10 The Golden Horde and Italian Merchants

Like the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Khazars before them, the Mongols began their presence in southeastern Europe in an aggressive military manner, but before long they, too, revealed their true intentions.

Eastern Europe formed most western part of the Mongol Empire, which was divided into four large regions, or hordes. The Mongols called their far-western horde the Kipchak/Qipçaq Kaganate (from the Turkic name of the nomadic Polovtsians they conquered and dispersed). In Slavic and western European sources, this territory was known as the Golden Horde. The Mongols themselves accounted for no more than 4,000 people, mostly military elements who were assigned to serve in the Golden Horde. As for the majority population (which included south-central and eastern Ukraine as well as the adjacent Don and Volga valleys), it consisted of Turkic peoples, both descendants of Polovtsians who did not flee and Tatars, who formed the largest portion of the Mongol armies in the western part of their empire. It was not long before the Golden Horde was associated largely with its Tatar component.

The various principalities of Kievan Rus’ continued to exist, and their rulers were left in place as long as they paid an annual tribute to the Mongol-Tatar authorities. This initially took the form of having to make an annual journey to Old Sarai (Sarai-Batu) and New Sarai (Sarai-Berke) on the lower Volga River, in order to pay obeisance to the Great Khan’s representatives. Those Rus’ princes (and there were some) who refused to abide by the new Mongol Order risked invasion and devastation of their lands by the armies of the Golden Horde.

The Golden Horde derived its wealth from control of trade and commerce along several routes that converged on the lower Volga region. These included the famous Silk Road that began in China and crossed Central Asia until it reached Old and New Sarai. From there merchants could move in several directions: southward along the Caspian Sea coast to Persia; northward up the Volga to the northern Rus’ lands of Vladimir-Suzdal (later Muscovy), Tver’, and Novgorod; westward to Kiev, Volodymyr-Volyns’kyi and on to Cracow and central Europe. But most important was the route that led southwestward to the Crimea, either via a caravan route across the Ukrainian steppe to the Mongol administrative center of Krym/Solkhat (today Staryi Krym) and the Italian ports of Soldaia (today Sudak) and Caffa, or to Tana (today Azov) at the mouth of the Don River and from there across the Sea of Azov to the coastal cities along the Straits of Kerch and the Black Sea.

MAP 10 THE GOLDEN HORDE, circa 1300

Under the protection of the Pax Mongolica, the coastal cities in the Crimea were revived, this time under the leadership of Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa, and especially Genoa. As early as in 1266 the Golden Horde granted Genoese merchants the right to build some warehouses in the ancient Bosporan Kingdom’s port of Theodosia (today Feodosiia). Within a few decades, the port became one of the largest cities in the region, called Caffa. Inhabited by a heterogeneous mix of peoples (including Armenians, Greeks, Slavs, Vlachs, Karaites, and Tatars), Caffa was administered by Genoese and given an Italianate flavor symbolized by a large Catholic cathedral that from 1311 served as the seat of a Roman-rite diocese. The city’s wealth derived from its control of the international trade in silk and spices from Central Asia as well as from local products such as fish, grains, hides, and, most importantly, slaves from the Mongol-controlled steppe hinterland.

10.1 The Genoese Crimean port of Caffa (today Feodosiia).

Such widespread commercial relations promoted economic wealth and cultural interaction, in particular in the Crimea. Less evident but no less influential was another kind of traveler. In 1347 the bubonic plague reached Caffa, carried by either Tatar soldiers or slaves from the steppe hinterland. The invisible immigrant from the Far East quickly spread its deadly destruction to other cities along the Black Sea coast, whose Genoese and Venetian traders then brought the disease to the heart of Europe. Within a few years the Black Death, as this scourge brought through Caffa came to be known, had killed off at least one-third of Europe’s population.

10.2 Genoese fortress walls above Soldaia (today Sudak), whose Crimean coastal port was first developed by the Venetians.

The Mongol invasion and the Pax Mongolica are generally treated in negative terms by historians of Ukraine and Russia. In traditional accounts of Ukrainian and Russian history, the year 1240—when the city of Kiev was destroyed—is considered the end of Kievan Rus’. The next two centuries, until 1480, when Rus’ rulers finally no longer had to pay an annual tribute to the Golden Horde and its successors, are described in East Slavic accounts as the era of the “Tatar yoke.” Little appreciation is accorded to the fact that the Pax Mongolica actually encouraged a degree of stability and economic prosperity in the lands of Kievan Rus’, often with the active collaboration of Rus’ secular and ecclesiastic leaders. For instance, it was during the era of the Golden Horde (whose Mongolo-Tatar overlords adopted Islam after 1313) that the Orthodox Church completed the Christianization of the vast rural expanses of Rus’ society. Nor did the Mongol invasion cause the depopulation of the southern Rus’ principalities as has been claimed by Russian scholars and publicists since the nineteenth century. In short, the transformation of Kievan Rus’ into a polity dominated by three alternate power centers (Novgorod, Vladimir-Suzdal’, Galicia-Volhynia)—a process begun during the era of disintegration well before the Mongol invasions of 1237-1241—was not completed for another century. Until that time the heritage of Kievan Rus’ on Ukrainian lands was preserved in the independent principality, and later kingdom, of Galicia-Volhynia.