to that of his lord John de Beaumont and noted that the khan's entire face was covered with reddish spots. Batu also carried a nickname, written as сайн, the name by which Marco Polo later referred to him. The portraits agree on one thing: people who met him remembered both his menace and his cunning. Carpini would later be the one who got Batu's approval to travel further into the empire, where he noted that the Great Khan's aunt was executed.

• 3. An Inherited Ulus

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  After Jochi died, Genghis Khan parceled out his son's appanages among Jochi's own sons and installed Batu as Khan of the Golden Horde, also called the Ulus of Jochi or the Kipchak Khanate. Jochi's eldest son, Orda Khan, agreed that Batu should succeed their father, and Genghis Khan's youngest brother Temuge attended the coronation as the official representative of Genghis. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, he left 4,000 Mongol men to Jochi's family. The inheritance was then split. Orda's White Horde took the lands roughly between the Volga river and Lake Balkhash, while Batu's Golden Horde took the lands west of the Volga. Batu did not sit idle in his new territory. In 1229, Ogedei sent three tumens under Kukhdei, Sundei, and Humpdei to subdue the tribes on the lower Ural River. According to Abulghazi, Batu joined Ogedei's campaign against the Jin dynasty in North China while his younger brother fought the Bashkirs, the Cumans, the Bulghars, and the Alans in the west. The Mongols took major Jurchen cities and turned the Bashkirs into allies. In the 1230s, Ogedei handed Batu and the family of Jochi lands in Shanxi, though their officials worked under an Imperial governor, as they also did in Khorasan.

• 4. The Sack Of The Rus

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  In 1235, after the Mongol-Jin war ended, the Great Khan Ogedei ordered Batu to conquer the western nations and assigned him an army of possibly 130,000 to invade Europe. Batu, who had earlier directed the conquest of the Crimean Peninsula, was joined by his relatives Guyuk, Buri, Mongke, Khulgen, Khadan, Baidar, and by generals including Subutai, Borolday, and Mengguser. The army was actually commanded by Subutai. It crossed the Volga and invaded Volga Bulgaria in 1236, and it took a full year to crush the Volga Bulgarians, Kypchaks, and Alani. In November 1237, Batu sent envoys to Yuri II of Vladimir-Suzdal demanding his allegiance, and when Yuri refused, the Mongols besieged Ryazan. Six days of bloody battle left the city annihilated, never restored to its former glory. After burning Kolomna and Moscow, the horde laid siege to the capital of Vladimir-Suzdal on the 4th of February 1238, and three days later took and burned it, with the royal family perishing in the fire. The grand prince fled north, raised a fresh army, and saw it exterminated on the Sit' River on the 4th of March. Batu then split his force to ransack fourteen Rus' cities, among them Rostov, Yaroslavl, Tver, and Torzhok. The hardest to take was the small town of Kozelsk, whose boy-prince Titus and inhabitants held out for seven weeks. Legend held that the city of Kitezh sank into a lake with all its people at the news of the Mongol approach. Only Smolensk, which submitted and paid tribute, and distant Novgorod with Pskov, shielded by marshlands, escaped destruction. In December 1240 the Mongols stormed Kiev, and despite fierce resistance by Danylo of Halych, Batu took Halych and Volodymyr, turning the Ruthenian principalities into vassals of the Mongol Empire.

• 5. Into The Heart Of Europe

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  Cuman refugees fled into the Kingdom of Hungary, and Batu sent at least five messengers to King Bela IV, all of whom were killed. His final demand carried a threat that those who dwell in houses and have fixed towns and fortresses cannot escape, unlike the Cumans. Batu then resolved to reach the ultimate sea, the point beyond which the Mongols could go no further. Historians still debate his aim, some arguing he wanted only to secure his flanks against European interference, most believing he intended to conquer all of Europe once his forces were ready. Subutai and Batu sent spies into Poland, Hungary, and as far as Austria before striking in three groups. One group devastated Poland and defeated a combined force under Henry II the Pious, Duke of Silesia, and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order at Legnica. A second crossed the Carpathian Mountains and a third followed the Danube, sweeping the Hungarian plains and pushing into Austria and Dalmatia by the spring of 1242. Subutai, the actual field commander, waited on the Hungarian plain for victory over the Magyars, the Croats, and the Templars. In 1241 a Tatar army led by Bujek crossed the mountains of the Kara Ulagh, defeated the Vlachs and a leader named Mislav, then was beaten by Ivan Asen II of the Second Bulgarian Empire. After the siege of Pest, Batu's army withdrew to the Sajo River and crushed Bela IV at the Battle of Mohi on the 11th of April. The Mongols appointed a darughachi in Hungary and minted coins in the name of the Khagan, while Batu sent Khadan after Bela, who fled to Croatia.

• 6. The Death That Halted A Conquest

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  Batu once demanded that Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, dethrone himself, declaring that he was coming to usurp the throne. Frederick replied only that he would make a good falconer, for he understood birds very well. The Emperor and Pope Gregory IX called for a crusade against the Mongol Empire, but Europe was too consumed by internal strife to answer. By late 1241, Batu and Subutai were finalizing plans to invade Austria, Italy, and Germany. Then word arrived that Ogedei Khan had died in December 1241. Batu wished to press on, but Subutai reminded him of the law of Yassa, and the Mongols withdrew in the late spring of 1242. The Princes of the Blood, and Subutai, were recalled to Karakorum, where the kurultai would be held. Batu stood as a potential Great Khan, yet when the title slipped from his grasp he turned instead to consolidating his conquests in Asia and the Urals.

• 7. Viceroy And Rival

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  Withdrawing from Hungary, Batu pitched his camps along the banks of the Volga and began to wield power as the western empire's overseer. When the Great Khatun Toregene invited him to help elect the next emperor, he pleaded an inability to attend any immediate kurultai, stalling the succession for years. Guyuk was finally elected Khagan in 1246, with Batu's brothers representing the Jochid line, and Batu became viceroy over the western parts of the empire. He managed routine affairs among the Rus' princes, nominated Jochid retainers as governors of Iran, and received grandees from the Caucasus, yet never openly challenged the Great Khan's authority. His grip on the Rus' princes was severe. Yaroslav II of Vladimir was confirmed as suzerain and given authority over Kiev, then sent to Karakorum for Guyuk's inauguration in 1246, where he was poisoned. Michael of Chernigov, who had murdered a Mongol envoy in Kiev, was ordered to pass between two fires and prostrate himself before the tablets of Genghis Khan; when he refused to adore the images of a dead man, Batu had him killed. Danylo of Halych, summoned to Sarai, submitted at last and heard Batu say that he had effaced his ill conduct by his obedience, sealed with a draught of airag and an exchange of hostages that resettled 100 families of Keraites in Carpathian-Galicia. Suspicion between Batu and Guyuk only grew. Sorghaghtani Beki, the widow of Tolui, warned Batu that he was the Great Khan's real target, and when Guyuk summoned him, Batu moved slowly. Guyuk died suddenly before they met, and by some accounts one of Batu's brothers poisoned the Great Khan, though the story is not fully confirmed.

• 8. The Kingmaker

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  When Batu fell ill, Mongke Khan came to the Ulus of Jochi to greet him on the advice of his mother Sorghagtani, and Batu was much delighted to see him. That bond shaped the next succession. In 1250, Batu called a kurultai on his own territory, but the Ogedeid and Chagataid families refused to attend beyond the Mongolian heartland. When the gathering offered him the throne, Batu rejected it and nominated Mongke, who had led Mongol armies in Rus', the Northern Caucasus, and Hungary. He then sent Mongke under the protection of his brothers Berke and Tukhtemur and his son Sartaq to assemble a formal kurultai at Kodoe Aral. The Ogedeid and Chagataid princes refused every invitation, insisting a descendant of Ogedei must be khan, and Batu accused them of killing his aunt Altalaun and defying Ogedei's nominee, Shiremun. After Mongke was proclaimed Great Khan in 1251, he punished the plotters, and Batu had Buri executed by Buri's own opponent general. Batu's reach extended deep into Rus' politics. When Grand prince Andrey II of Vladimir allied with rebellious western princes, Batu sent a punitive expedition under Nevrui, and Andrey fled to Pskov and then to Sweden. Thanks to his friendship with Sartaq, Alexander was installed as grand prince of Vladimir by Batu in 1252. Andrey returned to Sarai in 1256 to beg pardon and was shown mercy. At the height of his standing under Mongke, Batu had free access to the imperial treasury, and he and Mongke seemed the most capable and law-abiding of all Genghis Khan's grandsons.

  Batu stood about five feet seven inches tall, roughly 1.70 meters, and had at least four children: Sartaq, Toqoqan, Andewan, and Ulagchi. His mother Ukhaa ujin belonged to the Mongol Onggirat clan, while his chief khatun Boraqchin was an Alchi-Tatar and the mother of Sartaq. Before his death in 1255, Batu left the affairs of state to Sartaq, who became khan of the Golden Horde from 1255 to 1256. When both Batu and Sartaq died, a brief regency by Boraqchin held the throne for Ulagchi, and then Batu's brother Berke inherited the Golden Horde. Berke had no taste for unity with his cousins. He made war on Hulagu Khan while still officially recognizing Mongke as overlord, and he demanded the submission of Hungarian King Bela IV and sent his general Borolday into Lithuania and Poland. The name itself carried meaning. The Kipchak Khanate was known in Rus' and Europe as the Golden Horde, or Zolotaya Orda, some say for the golden color of the khan's tent, with horde drawn from the Mongol orda or camp and golden carrying a sense close to royal. Of all the khanates, this one ruled longest. Long after the Yuan dynasty was driven from China and the Ilkhanate fell in the Middle East, the descendants of Batu Khan still held the steppes of what is now Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, ruling the Jochid Ulus until 1360, a full century after Berke died in 1264.