Golden Horde
The Golden Horde lived in tents whose color may have given the state its name. According to one account, the appellation Golden came from the golden hue of the tents the Mongols used in wartime. Another points to an actual golden tent used by Batu Khan or Ozbeg Khan, and a third simply to the riches of the khan. Gold also denoted imperial status, while other colors referred to directions.
For a state so named, the term is curiously young. It was not until the 16th century that Russian chroniclers began explicitly using Zolotaya Orda for this particular successor of the Mongol Empire. The first known use came in 1565, in a chronicle called the History of Kazan, applied to the ulus of Batu centered on Sarai. In its own day the realm answered to other words: Ulus of Jochi, Dasht-i-Qipchaq, the Qipchaq Khanate.
How did a khanate that began as the farthest, least-fixed corner of a divided empire grow to span the land from Siberia to the Danube? How did a Mongol court become Turkic and Muslim, and why did Moscow, once a tribute-payer, end the so-called Tatar yoke at a river in 1480? The answers run through banquets, plagues, and a war between brothers' descendants.
Zolotaya Orda is a partial calque of a Turkic term, Altan Orda. In that process Zolotaya was translated as Golden, while Orda was transliterated as Horde. The Russians took Orda from ordo, the word the Mongols used for a mobile camp, and applied it to the seat of the khan. The English word horde, meaning a large and often threatening group, came later, stretched metaphorically from the reputation of the Mongol hordes.
The Volga-Ural region wore many names across the centuries. It was called Orda, Zolotaya Orda, and Bolshaya Orda, the Great Horde, alongside Jochid Ulus, named after Jochi. In the earliest Russian chronicles that mention the state, it had no official name at all, and writers reached for expressions such as Tatars.
The wings of the realm carried their own contested labels. The eastern or left wing was called the Blue Horde in Russian chronicles and the White Horde in Timurid sources such as the Zafar-Nameh. Western scholars tended to follow the Timurid usage. But Otemish Hajji, a historian of Khwarazm active around 1550, called the left wing the Blue Horde, and he knew the khanate's oral traditions. Tellingly, the designations Golden, Blue, and White Horde have not been found in any source from the Mongol period itself.
Genghis Khan divided his empire among four sons, and Jochi received the lands around the Irtysh River. As the eldest, by Mongol custom, he was given the territory farthest from his father's native land. Jochi died before he could expand it much, and Batu Khan became his primary heir, while Jochi's eldest son Orda founded a separate power in the east.
In 1229, at Ogodei's enthronement, the kurultai resolved to subdue the Kipchaks, and Batu drew the western campaign. In 1235 he set out with the great general Subutai, taking the Bashkirs' land and then Volga Bulgaria in 1236. Ryazan was the first Russian principality to fall, in December 1237. The Mongols gave up on Novgorod because of muddy terrain and resistance, and scorched-earth tactics pushed them south toward the Dnieper. Kiev was sacked in the winter of 1240-1241.
By March 1241 Batu and Subutai had crossed the Dnieper and turned toward Hungary. That spring, German, Polish, and Hungarian forces lost at Legnica and Mohi. In January or February 1242 the Mongols crossed the Danube into Austria and Dalmatia, chasing Bela IV of Hungary. Then in March they halted, having learned of Ogodei's death the previous December, and Subutai ordered a full withdrawal. On the way back they destroyed Pest, and relations between Batu and Subutai grew increasingly strained.
Batu chose not to return to Mongolia. He resented the authority of the Ogodeids and instead consolidated his horde, settling at a new residence on the lower Volga. The site sat at a crossroads of land and water routes. Its distance from the Dnieper, where Lithuanians raided, and from the Caucasus, where Alans and Circassians hid in the mountains, made it safe. Trade and a growing pastoral economy swelled both the population and the number of tents.
The senior princes of Rus acknowledged Batu's supremacy, among them Yaroslav II of Vladimir, Daniel of Galicia, and Sviatoslav III of Vladimir. Daniel visited Batu in 1245 and pledged allegiance, and afterward equipped his army in the Mongol fashion, his horsemen in Mongol-style cuirasses, their mounts armored at shoulder, chest, and head. Michael of Chernigov, who had killed a Mongol envoy in 1240, refused obeisance and was executed in 1246.
Written Mongol survives poorly from the Horde's territory, perhaps because of general illiteracy. According to Grigor'ev, the yarliq, the decrees of the khans, were written in Mongol and then translated into Cuman. Arabic-Mongol and Persian-Mongol dictionaries from the middle of the 14th century, made for the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate, point to a real need in the chancelleries that handled correspondence with the Golden Horde. Letters received by the Mamluks, if not also written by them, must have been in Mongol.
When Mongke succeeded as Great Khan in 1251, he did so with Batu's assistance, and Batu became the most influential person in the empire. Their friendship held the realm together, and the two shared rule with other princely lines over lands stretching from Afghanistan to Turkey. Batu let Mongke's census-takers operate freely. In 1257 Mongke appointed a chief darughachi for the Volga region, with counters known in Russian sources as chislenitsi.
The count reached Crimea, the Caucasus, the Kipchak steppe, and possibly southern Siberia, but the far northwest waited. Novgorod was not counted until the winter of 1258-1259, and an uprising broke out there against the census. Alexander Nevsky mediated between the Mongols and the city, and afterward the nobles oversaw tax collection directly. Andrey II, who refused to submit to Batu, faced a punitive expedition under Nevruy that drove him to Novgorod, then Pskov, then Sweden.
Batu died in 1256, and the succession turned grim. His son Sartaq, named by Mongke, died as soon as he returned from Mongolia. The infant Ulaghchi followed under the regency of Boragchin Khatun, Batu's widow, and died after a few months. Boragchin turned to Hulegu for protection, but Batu's younger brother Berke accused her of high treason and had her executed. Berke, a convert to Islam, was enthroned in 1257 or 1258.
Berke was a devoted Muslim with a close relationship to the Abbasid Caliph Al-Musta'sim, whom Hulagu killed in 1258. The Jochids believed Hulagu's state had erased their presence in the Transcaucasus. Earlier, the Horde had sent a large delegation to join Hulagu's Middle Eastern expedition in 1256-1257, but one Jochid prince was accused of witchcraft against Hulagu and executed with Berke's permission, and two more died suspiciously. Some Muslim sources add that Hulagu refused to share his war booty.
War broke out in 1262. Golden Horde contingents in Hulagu's army fled, one reaching the Kipchak steppe, another crossing Khorasan, and a third finding refuge in Mamluk Syria, well received by Sultan Baybars. Berke forged an alliance with the Mamluks and sent the young prince Nogai against the Ilkhanate. The Ilkhanid army crossed the Terek River and seized an empty Jochid camp, only to be routed by Nogai. Many drowned as the ice broke on the frozen Terek.
Nogai's reach extended into the Balkans. With help from the Kingdom of Bulgaria, Berke's vassal, he invaded the Byzantine Empire in 1265 and came within reach of Constantinople, forcing Michael VIII Palaiologos to release the former Seljuk sultan Kaykaus and pay tribute. Berke gave Kaykaus Crimea as an appanage. Hulagu died in February 1265, and Berke followed the next year while on campaign near Tiflis, marching to fight Hulagu's successor Abaqa but dying en route.
Oz Beg Khan took the throne in 1313 and made Islam the state religion. In 1314 he built a large mosque at Solkhat in the Crimea and proscribed Buddhism and Shamanism among the Mongols. By 1315 he had Islamized the Horde and killed Jochid princes and Buddhist lamas who opposed him. When Ibn Battuta visited Sarai in 1333, he found a large, beautiful city of vast streets and fine markets, where six nations, Mongols, Alans, Kypchaks, Circassians, Russians, and Greeks, each kept their own quarters, and merchants held a walled section to themselves.
The Black Death struck the Horde in the 1340s and broke its economy. The disease likely first appeared near Issyk-Kul, and by the spring and summer of 1346 it had reached most cities, including Urgench, Sarai, and Azaq. It spread through Jani Beg's army during the siege of Caffa. Whole regions were depopulated, and by the 1350s parts of the northern trade route had collapsed.
The period from 1359 to 1381, the Great Troubles, was a churn of murdered khans. Berdi Beg was killed by his brother Qulpa in 1359, and Qulpa, whose two Christian sons bore the names Michael and Ivan, was killed in turn by his brother Nawruz Beg in 1360. The general Mamai backed puppet khans but lost to Dmitry Donskoy at the Vozha River in 1378 and again at Kulikovo in 1380. Tokhtamysh then defeated Mamai in 1381 and briefly restored the Horde, taking Moscow after a three-day siege under a false truce.
Tokhtamysh fell to Timur, who gathered an army 200,000 strong and beat him at the Kondurcha River in 1391, then annihilated him at the Terek River in 1395. The Horde shattered into smaller khanates: Sibir, the Uzbek Khanate, the Nogai Horde, Kazan, Crimea, the Qasim Khanate, the Kazakh Khanate, the Great Horde, and Astrakhan. Moscow shed the Tatar yoke at the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480, when Ahmed retreated. The Crimean Khanate, an Ottoman vassal since 1475, sacked New Sarai in 1502 and destroyed it for good.
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Common questions
What was the Golden Horde?
The Golden Horde, also called the Ulus of Jochi and self-designated as Ulug Ulus, was a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate established in the 13th century from the northwestern part of the Mongol Empire. After the empire divided in 1259 it became a functionally independent khanate, also known as the Kipchak Khanate.
Where did the name Golden Horde come from?
The name Golden Horde is a partial calque of the Russian Zolotaya Orda, itself a partial calque of the Turkic Altan Orda. The Golden element is attributed to the golden color of the Mongols' wartime tents, to an actual golden tent used by Batu Khan or Ozbeg Khan, or to the riches of the khan, with gold also denoting imperial status.
How large was the Golden Horde at its peak?
At its peak the Golden Horde extended from Siberia and Central Asia to parts of Eastern Europe, reaching from the Urals to the Danube in the west and from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea in the south. It bordered the Caucasus Mountains and the territory of the Ilkhanate.
When did the Golden Horde adopt Islam?
The Golden Horde's military power peaked under Ozbeg Khan, who reigned from 1312 to 1341 and adopted Islam as the state religion after taking the throne in 1313. He built a large mosque at Solkhat in the Crimea in 1314 and had Islamized the Horde by 1315.
How did the Golden Horde end Mongol rule over Russia?
Internal struggles allowed Moscow to formally rid itself of the Tatar yoke at the Great Stand on the Ugra River in 1480, when the khan Ahmed judged conditions unfavorable and retreated. This event traditionally marks the end of Mongol rule over Russia.
What were the last remnants of the Golden Horde?
The Crimean Khanate and the Kazakh Khanate were the last remnants of the Golden Horde, surviving until 1783 and 1847 respectively, when they were conquered by the expanding Russian state. The Crimean Khanate sacked New Sarai in 1502, ending the Great Horde.
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