The Mongols and the Transformation of Rus' Political Life

The year 1240 is traditionally viewed as a crucial turning point in the history of eastern Europe. It is the year in which the Mongols captured and razed the city of Kiev and in which Kievan Rus' is considered to have ceased to exist.

The completion of these trends took place during the century following the ‘fall’ of Kiev. During this ‘Mongol era’ of Kievan history, the social and adminis­trative structure of Rus' society remained the same, and local princes, if they rec­ognized the ultimate authority of the Mongols in eastern Europe, were essentially left to rule undisturbed in their local patrimonies as they had done before. This last era of Kievan Rus' history saw a different evolution in each of the three regional successor states. On Ukrainian territory, the western principality, later the Kingdom, of Galicia-Volhynia was to lead an independent existence until 1349· But before examining the specific evolution of Galicia-Volhynia, it is neces­sary to review the beginnings of the Mongol presence and to examine its general impact on eastern Europe.

The rise of the Mongols

As their name suggests, the Mongols were a nomadic people who originated in Mongolia.

The Mongol armies quickly developed a reputation for invincibility and feroc­ity. Tales of the massacres of whole cities and regions became widespread in some of the conquered regions, and it became common for western sources to describe Chingis Khan as the ‘scourge of humanity.’¹ In reality, Chingis Khan and his suc­cessors were not much different from other empire builders in history, and if his Mongol armies carried out brutal destruction, they did so not as an end in itself but as a means of inspiring fear and convincing their enemies that they must sub­mit to Mongol rule or perish. Those rulers who submitted immediately and recog­nized Mongol rule were usually left to reign over their respective territories, which more often than not even flourished under the new order. The creation of a new world empire from China to Europe, therefore, was the goal of Chingis Khan, not wanton and indiscriminate destruction.

It was not Chingis Khan but rather his generals and descendants who were to conquer eastern Europe and make large parts of Kievan Rus' subject to the Mon­gol Empire. Already during the last years of Chingis’s life, a Mongol expeditionary force on its way into northern Persia swung northward across the Caucasus Moun­tains into the Kuban steppe region. In 1222, the Mongols defeated first the Alans and then the Polovtsians, continuing their route north of the Sea of Azov into the Crimea, where early in the next year they captured the coastal city of Sudak. In the meantime, the frightened Polovtsians turned to the Rus' princes, three of whom (from Galicia, Kiev, and Chernihiv) joined them in an offensive attack against the new invaders. In the spring of 1223, a joint Rus'-Polovtsian army met the Mongol expeditionary force on the Kalka River near the Sea of Azov, and after three days of battle it was totally routed.

This disaster on the Kalka for the southern Rus' princes and the Polovtsians had no immediate consequences, however, because the Mongol expeditionary force returned home across the eastern steppe. To contemporary Rus' commen­tators, the Mongols were just another in the long line of steppe invaders who seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared. In the words of the chronicles, ‘We know neither from whence they came nor whither they have gone. Only God knows that, because He brought them upon us for our sins.’²

The experience on the Kalka River seemed to be an isolated tragedy, and life in Kievan Rus' went on as usual. The unsuspecting Rus' princes even increased their internecine conflict, with the consequence that between 1235 and 1240 alone the city of Kiev changed hands no fewer than seven times.

The Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus'

The Mongols began their invasion of Kievan Rus' with a systematic attack on its northern cities. First came Riazan', in December 1237, and it was followed in rapid succession by Kolomna, Moscow, Vladimir, Suzdal', laroslavl', and Tver' during the first three months of 1238. Although the way to Novgorod was open, the Mongols decided not to continue westward but instead to turn southward, where they spent nearly the next two and a half years in the steppe region between the Donets' and the Don. There, in the traditional homeland of the Polovtsians - the Steppe of the Kipchaks - the Mongols prepared for the next stage of their assault on eastern Europe. Of the Polovtsians in their midst, some surrendered and were allowed to become Mongol subjects, some joined the Kara­kalpaks and other Turkic allies of Kievan Rus' who had settled the frontier district along the Ros' River, and others fled farther westward across the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, where they were favorably received and Christianized.

Besides eliminating the Polovtsians, during the summer of 1239 the Mongols undertook expeditionary strikes against the southern Rus' principalities of Pereia- slav, Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, and Chernihiv. In October 1239, Chernihiv fell, and dur­ing the next year, from their base in the steppes, the Mongols kept close watch over the principality of Kiev and its southern defense system along the Ros' River.

After a siege lasting several weeks, Kiev fell on 6 December 1240. The Mongols then moved farther west. Their armies divided: one group proceeded toward Volodymyr, in western Volhynia, and the other southward toward Halych, in Gali­cia. Both cities fell in 1241 after short sieges. The Mongols then moved farther south and west. The main force in Halych, under Batu, crossed the Carpathian Mountains and entered Hungary. The force in Volodymyr split, moving north­ward toward the Teutonic Order and westward into Poland. It finally turned southward across Moravia in order to join Batu’s main army already in Hungary. The Mongols remained in Hungary until the spring of 1242, when, upon learning of the death of the great khan in Mongolia, Batu decided to return eastward. The

Mongol armies started back hurriedly along a route that passed along the south­ern bank of the Danube, across the Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, and, finally, to the lower Volga region. There, Batu established his headquarters near the mouth of the Volga River, in Sarai, which before long was to develop into a powerful administrative and commercial center from which the Mongols ruled their eastern European conquests.

The Golden Horde

The new entity created by Batu represented one of four regions or hordes into which the Mongol Empire was divided. The Mongols referred to it as the Kipchak Khanate, a name taken from the Kipchaks, or Polovtsians, some of whom remained after 1238-1239 as subjects of the Mongols. In Slavic and western Euro­pean sources, the Mongol-led Kipchak Khanate came to be known as the Golden Horde. The Mongols themselves were a small minority, descendants of the 4,000 Mongol troops assigned to the region by Chingis Khan. Most of the Kipchak Khanate’s population consisted of Turkic peoples - descendants of the Polov­tsians and, later, the Tatars, who were to form a large portion of the Mongol armies in the west.

If the Rus' princes paid their tribute to the Mongols, however, they were left alone. It is certainly true that during the era of Mongol expansion its generals showed little mercy toward those enemies who resisted and then suffered defeat. But it was not in the Mongols’ interest to transform Kievan Rus' into an uninhab­ited and unproductive wasteland. Even during the Mongol invasions between 1237 and 1241, the actual physical destruction of Rus' towns and cities was proba­bly less than what writers recorded in contemporary and later chronicles. More­over, when the alarm of imminent attack was sounded, the inhabitants of many towns and cities fled to the countryside, where they remained in safety until returning home after the Mongol armies had passed through on their relatively quick campaigns through the north (December 1237 to March 1238) and south (November 1240 to February 1241).

In essence, life in Kievan Rus' returned to what it had been before the appear­ance of the Mongols. Those few centers on Ukrainian lands that had been hit directly (Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, Kiev, Kolodiazhyn, Kam"ianets'-Podil's'kyi, Halych, Volodymyr) had to be rebuilt, and the population which had fled to the countryside was temporarily dislocated, but as the English medievalist J.H. Fen­nell has written: ‘The same princes ruled the same districts; the same chronicles were kept in the same centers...; and the same enemies harassed the same seg­ments of the western frontiers.’³

The fundamental reason for the absence of any profound change was the Mon­gols’ lack of interest in ruling over the lands of Kievan Rus' directly. After all, from their perspective Kievan Rus' was a peripheral territory not located directly along the lucrative trade routes emanating from Central Asia and terminating along the northern shores of the Black Sea. It seemed best, therefore, simply to hold the Rus' lands in vassalage. The easiest way to do that was to cooperate with the existing ruling elites, who would be expected to render political obeisance and, of course, pay tribute. Initially, the Mongols were particularly successful in coopting some of the most powerful Rus' princes, such as Aleksander Nevskii of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal' in the north and Danylo of Galicia in the south.

Whereas the Mongols subsequently had mixed success in controlling the Rus' princes (Mykhailo of Chernihiv, the grand prince of Kiev, for instance, was among those who remained recalcitrant in the early days, until his torture and assassina­tion by the Horde in 1245), they seemed to be consistently able to work with the hierarchy of the Orthodox church. Manifesting their well-known tolerance of for­eign religions, the Mongols guaranteed all existing rights held by the church and even extended further privileges. Church lands and individual priests (and even­tually their families as well) were exempted from taxes, and church authorities were given the right to judge in civil as well as criminal cases their own clergy and all church people. As a result, the Mongol era in Kievan history witnessed a marked improvement in the status of Orthodoxy. Not only did the church increase its wealth, it also was finally able to complete the process of Christianiza­tion, begun ‘officially’ in the late tenth century but made effective in the far-flung countryside only as Orthodoxy expanded its influence under Mongol rule in the late thirteenth century. The new role of Orthodoxy was all the more enhanced, since the Mongols favored the further diffusion of power among the Rus' princes, which left the Orthodox church as the only real unifying force in an otherwise politically fragmented Kievan realm. It is also interesting to note that in the south­ern (Ukrainian) as well as in the northern Rus' lands, many peasants and small artisans in the cities willingly subjected themselves to the new Mongol order. After all, the Mongols promised peace and stability in return for an annual payment in grain or other goods. Because at least initially they delivered on their promise, the new order of peaceful stability, the Pax Mongolica, may have seemed for many peasants and artisans, as well as for the Orthodox church, a welcome change from the interprincely wars and frequent nomadic raids that had marked the previous era of disintegration in Kievan Rus’.

For their part, the Mongols and Tatars of the Golden Horde continued the tra­ditions followed by many of their nomadic predecessors, who had settled on the steppe between the Caspian and Black Seas and had derived their wealth from control of the great international trade routes that passed through the region. The Golden Horde’s first capital of Sarai, known later as Old Sarai (Sarai-Batu), and its successor New Sarai (Sarai-Berke), farther upstream near the bend where the Volga almost meets the Don, served not only as the administrative and cul­tural center of the Golden Horde’s bureaucracy, but also as the nexus for trade routes spreading out in all directions. The famous Silk Road from China and

Central Asia converged on both Old and New Sarai, and from there merchants moved southward along the western Caspian coast to Azerbaijan and Persia; northward up the Volga to the northern Rus' lands of Vladimir-Suzdal' (later Muscovy), Tver', and Novgorod; and westward to the Crimea, either via a caravan route across the Ukrainian steppe to the Mongol town of Solkhat (Staryi Krym) or to Tana 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 Black Sea. Subordinate routes went north from the Crimea across the steppe to Chernihiv, Kiev, and Galicia and from there westward to Central Europe.

The Pax Mongolica and Italian merchants

Under the protection of the Pax Mongolica, the old Khazar trade pattern from the Orient to the Byzantine Empire, which had been disrupted for several centu­ries by Kievan Rus', was now restored. The Crimean coastal cities were therefore revived, this time under the leadership of Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa, and, especially, Genoa. In 1266, the Mongols allowed the Genoese to build some warehouses at the former Bosporan Kingdom port of Theodosia, which soon came to be known as Caffa. Within a few decades, Genoese and, to a lesser degree, Venetian influence spread throughout the region, with the result that among the old centers of the Bosporan Kingdom, Panticapaeum became Vosporo, Tanais became Tana, Tmutorokan' became Matrega, and Sugdea became Soldaia. Farther west, the Genoese also controlled Cembalo, on the western coast of the Crimea, and they revived the Rus' port of Bilhorod, at the mouth of the Dniester, under the name Moncastro. All these cities became not only markets for inter­national trade, but also centers of local manufacturing and crafts.

The main center for the Caspian-Black-Mediterranean Sea trading network was Genoese-controlled Caffa. Like the other cities in the region, Caffa was inhabited by a heterogeneous mix of Armenians, Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, Vlachs, Karaites, and Tatars, although its administration was in the hands of a few Genoese trading companies (factories) and bankers, who maintained good relations with the Byz­antine Empire and were directly linked to the economy of the homeland city of Genoa. The control of the Genoese was symbolically enhanced by the establish­ment of a Roman Catholic bishopric in Caffa as early as 1311. The main local industry was shipbuilding, but Caffa’s greatest wealth came from its control of the international trade in silks and spices from Central Asia and, later, the more local trade in fish, grains, hides, and slaves, which came from the Mongol-controlled lands of eastern Europe and then were brought on Genoese or Venetian ships to the Byzantine Empire and further on across the Mediterranean Sea to the ports of southern Europe.

Despite occasional conflict with the early Mongol rulers of the Golden Horde, by the second half of the fourteenth century Genoese influence had grown to such an extent that most of the Crimean Peninsula had become a Genoese colony known as Gothia. (That name derives from the fact that there still existed in the Crimean hinterland the remnants of the Gothic principality of Theodoro- Mangup.) In essence, from the late thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, the classic symbiotic relationship between the steppe hinterland and the coastal city was reestablished, and an era of stability accordingly brought to eastern and southern Ukraine under the hegemony of the Golden Horde and the Genoese.

Nonetheless, while the Pax Mongolica restored a degree of stability and eco­nomic prosperity in large parts of eastern Europe, often with the active or passive assistance of Rus' princes and clergy, that same elite of Kievan society could not help but be ideologically opposed to Mongol rule. The ideological gulf between the Christian Rus' and their Mongolo-Tatar overlords further widened after 1313, when the Golden Horde officially adopted Islam. On account of that gulf, con­temporary and subsequent chroniclers describe the Mongols in negative terms, with the result that the image of the ‘Tatar yoke’ still prevails in most histories of Ukraine and other countries of eastern Europe. Furthermore, the decline of Kiev, already well under way before 1240, together with the opposition of some to the new Mongol order, encouraged the departure from Kiev and other southern Rus' cities of some members of the political, economic, and intellectual elite, who moved either northward to Vladimir-Suzdal' or westward to Galicia-Volhynia. This migration northward and westward was undertaken by only a small proportion of Ukraine’s inhabitants, however. It was not a large-scale exodus resulting in depopulation of the middle Dnieper region, as suggested in the nineteenth­century writings of Mikhail Pogodin and subsequent Russian historians (see chapter 2).

It was, nonetheless, during this last era of Kievan Rus' history that under the watchful eye of the Mongol rulers the gradual realignment of political power among the Rus' lands was completed. In the north, Novgorod continued its sepa­rate existence, while within Vladimir-Suzdal' the new city of Moscow soon would become the dominant political force. In the south, Galicia-Volhynia was the only Rus' principality on Ukrainian territory to survive as an independent state.