HIS 241
The Mongol Invasion
Remarks by Professor Evans

Mongol map

Map of the Mongol Empire at its greatest extent

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While Russia states were generally able to deal with the threats from the north and west, i.e., the Swedes and the Teutonic knights, after the collapse of the Kyivan state, the real danger came from the east much later in the form of the Mongols. Please note that in Russian history, the "Mongols" are known as "Tatars."

The Mongols, which are also covered a bit in HIS 111, created the greatest land empire the world has ever known, and they had an enormous impact on the course of Russian history. (As graduate students, we always used to joke that you could hear the Mongol hoof-beats echoing through Russian history. Whenever a disaster befell Russia, we would just Blame it on the Mongol legacy, or whenever a leader had to make a decision, we would say he heard those Mongol hoof-beats!) Don't forget that from the Mongol point-of-view, "Russia" was only the frontier of their great empire stretching across Eurasia. See the map just above.

The Mongols first appeared on the Kyivan scene in 1223 when they defeated an army led by a coalition of Russian princes on the banks of the Kalka River, but the Mongols did not follow up their victory with an immediate invasion. In 1236 they returned with an army led by Batu (1207?-1255). He was the son of Jochi and the grandson of Genghis Khan. It has been estimated that the Mongol army was somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 men, perhaps many more, mounted on horseback, which gave them enormous mobility advantage. After subduing the peoples on the lower Volga and in western Central Asia, the Mongols moved on to deal with the Russian territories. Remember that Rus' had fragmented in the years after the unified Kyivan state, and so, by the thirteenth century, there were then numerous independent principalities existing, each ruled by a prince. (This is often called the appanage period of Russian history.).

As the Russian princes were unwilling to unite against the Mongol threat, bad things ensued. Riazan was captured and burned to the ground. Other cities soon suffered the same fate: Kolomna, Moscow, Vladimir. Russian armies that did take the field were annihilated. Other town/cities suffered a fate of ransacking and destruction. As the Mongol campaign continued, further cities fell, culminating with the fall of Kyiv in 1240. The Mongols then moved west and invaded Hungary and Poland.

So, between 1236 and 1240 Russian cities were destroyed everywhere as the Mongols ruthlessly stormed across Russia leaving utter devastation and destruction behind. (Only Novgorod and Pskov escaped damage.) By 1242 the Tatars had established their capital of Sarai on the lower Volga River. They controlled an enormous amount of territory, which is popularly know as "Golden Horde," a kind of misleading term which should be more accurately referred to as the Khanate of Qipchaq. Most areas to the north were not under direct Mongol control. Instead they paid tribute to the Mongols.

In terms of the immediate Mongol impact, for the most part the Mongols did not interfere in the day-to-day affairs of the Russians; they were content to just pick/approve a Grand Prince and let him control Russian affairs as long as the annual tribute was paid. The Grand Prince was given a yarlik (aka iarlik or Ярлык), a patent of from the Mongols. The iarlik gave the Grand Prince authority over Russians, and most importantly, made the Grand Prince the the khan's tax-collector in Rus', and as such could gain authority and real power over the other princes of Rus'. That power fell to the grand princes of Moscow.

It seems pretty clear that the Mongols did not much interfere directly in terms of Russian society, religion or culture, etc, but they did influence Russia. For example, they did not mandate that the Russians change their religion, or use the Mongol language, but the Mongols did cut most of Russia off from what was going on in Western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; this tended to make Russian religious and cultural developments a bit more parochial. (That is not the exact word that I was looking for right there, but it will have to do.). There were periodic re-invasions by the Mongols and that meant a bit more destruction, and there is no doubt that it took some time to recover from the economic and physical destruction (loss of life) from the initial invasions. It is also pretty clear that the Mongols hastened the break-up of what was left of Kyivan Rus', and this did lead to a split of "Russia" into southern, western and eastern parts. I also tend to believe that it is pretty clear that the Mongol invasion allowed Moscow, a previously-minuscule petty principality, to emerge as the center of medieval Russia since that is where the Mongols recognized the Grand Prince as residing. Finally, more debatable re Mongol influence, is the premise advanced by some historians that the Mongols introduced elements of what has been called "oriental despotism" into Russian political practice, leading eventually to the emergence of the Russian autocracy.

There is still considerable debate over the actual impact of the Mongols on the course of Russian history. For a long time this period was simply seen as the Mongol Yoke, a time of black oppression and devastation lasting about two centuries, but the truth was far from that, and careful historical work, by Charles Halperin among others, in the last few decades has begun to paint a different picture of the Russian-Mongol relationship, but it was never a happy and friendly one. After all, the Mongols were the conquerors.

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