Chapter 6 Pax Mongolica

Kyivan Rus’, a polity with no generally recognized date of birth, has a definite date of death. It occurred on December 7, 1240, when yet another wave of invaders from the Eurasian steppes, the Mongols, conquered the city of Kyiv.

In many ways, the Mongol invasion of Rus’ marked the return of the steppe as the dominant force in the region’s politics, economy, and, to some extent, culture. It put an end to the independence of the forest-based polities and societies united for a time within the boundaries of Kyivan Rus’ and their ability to maintain ties with the Black Sea littoral (primarily the Crimea) and the larger Mediterranean world. The Mongols turned back the clock to the times of the Khazars, Huns, Sarmatians, and Scythians, when steppe polities controlled the hinterland and benefited from trade routes to the Black Sea ports. But the Mongols were a much more formidable military force than any of their predecessors, who had managed at best to dominate the western part of the Eurasian steppe, usually from the Volga basin in the east to the Danube estuary in the west. The Mongols, at least initially, controlled all of it, from the Amur River and the steppes of Mongolia in the east to the Danube and the Hungarian plain in the west. They established the Pax Mongolica, a Mongol-controlled conglomerate of dependencies and semidependencies of which the Rus’ lands became a peripheral but important part.

The arrival of the Mongols ended the illusion of the political unity of the Kyivan realm and put an end to the very real ecclesiastical unity of the Rus’ lands. The Mongols recognized two main centers of princely rule in Rus’: the principalities of Vladimir-Suzdal in today’s Russia and Galicia-Volhynia in central and western Ukraine. Constantinople followed suit, dividing the Rus’ metropolitanate into two parts. The political and ecclesiastical unity of the Kyiv-centered Rus’ Land had disintegrated.

In the lands of what is now Russia, ruled from Vladimir, the Mongol presence lasted until the end of the fifteenth century and eventually became known as the “Tatar yoke,” named after Turkic-speaking tribes that had been part of the Mongol armies and stayed in the region after the not very numerous Mongols left. The view of Mongol rule as extremely long and severely oppressive has been a hallmark of traditional Russian historiography and continues to influence the interpretation of that period of eastern European history as a whole. In the twentieth century, however, proponents of the Eurasian school of Russian historical writing challenged this negative attitude toward Mongol rule. The history of the Mongol presence in Ukrainian territory provides additional correctives to the traditional condemnation of the “Tatar yoke.” In Ukraine, ruled by the Galician and Volhynian princes, the Mongols were less intrusive and oppressive than they were in Russia. Their rule was also of shorter duration, effectively over by the mid-fourteenth century. This difference would have a profound impact on the fates of the two lands and the people who settled them.

The sudden Mongol rise to world prominence began in the steppes of present-day Mongolia in 1206, when Temujin, a local tribal leader and commander, united a number of tribal confederations and assumed the title of khan of the Mongol hordes. Genghis Khan, as Temujin became known after his death, spent most of his first decade as supreme ruler of the Mongols fighting the Chinese, whose lands were the first he incorporated into his rapidly expanding empire.

Before his death in 1227, Genghis Khan divided his realm among his sons and grandsons. The western lands, which then included Central Asia and the steppes east of the Volga, went to two of his grandsons. One of them, Batu Khan, was dissatisfied with his inheritance and pushed the borders of his realm farther west. That push became known as the Mongol invasion of Europe. In 1237 the Mongols besieged and took Riazan on the eastern frontier of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality. Vladimir, the principality’s capital, fell in early February 1238. When its defenders took their last stand at the Dormition Cathedral built by Andrei Bogoliubsky, the Mongols set it on fire. Towns that defended themselves with particular determination were massacred wholesale. That was the case in Kozelsk, which fell after a siege of seven weeks. The Rus’ princes resisted the Mongol onslaught as best they could, but, divided and disorganized, they were no match for the highly mobile and well-coordinated Mongol cavalry.

As the Mongols approached Kyiv in November 1240, their huge army made a dreadful impression on the defenders. “And nothing could be heard above the squeaking of his carts, the bawling of his [Batu’s] innumerable camels, and the neighing of his herds of horses, and the Land of Rus’ was full of enemies,” wrote the chronicler. When the Kyivans refused to surrender, Batu brought in catapults to destroy the city walls, built of stones and logs in the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The citizens rushed to the Dormition Cathedral, the first stone church built by Volodymyr to celebrate his baptism.

Kyiv suffered a deadly blow from the Mongol assault and would not recover its former importance and prosperity for centuries. But the population of the Kyiv and Pereiaslav lands did not abandon the region altogether and did not move to the Volga and Oka basins, as some Russian scholars suggested in the nineteenth century. If the dwellers of the Kyiv Land had to flee the steppe borderlands, they had plenty of opportunity to find safe haven closer to home, in the forests of northern Ukraine along the Prypiat and Desna Rivers. Not incidentally, the oldest Ukrainian dialects were spoken in the Prypiat forests and the foothills of the Carpathians — areas shielded from nomadic attacks by woodlands, marshes, and mountainous terrain.

By the time Kyiv fell to the Mongols, it no longer reigned over others but was itself ruled by outsiders. The head of the city’s defenses, a military commander named Dmytro, owed allegiance to Prince Danylo (Daniel), ruler of Galicia and Volhynia in present-day western Ukraine. Prince Danylo had taken the Rus’ capital under his protection the previous year by arrangement with Prince Mykhailo of Kyiv, who fled after originally resisting the Mongols, then losing to them his main stronghold, the city of Chernihiv, and eventually the will to resist.

Danylo of Halych was a rising star of Rus’ politics. Like Genghis Khan, he had been orphaned in childhood. He was four years old in 1205 when his father, Roman, whom the chronicler calls “the autocrat of Rus’,” fell in battle with the Poles. In the previous few years, Roman, whose patrimony had originally included the principality of Volhynia, had managed to take control of the neighboring principality of Galicia, becoming the ruler of all Rus’ lands west of Kyiv. Danylo and his younger brother, Vasylko, inherited the title but not the possessions of their father. Those were contested by rival Rus’ princes, as well as by rebellious Galician boyars, and then by the Poles and Hungarians. Not until 1238, the year of the Mongol attack on northeastern Rus’, did Danylo finally reestablish control over both Volhynia and Galicia and install his own voevoda, or military commander, in Kyiv.

The Mongol invasion put Danylo’s skills as a ruler and military commander to the test. More importantly, it revealed his talent as a diplomat. When the Mongol military commander demanded that Danylo turn over his capital city of Halych to the Mongols, he went to see Batu Khan in his capital, Sarai, on the Volga. It was the kind of visit other Rus’ princes had paid the khan earlier, the purpose being to pledge allegiance to the Mongols and receive the khan’s yarlyk, or conditional right to rule their principalities. “Do you drink black milk, our drink, mare’s kumis?” the khan asked Danylo, according to the Rus’ chronicler. “I have not drunk it so far. But if you so ordain, I shall drink it,” answered Danylo, showing the khan respect and obedience. In this way the chronicler metaphorically described Danylo’s submission and his initiation into the Mongol elite.

The chronicler, critical of the very idea of Christian Rus’ princes swearing allegiance to pagan Mongol khans, described three models of their behavior vis-à-vis the Mongols. Prince Mykhailo of Chernihiv exemplified the first, which met with the chronicler’s utmost approval.

In actual fact, the Mongols never asked the Rus’ princes to abandon their faith and showed maximum tolerance of the Orthodox Church in general. But the chronicler’s differentiation of three models of behavior reflected very real gradations in the Rus’ princes’ collaboration with and resistance to Mongol authority. Prince Mykhailo, who was indeed killed on Batu’s orders, refused to capitulate to the Mongols in 1239 and even killed the envoys sent by the khan to receive his surrender. Yaroslav of Vladimir, by contrast, was the first of the Rus’ princes to pledge allegiance to the Mongols, which gained him the title of grand prince of Rus’ and the right to install his voevoda in Kyiv. He remained loyal to the Mongols until his death in 1246, as did his son and successor, Aleksandr Nevsky, whom the Russian Orthodox Church later recognized as a saint for his role in defending the Rus’ lands from western aggressors, the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights. Danylo took a different course: while he swore allegiance to Batu Khan, he did not abide by his oath very long.

Danylo received Batu’s yarlyk for Galicia and Volhynia in exchange for his promise to pay tribute and take part in Mongol military campaigns in the region. Mongol suzerainty shielded him from claims on his territory not only by rival Rus’ princes but also by aggressive western and northern neighbors. Danylo took advantage of the new atmosphere of political stability to initiate the economic revival of his realm. It was less devastated than other parts of Ukraine and served as a destination of choice for refugees from lands close to the steppe, where the Mongols had their outposts and exercised direct control. If one trusts the Rus’ chroniclers, economic opportunities in the Volhynian and Galician towns under the protection of Prince Danylo attracted many refugees from the Kyiv region.

Danylo moved his capital farther from the steppe to the newly established town of Kholm (present-day Chełm in Poland). He was eager to turn it into a major economic center. “When Prince Danylo saw that God favored that place, he began to summon settlers — Germans and Rus’, members of other tribes, and Liakhs [Poles],” wrote the chronicler. “They came day in and day out. Both youths and masters of all kinds fled [here] from the Tatars — saddlers, bowmen and fletchers, and smiths of iron, copper, and silver. And activity began, and they filled the fields and villages around the town with dwellings.” Kholm was not the sole object of Danylo’s attention. He established new cities — such as Lviv, the future capital of the region, first mentioned in the chronicle in 1256 and named after Danylo’s son Lev — and fortified old ones.

Under the rule of Danylo and his successors, the Galician-Volhynian principality gathered within its boundaries most of the Ukrainian lands settled at that time. Its rise to prominence was due to political, economic, and cultural processes that weakened the power of Kyiv and favored the emergence of borderland principalities. The Mongol invasion facilitated this rise. Some historians have argued that accommodating the Mongols was the best policy for the Rus’ princes to follow if they cared about their subjects’ well-being. Mongol rule — so goes the argument — brought stability and trade to the region. True, Kyiv was devastated and would take centuries to recover. But this long-term impact had more to do with the shifting of trade routes from the Dnieper to the Don and Volga in the east and the Dniester in the west than with the scope of the destruction.

Also far from devastating was the Mongol takeover of the Crimea. Contrary to popular belief based on early historiography, the Mongols did not bring the Crimean Tatars to the peninsula. They simply facilitated the Turkic (Kipchak) takeover, which began long before the Mongol invasion. The Sudak fortress, taken by the Mongols in the 1220s, in time gave way to Feodosiia, or Caffa, first under Venetian and then Genoan rule as a major trading center. The Crimea remained a commercial hub of the region, linking the Eurasian steppes with the Mediterranean world during the period of Mongol rule.

The Mongols were a a powerful but often absent force in the Ukrainian lands during the second half of the thirteenth century, and the rulers of Galicia-Volhynia were eager to take advantage of that circumstance. They sought to become independent of the Horde by building local alliances.

Danylo focused his foreign policy on rebuilding relations with his western neighbors and forging alliances to assist in a future revolt against the Mongols. In 1246, on his way back from visiting Batu, Danylo encountered papal envoy Giovanni del Carpine, whose account of the Mongol destruction of Kyiv we cited earlier. They discussed the establishment of relations between Danylo and the pope. Upon his return to Galicia, Danylo sent an Orthodox cleric to Lyon, where the papacy was located at the time, to establish direct contact. Pope Innocent IV wanted the Rus’ princes to recognize him as their supreme religious leader. Danylo, for his part, wanted the pope on his side to consolidate support from the Catholic rulers of central Europe against the Mongols.

This contact between the Galician prince and the pope, established with the help of del Carpine, eventually led Innocent IV to issue a bull in 1253 urging the Christian rulers of central Europe and the Balkans to take part in a crusade against the Mongols. He also sent his legate to Danylo and bestowed on him the crown of a Christian king. Prince Danylo became King Daniel, rex ruthenorum (king of the Rus’). Apart from getting the pope’s backing, Danylo finally concluded an alliance with the king of Hungary, who agreed to marry his daughter to Danylo’s son. His other son married the daughter of an Austrian duke. In 1253, emboldened by promises of support from central Europe, Danylo began military action against the Mongols. He soon took control of parts of Podolia and Volhynia that had been under Mongol rule. He could not have better timed his offensive, since Batu Khan of the Golden Horde died in 1255, and each of his two successors ruled for less than a year.

It took the Mongols five years to return to Galicia and Volhynia with a new army, seeking to restore their possession of those lands. Western support was crucial at that point, but it never materialized. The central European rulers ignored the papal bull calling for an anti-Mongol crusade. Matrimonial ties also turned out to be of little help, as Hungary was recovering from a recent defeat by the Czechs. Danylo had to face the new Mongol army alone. The Mongol military commander, Burundai, who arrived in Galicia-Volhynia at the head of a large army, demanded Danylo’s participation in campaigns against the Lithuanians and the Poles, destroying alliances he had built in the region. Burundai also required Danylo to destroy the fortifications he had built around his towns, rendering the principality vulnerable to potential attacks from the steppe. Danylo obliged. He once again declared himself a vassal of the Mongols.

Danylo’s alliance with the pope in the 1250s came at a price with regard to not only the anti-Mongol crusade but also his relations with the Orthodox clergy, both in Constantinople and at home in Rus’. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by participants in the Fourth Crusade, the divisions between Eastern and Western Christendom became more than a matter of theological and jurisdictional nuances. They grew into open hostility, exacerbated in Rus’ by metropolitans sent from Constantinople. Danylo eventually managed to silence opposition to his alliance with Rome from the local clergy but not from Constantinople. When in 1251 Danylo’s protégé as metropolitan of all Rus’, the former bishop of Kholm, Cyril, came to Constantinople for a blessing, he was confirmed as metropolitan on condition that he not reside in Galicia, whose prince was known to be conspiring with the pope. Cyril, a native of Galicia, moved to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality.

The transfer of the see became official in 1299, during the tenure of Cyril’s successor, a Greek metropolitan named Maximus. In 1325 the metropolitan see was moved to Moscow by another Galician appointee, Metropolitan Petro. This would become a major factor in the rise of the Moscow princes as leaders of northeastern Rus’ — the core of modern Russia. Mongol rule over much of what is now Russia was much stricter and lasted longer than their rule over other parts of Rus’. The areas around Moscow were simply closer to the heart of the lands possessed by the khans of the Golden Horde. The Mongols created the office of grand prince of Rus’ to help administer their realm and collect tribute. It first went to the princes of Vladimir-Suzdal but was later contested by the two leading principalities of the region, Moscow and Tver. In the long run, the princes of Moscow, the “owners” of the metropolitan see, emerged victorious in the struggle for the office and, more importantly, for mastery of the Mongol part of Rus’.

The see moved from Kyiv to Vladimir and Moscow retained the name Metropolitanate of All Rus’. As compensation, Constantinople allowed the Galicians to create their own metropolitanate in 1303. This new see, established in the town of Halych, the capital of the principality of Halychyna, or Galicia in Latin, was called the Metropolitanate of Little Rus’. It included six of the fifteen eparchies, or dioceses, that had been under the jurisdiction of Kyiv at some point. Among them were not only the eparchies on the territory of present-day Ukraine but also the eparchy of Turaŭ in today’s Belarus. The notion of Little Rus’, which some scholars believe the Greeks to have understood as “inner” or “closer” Rus’, was born. Much later, the term would become a bone of contention in battles over Ukrainian national identity, with the appellation “Little Russians” attached in the twentieth century to proponents of all-Russian or pro-Russian self-identification among Ukrainians.

The Mongols’ invasion and their prolonged presence in the Pontic steppes confronted the Rus’ elites for the first time with the dilemma of choosing between the East, represented by both the nomads of the steppe and the Christian tradition of Byzantium, and the West, embodied by central European rulers who recognized the ecclesiastical authority of the pope. Finding themselves for the first time on Europe’s major political and cultural fault line, the post-Kyivan elites of the territories of modern Ukraine began a balancing act that prolonged their de facto independence of both East and West for at least another century.

Histotians often consider Galician-Volhynian principality the last independent state in the Ukrainian lands until the rise of the Cossack Hetmanate in the mid-seventeenth century. This judgment requires some qualification. While often in disagreement and occasionally at war with the khans of the Golden Horde, Galicia-Volhynia remained a tribute-paying vassal until the very end of its existence in the 1340s. In exchange for tribute, the khans allowed the Galician-Volhynian rulers complete independence in their internal affairs. In the international arena, Galicia-Volhynia benefited from the Pax Mongolica to the end. The weakening and eventual breakdown of that international order in eastern Europe facilitated the fall of Galicia-Volhynia as a unified state.

The disintegration of Galicia-Volhynia began with an event that would seem trivial today but held extreme importance for medieval and early modern polities: the extinction of a ruling house, in this case the Galician-Volhynian princely dynasty. In 1323 the two great-grandsons of Prince Danylo died: some historians believe that they met their end in combat with the Mongols — the wrong battle to fight at the time. As Danylo had no other male descendants, Prince Bolesław of Mazovia in Poland, a maternal nephew of the deceased princes, took over the principality. A Catholic by birth, Bolesław accepted Orthodoxy and changed his name to Yurii — to him, the political prize was clearly worth a liturgy. That was not enough for the local Rus’ aristocracy, the boyars, who despised their new ruler for neglecting their interests and relying on the advice of people he had brought from Poland. In 1340 the boyars poisoned Yurii-Bolesław, the last ruler to style himself dux totius Russiae Minoris (duke of all Little Rus’), leading to a period of prolonged struggle over Galicia-Volhynia and the eventual demise of the principality. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the former mighty principality was split in two, with Galicia and western Podolia going to Poland and Volhynia to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

King Casimir III of Poland was the main actor in the drama of the Polish takeover of Galicia. He first attempted to take Lviv, the Galician capital from the 1270s, in 1340. The local elites, led by the Galician boyar Dmytro Dedko, turned for help to the Mongols and repelled the Polish onslaught with their assistance. But Casimir came back in 1344 and this time managed to seize part of the principality. In 1349, after Dedko’s death, Polish troops occupied Lviv and the rest of the Galician-Volhynian principality. The Lithuanian and local troops expelled them from Volhynia in the following year, but they kept their holdings in Galicia. In the mid-fourteenth century, hundreds of Polish nobles from other parts of the kingdom moved to Galicia in search of land offered in exchange for military services. From Casimir’s point of view, conditional land ownership was a means of ensuring that the nobility would not neglect its duty to defend the new province.

The Kingdom of Poland fully incorporated the Rus’ lands of Galicia and western Podolia only in the 1430s, as the palatinates of Rus’ (Ruthenia) and Podolia. Also around that time, in response to the demands of the local nobility (both Polish and Ukrainian), the right to unconditional landholding was extended to noble residents. By far the most important political development associated with the incorporation of Galicia and parts of Podolia into the Kingdom of Poland was the extension to the local nobility of the political rights enjoyed by their Polish counterparts. Those included the right to participate in dietines, or local noble assemblies that discussed not only local affairs but also matters of state and foreign-policy issues. The nobles also received the right to elect representatives to the Diets of the entire kingdom, and as the defense of the Galician-Podolian borderland from incursions of steppe tribesmen took on greater importance between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, they used it to the full to lobby their interests at the courts.

The integration of Galicia and western Podolia into the Kingdom of Poland — which opened the region to the influence of the Polish model of noble democracy, the German model of urban self-rule, and the benefits of Italian Renaissance education — came at a price that some historians of Ukraine consider too high. The region lost its semi-independent status, and the boyar aristocracy, its princely power and dominance in local politics. Cultural Polonization affected not only the aristocracy but also the local nobility; Rus’ artisans were squeezed out of the towns at an accelerating rate, and Orthodoxy faced powerful competition from the Roman Catholic Church.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania offered another model of incorporation of Ukrainian lands into a foreign polity. The grand duchy had taken over Volhynia in a fierce competition with its Polish rivals; it also gained control of the Kyiv Land, which, unlike Galicia-Volhynia, had been under more or less direct Mongol rule until the fourteenth century. The Lithuanian model was more conducive to the preservation of the local elites’ political influence, social status, and cultural traditions than the Polish one.

The grand duchy became an actor on the Ukrainian scene in the first half of the fourteenth century under its most famous ruler, Grand Duke Gediminas, an effective empire builder and the founder of the Lithuanian ruling dynasty. By some accounts, Gediminas managed to install a prince of his own in Kyiv in the early fourteenth century. That does not appear to have had any immediate effect on the status of the principality, but change would come as the Lithuanian princes, supported by local retinues, began to push the Tatars farther into the steppes. The decisive battle took place in 1359. That year, Lithuanian and Rus’ troops led by Gediminas’s son Algirdas defeated the forces of the Noghay Tatars — the leading tribe of the Golden Horde in the Pontic steppes — in battle on the Syni Vody, a river in today’s central Ukraine. As a result, the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania shifted south to the Dniester estuary on the Black Sea coast. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania became not just a powerful successor to Kyivan Rus’ but also the holder of most of the Ukrainian lands.

The Lithuanians brought representatives of their own Gediminian dynasty to Rus’, but Gediminas’ descendants went native more quickly than their Rurikid predecessors of the tenth century. The Lithuanian rulers married into local Rus’ families, gladly accepting Orthodoxy and Slavic Christian names. Overwhelming Rus’ dominance in the cultural sphere facilitated Lithuanian acculturation. The authority of Byzantine Orthodoxy now swayed the Lithuanian elite, which had remained pagan into the fifteenth century. The Rus’ chancery language, based on the Church Slavonic brought to Kyiv at the end of the tenth century by Christian missionaries, served as the language of administration throughout the grand duchy; its law code, which became known as the Lithuanian Statute in the sixteenth century, was a version of the Rus’ Justice. The grand duchy effectively became an heir to Kyivan Rus’ in every respect but dynastic continuity. Some historians used to refer to it not as a Lithuanian state but as a Lithuanian-Rus’ or even a Rus’-Lithuanian polity.

As the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania took over most of the Ukrainian lands, they brought about political, social, and cultural change. The two states had very different policies with regard to the accommodation and assimilation of Rus’ elites and society. But in both cases we see the emergence and strengthening of similar tendencies that led to the decline of the Rus’ principalities’ rights of autonomy. By the end of the fifteenth century, they would be wiped off the political map of the region, ending the princely era that had begun in Kyivan Rus’ back in the tenth century.