The Mongol Empire

By: Sharon White
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:27:00
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The arrival of the Mongols, also known to the Russians and the rest of the world as Tatars, was a major turning point in the Russian history. To give impartial consideration to the Mongols, who exacted tribute from the Russians for two hundred and forty years, we must change our perspective altogether: there is no point in looking at the Mongols through Russian eyes, the Russians must be seen through Mongol eyes. From the Mongol point of view the Russian adventure was simply an episode, and on the whole a minor episode, in a ramified campaign of conquest that included China and Central Asia; indeed, it failed in Russia not through Russian action but because the Mongol realm began to decompose from within. Around 1300 the Mongol Empire extended from China to Poland, occupying the whole of Asia except India, Burma and Cambodia. When we consider that the Mongol people numbered possibly a million, while the peoples it controlled amounted to some 100,000,000, and that at its zenith it had fewer than 150,000 troops, it is obvious that under the leadership of this small group of nomads something special took place. Russian history between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries is incomprehensible without the Mongol background. Fundamental decisions were made by the Great Khan of the Mongols, who held his residence in Mongolia or in China. This meant that the Russian vassals of the Khan of the Golden Horde--the Mongol unit encamped in Russia--were actually governed by the ruler of Peking.

The structure and function of the Golden Horde itself and hence of Russia was established by the founder of the Mongol Empire, Chingis Khan, whose followers considered him enjoined by heaven to rule the world. Conversely, Russia made a substantial contribution to the power both of the Golden Horde and of the Mongol empire it was part of. Russians drafted into the Mongol armies played an important role in the campaigns of the Khans of the Golden Horde as well as of the Great Khans themselves. During the 1330's there was a Russian division of Guards stationed in Peking that was an important pillar of the imperial regime in China. Russia was milked for craftsmen and artisans of all kinds, who worked in the Golden Horde and as far east as Mongolia. In short, though Russian historians have generally had a biased view of Mongol influence, either pretending that it was on the whole rather negligible, or on the contrary magnifying its negative effects and blaming the Mongols for Russian backwardness, their perhaps normal feeling of national identification cannot obscure the fact that Russian political and governmental life was moulded by Mongol politics for two centuries and more. The Grand Dukes of Vladimir and Moscow, as well as all other Princes, were only rulers by the grace of the Khan, who was both the de facto and the de jure source of power throughout Russia. The Church, too, exercised its functions by virtue of Mongol authority, which from a religious point of view was quite benign, since the Mongols were wholly tolerant of religious differences, and though at first apparently Shamanists themselves had no objection to following Russian customary law. This, to be sure, did not eliminate discords, since Russian so-called immemorial tradition was a tissue of confusion, but at any rate it made for quiet.

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