History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th century

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HISTORY ./^;5. MONGOLS

FROM THE 9th TO THE 19th CENTURY.

Part II.

THE SO-CALLED TARTAES OF RUSSIA
AND CENTRAL ASIA.

Division L

Henry H. Howorth, f.s.a.

LONDON :

Longmans, Green, and Co.

1880.

-^

TO

COLONEL YULE, C.B.,

AND

AUGUSTUS FRANKS, F.R.S., F.S.A.

I DEDICATE the following pages to two friends whom
I deem it a singular privilege to have known. Colonel
Yule, who has restored to us so much of the romantic
history of the East, and whose accuracy and breadth of view
have made his works European classics. He has proved to
the letter the truth of the adage, that he who seeks to bring
home the wealth of the Indies must fill his galleons with
corresponding wealth before he starts. He will not blame a
scholar who wishes to put his master's name on the threshold
of his work. Nor will my other friend, Mr. Franks, facile
princeps as an archaeologist within our four seas, who
distributes his bountiful knowledge with the generous
prodigality that becomes the possessor of an overflowing
store. Those who know hinv*^ best will not dwell, however,
on what is so well assured as his reputation, but will rather
revert to that urbanity and unfailing kindliness which knits
men closer together than all the wisdom of Solomon.

PREFACE.

IT is with great diffidence I venture to publish a second instalment of this
history, an instalment dealing with a singularly unfrequented chapter in
the great drama of human life, which, so far as English literature is concerned,
may be said to be completely unexplored. I know its faults and shortcomings
too well to permit me to claim for it more than a modest reputation. I beUeve
that it condenses the results of some honest labour, perhaps of more than the
casual reader would imagine; that it deals with a complicated and intricate
subject; that it attempts to arrange in logical sequence and continuity a series
of hitherto disintegrated and broken facts; and I hope that it may furnish
some future historian with a skeleton and framework upon which to build his
palace, when he shall clothe the dry bones with living flesh. Beyond this I make
no claims. My critics have been singularly forbearing in their treatment of my
former volume, and it is a supreme satisfaction to me to have made through it a
number of friends, whose tenderness to my failings has been as conspicuous as
their own learning. Perhaps I may claim their general consent that underneath
the superficial faults there remains a substantial addition to historical literature
which future researches will not entirely displace. If a few remarks have
seemed unfair, it is only a very small element compared with the great
number of suggestions which have been not only fair, but generous. As some
of the criticism passed upon the former volume will apply equally well to this,
I would hold a parley beforehand with those who wield the scalpel upon
points in which the patient may perhaps claim to be heard as well as the
doctor. One has complained of my style, that it has not the majestic ring of
Gibbon, or the easy flow of Macaulay. It is indeed easy for me to plead
guilty to this charge. I question whether either Gibbon or Macaulay, gifted
as they were, far beyond my capacity, could have traversed the arid steppes of
Asiatic history, tracked out the rivulets and streams which must be traced if
its course is to be known at all, and dealt with unfamiliar localities, uncouth
names, perpetual and monotonous fighting, and with materials such as these
have presented a pleasant picture to the fancy. To embroider a glorious quilt
we must not only have fine colours, but a chaste pattern ; but when the colour
is uniformly dull, and the pattern is uncouth and rude, we cannot hope to
attract the casual eye. But why this mass of details ? why not paint a few
generalities, grasping the main story in a few choice phrases, and leaving
the rest to oblivion? Here we have an issue on which I must not cry quarter.
Generalities, broad deductions, the philosophy of history, that is pleasant
reading enough, and for that pleasant writing too, but it is surely as vicious as
the dialectic of the schoolmen, until we have mapped out the details of our

VI PREFACE.

subject. lie who comes after, who can epitomise, who can point the moral
of the whole story, whose view of the wood is not blunted and obscured by
the profusion of trees, may do all this, and will assuredly gain the reward of
being read for his pains ; but before he can begin it is necessary, especially in
such fields as those of Asiatic history, that some one should trace out, step by
step and link by link, the crooked story, and spend nights and days in doing
the work of the backwoodsman, in clearing away the tangle, in cutting down
the rude forest, in running his plough through the virgin furrow ; and when he
has made all more or less clear, then his children will come and plant gardens
and orchards where he toiled. They will not remember perchance the work
that went before, they will grumble if some rude stump that defied the
pioneer's axe still blocks their way, but the harvest will be none the less largely
due to his labour ; and when he lies down to sleep, if he have done no man,
dead or living, an injustice, if he have not stolen what he displays as his own,
and bravely confesses that his rough-hewn chair is not so comfortable to sit in
as that made by a more practised hand, he will perchance have the satisfaction
which some say is worth living for, of having done his best at what his hand
found to do.

Style I profess in this work to have none. In some places, where
perseverance has almost succumbed under the load of monotonous detail,
I feel on reading the phrases again as if they had been written in the
unsophisticated days of early school life, when style and punctuation were
both contemned. It has been as much as patience and vigilance could secure
that the narrative should be intelligible, and in many places where the
pen would willingly have run riot, where a little poetry might have
been scattered among the phrases, the temptation has had to be sternly
resisted, for fear the facts should be distorted, and lest what is neces-
sarily a very compressed narrative should swell over untold volumes. The
facts I have tried to make clear and accurate. In many places I know I
have failed, non omnia possumus omnes — sometimes through the frailty
which all suffer from occasionally, sometimes when ill health has made the
task of revision irksome and difficult, sometimes when new material has
reached me after the story was irrevocably printed ; but I have at least this
excuse, that none of the giants under whose shadow I have walked have
escaped similar casualties — all of them are found tripping sometimes. It
would be^ a poor and a mean victory for their scholar to drag out and pin
down the occasions of their faltering, and it is no ambition of mine to do so.
In nearly all cases I have told the story as I thought it should be read, giving
my authority, and passing by my master's mistake without calling attention to
it. It would be blind indeed to attribute to merit what is the mere result of
good fortune. Perfection is indeed beyond our grasp, as the most shallow
philosophy will teach one ; but if it be so, it becomes doubly true, as the
proverb says, that " the best is the greatest enemy of the good." He whose
fastidiousness prevents him giving the world no product which is not perfect,
is not only postponing publication to eternity, but is robbing the world of its
due heritage in utilising the advance, faulty as it may be, which he has made.
I am conscious, therefore, that the following pages are full of faults ; but I

PREFACE. ^ Vii

would ask the more caustic of my critics, before they tie my scalp to their
girdle, to at least look at my too ample table of errata and additions, especially
those attached to Chapter IV., which deals with such a difficult section of this
history. The book has had to be both written and printed under considerable
difficulties, while the resources of the author, upon whom the burden and cost
of such a work naturally fall, have been too small to allow him to have an
unlimited number of proofs for correction. If some blunder therefore seems
more than usually stupid, do me the favour, most benevolent critic, who
would be nothing if not frank, to turn to the calendar of sins at the end, where
I have committed " The Happy Despatch," and saved you the trouble of
running your steel into me.

In the spelling of the names I have had even greater difficulty than before.
It is a peculiarity of the Turkish dialects that familiar proper names assume
different forms among them, and that the names which good Muhammedans
give their children from the Koran become distorted in different ways by the
Tartars of Kazan, by the Kazaks, etc., etc., and, therefore, add another
difficulty to the usual sources of embarrassment in regard to Eastern names.
With every deference to the arguments I have seen on this subject, the
difficulty remains at present insoluble, and our way must be a compromise —
too often an inconsistent compromise. This I know has been the case with
me. I can only hope that some reasonable solution may sometime be
forthcoming, and that in the following pages, bristling with proper names,
that this frailty has not caused any serious errors of statements of fact.

Fault may, perhaps, also be found with the number and iteration of my
references. Here, again, I have a theory which may not be that of my
critics. The greater j)art of history is an induction from certain facts. It
comprises, therefore, besides the actual data of our authorities, the personal
equation of the historian. For the student, the critical student, it is absolutely
necessary that he should be able to separate these two elements. In science,
at least, we can admit of no infallibility. In such inquiries as ours, there is
no court of final appeal, which can decide once and for ever the truth or
falsity of any position. The prejudice and the bias of the historian's political
and social theories inevitably colour his arguments, and make him, even when
most judicial, more or less an advocate; nor can any man be omniscient, even
in the limited range of one historical panorama. While it is quite certain
that, however well finished the work, it must inevitably, before many years,
become in part, if not altogether, obsolete from new discoveries. A coin, an
inscription, a mere trifle in appearance, may dislocate the whole of a long chain
of inference, and demand that the work shall be redone. For these reasonsi
therefore, it is assuredly necessary that a history, which is more in the form of
mosaic than aught else, in which the various pieces have had to be brought
together from many sources, should contain references for every fact. But
there is another and a more important reason— one which has a moral aspect
rather than a critical one— and that is that no man has a right to appropriate
the work of others, the deductions of others, even when slightly altered by
himself, without assigning them due credit for the same. For a man to parade
himself in a costume that he has borrowed from a thousand sources, and to

VIU PREFACE.

which he has added a mere feather or two, or even two hundred, and to make
believe before the world that he, " Jupiter omnisciens," is the author of it all,
is to act, indeed, the part of the cormorant, and to invite a fierce onslaught
from the critical anatomists of the future (such an onslaught as Leibnitz made
on Descartes, for instance), when they pull his work in pieces, and show
whence he has drawn his matter, and how unjust has been his appropriation.
It is not a mere shadow I am arguing against, it is the active theory of a large
school of historians, especially in Germany; and I may instance one famous
example without hesitation, since I greatly venerate him and his immense
learning, and look upon him as the profoundest and most accurate writer which
historical science has in our day produced — I mean Mommsen. His Magnum
Opus is a work of genius such as has hardly been matched in historical
inquiry, but it is literally of very little value to the student. From end to
end there is scarcely a reference ; the whole, which is a masterly condensation
of most heterogeneous and scattered materials, has to be accepted on the
ipse dixit of its author. This is well enough if we are reading " Ivanhoe " or
♦' Romola," but assuredly it is unfair to the reader and useless to the student
of serious history unless we know on what data certain views are propounded,
while it is eminently unfair to those who went before. Will anyone say that
Mommsen's work would have been possible if Niehbuhr had never written, and
yet the name of Niehbuhr occurs hardly once throughout the book ; nor do the
names of others who have followed up certain difficult inquiries. To reap
their harvest, to put it all in our own corn-rick, and then to label it with our
own name, is assuredly not quite right, whatever scheme of historical casuistry
we adopt. It is not right in a small man, but it is grievously wrong in a giant,
whose knowledge overshadows that of all others, and whose reputation is
dwarfed rather than enhanced thereby.

Another writer from whom I have learnt a great deal more than I can tell,
and whose praises I have sung in a former volume, is a second example of this
fault. It is only after going through the intricate mazes of a difficult
ethnographic problem that one can thoroughly appreciate the skill and
knowledge of Klaproth, but the preparation for the same work at the same
time brings vividly before us how very much of his material has been taken
from other sources without a word of acknowledgment. Thus, in his
"Travels in the Caucasus" there is a graphic account of the Kalmuks
running through nine chapters, which is literally transferred from Pallas's
little known work, entitled " Samlungen Historischer Nachrichten ueber die
Mongolischen Volkerschaften " without acknowledgment. Elsewhere he has
similarly laid under contribution the translations from the Chinese of the
Russian archimandrite, Hyacinthe Biturinski. This is assuredly unworthy of
such a man.

There is another charge of which I feel inwardly guilty, and to which I
would make a reply beforehand, and that is as to the focus of various parts of
the work. It may be said that I have enlarged too much upon the obscurer and
less important parts of the story, and thus by comparison dwarfed the relative
importance of the other parts — that in some cases, in fact, I have looked
through a telescope, and in others through a microscope ; in some have

PREFACE. • ix

sketched in the whole wood in broad lines, in others elaborated separate trees
in monotonous detail. This is true enough, and it no doubt affects the artistic
symmetry of the picture very materially. The excuse is perhaps only a partial
one, but such as it is I offer it. Some parts of the journey are over well
trodden and well surveyed ground. We have not to make sure of our foothold
in a quaking morass by driving in piles before we step. Here, therefore, we
can march with greater freedom and safety, and need not elaborate our road
as we go along. Other parts are less known, and, although politically
less important, are ethnologically not so, and it is absolutely necessary
to trace them out accurately and fully if we are to grasp the whole subject
firmly— here we necessarily have to link together details, and to labour
small facts, which are the only materials we possess, and thus to fashion
ourselves a roadway through the virgin swamp. It is assuredly very
wonderful that the heritage of Jingis Khan, broken as it is into so many
fragments, should be capable of being cemented together again by a
continuous story ; that we should be able to recover the pedigrees of so many
lines of princes claiming descent from him in their entirety, and thus to
aggregate into one historic whole a landscape that seems at first all broken
into substantive units. This can only be done by the collection at many
points of the story of obscure details, and this alone justifies their collection,
a labour which, if tedious to the reader, has been tenfold more tedious to the
writer, who has had to glean over acres of barren and unproductive ground to
secure here and there a solitary ear of grain.

I will now condense briefly a syllabus of the contents of the following
pages : The volume may be considered almost a separate work from that
which went before. The greater part of it has only a collateral connection
with it. Jingis Khan had four sons. Of these, the eldest, Juchi, died before
him, but he had already been assigned his portion of the inheritance by his
father. That portion consisted in the tribes encamped in the district formerly
composing the empire of Kara Khitai. In this inheritance Juchi was
succeeded by his eldest son, Orda. After the deaths of both Juchi and his
father, Batu, a younger brother of Orda's, undertook an expedition into Central
Europe, and conquered a wide area of the country, which he left to his
descendants. This comprised the country from the Yaik to the Carpathian
mountains, and included a suzerainty over Russia. Another brother, named
Sheiban, was assigned the tribes living in the country of the Kirghiz Kazaks,
while another descendant of Juchi, Nogai, was given the various tribes of
Turks once known as Pechenegs, and in later times called Nogais from
himself. These various tribes were recruited sometime in the fourteenth
century, on the break up of the special appanage of Ogotai, Jingis Khan's
second son, by a large migration from Sungaria. . These various tribes and
peoples were subject to a hierarchy of chiefs, all owing more or less supreme
allegiance to the ruler whose metropolis was Serai, on the Volga, and the
whole are comprised in the phrase, the Golden Horde. The first chapter of
this work contains an ethnographical account of the different tribes and clans
composing the Golden Horde in this its widest sense. The second chapter
gives a history of Juchi Khan, of Batu Khan, and of his son Sertak, and

X PREFACE.

describes the early campaigns of the Mongols in Central and Eastern Europe.
The third chapter deals with the history of the Golden Horde during the reign
of Bereke, the brother and successor of Batu, and of the latter's descendants
to the time of the extinction of his family, during which time Russia was
virtually a Mongol province. The fourth chapter deals with the struggles that
thereupon ensued between the descendants of other sons of Juchi for
supremacy in the Khanate, which ended in the triumph of the family of Orda.
The fifth chapter traces the history of the Golden Horde during the period
of its decay, and until it had by various secessions dwindled down to the
small Khanate of Astrakhan, and traces the history of this petty Khanate till
it was overwhelmed by Russia. In these four chapters I have endeavoured to
trace out the story of the original conquest of Russia by the Mongols (whom
I have here called Tartars),* the condition of Russia during the Tartar
domination, and the interesting process by which it gradually emancipated
itself from this yoke, and eventually trampled under its oppressors ; and have
tried to point out how far the conquest has affected the history and the social
economy of that great and interesting empire. I have also tried to show how
during the Tartar supremacy the South of Russia, under the influence of a
strong rule, was the focus of a vast trade and culture, and the means by which
Cairo, Baghdad, and Peking were brought into very close contact with Venice,
Genoa, and the Hanseatic towns ; and have described the terrible campaign
which the Great Timur waged in Europe, and which broke the power and
prestige of the Golden Horde.

As I have said, the empire, connoted by this phrase, broke asunder into
several fragments. Of these, one was the Khanate of Kazan, on the Middle
Volga, which, with its subordinate satellite, the Khanate of Kazimof, forms
the subject matter of the sixth chapter. The chief interest of this is the
perpetual struggle it carried on with Russia in the very heart of that empire,
until it was conquered and appropriated in the sixteenth century. The
conquest of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan carried the borders of
Russia, which had hitherto not extended further east than the river Sura, as
far as the Volga, and immensely increased its resources. A more important
fragment of the Golden Horde is that whose history is told in the seventh
chapter, namely, the Khanate of Krim, or the Crimea, which was only
crushed and annexed by Russia at the end of the last century. This Khanate,
which became an outpost of the Ottoman Turks for several centuries, barred
Russia from access to the Black Sea, as the possessions of the Swedes and
Danes, and of the Livonian knights, barred it from access to the Baltick, and
thus prevented an immense community from partaking readily in the fruits of
culture and civilisation, which were the heritage of Western Europe.

East of the Volga, the Kirghiz Kazaks are a race whose history is difficult
to follow, and yet who form one of the most interesting of nomadic communi-
ties. They are the descendants for the most part of the tribes subject to the
eldest son of Juchi Khan. The history of these tribes, from the time when
they first became a distinct entity until they were absorbed by Russia, occupies

• For a justification of this see infra, page 37.

PREFACE. xi

the eighth chapter, which I believe contains a considerable amount of matter
new to English readers. The tribes who were governed by Sheiban, and who
were afterwards known as Uzbegs, under which name they have filled such
an important role in Asiatic history, are the subject matter of the ninth, tenth,
and eleventh chapters. The ninth chapter deals with the history of the
important Uzbeg Khanates of Bukhara and Khokand, and of the various
petty Uzbeg principalities which have broken away at various times from the
former. It traces the history of these areas from their invasion by the Uzbegs,
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, down to our own day. The tenth
chapter deals with the Khanate of Khuarezm, or Khiva, which was also
founded by the Uzbegs shortly after that of Bukhara, and traces its crooked
and difficult history down to its virtual conquest by Russia a few years ago.
The eleventh chapter deals with the Khanate founded in Siberia by a branch
of the Uzbegs, and contains a full and detailed notice of its destruction by the
Cossacks in the sixteenth century. The last chapter is devoted to the Nogais,
the most disintegrated, broken, and scattered of any of the branches of the
Golden Horde, and traces out their dry and monotonous history as far as our
materials will permit.

Thus we complete our survey of the various fragments into which the
Golden Horde was broken. It will be seen that, with the exception of three
or four comparatively unimportant links, we are able to trace out the
genealogies of the many princes who have ruled over this area and its sections
back to their great progenitor Jingis Khan, and thus to give unity and
completeness to a vast mass of details which almost evade logical treat-
ment from their sporadic and dislocated nature. We by this means, as it
were, thrust our hand into a vast complicated and knotted skein of cords, and
by seizing one knot, the key of the whole, drag out a portion and arrange
its threads in symmetrical order. A second portion occupied us in our
former volume, dealing with the Mongols proper and the Kalmuks ; a third,
treating of the khanates of Jagatai and Kashgar, of the empire of the Ilkhans
of Persia, of that founded by the great Timur, and lastly, of its more famous
daughter, the Moghul empire of India, with an index to the whole, will
complete our task, and we hope that we may have strength and patience to
compass it.

As this work is professedly a collection of details, it will not be deemed
unprofitable that we should try and abstract some general lessons from them.
These lessons are of two kinds— ethnological and political. In tracing out
the migrations of a strong-backed race of nomades, in tracking them from the
steppes and prairies, where the herdsman and the shepherd are alone at home,
until we find them invading the latitudes of cities and of cornfields, gradually
changing their method of living and becoming citizens and settlers, we
naturally follow in the spoor of the great human procession which comes out
of darkness, and is marching whither we cannot tell. Not in Mongolia only,
and not among Tartars only, has the herdsman and the nomade been the
progenitor of the ploughboy and of the quidnuncs that gather together in
cities. This seems to be a general law of human progress. So, at least, it has
been considered by many reputable writers on public polity, and we need not

xii PREFACE.

waste our rhetoric in proving it. We may garner a more profitable harvest by
a less ambitious survey. What, then, are the facts, stated briefly? A broken
race of shepherds occupies the country round the southern shores of Lake
Baikal and the district to the east of it, a race numbering perhaps half a
million souls at the outside. This race, broken into various fragments, is
welded together into a homogeneous whole by a strong hand. It has the
usual virtues of those who have to labour hard for their livelihood under harsh
circumstances. It is strong and healthy and enduring, as all races of
nomades are. It has few wants, and little culture. Its life is a variation
between tending camels and cattle and fighting for its own against robber
neighbours. Its home is between the polar wind of winter and the unbearable
sun of the steppe in summer. With it, frugality and temperance, perseverance
and a belief in rigid obedience and discipline, are elementary virtues. Courage
to face all odds, supreme confidence in itself, supreme contempt for the weak
and the frivolous, without any traces of mere philanthropy in its national spirit,
and with all the stiff-necked assurance of the prosaic Philistine. These are
not amiable virtues, but they are at least strong and moving ones; they secrete
the underlying marrow in the bone which enabled three uhlans to enter
a hostile town with a laugh on their lips, which nerved that famous soldier
who seized the Great Moghul by the collar and dragged him forth from
the midst of a crowd of fanatical followers, and which was the companion of
Colonel Stoddart when he madly rode his charger into the royal square at
Bukhara during the solemn season of Ramazan, as we shall show further on.
It explains all those acts of heroic courage and pertinacity where a man
has dared to face outrageous odds— the Thermopylae of history; the sus-
taining examples whfen in difficulty of those brawny races who have made
their neighbours bow the neck and have dragged their country to the fore.
Of this hard grit were the Mongols made. When such folk have been
manipulated by a master hand, who has been a born-warrior, who could
invent a new system of tactics and devise a commissariat that is still the
wonder and riddle of the inquirer, could plan vast schemes, and have the
courage to face any difficulty, who trained a crowd of subordinates with few
other ambitions than to receive his favour from whom their own skill and
resources seemed inspired ; when the soldiery he commanded were ready to
do anything he ordered them, were never cowed or disheartened by momentary
checks or defeats, but seem to have looked upon their leader as a god, and
lost all sense of individual aim in eagerly struggling to be his servants, and
when by a series of victories that most potent of all human motives is
begotten, namely, the confidence a people has in its own invincibility, the
feeling that the earth is its special heritage and that all other races and
peoples who will not obey must perforce be swept away like stubble, that
underlying reserve of power which, according to Beranger, makes the Gallic
cock crow the loudest when gashed with the deepest wounds— then you get
such an extraordinary movement as took place in Eastern Mongolia in the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Jingis Khan, Timur, Nadir Shah, in
the East— Alexander, Cresar, Napoleon, in the West— are the symbols of such
movements, having a common explanation and teaching a common lesson ;
but the revolution effected by Jingis Khan was far more potent than the rest.

PREFACE. xiii

What did he in fact do ? Having organised and consolidated his Mongol
countrymen, he speedily conquered the various Turkish tribes of Central Asia.
Differing in language, there was yet a common bond of union, in common
customs, and in the fact, which has been too little observed, that he and his race
were of Turkish origin, and not Mongols. The Turks in all parts of Asia, after
a momentary resistance, collapsed altogether and joined his army. It thus
grew like a rolling snowball in the Alps. Every tribe that it encountered and
defeated fell into rank behind him and joined in his triumphal march, just as
Hessians, and Poles, and Italians followed Napoleon, and as the various races
of Europe were enrolled in the Roman armies. There was little outbreak or
rebellion among them, and where it occurred it was mercilessly repressed by
the extirpation of the whole race. The perpetual success of his arms was
the most potent of consolidating forces, and when he died those whose
master he was, were not a disintegrated mob, but a nation — a nomadic nation,
no doubt, but bound together by a fanatical loyalty to himself and his family,
and linked also by a singularly ingenious and practical hierarchy of rulers.

His empire was divided into four sections among his sons. These divisions
subsisted long, and were all feudally subservient to the senior house, which
reigned in the far east. Then they broke asunder. Then each one disintegrated
into smaller fragments, and eventually into still smaller. One extraordinary
feature, however, as I have stated, ruled meanwhile — a feature which made
the work we are writing possible. All these sections, great and small, were
ruled by princes of the sacred caste, and had an aristocracy of the same
descent. Jingis Khan was the fountain of all their princely houses, while
the upper caste, equivalent to the aristocracy and middle-class with us,
which there as everywhere in history kept alive the love of freedom, the
aspiration after other things than those which distract the ambition of the
bovine masses, who added the salt to the lump, the iron to the blood, who
formed the steel-head of the wooden spear, were also in the main of Mongol
descent. They belonged in the language of the Kazaks, the proudest and most
illustrious of robbers, whose polity is the most democratic of oligarchies, to
the class of white bones; while those whom they led and taught and
commanded belonged to the class of black bones. This was more universal
than is generally supposed. The fragments of the Mongol empire may be
roughly divided into two classes. Those which continued nomadic as before,
whose people perforce remained herdsmen and shepherds, since their country
was beyond the limits of cultivated land ; of these the Kazaks and Kalmuks
are notable examples to this day, and the rule about white bones and black
bones is universal amongst them. In the other section the Mongols overran
and conquered settled countries — Russia, China, and Persia. Here the
same law applied in a disguised form. Here also the ruling caste, the
aristocracy and upper strata of the country, were descended from the vigorous
invaders ; the handicraftsmen and hinds who worked and suffered for them
were the old indigenes whom they had conquered, and their descendants. In
China and Persia it was notably so. In Russia it was so also on a smaller
scale, as the note on page 362 will partially evidence. The invaders in
all cases were of course a fraction merely of the old inhabitants. They

xiv PREFACE.

for the most part accepted wives from the latter, and thus their language
and other superficial qualities disappeared. They were, in fact, in ordinary-
phraseology, absorbed ; but this word must not be taken too literally. We
can test its meaning by a parallel instance elsewhere— England, for example,
at the Norman Conquest. The aristocracy, the upper caste, in this country
was virtually swept away or trodden under, and was replaced by a more
vigorous and energetic one. This substitution in the class which alone has
wealth and leisure, the two foster mothers of the arts ; which can alone indulge
in the luxury of education and display, means a huge impulse given to progress
of all kinds. It is a curious feature in the history of civilisation that it is
not continuous, that it should have to pass through periods of stagnation and
decay, and have to be renewed by fresh ideas, sown by rough and unsophisti-
cated hands. Just as in nature the most bountiful harvests of summer are
generally garnered after the severest winters, just as the proverbial green of
the Nile valley needs that periodically the river shall overflow its banks,
and cover the remains of last year's crops with a layer of mud, so it is with
human progress. Worn out and sophisticated communities require to be over-
whelmed for awhile by a wave from the deep water which has not been
tainted nor disturbed, and apparently the deeper the ground is torn up, the
greater the desolation for the moment, the longer the fields lie fallow, the
more generous will be the harvest. The instance of the Mongols is only a
type of a general law. As a rule the several strata or layers which form a
human community represent the several waves of successive conquerors or
immigrants who have fertilised and strengthened the race. Where the
country is small and homogeneous, these social strata are generally arranged
in vertical fashion, the aristocracy and middle class, who are virtually drawn
from the same source, representing the later, and the hewers of wood and
drawers of water the earlier streams of migration. Where the area is large
and its surface much diversified, these layers have rather a horizontal
distribution ; the remoter, more rugged, and inaccessible parts of the country
being the refuge of what remains of the earliest inhabitants, the more
fertile and desirable parts being appropriated by the latest comers. England,
excluding Wales, may be taken as a concrete example of the former rule, and
India of the latter. The Calabrian peasant and the Milanese noble, the
Gallician boor and the Castilian hidalgo, the Galway squatter and the
Norman peer, are European instances of a contrast which is universal, and
which the historian explains by the contemporaneous existence, side by side,
of a primitive indigenous, and an invading and more developed type of
human being. In Russia the Mongols have produced examples of both laws;
not only have they largely recruited the upper ranks in the country, but they
have planted large colonies in the valley of the Volga, which will no doubt
be as easily assimilated by that most absorbent of Arian races, the Eastern
Slavs, as the other races whom it has swallowed up. Presently this mixture
may develope a human type which our philosophy has hardly contemplated.
The Slavs as a race are notoriously as mobile as mercury — so notoriously
that a national saying compares them to junket. Wherever they have proved
themselves a strong-willed and coherent race, they have been led and governed

PREFACE. XV

by strangers, who have given bone and sinew to the invertebrate mass. The
old Russian aristocracy, as is well known, was of Scandinavian origin ; the
later has a cosmopolitan pedigree, and it may well be that the mixture of
Russian with Tartar that is taking place on the Volga and in Western Siberia
will evolve " the coming race," which shall have its day when our children
have ceased to be —

" The heirs of all the ages in the foremost ranks of time."

There is another ethnological problem of a wide and general interest, of
which the study of the Mongols helps us to a solution. When we examine
for the first time the race changes which have taken place in such a compli-
cated area as Central Asia, we are baffled by their seeming perversity and
aimlessness. A close and detailed study of these movements, which alone is
of any value, will show that they are not so irregular as they at first seem, but
that a more or less general law underlies them. Movements of races are
limited very sharply by physical considerations. Mountains and deserts are
practically as great barriers as the ocean itself ; they thus govern very largely
the direction of migration. Again, the existence of strong powers at certain
points act as potent breakwaters to the drifting of nomadic tribes. Hence it
follows that when we have tracked out a large migration like that of the
Mongols through its various eddies and fluxes, we can more or less map out
the general route which other similar migrations must have followed. We
can not only gauge the direction of the gravitation, but also put our fingers on
the weak parts of the embankment, where the tide is the most likely to have
broken through. We thus find that with the Mongols who came from the
banks of the Onon and the Kerulon, although they eventually fought with and
won China, yet that that powerful empire acted for a time as a barrier, and a
large division of various tribes which were set in motion by Jingis Khan moved
westward with the sun until it reached the Carpathians ; another great
wave, turning round the great outliers of the Pamir plateau, flooded over the
Jaxartes and the Oxus, and stopped not till Baghdad was in their power;
while a third and later wave, an afterflow of the main tide, swept over North-
western India and put the great Moghul on the throne of Delhi. This
involved a vast movement, which shifted the centre of gravity of the Turkish
tribes many degrees to the west of its former position. If we now remit the
Mongols to their original home, and restore things to the condition they were
in at the accession of Jingis Khan at the end of the twelfth century, and
analyse the race revolutions of the centuries preceding that date— a work
which I have tried to do in some detail elsewhere — we shall find that the
Turks who preceded the Mongols as the dominant race in Asia followed the
same lines. They, too, pushed westwards to the Carpathians; they, too,
flooded over the Jaxartes and the Oxus, and overran Syria and Asia Minor, thus
stretching their hands even beyond the Mongol reach, while at the other end
of Persia they crossed the Indus, and also founded an empire of Delhi ; and
as if to make the parallel complete, although they did not conquer all China,
they did overrun its northern portion and ruled it for awhile. This carries us
back to the sixth century.

xvi PREFACE.

Before the Turks, the various Hunnic races were the most influential in
Central Asia. Here we reach a difficult, and an as yet but partially explored,
ethnographic region ; but so far as we have information, the story, on a
smaller scale, is the same ; and I have tried to illustrate it partially in a series
of papers in the journal of the Ethnological Society on '♦ The Westerly Drifting
of Nomades." This, then, seems to be a law of some generality, and we
can at least carry back the story to the days of Herodotus, who, in explaining
the eviction of the Cimmerians from Southern Russia, tells us how they were
pushed on by the Scyths, the Scyths by the Massagetae, they by the Issedones,
and they in turn by the Arimaspi.

Is this law the cardinal law of human migration ? It may well be so. We
dare not say more until the ground has been closely scrutinised and mapped
out, but a priori it seems most probable, and, if so, it is clear that the
revolutions we have traced are most important, as the latest, and perhaps the
widest, and that if we are to enter and trace out the long and diminishing
avenue leading back to the cradle of our race — a goal to which many longing
eyes are turned — the traveller must first pass through the countries which
have occupied us so long, and make the history of the Mongols his starting-
point.

Let us now consider some political lessons, more attractive than these
speculations to those who in the guise of the men of Gath are ever crying
out ** Cui bono " to ourselves and such as we. A portion of the area whose
history is covered by this volume is very interesting as the battle ground of
current diplomacy, and the subject of rival aspirations on the part of England
and Russia, and political problems are waiting for solution here which cannot
be solved satisfactorily or finally without due regard to certain historical
considerations. Nor is this the only political problem which our studies
throw seme light upon.

It is assuredly an interesting inquiry to analyse the conditions under which
such a community as that of Russia was moulded. We shall not fail to trace
many of those singular social characteristics which repel or attract us to the
discipline which the race has suffered, and the crimes of which it has been
the victim. When the Mongols invaded the West, Russia was broken up into
a number of feudal principalities, owning but a slight allegiance to the over-
chief of the whole, the so-called Grand Prince, The Mongol invasion was
accompanied here, as elsewhere, by ruthless destruction and havoc, for it was
their wont — to use a phrase of Sir Thomas Browne — " to treat human beings
as flies, and to convert whole nations into wildernesses." It was a fortunate
thing for Europe that the greater part of Russia had no attractions as a
residence for the shepherds and herdsmen of Tartary. Its forests and marshes
were a hindrance to them, and when they had laid it waste they withdrew
from Russia proper to the Ukraine and the level plains of never-ending grass
which extend from the Dnieper to the river Ural, ever the paradise of herdsmen.
The wreck and ruin which they had caused, the backs they had harrowed so
deeply were abandoned to their own resources, and the gaping wounds had
to heal as best they might without aid from the outside.

When the Mongols withdrew they left behind them comm.issaries to collect

PREFACE. • xvii

dues and taxes from the various towns and districts — publicans who farmed out
the revenue, and who, like this famous genus throughout the East, had a common
ancestor in the horse-leech that ever cried for more, and who drained the very
vitals of the land. These gadflies, and the ruin caused by periodical raids
for plunder, were the main economical hindrances to the nation's progress.
A hindrance of another kind was the fierce inquisitorial and jealous super-
vision which the Mongol suzerains exacted at every turn from the ruling
caste, and which was aggravated by the jealousies and strifes of the various
princes, who outdid each other in sycophancy. Those ignoble vices which
men who crawl inherit became naturally prevalent, and spread with natural
rapidity to the lower strata of society— deceit, chicanery, servility, and
mutual distrust, the common property of slaves. Nor is it easy for those who
have never had the ploughshare run through their own flesh and that of
their children; who have had a strong arm to lean upon, and have not been
perpetually linked arm-in-arm with suspicious and treacherous neighbours, to
preach homilies on such a state of things. Presently, two potent reforms
began the work of lifting the nation out of the slough. By their address, and
by their ample promises and faithful services, the Russian princes obtained
from the Tartars the privilege of being the farmers of the tax. They
made themselves answerable for it, and thus got rid of the hateful
presence of the commissaries. At the same time the culture which was
grafted upon the Tartars by their conversion to Muhammedanism, and the
intercourse that ensued between Cairo and Sultania on the one hand and the
banks of the Volga on the other, together with the wealth and luxury induced
by the great trade route from India and China passing through their country
to the marts frequented by the energetic merchants of Genoa and Venice,
introduced a much milder regime and more humanitarian views at the Tartar
court, which was reflected in their treatment of their proteges. Meanwhile the
line of princes at Moscow had secured for themselves the hereditary position
of Grand Prince and of imperial tax masters to the Mongols, who were not
loath to encourage the strengthening of the hands of such faithful and
devoted servants. On the other hand, the feeling grew apace in Russia, and
especially among the ecclesiastics and better educated and more far-seeing
men, that if the hated shadow which overhung the land was ever to be
dissipated, if the servile chains that hung about their limbs were ever to be
struck off, it could only be by consolidating the power of Russia in one strong
hand, and by concentrating in it every form of authority until that aggre-
gation of very ignorant and very superstitious peasants should look upon their
ruler as a Messiah whose mission it was to lead them out of the land of
bondage where they lay, and who could claim from each one the sacrifice of
everything he possessed. This was the creed that was gradually and firmly
implanted in every breast. It first enabled the Grand Prince to crush out and
destroy the various appanaged princes, and to create a homogeneous power
out of them, with its metropolis at Moscow, and then to show a bolder front to
his patrons. While this was going on in Russia, the power of the Golden
Horde was being sapped by internal decay, and received a staggering blow
from the hands of the great Timur. Under these influences it broke into several

xvm PREFACE.

fragments. After a tedious struggle the Grand Prince of Moscow, in the
middle of the eleventh century, succeeded in destroying and annexing those
parts of the Golden Horde known as the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and
Siberia ; and within less than a century, through the enterprise of the Cossacka,
the national flag was carried as far as Kamskatka and the Yellow Sea.

These external conquests were effected by the famous Tzars Ivan the
Third and Ivan the Terrible, who probably carried the autocratic theory of
government more completely to its logical conclusion than it was ever
carried before. Russia in their hands became in fact a mere multitude of
abject slaves subject to a most tyrannical master, who crushed out and
destroyed the old aristocracy, while almost every trace of municipal and social
freedom disappeared. The servility which had been exacted by the Mongols
was transferred to the Tzar and his officials : all power was directly dependent
on himself; birth, reputation, wealth, were of no influence when in opposition
to his whim, and every trace of liberty was uprooted. Serfdom was introduced,
the peasant was tied down to the land, and the whole nation, by an ingenious
hierarchy of officials, was made a mere machine, of which the key was in the
hands of one irresponsible person, and during one long reign in the hands of a
madman and a monster. All this was perhaps necessary to the consolidating
of sufficient power to expel the foreigner whose heel was on the nation's neck,
but it meant something much more. Just at the very epoch when, through
the influence of the Renaissance and of the Reformation, Western Europe
was entering upon an entirely new era of progress and culture, Russia was
beginning to settle down into that long period of stagnation which followed the
expulsion of the Tartars, when every man's individuality was crushed out of
him, and ignorance and social degradation prevailed everywhere. Learning
practically disappeared. The Church shared in the general arrest, and the
whole land was steeped in Bceotian darkness, a veneer of superficial luxury
of a gross and sensual character making the stagnation below more revolting.

Such was the land which Peter the Great was called upon to govern at the
end of the seventeenth century — the uncongenial soil in which he endeavoured
with such persevering energy to plant German and French civilisation,
endeavouring to transplant the vine and the fig-tree to the frozen soil of
Moscow ; and is it wonderful that he failed very largely, as the great body
of Russian historians confess he did. The soil was not ready for such plants.
The country needed a remedy of another kind first, and this Peter the Great
did apply with a success that has scarcely been appreciated.

When he mounted the throne the Russians were enclosed on all sides by
hostile neighbours, and had no access to the outside world. Choked, as it
were, in an iron girdle, they were literally compelled to " stew in their own
gravy," to vegetate alone; and those who believe, as all students of history
must, that under such conditions progress is impossible, must feel some
sympathy with the struggles — rude and brutal no doubt very often, but yet
the justifiable struggles — of the young Colossus to break through the barriers
which enclosed it, and to get a breathing space where the fresh air from the
outer world could inflate its lungs with a new and virgin sensation, that of
having vast needs and vast wants, the prelude to having them supplied.

PREFACE. . xix

It is almost incredible how shut in Russia was at this time. On the south,
the Crimean Tartars barred all access to the Black Sea. In the west and
north-west, the Swedes and Danes, the Livonian and Prussian knights, and
the Germans, created a cordon of fiscal and other barriers which absolutely
closed all ingress and egress for the arts and humanities except through the
narrow portals of the Hanseatic league. The best test perhaps of the isolation
of the empire at this time is to be found in the great influence exercised upon
its internal condition when such an uninviting entrance to it as the White
Sea was discovered by Chancellor and the other English navigators in the
sixteenth century.

Peter began his work by forcing his way to the Baltic and to the Sea
of Azof. The foundation of St. Petersburg — which was perhaps the greatest
mistake of his life, since it planted the heart of the empire in one of its
extremities, instead of near its centre of gravity ; planted it, too, in an extremity
which was numbed and enfeebled by the harshness of its surroundings —
was merely an attempt to create a great emporium for western culture at a
point easily accessible from the sea. What Peter began was only completed
by Catherine at the end of the last century, when she conquered the Krim,
and for the first time enabled Russia to have perennial intercourse with
the world, undisturbed by intermittent close seasons of frost. This is the
story we have traced out in detail in the following pages. It is assuredly
a very instructive story. It is only yesterday that Russia's sun began to
emerge from behind the cloud-banks which have overshadowed it so long.
The glacial period in its history, when the Tartars were its masters, was
followed by a terrible period of oppression, supplemented by exclusion from
the world of culture. Is it to be wondered that so much remains behind that
is uncouth and barbarous, and almost hopeless. Those who try to plant
roses in its uncongenial soil, and find them wither, are apt to break out into
jeremiads, tempered by abuse; while others who see in its homogeneous,
ignorant, happy-go-lucky, servile, drunken peasants, nothing but the natural
incapacity of the race, forget the social chaos from which these weeds have been
inherited. It is a very crude philosophy which fancies that every race, how-
ever invertebrate, and every community, however guiltless of public virtue, is
fit material for the nostrums of our day — parliaments, juries, self-government.
Because the Anglo-Saxons, who have always been free men, have worked out
a form of government that essentially requires the virtues of free men for its
support, it does not follow that those who have been ground down by ages of
terrible oppression should also be fit for the same heritage. It is impossible that
culture which is to reach not merely the superficial layers of a community but
the lower grades of the social edifice can be produced at once, and before the
plough has gone deep down below the sod, and the broad furrows have been
disintegrated by many a frost and many a burning sky. The work is being done
slowly, and amidst immense difficulties. Those who will turn to the sardonic
phrases Voltaire applied to the Russians, or the character which the history of
the last century gave the Cossack ; those who have read the story of Suvarof's
murderous campaigns with an unbiassed mind, and compared it with that of
the campaigns of Russian armies lately ; those who will put side by side the

Xk PREFACi£.

Russia of Catherine the Great and of Alexander the Third, must feel that the
Russian race is immensely altered, and that the metaphorical Tartar
apostrophised by Voltaire is no longer the prominent feature in it. We
shrink no doubt from many of the characteristics of Russian public life — from
its Oriental system of diplomacy, from the atmosphere, tainted with corruption,
in which its bureaucracy lives, the want of genuine patriotism among its masses,
the crass ignorance of its people, and the degraded position of its Church
in the rural districts. We would see these things disappear, and we believe
they are disappearing, and that a genuine leaven is gradually leavening the lump.
Meanwhile, the too level mass of ignorance and Philistinism can only be kept
together at present by a strong hand, and to import Western specifics among its
untrained people is to court inevitable failure. Those who like myself are privi-
leged to know many Russian scholars, and to feel how very close akin in many
ways they are to Englishmen, and to have seen the kindly, unselfish, hospitable
Russian peasant at home, will continue to hope, and feel a justification in
hoping, that the slough in which the race was so long buried, and which we
have tried to explore, will not always leave its mud spots upon it, but that
presently it will stand shoulder to shoulder with our own people, which it rivals
in fertility and numbers, and which it must be the hope of every decent person
it will rival in the noble work of making humanity bow its neck to nobler and
more ideal idols than it has hitherto done.

When we leave this historical survey to consider the critical questions
of policy which embarrass the present moment we at once enter a region
where dispassionate and judicial language is so unusual that it almost sounds
inappropriate, and we feel that our judgment may be easily warped by the passing
fanaticism of the hour. The rivalry of England and Russia in the East is an
old story, and one which has not very attractive features for those students
who endeavour to look beyond the ephemeral politics of to-day and to view
the wider horizon in which these incidents are mere details. It involves two
distinct factors — the policy of Russia on the Bosphorus, and in Central Asia.
The two are very often named together, much to the confusion and misappre-
hension of the subject. Let us first briefly consider the former. Russia's links
with Byzantium, " that sublime theatre of religious and political vicissitude," as
it has been well apostrophised, are co-extensive with her history. From Byzan-
tium she first received her Christianity. Byzantium was the object of piratical
attack on the part of her early Scandinavian princes. During the long period
of her degradation it was the perennial intercourse of her priesthood with
Byzantium which created the mere twilight of culture which alone illumined
her unfortunate provinces. When the Turk captured Byzantium and trod
under foot the centre and focus of Greek Christianity, Russia became the most
powerful and important home of that Church, the hope and the support of
its priesthood. Many cultured Greeks then made their way to Russia, and
finally in 1472 the Tzar Ivan the Third married Sophia, the niece of
Constantine Palaeologus, and thenceforward looked upon himself as having
hereditary claims upon what he described as "that imperial tree whose
shadow had once covered all orthodox and brother Christians."* He

* Vide infra, 313, etc.

PREFACE. • xxi

also adopted the double-headed eagle, the blazon on the old imperial standard,
as the national arms of Russia. Meanwhile, the Turk (who held the
Bosphorus), was hated for his religion — that of the Tartar, who had so
long trampled upon Russia— and was hated also because he held all the
approaches to the Black Sea, and thus created a barrier between the frozen
land and the sun, which was unbearable. He was hated, further, because he
dominated over and ill-used the Slavs, who lived south of the Danube, and
who were near akin in blood and language and faith to the Russians. It is
true the Latin Christians of the West were even more hated than the Turk,
and that their stronghold in Central Europe — Poland, was a constant thorn in
Russia's side, and that her Machiavellian princes did not scruple to utilise a
Turkish alliance very often, as the following pages will testify ; yet the great
underlying current remained as we have sketched it, and Tzargorod, the city
of the Casars, was, in the popular creed of Russia, long before Peter the
Great, and his more or less problematical will, the object of yearning ambition.

On the other hand, we must remember that until recently the only strong
arm which the Southern Slavs could lean upon was that of Russia. Austria
was ambitious of being not a Danubian power, but a great German empire,
and habitually sacrificed her other vast provinces to satisfy the natural
leanings and sympathies of the petty archduchy out of which she grew.
This threw the Southern Slavs into the arms of Russia, as well as
another race whose exceeding fertility is such a marked feature in its
character, and which is far other than Slav in tradition and blood. I
refer to the Rumans or Vlakhs, whose only point of contact with Russia,
besides their geographical position, is their religion. All this is matter
of history, and cannot be disputed. It explains a great deal of what has
recently happened in the East, and it might lead captive our judgment,
if history and sentiment were the only factors in politics. Russia is not,
however, the cynosure of every eye. Its past has been a cruel one, and it
naturally lags far behind much of the rest of the world in culture and
civilisation. Its foot is heavy, and few daisies grow where it has trod. We
feel that that foot is doing effective service when it stamps on the incorrigible
robbers of Asia, but we feel more strongly that its presence is unwelcome and
hurtful where more cultured races have already settled. When Russia
annexes a province, it ceases to be a part of the world's common capital of
culture and wealth, and sinks into the common Philistinism that more or less
inevitably surrounds races trained as the Russians have been. She not only
closes the door, but buries the key, with the narrow political selfishness
which supposes that a nation is poorer which allows the stranger to warm his
hands at its fire, and forgets that the barter of mental gifts is as necessary to
human progress as the exchange of material commodities.

Again, there are certain critical geographical positions which in all history
have been of vital consequence to others than their mere possessors. What
Gibbon has said about the position of Byzantium is too familiar to need
quotation, and his panegyric assuredly contains a momentous truth, enshrined
in splendidly coloured phrases.

It is felt by politicians of all schools that Constantinople in the hands of

XXll PREFACE.

Russia means the freezing up of one of the most important channels the world
possesses, and the consequent shrinkage of the world's stock of wealth and
resources. The possession by Russia of the mouths of the Danube means
giving over the gateway to the chief thoroughfare of Central Europe to the
most backward and unscrupulous of its communities. In both cases
a corporate interest is threatened which is of far higher value in every
way than the mere historical sentiment which has been nursed for so many
generations, and at all costs and sacrifices it is necessary that this sentiment
should not bear too luxurious fruit, and that the Bosphorus and Dardanelles
should not be in the grip of a giant who could close them when his whim so
dictated, and create an arsenal in the Black Sea which would imperil the
world's peace for many a decade, and retard proportionately the growth of
freedom in Russia itself. We do not affect to feel much pain at the blows
which have fallen on the Turk. We have no sympathy with his antecedents
and his history — or, to speak more faithfully, his history in Europe. Here
he has done little but destroy and devastate, and where he has not done
this the musty incense which arises from stagnation and decay, and which
harbingers his coming shadow, is more in harmony with the Philosophy of Sir
Thomas Browne than our own. We have not, on the other hand, any leaning
towards that heroic policy which consists in perpetually and unceasingly
thrusting out bricks from the bottom of our neighbour's wall until it falls
in glorious ruin, and then philosophising with unctuous insincerity on the
sins and follies of those whose apple croft is in the way of our envious
eye, as has been so often the case in the Foreign Office of Russia, nor
with the art of leading astray too honest and unsuspicious strangers
with a pretence of philanthropy when we really mean aggrandisement.
Our sympathy for many years has been with another solution, one
which is in process of accomplishment at this moment. Austria has ceased to
contend in the futile struggle for Charlemagne's crown with the broad-
shouldered Pomeranians. She has begun to turn her eyes elsewhere. Her
very name suggests that she is an Eastern Empire. Her Slav peoples, the
most cultured and civilised of all the Slavs, are the most powerful
element in her population. It is round her that the Danubian nationalities
will inevitably range themselves. Thus shifting her centre of gravity further
East she will become the mother of the southern Slavs, who have a much
closer common tie of blood,* and a tie which binds them more closely to the
Magyars, who are so jealous of them, than generally supposed. She will
thus pay back in some measure the debt the Western world owes to the
Eastern, by forming the link between the two, and handing some of the
treasures that have overflowed on her ample knee while she lay between the
Adriatic and the Carpathians, to the less fortunate although more energetic
dwellers in the valley of the Lower Danube. Presently Russia will face
the inevitable at least with composure. She has enough work on her hands
already. Her empire is already too vast and unwieldy. The possession of
Constantinople would be a temptation to shift her metropolis away from her

See Papers on the Migrations of the Slavs, by H. H. Howorth, Journal of the
Anthropological Institute.

PREFACE. xxiil

own people to the sunny latitudes of the Golden Horde, and thus to repeat
the blunder of Peter the Great. Her great strength now is due to the
homogeneousness of her people. It would be a source of weakness, and not of
strength, for her to be hampered with the contending ambitions of Rumans,
Bulgarians, Greeks, and Turks. She has already got a splendid sea board
on the Euxine, and ports for her southern provinces, as well as her Trans-
Caucasian ones. What advantage save a sentimental one would the
possession of Constantinople bring unless it be deemed an advantage to
make the Euxine a private Russian lake altogether. The case seems so plain
that it will need no great sacrifice of vanity or of repute if the direction
of the nation's ambition is directed elsewhere ; and meanwhile, if prudence, ■
statesmanship, and foresight be brushed aside altogether by Russian diplo-
macy, and if its eye still turns towards the city of Constantine, the world
has one gauge for its own security in the undisguised alliance of Germany
and Austria, an alliance dictated not by philanthropy, but by mutual interest,
which is a far more potent factor in politics than philanthropy.

Let us now turn our view further east. The progress of Russia in Central
Asia has been the subject of much rhetoric, inflated and otherwise, recently,
in which its more important elements have been a good deal overlooked.
The Russian advance in Central Asia comprises two periods and two sets of
conditions entirely differing from one another. The appropriation of the
steppes of the Kirghiz Kazaks, the so-called independent Tartary, is quite a
different matter in origin and in character to the Russian attack upon the
Uzbeg Khanates of Central Asia.

In regard to the former, I hold most completely that the course adopted was
amply justified in every way. The Kazaks, whose very name is a synonym
for freebooters and robbers, have been the scourge of all their neighbours for
generations, habitually given to robbery and pillage, bound by no promise and
no oath, and constantly disintegrating under the solvent of rival chiefs, with
rival reputations, as leaders of bandits. The Russians were long-suffering for
years (as we shall amply prove),* to their habitual treacheries and deceits.
They tried means of various kinds to secure peace among them, and to protect
their own frontier populations from perpetual harass, but with no avail. Murder,
robbery, harrying of women and children, of cattle and goods, waylaying
of caravans of merchants, all the vexatious and irritating forms of border
marauding which a long inheritance of robber habits had taught them, were
continually being practised. Under such circumstances annexation was
inevitable. The stamping out of these practices could only be compassed by
the complete conquest of the race, and by putting it under surveillance, and this
was done effectually, and with humanity and prudence. Those who affect to
admire the savage in his unsophisticated condition, generally live upon velvet,
and write their allegories far away from danger. To the backwoodsman
and pioneer, who live in immediate contact with him, the picture has a
much more lurid light, and it is assuredly inevitable and right that where a
great empire has an uncertain boundary, across which its predatory neighbours

* See chap, viii.

XXIV PREFACE.

are habitually crossing for other than peaceful purposes, that it should crush
them. If they will submit and become peaceful subjects, all is well ; if not,
they must take their departure to the other country, as the Red Indian, the
Australian, and the Tasmanian have done, or are doing. In the case of the
Kazaks, they have preferred the former alternative. They have largely accepted
the new conditions, and become a thriving community, their herds having
increased immensely. It is true they have lost their freedom, but freedom is
an intangible term which does duty to point many an ambiguous moral. It
will require a very cynical critic to confess that the world is not better
because rapine has ceased in the Kazak steppes, and because a horde of
unlicensed robbers has been subjected to the restraining discipline of a
strong-heeled power like Russia, and a very captious one to argue that this
conquest was a menace to any other civilised power. We may now turn to
the more difficult questions involved in the recent subjection of the Uzbeg
Khanates, which I have described in detail in the later chapters of this
volume.

This conquest has certainly brought little honour or profit to Russia, and its
justification is by no means universal in Russian circles. Russia has a large
army; it has no representative institutions worthy of the name, and all its
bolder and more adventurous spirits choose the army for their profession.
There alone, to a large extent, a man can elbow himself into the front rank,
and acquire at least the factitious glory of being talked about and envied by
his countrymen. The army is, in fact, the dominant caste of Russian society ;
and the army everyvi^here, under such conditions, is a bad school of public
morals or of international equities. To a man whose only capital is his
sword it is a great temptation to flesh it somewhere, and if there be no
convenient victim at hand, to manufacture one. Fortune has literally to be
carved. Again, Russia is a vast empire, in which means of communication
are few and slow, and in which the heart is remote from the extremities, and
they accordingly do not always beat in unison. The border commanders,
like those of ancient Persia, are virtually satraps, with great powers of
initiation in their hands, and cannot be always controlled. These conditions
favour the existence of such soldiers of fortune as General Kaufmann and
others, who have not been restrained by tender scruples from pushing their
neighbours into an aggressive attitude and then falling upon them, reaping a
shower of decorations in doing so. It is no secret that he and such as he are
not the favourites in the better Russian circles that they are made to appear.
They are neither very respectable nor very popular instruments of aggression,
but they are more or less indispensable. It is true the authorities at St.
Petersburg condone their actions when successful. The fruit garnered by
an army in an autocratic empire must go to the wine-press even although it
set the teeth on edge, for it has cost much sacrifice, and the army has a
voice which must be obeyed, since it forms the only cohesive element in the
body politick. It matters little that the budget of Turkestan furnishes an
accelerating deficit; that all the dreams begotten of the famous golden sands
of the Bukharian rivers are as delusive as the pearls which attracted Ccesar to
these shores ; that the poor baubles that are exhibited at the capital as the

PREFACE. XXV

spoils of Khokand raise a smile in the artist and a sneer in the student of
political economy. All this has to be concealed, for the prestige of the army is
at stake, and men must try and believe that what cost so much sacrifice must
be worth a good deal. These scattered postulates will at all events go to
show that we have little sympathy with that aspect of recent Russian aggres-
sion dissected so well by our friend Mr. Schuyler, and one of whose fruits was
the famous massacre of the Turkomans ; but we shall have run our scalpel
into but a very superficial layer if we fancy we have probed the whole question
when we have thus stated some of its features. That question involves a
much wider issue, namely, the jealous antagonism of England and Russia
in Central Asia for the last half century, which gives the most colourable of
all the pretences for these aggressive border commanders.

The history of this rivalry and its fruits is assuredly one of the most painful
chapters in human annals. The ruling principle of English policy hitherto
has been to create and perpetuate a neutral zone between our frontiers and
those of Russia, a policy which is equivalent to a regulation by which some
thoroughfare dividing two adjacent crowded areas shall be declared to be a
sanctuary -to which no policeman shall have access, and in which all k'nds
of vagabonds and intriguers and criminals shall have elbow-room. It is
assuredly a paradox that such a policy should have been formulated in our
time, nor is it wonderful that it should have produced the chaos which now
exists in Afghanistan and its borders.* When Bukhara was a strong power, as
in the days of the great Abdulla Khan,* or when, still later, Afghanistan was
controlled by the sturdy hands of the founders of the Durani empire, then it
was plausible to urge such a policy, for there was a ruler strong enough within
the neutral zone to compel those who harboured there to behave decently; but
in Asia power is always short-lived, and the chronic condition of all govern-
ment is disintegration, and accordingly during the last half century we find
hat persistent decay has overtaken the States between the frontiers of
England and Russia. Meanwhile both empires have persistently employed
open and covert means for checkmating each other's influence there. The
journeys of Abbott and Shakespear, of Stoddart and Conolly, which are
detailed later on, are familiar to our readers. They were counterchecked by
agents from Russia ; and what have been the fruits ? Can Russia look back
with anything but grim regret to the expedition of Perofski, or England to the
massacre of Kabul and the murder of Stoddart and Conolly? all of them Dead
Sea apples in the same basket. Has anything been solved or furthered? It
is true the Russians have annexed Khokand and are the masters of Khiva and
Bukhara, and that we are in possession of Kabul, but the intervening area is
reduced to confusion, and both the rival empires have serious problems on
their hands to solve.

Is this a comfortable subject either for a retrospect or for present study for
those who are patriots in either country? I trow not. If not, is it not time
that the exploded fallacy of a neutral zone should be discarded, and that we
should look elsewhere for a more reasonable and lasting remedy?

Before we turn to this we may glance elsewhere for a moment. There

* Vide itifra, page 733, etc.

XXVI PREFACE.

is a general impression abroad everywhere in England that Russia's great
object in her Eastern policy is the eventual conquest of India. This may
be so ; I can find little to support such a view in public documents. It is true
that in the time of Peter the Great, before the English had an Indian empire,
there was a notion prevalent in Russia, as elsewhere, that India was an
El Dorado whence stores of fabulous wealth were to be obtained, and he no
doubt sent officers to try and explore the route thither. This is not only true,
but it was assuredly most justifiable. Again, it is true that a constant tension
and irritation having existed in the mutual relations of Russia and England
for many years, involving one terrible war and the preparations for another,
Russia has endeavoured to create trouble for us in the weakest part of our
armour. It is true, also, that the diplomatic language and amenities of Russia
are of that tortuous character which a fervid popular orator once described as
attorneyship rather than statesmanship. All this we grant freely, but it does
not involve the notion that the current aim and object of Russian policy is
the conquest of India.

India is known to involve burdens as well as responsibilities which the
Russian back is by no means able to support, while the advantages it holds
out in the shape of trade are but poor attractions to a nation whose manufac-
tures are a sickly plant. The glamour that affected many European eyes
in regard to India is fast disappearing. It is now known that the chief virtue
of that fruit is in its external attractiveness, and that its juices have been long
ago exhausted by generations of hungry robbers. When we grant this, does
it imply, however, that we may fold our arms and close our lids, and let our
ship sail with the nearest current and the nearest breeze, as if we were the
companions of the ancient mariner ? Those who navigate after this fashion
inevitably run their ship on the rocks. Assuredly not. We cannot leave India
if we would ; there is no one to take our place, and while there we are bound
by every sacred tie to secure the safety of its inhabitants, not only from
external attack, but from perennial panic. The people of India know well
what a menace Afghanistan has been to them ; that it has been from
Afghanistan that every invading horde has come, which has spread desolation
over the country, and made slaves of its peoples. If Afghanistan is turbulent
and unfriendly, and if, further, the exigencies of rival policies elsewhere
make it prudent and desirable for Russia to employ it as an advance
guard, and to keep a sword of Damocles hanging over our two hundred
millions of helpless fellow subjects, it becomes not only our right, but our
manifest duty, to interfere. It is almost puerile to discuss the right or wrong
of interfering with our neighbour, who, we know, is undermining our wall,
and lodging dynamite there to blow down our homestead. To speak of his
right in such a case is to pervert the language of morals and of law altogether.
My neighbour may do his will so long as he does not menace me and my
interests ; when he does so, I, who am a trustee for a nation of feeble men
and women, am a criminal if I do not warn him, and if he will not listen,
run my rapier through him ? War is wholesale murder, we are told. If it
be murder to strangle a person who has seized us by the throat, or is
planning our destruction, it is a form of murder which no law but that of

PREFACE. . XXVU

inanity will deem unjustifiable, whether it be retail or wholesale. When it
became clear that the Amir of Kabul, the ruler of a brutal fanatical nation,
was unfriendly to us, and intriguing with Russia against us, and when this
became a possible danger to India, we were bound to interfere, and if need be
to smite him to the ground. We have done so, and the question remains,
what are we to do with his inheritance ? In the first place, as we have seen,
the notion of a neutral zone between the frontiers of England and Russia is
one which has been found to be impracticable, and full of constant menace.
This view is felt as strongly in Russia as here, and has lately been urged with
force by Professor Martens, of Moscow. The only prudent solution of present
difficulties to which things are inevitably tending, is that England and Russia
shall have a common frontier. This solution has pressed upon me more and
more in writing the history of recent events among the Uzbegs.

Let us now consider some of the practical bearings of this hypothetical
solution.

Under the name Afghanistan we include three districts, varying in history
and traditions. I. Afghanistan proper, bounded on the north by the magnifi-
cent frontier of the Hindu Kush, the most perfect scientific frontier in the
world, which is traversed by the difficult passes of Bamian, etc. This includes
Kabul and Kandahar, the Sulimani mountains, and the country occupied and
inhabited by the Afghans proper. 2. Afghan Turkestan, lying north of the
Hindu Kush, and watered by the head streams of the Oxus, and including
inter alia the well-known districts of Balkh and Badakhshan. This, as we
shall show further on,* is but a recent Afghan conquest. It is inhabited by a
race which is not Afghan in blood, and is dominated by a warrior caste of Uzbegs
whose connections and sympathies are with Bukhara. These districts once
formed a part of the Uzbeg empire, of which Bukhara was the focus, and have
never submitted quietly to the ruler of Kabul. 3. Herat, and its surrounding
district. This, also, is but a recent Afghan conquest. Herat was for many
centuries the eastern buttress of Persia. It was the ancient capital of
Khorasan, the richest of the Persian provinces. It has been long coveted by
the Persian ruler, and its natural destiny is to be joined once more to Persia.

To attempt to make these three sections obey one sovereign, and he a
nominee of the hated Kaffirs, is impossible, unless we employ an army
continually, and then it will be the old story of yoking discordant elements
to the same plough. There can be no good reason why Afghan Turkestan
should not be allowed to gravitate into its natural alliance and to be absorbed
by the Khanate of Bukhara. The country south of the mountains, largely
homogeneous in race and in sentiment, would be very manageable under
British tutelage, either ruled by one chief at Kabul or controlled after the
fashion which has been so successful in Beloochistan. The Hindu Kush
would then be the virtual boundary between England and Russia, Bukhara
being ^protege of the former and Afghanistan proper of the latter.

Herat might most reasonably be restored once more to Persia, with the
inhabitants of which its citizens have close religious ties, both belonging to
the Shia sect, while the Uzbegs, like the Osmanli Turks, belong to the

* Infra, page 853, etc.

xxviii PREFACE.

hated rival sect of the Sunnis. I confess that nothing would be more likely
to give stability and prestige to that dislocated country which has been
so much neglected by English diplomacy of late years, and where our
interests are so closely involved, as the addition to its area of a district
which it once possessed, and which in the hands of the Afghans has been
a perpetual thorn in its side. This separation of Afghanistan into its
constituent elements and their readjustment is so feasible, would meet
so perfectly the aspirations of the inhabitants, and would secure such a
magnificent frontier between England and Russia, that it has a singular
attractiveness. In Russia, as in England, public opinion is weary of this per-
petual embroglio in Central Asia. The defeats in Turkestan, the ever-recurring
petty wars in which no glory is reaped, while the resources of the country are
drained, and the adventurous policy of border commanders, have been a terrible
burden to the country, which has enough and more than enough territory, and
which in reaching the Hindu Kush would reach the term of its natural exten-
sion, while to all right-thinking folk it would be indeed a new leaf in the book
of statecraft if the tension and irritation that separate two such mutually
sympathetic races as Englishmen and Russians always prove themselves
to be in private intercourse, should give place to a more amiable temper.
When our memory reverts to the days of good Queen Bess and her
intercourse with the Tzar of Muscovy, which I have described later on ;
reverts to the days of Chancellor, of Jenkinson, and " the Russia company" of
Horsey and of Hanway, and sums up the vast amount of cordial good-
fellowship that once united the two countries so closely, it is more than a
chimerical dream that would wish to see these ties renewed on a firmer basis,
and a scheme developed by which we might be again close friends, and
work hand in hand, if by different methods, in restoring to Asia, the nursery
of the human race, some of its ancient prosperity and renown.

Having made this survey of some of the lessons suggested by these studies,
I must now enumerate the authorities which I have chiefly used.

In the first place, my thanks are due to Von Hammer Purgstall, the historian
of the Turkish empire. In January, 1833, the Imperial Academy of St.
Petersburg offered a prize for a work on the history of the Golden Horde, to
be composed from Eastern and Western authorities, from coins, etc. Appar-
ently the only response to this was made by Von Hammer, who composed
his famous work, the basis of four of the following chapters, entitled " Geschichte
der Goldenen Horde in Kiptschak," which he published at Pesth in 1840.
This great monument of erudition and skill, carved out an entirely new
country, and with singular insight and capacity. I am only echoing the
language of the great Eastern numismatist Soret in speaking in indignant
terms of the unfair and small spirit in which the Imperial Academy received
this work, which has never been equalled in its own line, and which more
than amply met the conditions of the prize. Von Hammer speaks in naturally
strong language of the slight that was put upon him, but he enabled posterity
to judge better of his claims by printing the reports of Fraehn, Schmidt, and
Krug, upon which the prize was withheld. There breathes through them all
a littleness which is unworthy of such names, and beyond and behind this

PREFACE. • xxix

a jealousy of the fact that some other than a Russian had done for the most
difficult part of Russian history what no Russian had then or has since
accomplished. Of course, the book contains mistakes ; so in all conscience do
the writings of the three Academicians ; but the surprising fact in a work
involving such immense research is that they should be so few, and it is at
least a satisfactory lesson which Nemesis will dictate to every candid inquirer
that Von Hammer's work towers in the mind's eye of the historian far above
any of the works of his critics as a contribution to the history of Eastern
Europe, and there is a home-thrust which meets with genuine sympathy from
those who shrink from injustice when Von Hammer, in replying to one of
Fraehn's small, carping criticisms, says sharply, in the language of Moliere,
" Vous etes orfevre M. Josse."

Besides this work I have, also quoted frequently Von Hammer's " Osmanische
Geschichte," from the Pesth edition of 1834, and a third work by him,
" Geschichte der Chane der Krim, Wien, 1856," which is a standard work on
its subject. I have also used the edition of Wassaf, by Von Hammer, and his
history of the Ilkhans, noticed in the former volume. Next to Von Hammer,
I have in the earlier chapters most frequently quoted Karamzin, the well-
known Russian historian, whose work closes abruptly at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. I need not stay to praise the conscientious accuracy,
skill, and patriotism of his narrative, which have made it a classic. I have
consulted it constantly, both in the French and the German editions, the
latter of which contain a larger number of Karamzin's original notes.
Wherever a reference is made to this work, unless the words " Germ, ed."
follow, it is to the French edition.

In the later chapters of this work I have been most indebted to my honoured
friend ; he will allow me to call him so, M. Veliaminof Zernof, himself a de-
scendant from one of the old Tartar princes, and now a member of the Imperial
Academy. It is a subject of great regret that his works are still untranslated.
They are vast mines of carefully-arranged material, and will more than sustain
the reputation of the Academy of which he is an honoured member. His
magnum opus is the history of the Khans of Kasirr^of, in three volumes,
published by the eastern branch of the Russian Archaeological Society. The
first volume was translated into German by Dr. Julius \|rheodor Zenker, and
published at Leipzig in 1867, and wherever the first volunie is quoted here, it
is from this German translation ; the second and third volumes have been
translated for me by two of my friends, to whom I shall presently refer. They
have also brought within my reach the well-known monograph on the coins of
Bukhara and Khiva, with its great wealth of illustrative matter, by the same
author, and a memoir on the coins of Khokand, also by him, both published in
the series just referred to. I have to regret that I have not been able to meet
with a work on the Kirghiz Kazaks, published many years ago by M. Vel.
Zernof, and often quoted in his larger work. In the sources last quoted, is
condensed the result of Russian researches upon large portions of Tartar
history, and I feel that I cannot express my gratitude too much for them.
Another Russian scholar, whom it is my privilege to know, is Professor
Grigorief, well-known as a sturdy patriot, as an able administrator of a

XXX PREFACE.

difficult Eastern province, and as a profound writer on the history and
literature of the various Turkish tribes. His memoir on Serai, the capital of
the Golden Horde, is too well known to need mention. I have consulted his
notes to the journey of Blankennagel to Khiva, which throw much light
on the darkest period of the history of that Khanate, his translation into
Russian of the narrative of the Murza Shems, dealing with the history of
Khokand, and his criticism of Vambery's history, published as an appendix to
Mr. Schuyler's Turkestan, and I shall have to turn to him again for help in the
concluding part of this work.

One Russian writer, who lies prostrate with paralysis, I must not forget —
M. Lerch, whose kind urbanity and genuine good heart have made him so
many friends. His memoirs on the historji of Khiva and on the archaeology
of the valley of the Jaxartes will be found quoted in the following pages. I
hope sincerely it may be given him once more to prosecute his studies, and, if
not, that the sun may always shine brightly on his head.

M. Schmidt has collected together from Russian sources, in a series of
memoirs in the Russische Revue, a detailed account of the Russian campaigns
against Khiva. These I have largely used.

Fraehn, who was the creator of Eastern numismatics, and of whom I have
spoken some heated words above, has done too much to make my way certain
and clear for me not to doff my cap to his memory. I have constantly
consulted his famous "Resentio," and supplement, his catalogue of the
Fuchs collection, as well as his memoir on the town of Uvak in the " Trans-
actions of the Imperial Academy," and I must express my great regret that
his works in MS. are not made available for students. The papers of M. Soret
on the coins of the Tartar dynasties, published in the I^evue de Numismatique
Beige, have been of great service to me, as has the famous catalogue of the
coins in the Odessa collection by the late Professor Blau.

To the Russian scholar, Des Maisons, we owe the best edition and translation
of the indispensable history of Abulghazi. This was published at St, Peters-
burg in 1870, and has been constantly at my elbow. I have also consulted
the older edition of Leyden.

Miiller's famous collections for Russian history, in eight volumes, published at
St. Petersburg, have been of great service to me. I have also consulted Fischer's
history of Siberia, which work, however, is founded almost entirely, and with
but scant acknowledgment, upon Miiller. Levchine's well known history
of the Kirghiz Kazaks, which was translated into French by Ferry de Pigny
and published at Paris in 1840, has been the main foundation of the history
of the Kazaks in the following pages. It will be seen, however, that, thanks
to recent researches, this history is now much more completely known than
when Levchine wrote. Inter alia I have been able to illustrate it largely in
its earlier portion from th» well known '* Tarikhi Rashidi " of Haidar. This
I have consulted in a MS. translation in the British Museum, which is
apparently in the handwriting of Erskine, and which unfortunately has such a
confused pagination that I have only been able to give general references to
it. The " Tarikhi Abulkhair," which contains an interesting account of the
origin of the Sheibanids, has been consulted for me by rny friend Dr. Rieu,

PREFACE. - xxxi

who for this and other favours (at all times granted with the lavish generosity
that becomes one richly gifted), I cordially thank him. Baber's " Memoirs " I
have consulted in the admirable edition of Erskine, Makrizi in that of
Quatremere, and Ibn Batuta in that published by the Oriental fund.

My most esteemed friend, Mr. C. Schefer, who has lately been elected a
member of the French Academy, it would be an impertinence in me to praise.
He \% Jacile princeps among living Persian scholars, while his knowledge of the
literature and arts of the East is encyclopaedic. I deem his friendship one of
the chief privileges which I have secured by my Eastern researches. His
edition of the work of Abdul Kerim on the Khanates of Bukhara and Khiva,
etc., has been of great service to me. With Mr. Schuyler it has also been my
good fortune to have had friendly intercourse, which I much regret has been
interfered with by his migration to Italy. His work on Turkestan is one o^
the most masterly books of travel in our language, not only from the insight
and power of observation it displays, but also from the very valuable Russian
materials he has collected and translated. I am greatly indebted to the
Memoir on the History of Khokand, which is appended to that work, and
for details on Khiva, Bukhara, and especially the obscure and little known
Uzbeg principalities south of Bukhara. In the French translation of Forster's
Voyage to Bengal, there is an appendix by M. Langles, giving an account of
the Khans of the Golden Horde and of Krim, and chiefly founded on the
work of Abdul Ghaffar, which has been too little consulted by Von Hammer.
I have quoted from it frequently. Also from a rare work entitled " Histoire
du royaume de la Chersonese Taurique," by M. Stanislas Siestrzencewicz de
Bohucz, Archbishop of Mohilef, published at St. Petersburg in 1824. It
contains much interesting matter on the history of the Krim Khans, from
Polish and other'sources. The history of Krim has also been largely extracted
from the well-known account of that Khanate, translated from Turkish into
French by M. Kazimirski, and published in the twelfth volume of the
Nouveau Journal Asiatique ; from the Memoirs of the Baron de Tott (English
edition) ; from the well-known work of Peyssonel on the Commerce of the
Black Sea, Paris, 1787; from the "Histoire des Kosaques," byLesur; the
'♦ Annales de la Petite Russie," by Scherer ; and the anonymous " Histoire de la
Nouvelle Russie ; " as well as from the well-known travels of Pallas, Gmelin,
Guthrie, Clarke, Seymour, and De Hell. Among the standard works, unneces-
sary to detail, which I have gleaned over, are St. Martin's " Memoires sur
I'Armenie ;" the "Ugrische Volkstamm," of Miiller ; the great corpus of extracts
from the Byzantine historians, by Stritter ; Lelewel's " Poland," Erdmann's
" Travels," the " Histoire des Huns," of De Guignes, and especially the
supplemental volume, by Senekofski, containing the history of Bukhara in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mr. Tracy Tornirelli's mistaken loyalty,
which has made him lately a prominent figure in popular cartoons, must not
make us forget his valuable and interesting work on Kazan and its history.
Klaproth's various works, especially his "Journey to the Caucasus," have been
scoured for plunder. For Timur's campaign in Europe, I have consulted the
well-known and very exhaustive memoir by M. Charmoy, in the third volume
of the transactions of the St. Petersburg Academy, and also the *' History of
Timur," by Sherif ud din, translated by Petis de la Croix,

XXXll PREFACE.

For the history of the Khanates of Central Asia, besides the works already
quoted, I have freely used the " Travels " of Frazer and of Ferrier, of Wood
and Moorcroft, of Burnes and Conolly, of Abbott and Wolff, of Khanikof
(edited by Bode), of Muravief, Meyendorf, Vambery, etc., Malcolm's " Persia,"
and Elphinstone's " Caubul," Erskine's "History of India" and Michell's
well known essays on Central Asia, translated from the Russian, Hellwald's
" Russen in Central Asien," Wathen's well known paper in the Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal, and Hitter's "Asien." The " Tabakat i Nasiri,"
as edited by Major Raverty (when are we to see the concluding part?), has
furnished me with some valuable matter for my first chapter. I have been
greatly indebted to the Hackluyt Society's publications for the travels
of Barbaro, Contarini, Herberstein, Horsey and Fletcher, and, most im-
portant of all, for "Cathay, and the Way Thither," by Colonel Yule. The
edition of Schiltberger, which it has just brought out, I have only been able
to utilise in the notes ; in the text the quotations are from Neumann's
edition. The older Hackluyt collection has supplied me with the travels
of Jenkinson and Johnson. Jonas Hanway and his famous quartoes are
too well known to detain us. Bell of Antermony has been consulted in
" Pinkerton's Voyages." The admirable editions of Carpini and Rubruquis by
D'Avezac have been constantly at my elbow, as have the various volumes of the
yournal Asiatique, and the Melanges Asiatiques of the St. Petersburg Academy.
Klaproth's Magazin Asiatique, the Geographical Magazine, the Russische Revue,
Fettrma-nn^ s MiiiJieilunoen, Baer and Helmersen's Beiirage, and the " M^moires
sur la Chine," by the French Jesuits, will be found quoted for several valuable
papers.

Vambery's " History of Bukhara" and his " Travels " I have found very useful
in the later chapters. It is to be regretted that the former work, which is full
of graphic power, was written with such want of care. It ought not to be
forgotten that Senkofski, in his well known supplement to De Guignes, had
already given from the "Tarikhi Mekim Khani" the history of the Astrakhanids,
which M. Vambery claims as a discovery of his own. These are my principal
authorities; others, such as Erdmann, Wolff, D'Ohsson, Pallas, Yule, etc., I
have already mentioned in my former volume ; others which I may have
here overlooked will be found duly mentioned in the following pages, when
1 have drawn inspiration from them.

On looking over the roll of great men, living and dead, whose garners I
have rifled, I feel more than ever how small my efforts have been compared with
theirs, and how much I am indebted to them. I hope I have done them no
injustice. If my readers find anything of value in the following pages, let
them assign it to those under whose shadow I have found shelter, and leave
the rest to me. In many places, I may say with Charron, I only claim the
form and method, and not being able to say the thing better than my
authority, have without scruple used his words. A man is not jealous of his
father, or a scholar of his master. What they have taught me I have tried to
interpret for others. I shall be well content to have cast some seed from
their baskets into corners where nothing grew before, and to make men

PREFACE. xxxiii

understand the value of the gold which they laboured to carve oat of the rock
and which they sometimes left barely visible, while the easy task remained
of chipping off a few splinters and laying it all bare.

I must now return my thanks to others who have assisted me. In the first
place, these are due to the kind good friends who have opened up for me
sources which were otherwise a sealed book. I mean the various works here
quoted from the Russian. None can exaggerate the dreary labour involved in
spending many days and nights in translating from another tongue, and purely
out of good nature, for the writer of a book whose very enthusiasm for such an
arid subject is near akin to madness in their eyes. Among those who have
assisted me in this way, I have to mention my friend, Mr. Fairbrother, whose
unaffected goodness has left him stranded without an enemy, which is as great
a temptation to one's virtue as authorship would be in the absence of criticism.
He has now migrated to Moscow, where my gratitude I hope may reach him.
Next, my younger friend, Mr. Kinloch, who is not only a good Russian scholar,
but an ingenious chemist. He has not spared himself for me, and a great deal
that is of value in the following volumes would have been hidden in Egyptian
darkness but for his assistance and zeal. I have also received help at all times
in the most free and generous manner from my friends, Mr. Schuyler, Mr. Robert
Michell, and Mr. Delmar Morgan, all well known as Russian scholars, and from
whom the world expects a rich harvest of translation in the future. To Dr.
Rieu, of the MS. department of the British Museum, I am much indebted for a
translation from the Persian of several pages of the Tarikhi Abulkhair, for
some long passages of Khuandemir, and for a perennial good nature which
has never flagged towards me and my work. Dr. Rost, of the India Library;
Mr. Vaux, of the Asiatic Society, and Mr. Edward Thomas, I have to thank
for unfailing urbanity, and for the loan of rare books, a loan on the only
condition that is of any value to a student doing original work, namely, for an
indefinite time.

Lastly, there are those who live closer to our hearth, and who know us better
than the rest. A Chinese proverb says, " The conjuror never takes in the man
who plays the gong for him." On his own carpet there is not elbow room for
an impostor to play the hero, or to formulate the pretences with which he can
mystify the crowd. On the other hand, the ties that bind him there are not so
ephemeral as the bonds which connect him to those whose lions never live
beyond the conventional nine days. It is no part of the world's business
assuredly, but it is none the less a part of our duty to think at this time of those
who have meanwhile made our home happy and bright. When a terrible
calamity has thrown a shadow across our lives, it is a great temptation to invoke
oblivion, by burying one's life in a work like this, and to forget meanwhile
that others are in the shade perhaps more deeply than ourselves. More
thanks for the overflowing kindness and gentleness which never grumbled
or complained. As for other justification for what many deem wasted
hours, health, and money, there is a ring of something like a great truth
behind, which I would shelter in the quaint and rugged words of Sir Thomas
Browne : " There is no sanctum sanctorum in philosophy," he says, " the
world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated

XXXIV PREFACE.

by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage that
we pay for not being beasts. . . . The wisdom of God receives small
honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross
rusticity admire his works. Those highly magnify him, whose judicious
inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creation, return the
duty of a devout and learned admiration. Therefore —

" Search while thou wilt ; and let thy reason go,
To ransom truth, e'en to the abyss below.
Rally the scattered causes ; and that line
Which Nature twists be able to untwine.

Give thou my reason that instructive flight

Whose weary wings may on thy hands still light.

Teach me to soar aloft, yet ever so,

When near the sun to stoop again below.

Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover,

And though near earth more than the heavens discover.

And then at last, when homeward I shall drive.

Rich with the spoils of nature, to my hive.

There will I sit, like that industrious fly,

Buzzing thy praises ; which shall never die

Till death abrupts them, and succeeding glory

Bids me go on in a more lasting story."

Derby House, Eccles, January, 1880.

CHAPTER I.

THIS chapter is devoted to an account of the various races which
formed the heritage of the eldest son of Jingis Khan and his
descendants. This heritage was called Togmak by the
Mongols, apparently from a frontier town on the river Chu with which
they came early into contact. It was called Desht Kipchak, or the
Steppe of Kipchak, from the tribe of Kipchak, which was once its most
prominent occupier, and was known in the West as the Golden Horde.

Such of my readers as are not interested in minute ethnology and the
dry discussions of details which chiefly constitute it, will do well to pass
on at once to the next chapter, in which the narrative properly begins.
I have used the name Tartar as the generic name of the race described
in this volume. A justification of this I shall give later on. Here it
will suffice to say that the tribes to which attention will be confined
are of Turkish race, the aristocracy and leaders alone being of Mongol
descent. The aim and scope of our work are to integrate a large part
of the broken history of the Asiatic nomades around that of the famous
imperial race which claimed descent from Jingis Khan.

The Mongol word yurt meant originally the domestic fireplace, and
according to Von Hammer, the word is identical with the German
herde and the English hearth, and thence came in a secondary sense to
mean house or home, the chief's house being known as Ulugh Yurt or the
Great House.

An assemblage of several yurts formed an ordu or orda, equivalent to
the German hort and the English horde, which really means a camp.
The chief camp where the ruler of the nation lived was called the Sir
Orda, i.e., the Golden Horde.*

The name is applied by Carpini and Benedict of Poland to the great
tent tenanted by Kuyuk Khan. Tentorium proeparatiim quod apud ipsos
Orda Aurea appellatur : ubi K^cyuk debebat poni in sede, etc., says the
former.t Invenerunt imperatoreiii apud tentorium magnum quod
vacatur Syr a orda, says the latter. J The name was apparently similarly
applied to Batu's chief tent, whence it came about that eventually the
whole nation was known as the Golden Horde.

As I shall show further on, the Golden Horde was from the beginning
divided into two main sections; that subject to the older branch of

* Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 32, 33. t Ed. D'Avezac, 757» I Id'^ 777'

B

2 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Juchi's family dominated in the east, had a titular suzerainty over
the other, and was known as the Ak Orda or White Horde, while that
living in the western part of the Khanate, which held the real, although
not the nominal, authority, was styled the Kok Orda or Blue Horde.
These were, however, political divisions, and not ethnographic ones.

The ethnography of the Golden Horde is not very difficult to make
out. In the first place, the tribes who composed it may be divided into
two well marked and distinct sections, one of which, the Manguts or
Flat-Noses, formed the patrimony of Nogai Khan and his family,
and the other and much more numerous one comprised the remaining
Tartars, who were distinguished by a variety of names.

We will first consider the Nogais, who are also called Manguts. All
observers have agreed in separating them sharply from the other Tartars.
Thus, Dr. Clarke says of them : " They are a very different people from
the Tartars of the Crimea, and may be instantly distinguished by their
diminutive form and the dark copper colour of their complexion, sometimes
almost black. They have a remarkable resemblance to the Laplanders,
although their dress and manner has a more savage character."*

Pallas enlarges also upon their specially Mongolian features. Klaproth
says: '* Of all the Tartar tribes that I have seen the Nogais bear by far
the strongest resemblance in features and figure to the Mongols, a
circumstance which authorises the inference of an intermixture with that
nation, which perhaps took place during their residence to the north and
north-west of the Caspian."!

These extracts will suffice to show that the Nogais differ essentially
from the other Tartars in physique. They differ also in language.
Thus, Pallas says : " The language and writing of the real Tartars differ
little from those of the Turks, and the dialect of the mountaineers who
are subject to the Turkish dominion, bears a still greater analogy to that
of their masters. On the contrary, the tongue of the Nogais deviates
more remarkably, as they have retained numerous Mongolian phrases,
and make use of an ancient mode of writing, likewise mixed with the
latter, and called Shagaltai."| This mixture of Mongol with their
language is denied by Klaproth, and with justice. "On the other
hand," he says, "you still find among them some remains of the old
Tartar dialect, which they make use of in writing and which is called
Jagatai, or as it is there commonly pronounced, Shagaltai."§ This is
very interesting. As is well known, the Turkish race is divided by
ethnographers into two great sections, the western Turks, of whom the
greater part of the Tartars of the Golden Horde are good examples, and
the eastern Turks, of whom the Uighurs and the so-called Jagataians, of
whom we shall have much to say in our next volume, are the type.

* Clarke's Travels, i., 588. t Travels in the Caucasus, 161.

I Travels in Southern Russia, ii., 356. § Op. cit., 161.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. * 3

It follows, from what has been stated, that the Nogais speak a
dialect closely allied to that of the eastern Turks, with whom they also
agree in physique. This view is supported by another curious circum-
stance. In the mythical traditions of the Turks, the race is descended
from two stem-fathers, Nokus and Kiat, who are said to have been
brothers. The Turks proper are apparently comprised under the head
of Kiats, and thus we read of Kiat Kungrads and Kiat Kanglis.
Nokus, on the other hand, seems to be the representative of the eastern
Turks and Uighurs. In this view, it is curious to find one division of
the Uzbegs called Nokus Mangut.

From all these circumstances it would seem probable that the
Manguts were in fact a section of the eastern Turks who had found
their way into the west, where they are an intrusive element. Have we
any direct proof of such a migration ? I believe such a proof exists.
The empire of the eastern Turks or Uighurs, according to the Chinese,
was overturned by the Hakas in the year 840. Thereupon, we are told
that Pingtele, or Pangtele, one of the ministers of the late Khan, fled
at the head of fifteen tribes of Uighurs, to the Kololu or Karluks.*
This migration, I believe, first brought the Manguts into the west.
Now, on turning to western writers, we find a new and aggressive race
of Turks appearing shortly after this very date on the Volga, namely,
the Pechenegs. I propose tentatively to identify the Pechenegs with the
followers of Pangtele, and with the later Manguts.

The first appearance of the Pechenegs in Europe is dated by Constan-
tine Porphyrogenitus about the year 894-899, when, as he tells us, they
were attacked by the Khazars, and Uzi in alliance, and driven from their
ancient seats.f Previously, according to the same author, they had lived
on the Atil, i.e., the Volga, and the Geech, i.e., the Jaik, and were the
neighbours of the Uzi and the Mazari.J In another place he tells the
story in another way. He says that " the Patzinakitai, who were formerly
called Kangar, which name," he adds, " among them meant nobility and
strength, having taken up arms against the Khazars, were beaten, and
deserted their country, and were obliged to enter the land inhabited
by the Turks."§ By Turks Constantine always means the Magyars.

After a while, Constantine goes on to say, the Pechenegs quarrelled
with the Turks, and having defeated them, drove one section towards
Persia, i.e., as I believe, to the north of the Caucasus, and the other
towards the Carpathians. The Pechenegs now definitely occupied the
old Turkland on each side of the Dnieper, and divided their country
into eight provinces — four east of that river called Tzur, Culpee, Talmat,
and Tzopon ; and four west of it, namely, Chopon, Gyla, Kharoboe, and
Ertem,|| and thus occupied the very country held by the Nogais in later

* Bretschneider, op. cit., 118, 146. t Stritter, iii., 797- I ^<^-

5 Id., 798. II Id., iii., 806-7.

4 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

times. Elsewhere Constantine tells us the name Kangar was not applied
to all the Pechenegs, but only to three of their tribes who were stronger and
nobler than the rest.* This shows that Pecheneg and Kangar, which is
apparently only another form of Kankali, were not quite convertible terms.
Nestor, the early Russian annalist, confirms the account of Constantine,
except as to the date ; in dates, however, he is often astray. He says the
Pechenegs appeared for the first time in Russia {i.e., in the principality of
Kief), in the year 915. They made peace with Igor the Russian chief,
and advanced as far as the Danube, and had intercourse with the Greek
empire.t Zeuss thus gives the synonymy of the Pechenegs. They were
called Pizenaci by Liutprand, Pecenatici by Cosmas of Prague and
Pincenates, Pecinei, Petinei, Postinagi, by other western writers ;
Patzinakitai, by Constantine Posphyrogenitus ; Peczenjei, by the Slavs;
and Bisseni, or Bessi, by the Hungarians. This last form of the name
probably gave its appellation to Bessarabia ; Snorro calls the race Pezina
vollr. That the Pechenegs were Turks there cannot be any doubt. Ibn
el Vardi describes them as a Turkish race who had separated from the
other Turks, and settled between the Khazars and Krim. He calls them
Beknakije, and tells us, that although they had lived there so long they
had not any houses. J Anna Comnena tells us they spoke the same
language as the Comans. The meaning of the word Pecheneg is
explained very plausibly by M. Vambery as being a corruption of
bash mak, i.e., chief prince. § Von Hammer, and Dr. Schott, in his
memoir on the Kangar, say the name Bejnak means the related, or
aUied. It is undoubtedly a personal name; thus we read that when the
Cossack Yermak attacked the Siberians on the Tawda, a prince called
Pecheneg was among the slain, so that it is exceedingly probable that
the race was named after some chief named Pecheneg, as it was at a
later day after Nogai. It will be noted also that the chief who ruled on
the Volga at the time of Batu's invasion, was called Bachiinan, which
seems another form of the same name.

The Pechenegs occur for the last time, eo 7iomine, in the Russian
annals in the year 11 52, but in 1162, and in that section of Nestor,
written by the fourth continuation, we find a new name applied to the
rivals and enemies of the Comans, in the steppes of southern Russia,
who can be no other than the Pechenegs, namely, Chernoklobuks or
Black Caps. II

They are also mentioned in the years 1174, 1187, 1190, 1 192, and 1200.^
We again meet with the name in the accounts of Batu's invasion, when
we are told that in the autumn of 1239 he with the other princes marched
against the Russians and the Karakalpaks or Black Caps.** This name of
Black Caps, or Karakalpaks, is actually a well-known tribal name among

* Stritter, iii., 808. t Op. cit., ed. Paris, i.,43. I Zeuss, op. cit, 743.

^ Geographical Magazine, iv., 78. \ Nestor, xi., 98.

^ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 454-6. ** D'Ohsson, ii., 627.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 5

the Turks, and applied to an important section of the Nogais.* One of
the principal features of the Karakalpaks, distinguishing them from the
other Turkish tribes, is the possession of a considerable quantity of hair
on their faces ; and Bakui says of the Pechenegs, they had long beards
and large mustaches. He adds, that their food consisted chiefly of
millet. t Vambery says the favourite food of the Karakalpaks is kazan
djappay, i.e., meal baked in a pan with fat.

One of the tribes of Kipchak, as given by Novairi in 1325, was named
Kara Burkli, i.e., Black Caps ; and lastly, StrahlenbergJ tells us that
east of the Jaik there survived when he wrote places called Talmasata
and Curcutata, which are clearly identical with the Talmat and Tzur of
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, which he names as two sections of the
Pechenegs. For these reasons, I am disposed to identify the Manguts
and Karakalpaks as the descendants of the Pechenegs.

Having separated the Manguts and shown how they were an intrusive
element in the population of " the Kipchak," we may now turn to its
remaining Tartar inhabitants. These have a more or less homogeneous
history. Of course, in certain areas, as in the Krim and at Kazan, they
have been largely sophisticated in blood by a mixture with other races,
but in the main they are under their various names very pure and typical
specimens of the Turkish stock. We will now consider some of their
divisions, and begin with —

The Kazaks. The name Kazak has no ethnic value. It is applied to
Turkish tribes, to the Slavic Cossacks of the Ukraine, the Don, the
Volga, etc., and to the Circassians, a part of whose country was called
Kasachia by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, while they themselves are
called Kessek or Kazak by their neighbours the Ossetes, who affirm that
the Circassians called themselves Kasak before the coming of the
Kabardian princes from the Krim.§ Klaproth argues that the word has
been adopted by the Tartars to denote a man who leads a martial and
roving life like that of the Circassians, and he adds further, that in the
old Tartar and its kindred Turkish dialects it is not to be found, and
many Tartars even know nothing of its meaning. || Erskine says
distinctly that the name is formed of two Arabic words, and adds that the
Russian travellers call them Tartar words, as they do manyiArabic and
Persian terms which have been introduced into th6^artar or Turkish
language.^ This Arabic etymology is a very probable one, and accounts
for the word being found both on the banks of the Sir and north of the
Caucasus in early times, Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century
and Firdusi somewhat later both using it. It no doubt passed from
the Circassians to the Russian Cossacks. The name means merely
freebooter or nomade soldier. Haidar, in describing the young days

* Vide infra, chap. xii. t t>'Ohsson, Abul Cassim, 117, 118. J Op. cit., 282.

§ Klaproth, Travels in the Caucasus, 310-11. || Id., 311. f Erskine's Baber, xlv., note.

6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of Weis Khan, when after his father's death he took to robbery,
uses the word kazaki. The term was also apphed specially to the
hired soldiery employed by the various appanaged princes in Russia.
Thus we read of Cossacks of Riazan,* Cossacks of Ustiuge, etc.f
Similarly, we read of Kazaks of Gorodetz or Kasimof,t and Abulghazi
speaks of the vagabond soldiery in the service of the princes of Urgenj
as Kazaks. §

We thus see that the term "kazak" has in its origin no ethnic
value. We have now to consider how it came to be applied as a race
name to those who are often called Kirghiz Kazaks (they are called
Kirghiz by the Bashkirs, while I believe the Great Horde is also
so called by the other Kazaks), but who are now properly known as
Kazaks. This has been explained for us by Haidar, the author of the
Tarikhi Rashidi. He tells us how on the death of Abulkhair the Ulus of
the Uzbegs fell into confusion, and how many repaired to Girai Khan
and Janibeg Khan, the representatives of the White Horde, to the number
of 20,000 persons, and how they thus got the name of Kazak Uzbegs ;
and he afterwards refers to the same tribes merely as the Kazaks. Their
history from this time can be followed out in detail. || Before this date
no reference is made to any such race so far as I can make out, and it is
in every way certain that they so called themselves at this time, as being
fugitives and vagabonds, par excellence^ and that the name as a race-
name is no older than the second half of the fifteenth century. Before
this the greater part of the so-called Kazaks constituted the " White
Horde," subject to Orda Ichen and his descendants, from whom, as we
shall show, the chieftains of the modern Kazaks claim to descend.

As I have said, they call themselves Kazaks, and by this name they
are known to the Persians, Bukharians, and Khivans, while the Chinese
soften the k, and call them Khassaki, and also Hakas. I will now give
a list of their divisions. They are, in the first place, divided into three
sections, respectively known as ulugh iuz, urta iuz, and kichik iuz, j>.,
the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes, iuz meaning literally a hundred or
a century, H and being applied to a horde, as the Mongols apply the
terms minggan, tuman, etc.

Originally, we are told, the Great Horde comprised the three sections of
Uisun or Usiun, Tulatai, and Sargam. Eventually, the horde of Kunkurad
or Kungrad detached itself from the Middle Horde, and joined it.

The Middle Horde consists of the four sections named, Arghin,
Naiman, Kipchak, and Uvak-Girai.

The Little Horde originally comprised the powerful tribe of Alchin,
with seven petty clans, who were united into one tribe by Tiavka, in order
to protect them from the aggressions of their neighbours. They were

* Karamzin, v., 476. t /</., viii., 125. | Vel. Zernof, i., note 99, etc.

S Op. cit., 247. g Vide infra, chap. viii. f Levchine, 150, note.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 7

given the name of Semirodsk, i.e., the seven tribes, while the Alchin
tribe was itself divided into two branches known respectively as the
Alimuli and the Baiuly.*

I will now enumerate the names and habitats of the smaller divisions
of the Kazaks as given by Levchine, etc.

I.— The Little Horde.

The tribe of Alimuli consists of six divisions, called Kara Sakal, Kara
Kissiek, Kitie, Dort-Kara, Chumekei, and Chikly. When Levchine
wrote, it encamped in winter on the Sir, the Kuvan, the dried up bed of
the Jany Daria, on the sands of Karakum and Burzuk, and at the mouth
of the Yemba. A small section lived on the Ilek, the Or, and the Ural,
from the fort of Krasnogorsk as far as Verkhni Ozernaia. Their summer
camps were on the rivers Temir, Yemba, Saghiz, Uil, Ilek, Khobda,
Or, and Irghiz, in the hills of Mugojar, and the Karakum sands.
The tribe of Baiuli is divided into twelve sections, and comprises the
clans of Adai, Cherkes, Tana, Baibakti, Shikhlar, Maskar, Kizil-kurt,
Issen-Temir, a part of that of Jappas, and the greater part of those of
Alacha, Tazlar, and Bersch. All nomadised over-against the fortified line
of the Lower Ural passed the summer between the Ural and the Yemba,
near the lakes of Karakul, and the rivers Kuldaghaiti, Buldurti, Ulenti,
Jusali, Chungurlaou, Ankati, and Uilu, as far as Khobda ; the winter on
the Caspian, at the mouths of the Ural and the Yemba, and near Gurief.
A part of the tribe Adai lived at Mangushlak ; the sections Tazlar, Alacha,
and Bersch on the Sir, the Kuvan, and the Karakum sands. The greater
part of the Yappas encamped in summer on the Tobol, and the Turgai
opposite Troitsk, and in winter on the Sir and the Kuvan.f As we shall
see later on,t a part of the Baiuhs detached themselves about 1801
and 1802, under their leader Bukei, and settled in the government of
Astrakhan, and in the district of Rin Peski. Wahl says the emigrants
originally numbered 1,500 kibitkas, which number rapidly increased,
amounted in 1820 to upwards of 7,500, and in 1862 to 25,000 kibitkas, or
upwards of 100,000 souls. Their number would be still larger had it not
been for the disastrous winter of 1822, when the whole steppe was turned
to ice, and frightful snow-storms and icy blasts destroyed all animal life.
The losses of the horde during that dreadful season amounted to 280,000
horses, 73,000 head of cattle, and 1,000,000 sheep. Overwhelmed with
terror they fled into the Government of Saratof, but have been quietly
settled again in their old territory since 1863.

The Semirodsk, or Seven Tribes, comprise the Tabin, Tama, Kerderi,
Jagal-Baiuli, Kerait, Tiliaou, and Ramadan. They for the most part
wintered near the Irghiz, the Or, the Kumak, the Sugunduk, and the hills of
Karacha. They passed the summer near the Russian frontier between
the forts of Verkhni Ozernaia and Verkhni Uralsk, and thence southwards

* Levchine, 302-4. t Id., 304-6. I Vide infra, 671.

8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

to the Irghiz. The winter camps of the clans Kerder and Tama were
on the Ural between Orenburg and Uralsk; and their summer ones,
on the Donghuz, Khobda, Kanlis, and Ilek.

The greater part of the clan Tabin camped near the two preceding
tribes, another portion on the Tobol, Sir, Kuvan, and Yemba, while the
rest lived with the Middle Horde on the Issel, Chu, and the sands of
Aremetei. The clan Kerait wintered on the Sir, and passed its summer
on the Irghiz and the mountains of Karacha and Troitsk.

The clans of Tilief or Tilieou, and Ramadan, wintered on the Sir and
Kuvan, near the Keraits, and summered on the Turgai, and in the
neighbourhood of lake Urkach-Kandikli.*

II.— The Middle Horde.

The tribe or division Arghin, comprises the sections Kara Kissiek,
Karavul-Kissiek, Charjitim, Janjar, Chakchak, Dort-Avul, Atigai, Altai,
Tebich, Tabakli, Borchi, Karpak, Bassantien, Aghich-Kalkaman,
Kanjigali, Koziugan, and Kukshal. These clans, according to Levchine,
lived near the mountains Ulugh, Boyan-ula, Ireimen, Kizil, Kuyucha,
Mukcha, and the districts of Uch-Burlik, Kilchakti, Uch-Kundan,
Bikchentei, and the banks of the Turgai, Nura, Tobol, Irtish, Sarisu,
Ishim, Issel, Ubagan, Ulkoiak, and Ayati, the sands of Kara Tussun,
and the borders of the lakes Kizil, Kurjan, Tiba, and Bishkun.f

The Naimans comprised the clans of Akbura {ie., White Wolf),
Bulachi, Kara-Girai, Tirs-Tamgali, Dort-Avul, Kuk-Jarli, Irghiniekli,
Semis-Baganali (/.^., possessors of fat lambs), and Sadir. The greater
part of the Naimans lived in the mountains of Tarbagatai, the Upper
Irtish, and other places on the Chinese frontier ; the remainder on the
upper Ishim, the Turgai, Kara Uziek, Sir, Kuvan, Lap-su, Kuk-su, the
borders of the lake Ak, and the mountains of Ulugh, Kichi, etc.J

The Kipchaks comprised the clans of Tori-Aighyr, Tuiuchka, Kitabak,
Bultun, Karabalik, Kundelien, Tana-Buga, Uzun, and Kuk-Boron.
They Hved on the Issel, the Turgai, Chakiek, Ubagan, Tobol, Ayat,
Munyunli, and Uya, near the forts of Troitsk, Stepnoi, and Ust Uiskoi;
and on the sands of Karakum, as well as in the districts of Aman-
Karagai, Ebelei, Yedis, and Tiriekli.§

The Uvak-Girais consist of the clans Uvak, Girai or Kirai, and
Tarakli. They nomadised on the rivers Ubagan, Ishim, Uya, Taguzac,
Irtish, Issel, Sari Su, and Chu; on the sands of Ich-Kungur, in the
neighbourhood of lake Kechubai-Charkar, and near the fortified line
between the forts of Stepnoi and Verkho Uralsk; and also near the
forts of Zuerinogolofskoi and Presnogorkofskoi.

III.— The Great Horde.

The lesser divisions of the Great Horde comprise the clans of Botboi,
Chimir, Janis or Vanish, Sik-Am, Abdai Suvanc, Sara-Suli, Chanish-Kili,

* Levchine, 307. \ Id. I Id., 303-8. h Id.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK, 9

Kanii or Kankli, Jelair, etc. The tribe of Kungrad, which, as I said, joined
the Great Horde in recent times, includes the clans of Bailar-Janjar,
Uras Gheldi, Kuljegach, Bochman, Tok-Bulad, Iman-Bai, Kura-Kusia,
Etimlier, and Kuyush-Kansiz, These various clans of the Great Horde
wandered on the rivers Chu, Tala-Su, He, Kuk-Su, Karatal, Chirchik, Sir,
Sari-Su, near lakes Kara, Ala, Al-Su, Anamas, and in the towns of Kulja
Kashkar, Khokand, Tashkend, Turkestan, near the mountains Kara-Tau,
Tarbagatai, Chinghiz-Tsazan, and in the district known as the Seven
Rivers, as well as in other places on the borders of China, and in the old
country of the Sungars, One portion of the Kungrads lived in these
localities, and another encamped with the Naimans.*

In enumerating these sections of the Kazaks, we must not forget
that they comprise smaller divisions, and these again still smaller
ones, which are constantly altering in name, etc., so that the hierarchy
of the various sectional divisions would require almost a volume to
illustrate it. We will now turn to —

The Uzbegs, First, as to their name. Here I have to break a lance
with Professor Gregorief, for whom I entertain the profoundest respect,
and to whose wide researches and learning I am greatly indebted. In a
fierce criticism of Mr. Vambery's History of Bukhara, much of which is,
if severe, at all events unanswerable, he pours words of scorn upon those
who derive the name of the Uzbeg confederacy from Uzbeg, the great
chief of the Golden Horde. Nevertheless, the view so denounced I
think is supported by irrefragable evidence. M. Gregorief denies that it
is the custom of the Turks to name their tribes after noted heroes. I
can hardly understand this phrase. If we go back to legendary times,
we shall find that Oghuz, Kipchak, etc., are stated by the Turkish
genealogists to have given their names to the tribes they governed ; but
we need not go back so far. Assuredly the Seljuki and the Osmanli
among the greater Turk races and the various lesser clans of Turkomans
are instances of this practice ; while, if we turn to the Golden Horde,
we shall find it even more the case. The Bereke Tartars are so called
not only by Marco Polo, but by Abulfeda, and were so named from Bereke
Khan. The Nogais are another instance in point, while the various
tribes of Nogais are notoriously named from their founders as separate
and substantive tribes ; so is it with a considerable number of the lesser
clans among the Kazaks and Uzbegs.

Again, Professor Gregorief says the name Uzbeg does not occur till
the second half of the fifteenth century, a hundred years after the death
of Uzbeg. Sherif ud din, the historian of Timur, completed his famous
Zefer Nameh in 1424, and was a contemporary of Timur ; he distinctly
speaks of Idiku as Idiku the Uzbeg, and of the Kipchaks as Uzbegs.f

This shows us that the name was in use much earlier than M. Gregorief
says. His third argument is that Uzbeg did not rule over the tribes called

Levchine, 303-3. t Charmoy, Mems., St. Pet. Acad.,iii.,364; Sherif ud din, iii.,34.

C

lO

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Uzbegs. So far as we know, he was acknowledged as their over chief by
all the tribes of the Ulus of Juchi Khan, and his coins are found minted
at all the towns in the Horde which up to his date had struck money.

I cannot, therefore, see any good reason for rejecting the very natural
and current account that the Uzbegs were so named from the Great Uzbeg
Khan, while the etymology of Uzbeg generally suggested in lieu of this
derivation, namely, from Uz, self, and bek, bek,* is exceedingly impro-
bable and far-fetched.

Abulghazi tells us that Uzbeg converted his subjects to the Mussulman
faith, and it was due to him that all the inhabitants of the land became
converts to Islam, and that the II of Juchi adopted his name, which it
would retain till the day of judgment.! The name Uzbeg, therefore, like
that of Kazak, is a comparatively recent name, and does not date back
further than the reign of Uzbeg Khan, who died in 1340. Klaproth tells
us the Uzbegs are divided into four main divisions, namely, the Uighur-
Naiman, Kangli-Kipchak, Kiat-Kungrad, and Nokus-Mangut.J

The following table of the various branches of the Uzbegs was taken
from a work entitled " Nassed Nameti Uzbekia," by Khanikof :—

I. Mangut.

I. Juk-Mangut.

2. Ming.

2. Ak-Mangut.

3. Yuz.

3. Kara-Mangut.

4. Kirk

5. Ung.

6. Ungachit.

7. Jilair.

8. Sarai.

g. Kungrad.

I. Kanjagali.

1. Urus.

2. Kara-Kursak.

3. Chullik.

4. Kuyan.

5. Kuldauli.

6. Miltek.

7. Kurtughi.

8. Gal6.

9. Tup Kara.
10. Kara.

n. Kara-bura.

12. Nogai.

13. Bilkelik.

14. Dustnik.

II. Omli.

1. Ax-Tana.

2. Kara.

3. Churan.

4. Turkmen.

5. Kuuk.

6. Bishbala.

7. Kara-kalpak.

8. Kachai.

9. Haj-becha.

* Schuyler, i., 106.

t Op. cit., 184.

I See Polyglotta, 218.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK.

III. Kushtamgali.

10. Yelchin.

11. Arghun.

12. Naiman.

13. Kipchak.

14. Chichak.

15. Aurat.

16. Kalmak.

17. Kar-tu.

18. Burlak.

19. Buslak.

20. Samarchim.

21. Katagan.

22. Kalechi.

23. Kunegaz.

24. Butrek.

25. Uzoi.

26. Kabat.

27. Khitai.

28. Kangli.

29. Vz.

30. Chuplechi.

31. Chupchi.

32. Utarchi.

33. Upulechi.

34. Julun.

35. Jid.

36. Juyut.

37. Chil Juyut.

38. Bui-Maut.

39. Ui-Maut,

IV. Yaktamgali

V. Kir.

40. Aralat,

41. Kireit.
4a. Ungut.

43. Kangit,

44. Khaleuat.

45. Masad,

46. Murkut,

47. Berkuut.

48. Kuralas.

49. Uglan.

50. Kari.

51. Arab.

52. Ulechi.

53. Julegan.

54. Kishlik.

55. Ghedoi.

56. Turkmen.

57. Durmen.

58. Tabin.

59. Tama,

60. Rindan.

61. Mumin.

62. Uishun.

63. Beroi.

64. Hafiz.

65. Kinghiz.

66. Uiruchi.

67. Juiret.

68. Buzachi.

69. Sihtiyan.

1. Kul-abi.

2. Barmak.

3. Kujahur.

4. Kul.

5. Chuburgan.

6. Karakalpak-

Kushtamgali

7. Saferbiz.

8. Dilberi.

9. Chachakli.
I. Tartugu.

• 2. Aga-maili.

3. Ishikali.

4. Kizin-Zili.

5. UyugH.

6. Bukajli.

7. Kaigali.

1. Juzili.

2. Kusauli.

3. Tirs.

4. Balikli.

5. Kuba.

70. Betash.

71. Yagrini.

72. Shuldur.

73. Tumai.

74. Tleu.

75. Kirdar.

76. Kirkin.
77.

78. Uglan.

79. Gurlet.

80. Iglan.

81. Chilkes.

82. Uigur.

83. Aghir.

84. Yabu.

85. Narghil.

86. Yuzak.

87. Kahet.

88. Nachar.

89. Kujalik.

90. Buzan.

91. Shirin.

92. Bakhrin.

93. Tume.

94. Nikuz.

95. Mugul.

96. Kayaan.

97. Tatar.

12 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

In regard to the localities occupied by the principal of these tribes,
Khanikof says the Manguts live partly near Karshi and partly near Buk-
hara, while others of them, especially the elder branches, have established
themselves in both these towns. The Khan of Bukhara's family, as we
shall see, belongs to this stock. The Khitais are settled between Bukhara
and Kermineh; the Naimans live near Ziyan ud din; the Kipchaks between
Katta Kurghan and Samarkand ; the Sarai near the road leading from
Samarkand to Karshi ; the Kungrads partly in Karshi, and partly
between that town and the mountains of Shehri sebz ; the Turkmen on
the Amu Daria ; the Arabet between Karshi and Bukhara ; the Buzachi
near Buzachi, between the same places; the Durmans in and near
Khijuvan ; the Yabu partly nomadise near Bukhara and partly
with the Khitai Naimans in Miankal ; the Jid and Juyut are partly
settled on the Amu Daria, and partly wander about with the Turk-
men; the Betash are all settled near Bukhara; the Bakhrin in Miankal.*
To this enumeration of Khanikofs I ought to add that made by
Vambery, who tells us the Uzbegs are divided into thirty-two principal
taife or tribes, viz., the Kungrad, Kipchak, Khitai, Manghit or Mangut,
Noks, Naiman, Kulan, Kiet, Az, Taz, Sayat, Jagatai, Uighur, Akbet,
Durmen, Ushun, Kanjigali, Nogai, Balgali, Miten, Jelair, Keneguz,
Kanli, Ishkili, Bagurlu, Alchin, Achmaili, Karakursak, Birkulak, Tirkish,
Kettekeser, and Ming.f

As I have said, Haidar calls the Kazaks, Uzbeg Kazaks, suggesting
that both confederacies were closely related. This appears more vividly
when we examine the tribal names comprising each. Thus —

Uzbeg tribes. Kazak tribes.

Kungrad. Kungrad, a tribe of the Great Horde.

Kipchak. Kipchak, a division of the Middle Horde.

Khitai. Kitie, a clan of the Little Horde.

Naiman. Naiman, a division of the Middle Horde.

Oshiin. Uzun and Usiun tribes of the Middle and Great

Horde respectively.

Taz. Tazlar, a tribe of the Little Horde.

Uighur. Tori Uighur, a clan of the Middle Horde.

Kanjigali. Kanjigali, a clan of the Middle Horde.

Jelair. Jelair, a tribe of the Great Horde.

Kanli. Kanli or Kankli, a tribe of the Great Horde.

Ich kili. Chan ich kili, a tribe of the Great Horde.

Alchin. Alchin, the main tribe of the Little Horde.

These lists will show that the confederacies were composed largely
of common elements, but we must not exaggerate this fact too much
and mistake a result due to the disintegrating and re-welding process

» Bokhara, by De Bode, 74-8. f Vambery, Travels in Central Asia, 345-6, note.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 1 3

which went on during the Mongol domination for an initial identity.
When we examine the tribal names of the two confederacies closely,
we shall find not only that they consist of very heterogeneous
elements, but that these elements are separable into two main branches,
those which inhabited the Kipchak before the Mongol invasion, and
those who migrated thither in consequence of it. The great ethnological
fact underlying the history we are dealing with is the thrusting of the
Turkish community westwards. Before the Mongol period the Turks
occupied all Sungaria, and (as we showed in the notes to the former
volume) all the so-called Mongolian desert as far as the borders of
Manchuria, the Mongols being confined to the country round Lake
Baikal and to Dauria. The great effect of the Mongol conquests was to
push the Turks out of the eastern part of their former country, and to
drive them very largely into the west. A large portion of these more
eastern Turks probably formed the Ulus of Ogotai and his family.
When this ulus was broken up and destroyed, they seem to have
migrated, or were perhaps driven by the advancing Kalmuks into the
steppes of Kipchak. It was apparently in the main these new subjects
who were converted by Uzbeg Khan, and who adopted his name. Let
us examine this position somewhat more closely.

If we turn to the Uzbegs we shall find that two out of the four main
divisions into which they fall belong to this category of immigrants,
namely, the so-called Naiman-Uighurs and the Kiat Kungrads, while the
Naimans, the Uvak Girais in the Middle Horde, and the Kungrads in the
Great Horde among the Kazaks fall within the same class. If we examine
the minor divisions of the race, as given by Klaproth, Khanikof, etc.,
we shall find a large number of names, such as Jelair, Khitai, etc,
which also belong to this immigrant section. Now, it is curious that
Levchine, in describing the origin of the Kazaks, tells us distinctly that
the Kipchaks, the Naimans, the Kungrads or Kunkurats, the Jelairs, and
the Kanklis, the Durmans and Karluks, formed no part of their race
originally.* This confirms the view arrived at above from different
data. We will now consider briefly these immigrant tribes.

To what I said of the Naimans, the Jelairs, the Durmans, and the
Uighurs in the former volume I have nothing to add. The Naimans
(as I there showed), at the accession of Jingis Khan, dominated over
Northern Sungaria, from the Irtish as far as Karakorum. The Jelairs
and Durmans were Turkish tribes living among the Mongols, while the
U ighurs lived at the well-known Bishbaligh and its neighbourhood.

The conclusion I came to in that volume in regard to the Keraits has
been strengthened by further consideration. I have no doubt that they
were Turks and not Mongols. I ought here to mention that they occur
in the pages of Haidar. In describing one of Timur's campaigns, he

* op. cit., 138.

14 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

tells US that he sent Behram the Jelair, Khitai Behadur, and Sheikh AH
Behadur to the territory of Almatu. They engaged the Kerayets, i.e., the
Keraits, on the river Aishek Khatun. The t in Kerait is merely the
Mongol plural, and the tribe still survives in Eastern Sungaria, under the
name of Girai or Kirai. I have little doubt it also survives in the Uvak
Girais of the Middle Horde.

The Kunkurats form such a notable factor in Mongol history, and one
hitherto so neglected, that we may be pardoned for adding a few lines to
our former account of them. Rashid ud din says expressly they sprang
from the two people who came out of Irgene Kun, i.e. (in his legendary
history of the origin of the Mongols), from Kian and Nokus.* The
story went that before they left there they trampled on the hearths
of the other tribes, whence the Kunkurads suffered greatly from
pains in their feet caused by their having been burnt. As they
migrated sooner than the Mongols, the latter in former times had
been greatly at issue with them, and hated them. They themselves
reported that they were sprung from " Bestui Zerrin," i.e.^ the Golden
Vase, which story Erdmann compares with that of the Golden bowl of
Targitaos, etc. He argues that the tale is compounded of the notion of
the noble Kumis bowl and the mountain-girdled valley of Irgene Kun.f
Bestui Zerrin is said to have had three sons — Jurluk Mergen, the
ancestor of the Kunkurads proper ; Kabai Shireh, who had two sons,
named Angiras and Olkhonud, the ancestors of the Angirasses and
the Olkhonuds ; and Tusbudau, who had two sons, named Karanut
and Kungeliut. The latter, we are told, married his father's widow, by
whom he had a son named Miser Ulug, who also married his father's
widow, and by her had a son, Kurulas, whence sprang the tribe of the
Kurulas. Miser Ulug afterwards married a Khitaian, by whom he had a
son, Iljigin, the stem father of the tribe of the same name.J The
interesting thing for us, of course, about the Kunkurads is that the
Mongols trace the descent of their Imperial house from them.

Burtechino, the wolf-ancestor of the Mongol imperial stock, we are
told, was a descendant of Kian, and belonged to the tribe Kurulas. §
The Kurulas, as we said, were a branch of the Kunkurads. Rashid
ud din several times tells us that Alung Goa, who was the real ancestress
of the Mongol Khans, belonged to the same tribe of the Kurulas, || whence
it follows that the Mongol Khans were descended from the Turkish
tribe of the Kunkurads. When we come down to later times, we find
that the Mongol sovereigns constantly chose their principal wives from
among the Kunkurads. Thus, Kabul Khan married Goa Gulka, who was
a Kunkurat.U Yissugei married Ulun Egeh, or Oghelen Eka, who was an
Olkhonud.** Temujin's chief wife, Burte Fujin, was also an Olkhonud.

* Erdmann Temujin, 197. t /d-i "^l^, ^97, 198. I Id., 201, 202. ^ Abulghazi, 33.

I Id., 64, note 3, by Des Maisons. % Erdmann Temujin, 170. ** Id., 253.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 1 5

The "Yuen chao pi shi" says she was of the tribe Unghir, i.e.^
a corruption of Kungur, or Kunkur, and that her father enlarged to
Yessugei, on the fact that it had been customary for the Mongol
princes to marry the beautiful daughters of his house. This is also
said by Ssanang Setsen.* The beautiful wife of Khubilai Khan, Jabun
Khatun, was a Kunkurat.f Another of his wives, Nembui Khatun, was
also a Kunkurat, as was Katakash, the wife of the Kutchu, son of Ogotai
and Bulughan Khatun, the wife of the Ilkhan Gazan, etc.J On the
other hand, three of Jingis Khan's five daughters, named Kujin Bigi,
Tumalun, and Altalun, married respectively the Kurulat, Huladai
Gurgan, the Kunkurat, Shenggu Gurgan, and the Olkhonud, Javer
Sagan.§ Again, the soubriquet of Kiat, borne by the Imperial house
among the Mongols, is also closely connected with the Kunkurats, who,
as we have seen in the legend, are not only deduced from Kian or
Kiat, but we actually find to this day that one of the four main divisions
of the Uzbegs is called Kiat Kungrad. The Kungrads again are
deemed at Khiva the senior and most noble tribe. All these facts
concur in making it pretty certain that the Mongol rulers were in fact
descended from the royal house among the Kunkurads.

A question which remains is as to the district occupied by this
race. I have discussed this question in the former volume, with an
unsatisfactory result, having no other authority, practically, but Rashid
ud din. Since writing it, however, I have been able to cousult the
"Yuen chao pi shi."

In note 69 to this work Palladius tells us that it is stated in the life of
Dai Setzen, the father-in-law of Jingis Khan, as told in the Yuen Shi,
that the Kunkurads lived in the place called Kulehrundurgin and Dalai
Nur, and on the river Yehhgun. Dalai Nur is the well known lake into
which the Kerulon falls, and Yehhgun is assuredly the Chinese transcrip-
tion of the Argun, the river that flows out of the Dalai lake. In regard
to the other name, Undur in Mongol means hill or elevation, || and
Kulehr may perhaps be a form of Kerulon, the 1 and r being transposed.
This, then, would make the home land of the Kunkurads on Lake Dalai,
the Lower Kerulon, and the Argun. In confirmation of this, I may
mention that the Chinese author translated by Gaubil makes Potu or
Botu, the chief of the Inkirasses, live on the river Ergone, ?>,, the
Argun.1I When Temujin set out to bring his wife home from her
father's yurt, we are told in the Yuen chao pi shi that he went down the
Kerulon. All this is conclusive as to the position of the Kunkurads, and
we have only to reconcile it with the statement of Rashid ud din. As
D'Ohsson says, Rashid uses the term ongu very loosely ; sometimes he
applies it to the Inshan mountains and to the great wall which separates

* Ante, i., 50. t Erdmann, op. cit., 200. I Id., 200-3.

§ Erdmann, op. cit., 445. |! D'Ohsson, i., 82, note, f Op. cit., 3.

ID HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

China from Mongolia, at other times to the Khingan range, which
separates Manchuria from Mongolia.* He doubtless treats Manchuria
as a part of China, which it in fact was, during the domination of the
Kin dynasty, who ruled it during the reign of Jingis Khan. He
also gives the name of Jai Alchia to the same Khingan range ; and
in another place mentions "Alchia Kungur, which was formerly the
winter quarters of the Kunkurads," D'Ohsson points out that a river
Kungur, which springs in the Khingan range, is marked by D'Anville as
falling into Lake Taal, about N.L. 43. I may add that the river Olkui,
which is marked as springing from the same range somewhat further
north, not improbably gave its name to the Olkhonuds, one of the
divisions of the Kunkurads. I have little doubt, therefore, that the
Kunkurads occupied the eastern and north-eastern part of Mongolia,
west of the Khingan chain, and including the environs of the Dalai or
Kulun Lake and the river Argun, being thus planted between the
Mongols and the Tartars properly so called. Let us now return once
more westwards.

Having discarded the various tribes which invaded and settled in the
Kipchak during the Mongol domination, let us try and realise the
condition of things there before that event. The Kazaks, as we have
seen, were in the main the White Horde, under another name. The
White Horde occupied the country of the lower Sir, the Chu, and the
Talas. If we are to credit the express statement of Carpini, who
travelled through the country, Orda, the founder of the White Horde,
had a yurt east of I mil. It would seem, in fact, that his portion was
largely conterminous with the empire of Kara Kitai, which was probably
his father's ulus, and that the modern Kazaks are largely the descendants
of the Kara Khitaians, whence we still find the name Khitai surviving
as a clan-name in the steppes of Kipchak.

The Kara Khitaians, however, had only a short-lived empire ; they
had succeeded to the former power of the Turkish sovereigns of
Turkestan, called the Ilkhanids, and who have been shown by Professor
Gregorief to have been Karluks. The name Karluk survived as that of a
tribe even down to the time of Jingis Khan, but in its wider and earlier
sense it included the various tribes which obeyed the old Turkish sove-
reigns at Balasaghun and Almaligh, who were, as I believe, the ancestors
of the Kazaks. These Karluks were called the Lion Hoei hu, or Lion
U ighurs of Kashgar, by the Chinese. Their supremacy only dates from the
ninth century ; before that date the older Turks dominated in the valleys
of the Talas and the Chu. The Turks, who were ruled over by princes,
descended from the half-mythical Afrasiab. These Turks were, I believe,
driven out by the Karluks when the latter founded their power. They
then moved southwards into Transoxiana, and further south still towards

* D'Ohsson, i., 68, note.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 17

the borders of India, where they are well known as Khilj, Kalladjis, etc.
Let us now revert again to the Uzbegs. When we have discarded from
our consideration the various tribes who, as we have seen, joined
the Uzbegs under the influence of the Mongols, we shall have remaining
two principal divisions, namely, the Nokuz Manguts and the Kangli
Kipchaks. The former of these we have already considered. Let us
now turn to the latter.

The Kipchaks, who gave their name to the Khanate, and who were a
very important element in its population, have a history which is very
obscure and difficult to unravel. One section of them who lived west of
the Volga, and who were known as Comans to the Western writers, have
already occupied us in the former volume, and we need say no more
about them, but east of the Volga there was another section which has
been much neglected. These were the ancestors of the Kipchaks, who
now form such an important element in the population of Khokand and
Mavera un Nehr. As we have seen, the Kazaks treat them as strangers
to their confederacy, and they formed doubtless the original nucleus of
the Horde of Sheiban, brother of Batu. Where did they live ? We have
no absolute statements on the subject, and can only reach an answer by
a process of exhaustion. The Kankalis, as we shall see, occupied the
steppes north of the Aral, from the Volga as far east as the Sarisu. The
country east of the Volga on the Middle and Upper Jaik and further
east was, as we have seen, in all probability occupied by the Pechenegs
and Manguts, and we are driven to find a habitat for the Kipchaks in
the country north and north-west of the Balkhash Lake, where the
Middle Horde of the Kazaks has its camping ground, and where the
Horde of Sheiban apparently had its focus. These Eastern Kipchaks
lived beyond the region easily accessible to Arab traders, and we
consequently find hardly any mention of them in the writings of Arab
geographers. They are probably referred to, however, in an obscure
passage of the Nubian geographer Edrisi, in the 9th section of his
description of the 6th climate, under the name of Khafshakh.* These
Kipchaks no doubt formed a substantive power of their own before they
were attacked by the Mongols. There is a very interesting passage in
the Yuen shi which I believe refers to them, and which is so valuable as
dealing with an exceedingly obscure district that I shall take the liberty of
extracting it from Mr. Bretschneider's very valuable work. The passage
is contained in the 128th chapter of the Yuen shi, in the biography
of Tu tu ha {? Toktoghu), who was a prince of the Kincha (the Chinese
form of Kipchak). It reads thus : " The ancestors of the people of
Kincha originally dwelt north of Wuping, on the river Jelien, near the
mountain Andahan. Kuchu emigrated to the north-west, to the
mountain called Yuliboli, and this name was then adopted for the

• Op. cit., ed. Jaubert, ii., 416.

l8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

reigning family. Kuchu had a son Somona, who also had a son Inosze ;
they were all hereditary princes of Kincha. When Jingis was at war
with the Mieliki (Merkits), the prince Huodu fled to Kincha. Jingis
demanded his delivery, which was refused, when the emperor gave
orders to attack Kincha. When Inosze became old, his realm was
troubled by insurrection ; and his son Hulusuman then determined to
send envoys to Jingis, and offered his submission. Mengko (Mangu,
subsequently emperor) received orders to occupy Kincha. Hulusuman's
son Banducha surrendered with his people. Black mare's milk, which
is very pleasant to the taste, used to be sent from Kincha to the Court
of China ; whence the Kincha were called also Halachi. Tutuha, whose
biography is found in the Yuen shi, was a son of Banducha. He died
in 1279. His son Chuangwur, who died in 1322, was also a renowned
general; and his son Yientiemur* was a Minister of China, 1328-1333 ;
Yientiemur's brother Santun was also minister, as was Santun's son
likewise."t

A few words will suffice for the consideration of the Kankalis, to
whom we devoted a paragraph in the former volume. t I have there
identified them with the Nogais, and this is partially correct. We
still have among the Nogais clans with the names of Chushan-Kangli,
and Kabil-A'rt^/^-Agakli ; § in the same way, as we have seen, some
of the Pecheneg tribes were also Kankalis, and the most probable
solution of the question is, either that the Kankalis actually invaded the
west, together with the Manguts, or that they derived their name, which
means cart or araba, from some mixture with them. A few words on
their name of Kanklis may not be inopportune.

In describing the war of Oghuz Khan against the Tartars, Abulghazi
says that he had not sufficient sumpter-beasls on which to carry off his
booty, whereupon a brave boy who was with his army invented a
cart. His example was followed by the whole army. To these carts
they gave the name of kank. They were previously unknown, as was
their name. They produced when in motion a sound resembling kank-
kank, whence this name. The inventor of the cart was thereupon
called Kankli, and from him were descended the Kanklis or Kankalis. ||
It will be noted as a remarkable fact, and one referred to by Erdmann,
that the Kankalis are treated as the allies rather than as the subjects of
Oghuz Khan.H Dr. Schott says that among several tribes of Siberia a
cart is still known as kanga.**

Let us now consider another curious fact in the biography of Buhuman,
a KankaU chief, which is given in the Yuen shi. In this it is expressly
said that the Kankalis derived their origin from the Kaokiu, a people

• See his special biography ia chap, cxxxviii. t Bretschneider, op. cit., 174-5.

I Ante, vol. i., i8, 19. $ Asia, Polyglotta, 219, 230.

I Op. cit., 17. %, Erdmann Temujin, 499.

** Cbiaesiscbe Nachrichten ueber di KftDggar, etc., Metnt. Berlin Acad., 1844, 154, note.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 1 9

mentioned in the Han history.* This people is also and more frequently
called Kaoche, the particle ch6 also being read as kiu. Kaoch6 means
in Chinese high cart, and Dr. Bretschneider tells us further that in the
history of the Wei (i.e., in the 5th century of our era) the name of this
people is explained by the high wheels they used to put on their carts.f
Remusat also tells us that kaochd in Chinese means the same thing as
kankali in Turkish.J This is, therefore, a complete proof that the
Kankalis were in fact of the same race as the Kaoche. I would mention
parenthetically that Von Hammer tells us the Chinese kaoche is the
same as the Turkish kochi and the English coach. § I have sufficient
sins of my own to answer for without being responsible for all Von
Hammer's etymologies, but this one certainly seems reasonable and
interesting.

The Kaoche are well known in Chinese history. The name is a
synonym, in fact, for the Uighurs, which is another proof of the
connection, direct or indirect, of the Kankalis with the Eastern Turks.
Among the shreds of the Kankalis who escaped the Mongol arms was a
small tribe called Kayi or Kiat Kangli, which dwelt at Mahan, near Merv.
On the Mongol approach, they retired westward into the district of
Akhlatt, in Armenia. Eight years later, when the Mongols appeared
there, they again retired into Asia Minor. Their chief was named
Ertogrul. He and his people, consisting of about 440 famihes, obtained
the grant of a district near Angora, from the Seljuk Sultan of Rum,
and he was given the title of Uj Bey, or Margrave. He was the
father of the famous Othman or Osman, the founder of the Ottoman
Empire. II So that the Ottomans proper, the original nucleus of the race,
were Kankalis.

Constantino Porphyrogenitus calls the Kankalis, Kangar. Of this
name, Kangkiu is the natural Chinese transcription, a change which
may be compared with that of the Latin conclusum into the Italian
conchiuso;1[ and Kangkiu is, in fact, a name apphed to the Kankalis
by the Chinese, as De Guignes long ago showed. Now, in Schmidt's
criticism of Von Hammer's " Golden Horde," we are told that among
all the peoples of Central Asia, Mongols as well as Turks, the Osmanli
to this day are known as Khangar.** This is a curious confirmation of
the fact that the nucleus of their race was the small tribe of Kayi Kangli,
who left Khorassan on the invasion of the Mongols. In a small Chinese
book published in 1777, and entitled "Si in wen kian lo," is a curious
account of the Russians, who, we are told, were then governed by a
female khan. They are described as having been at war in the twentieth
year of Kien lung, /.<?., in 1755, with the Kanggar, which Schott agrees

* Bretschneider, Notices of Med. Geog. and Hist., 74, note 143. t Id.

I Recherches sur les Langues Tartares, 315. $ Golden Horde, 17, note 2.

j D'Ohsson, i., 393. 294. f Schott, op. cit., 154, note. ♦♦ Golden Horde, 608,

20 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

with Schmidt is the name by which the Osmanli are ftow known in
Central Asia.* The account is very quaint in its details, and makes the
war terminate by the Russians becoming tributary to the Kanggar, and
having to submit to pay an annual tribute of 500 boys and 500 girls to
the victors. All this is the manufacture of Chinese patriotism, nor does
the date seem to be correct ; but the account, as Schott says, doubtless
refers to the war which the Empress Catharine fought against the Turks,
in the years 1769 to 1774, and which ended in the peace so disastrous
for the latter, secured by the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarja.f

Let us now condense the result of our inquiry. It would seem then that
at the time of the Mongol invasion the valleys of the Chu and the Talas
were occupied by certain tribes once subject to the famous dynasty of
the Karluk Khans, and later to the Khans of Kara Khitai. These tribes
are now mainly represented by the Kazaks. West of them, in the steppes
north of the Aral, and wandering as far as the Volga, were the Kankalis.
West of them again, in the steppes of southern Russia, were the Comans,
a section of the Kipchaks proper. The other section of the Kipchaks
lived to the north and north-west of the Balkhash lake, in the present
country of the Middle Horde of the Kazaks. West of them, and on
the Middle Yaik and the Yemba, were the Pechenegs, Manguts, or
Karakalpaks. To the north of the latter were the Bashkirs, who did not
form any substantive community during the Mongol domination, and
who were, as I have shown elsewhere,t closely related to the Magyars
and to the Meshkeriaks of eastern Russia, and to the Uzes of the
Byzantine authors.

A few words, in conclusion, on the present condition of the various
Tartar Hordes. The Uzbegs, as we have seen, have practically left the
Kipchak steppes altogether, and are now living in the country of Mavera
un Nehr, in Turkestan, and in Khuarezm. Those who remain in Turan
are represented partially by the Siberian Tartars, who live chiefly in the
governments of Tobolsk and Tomsk. The Tobolsk Tartars take their
name from the river Tobol, on which and its tributaries they are chiefly
found. The Tartar inhabitants of the city of Tobolsk itself are chiefly
of Bukharian descent. When Georgi wrote they numbered about
4,000 men, and lived in villages of from ten to fifty houses. They
were Muhammedans, and practised agriculture, as well as being
herdsmen. §

Latham says they are found about Tiumen, on the Tura, and also
about Tara, on the Irtish, and are divided into six tribes, the Osta, Ali,
Kundei, Sarga, Tav, and Otus.||

The Tomsk Tartars live in villages on the river Tom, from its sources
in the mountains of Kusnezk to its outfall into the Ob. The Tartars of

* Schott, op. cit., 156. t Id., 158.

1 Geographical Magazine, iv. Author's paper on the Uzes, Torks, or Magyars.

5 Beschreibung Alt. Nat., etc., 115, 116. jj Native Races of the Russian Empire, 174.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK- ' 21

the city of Tomsk are also Bukharians. The Tomsk Tartars, Hke those
of Tobolsk, are agriculturists and cattle breeders. Their chief tribes are
the Tshagi, Ayus, and Tayan.*

The Kazaks we have already described. They are now, with the
exception of a portion of the Great Horde, entirely subject to Russia.
Of the Nogais and their present distribution we shall reserve a notice
for the concluding chapter of this volume. Here we will content
ourselves with giving a list of the chief Karakalpak tribes, as reported by
Vambery, the Karakalpaks being, as we shall show in chapter xii., a
section of the Nogais. Vambery thus enumerates them : The Baimakli,
Khandekli, Terstamgali, Achamaili, Kaichili Khitai, Ingakli-Keneguz,
Tomboyun, Shaku, Ontonturuk.f We will now turn to the Tartars
properly so called, those who formed the backbone of the Golden Horde.

They may be best divided into the Tartars of the Crimea, of Kazan,
and of Astrakhan. Of the first of these the number in 1858,
according to Wahl, was 240,000, but most of them afterwards migrated
to Turkey, according to some prophecy which predicted the union
of all Muhammedans on Turkish ground. " They have, however, had
cause to repent of their rash piety, for the holy soil did not offer
them anything like what they had left behind, and it is said they
are returning to the meat pots of Crimean Egypt."J The Crimean
Tartars are very mixed in blood. Many of them are of Nogai descent.
These are described as slight in build, but wiry, with a dark yellowish
complexion (often passing into copper colour), black eyes, small and flat
nose, black hair, and little beard. The formation of their eyes and
temples is strikingly peculiar, inasmuch as the latter are very projecting,
and make the former appear very deeply set in their cavities. The eyes
are narrow, long, and turn up slightly at the corners towards the arch of
the eyebrow.

" The Tartars of the northern mountains of the Crimea, and of the
steppes and valleys of that part of the country, are distinguished from the
others by their tall stature, powerful frames, and their resemblance to the
Circassians. Their complexion is lighter, they have big and dark eyes,
black beard and hair. They are a very handsome people. In the south
of the Crimea they seem to have much Greek blood in their veins. They
are also tall, strong, and dark (but not yellow, like those of the central
plains), and have long and agreeable faces, straight noses, of sometimes
Greek and Roman form, and black eyes and hair. The form of the Tartar
ear is very peculiar, and is probably caused by their habit of wearing
the big sheepskin caps. Thus it happens often that the ear is actually
broader than it is long. The fairness of the skin of their women, who
take care never to expose it to the air, is really extraordinary. "§

* Georgi, op. cit., 117 ; Latham, 174. t Vambery, Travels, 348, note,

I The Land of the Czar, 178. § Wahl, 178 and 179.

22 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

There is a colony of Tartars in Lithuania numbering about 8,000. Of
these 3,000 live in the governments of Minsk ; 2,800 in that of Vilna ;
400 in Kovno ; and 200 in northern Poland. They are composed partly
of Krim Tartars, who were made prisoners of war, and colonised in 1395
by Vitut, the ruler of Lithuania, who, we are told, " also established a
bodyguard of Tartar warriors, still forming a part of the lesser Polish
nobility. Although they intermarry with Polish women of rank, they
remain Muhammedans, and contract no marriage below their caste, so
that the Tartar type and martial spirit has been preserved by them in all
their ancient force. But forty years since there still existed a Tartar
regiment, the first rank of which was armed with pikes, the second
consisting of the servants of the first, which was entirely composed of
nobles. They are generally poor, but lead an irreproachable life, as if
to prove the respect with which they regard the memory and escutcheon
of their fathers. They are almost exclusively engaged in the tanning
trade, and altogether a most worthy, excellent people ; faithful, and
brave soldiers; modest, sober, and discreet in word and deed. Only
the educated can read Tartar, but without understanding it, and write
Russian or Polish with Arabic letters. They read the Koran in the
Russian or Polish Translation."* The Tartars of Astrakhan, who were
once a notable power, have dwindled down, as I shall show further on,
into a very small community, and consist mainly of Nogais.f

The purest representatives of the old Tartar Khanate of the Golden
Horde are no doubt the Tartars of Kazan. Besides those who live in
the government of Kazan itself, whose number is put down by Latham
at over 300,000, we are told that there are of them in the government
of Samara 105,000, in that of Simbirsk 85,000, Viatka 80,000, Saratof
50,000, Pensa 45,000, Nijni Novgorod 37,000, Perm 35,000, Tambof
13,000, Riazan 5,500, St. Petersburg 3,500, Kostroma 300, Moscow
300, and among the Don Cossacks 600. Wahl says of these Tartars :
"They are industrious, particularly at their national trade, the
preparation of skins, manufacture also morocco leather, and even
work in the mines. Their nankins and soups are celebrated. The
Tartar idiom spoken by their tribe is the purest of all the Turkish dialects
spoken in Russia, and has produced a literature by no means despicable.
They are an affable, gentle, honest, sober, and very cleanly people,
so that they are much in request everywhere. Their family life is
exemplary, and their children are carefully educated."!

Tornirelli says of the Kazan Tartars : " The number of their race
inhabiting the town of Kazan is about seven thousand. They are in
general well formed and handsome ; their eyes are black or grey ; they
have a keen, piercing look, a rather lengthened form of face, a long
nose, lips somewhat thicker than those of Europeans, a black beard,

♦Wahl, op. cit, 180.1. tChap. xii. 2 Wahl, 1 8a.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KIPCHAK. 23

carefully trimmed, and hair entirely shaven from the head, which is
covered with a small cap called a tebeteika ; their ears are large, and
standing out from the head ; a long neck, very wide shoulders, and a
broad chest. Such is the description Dr. Fuchs gives of their form and
physiognomy. They are moreover generally tall and erect ; their gait is
manly and imposing. The doctor was always warm in his praise of this
race. He says that whenever he entered a Tartar mosque he was
always struck with the fine and noble features of their elders, and he
asserts his behef that the ancient ItaUan artists might have chosen from
among this race most admirable subjects for their sacred pictures."

Of the women, TornireUi says : " They are middle-sized, and rather
stout ; like the men, they stand erect, but walk badly and awkwardly, a
circumstance principally owing to the heavy dress they wear. They
soon grow old, so that a woman of twenty-seven has the look of one of
forty ; this is owing to the custom they have of painting their faces.
Their complexion is rather yellow, and their faces are often covered with
pimples and a rash, which proceeds partly from the habit of constantly
lying on feather beds and partly from their heavy and over-warm
clothing."

Dr. Fuchs thus sums up the character of the race : " They are," he
says, "proud, ambitious, hospitable, fond of money, cleanly, tolerably
civihsed, intelligent in commerce, incHned to boasting, friendly to each
other, sober in every way, and very industrious. What is particularly
striking is the tenacity with which they have retained their national
characteristics, customs, and manners, although nearly three centuries
have elapsed since the race was subdued by the Russians."* Our author
goes on to describe in graphic fashion the manners and customs of the
Tartars in very great detail. I will content myself with extracting a
paragraph or two. One describing their dress is as follows : " The
dress of the Tartars of Kazan is so different from that of every other
nation that it certainly deserves description. They wear a shirt
(kulmiak) made of calico, sometimes white and sometimes red ; their
drawers (schtann) are worn very wide, and are made likewise of calico,
or occasionally of silk ; their stockings, called yuk, are of cotton or
linen ; a species of leather stockings, generally of morocco leather, called
ichigi, red or yellow, are worn over the stockings, or sometimes are
substituted for them. Their slippers, called kalut, are made of black or
green leather. Over the shirt they wear two garments, somewhat in the
shape of a European frock-coat without a collar ; the under one, having
no sleeves, is made of silk ; the upper, with sleeves, likewise of silk, is
called kasaki. Over these they wear a long wide robe, generally of blue
cloth, called chekmen, which is attached to the body by a scarf (poda).
In a pocket of this garment they keep their pocket-handkerchief

*ToraireIli, ii.,30faz.

24 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

(chaoulok). Their heads, which are shaven to the skin, are covered
with a species of skull-cap, called takia ; this is covered when they go
out with a hat (burik), made of velvet or cloth and ornamented with
fur ; the rich Tartars use for this purpose beaver-skins of great value."*

The following phrases from the love letter of a Kazan Tartar exhibit
the graceful fancy of the race : —

"In the garden there are many flowers, many various flowers ; but that
flower which recalls you to my mind, my beloved friend, is the most
short-lived of any.

"All that we need can be satisfied; hunger can be satisfied with a
piece of bread, thirst with a draught of water, but what can satisfy my
love for you ?

"Alas ! you are passing your time in the midst of pleasures, I am
passing mine in the midst of sighs and sadness ; you are blooming in
the midst of the world like a flower of Paradise, I am fading and
perishing here in the midst of soUtude and silence.

" The Volga flows rapidly, time flies still more rapidly, but how slowly
move the minutes of absence ! "f

A more pathetic passage is the following epitaph from a tombstone
near Ufa, on the banks of the river Diurna, which is much revered by
the Tartars. It is as follows ; —

" Goss Gussian Bey, a judge, full of equity, and well informed in all
the laws, here lies buried.

" We beseech Thee, O Lord, to have pity upon him, and pardon his
sins.

" He died in the year 774 (of the hejira), in the seventh night of the
sacred month.

<'He planned and projected— he wished to execute; but Death
opposes the vain projects of man.

" No one on earth can escape Death. Stranger or friend ! when thou
shalt pass this tomb, think of thy last end." J

The influence of the Tartars was naturally very great upon the various
Ugrian races of the Volga, and it is not at all improbable that one of
them, which is very important from its numbers, namely, the Chuvashes
(and who, the most recent Russian investigations make it probable, are
descended from the ancient Bulgars), received from contact with the
Kazan Tartars the Turkish dialect which they speak, and which is
clearly not their original language, but one which has been adopted.
This question, however, is only remotely connected with our present
subject.

♦ Tornirelli, ii., a8, 29. t Id., 41, 43. I /</., 76.

CHAPTER II.

JUCHI AND BATU.

JUCHI KHAN.

IN the earlier and less lucky days of Jingis Khan, the Merkits made
a raid upon his tent and carried off his wife Burte, who was then
enceinte. Wang Khan, the chief of the Keraits, recovered her
and restored her to her husband. On the way she gave birth to a son,
who was named Juchi, i.e., the unexpected or the recently arrived.* The
man who went to fetch her, covered the infant with dough, and, putting
him in the fold of his cloak, went off with him on horseback. This was
about the year 1176. Such was the birth of a prince whose posterity
governed a vast empire. His name occurs for the first time, according ,
to Abulghazi in 1203, when, we are told, he commanded the left wing of
his father's army against Tayang Khan, the chief of the Naimans ;t but
this is probably a mistake for his uncle Juchi Kasar. He took part in
his father's campaign against China \% but it was after this and when
Jingis Khan came into conflict with the Khuarezm Shah Muhammed
that Juchi becomes prominent. The origin and early history of this
campaign is only told cursorily in the former volume, and may well
occupy a small space here.

It was not probable that two vast empires which bordered upon
one another, which were both peopled by warlike inhabitants, and both
ruled by ambitious princes, would long remain at peace, and cause of
quarrel soon arose between the ruler of Khuarezm and the great
conqueror in the East, Jingis Khan. At first, however, their intercourse
seems to have been amicable. The fruitful valleys of Transoxiana were
then exceedingly prosperous — filled with busy cities, the focus of Asiatic
culture, and merchants from thence seem to have made their way into
remote corners of Asia, they trafiicked with Bulgaria for the products of
the fur countries of Siberia, and with the Mongols for objects of eastern
origin. We are told that a number of these merchants found themselves
at the court of Jingis soon after he had subdued the nomades of Eastern
Asia. Among them there are specially named Ahmed of Khojend, the
son of the Emir Hussein San, and Ahmed Tajik.§

* Abulghazi, 178. t Abulghazi, 89. \ Erdmann's Temudjin, 319.

§ Erdmann's Temudjin, 356.

26 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

We are told that one of them exhibited his wares before the Great
Khan, and asked him an exorbitant price for them, two or three gold
balishes for things only worth ten to twenty dinars. Jingis was enraged,
and said, "This man fancies that we have never seen such things
before ;" and he ordered the riches of his wardrobe to be displayed
before him, and then had the merchant's goods confiscated, and had him
put under arrest. When his two companions were introduced they
diplomatically put no price on their goods, and merely said, " We have
brought these for the emperor." This pleased him so much that he
ordered a golden balish to be given them for each piece of golden tissue,
a silver balish for every two pieces of fine cotton, and another for every
two pieces of coarse cloth. He then summoned the merchant whose
goods had been confiscated and paid him after the same rate. The
three traders were well treated, were supplied with food, and also with
white felt tents.* On their departure Jingis ordered his relatives and
the noyans and other grandees to choose two or three agents each, and
to supply them generously with money, and then ordered the whole body
to return with the merchants to the empire of Khuarezm to purchase
some of its products, and no doubt also to report on the condition of
the country. This caravan, according to Juveni and Rashid, con-
sisted of 450 persons, who are said to have been all Muhammedans.
Muhammed of Nessa, who was a high official at the court of
Muhammed's son, and is therefore very reliable, says their number was
only four, whom he names Omar Khoja, of Otrar ; El Jemal, of Meraga ;
Fakhr ud din, of Bokhara ; and Amin ud din, of Herat. t They were
probably the four leaders of the caravan. The caravan was apparently
preceded by three envoys specially sent by Jingis, who were named
Mahmud Yelvaj, of Khuarezm ; Ali Khoja, of Bukhara ; and Yusuf
Gemrga, of Otrar. They took with them silver bars, musk, jade,
and robes made of white camel's wool called Tarkul, as presents for
the Khuarezm Shah, and they also bore letters in which Jingis
recounted to him the various kingdoms he had subdued and the
power he had acquired; he urged that it would be well that they
should cultivate each other's friendship, and he commended the
merchants to his care. The letter, however, breathed that arrogant spirit
which pervaded all Mongol documents, and, although politely worded,
Muhammed was given to understand that his correspondent was really
his patron, and in addressing Muhammed as his son he really meant
that he should consider himself his vassal. Muhammed treated the
envoys well, and in the evening he summoned Mahmud Yelvaj to him,
and addressed him thus: "You are a Mussulman and a native of
Khuarezm. Tell me the truth. Has your master conquered Tamghadj
or no ?" At the same time he gave him a costly stone from his casket.

* Erdmann, op. cit„ 357. D'Ohsson, i. 205. t D'Ohsson, i. 2061

JUCHI KHAN. • 27

" As true is it as that the Almighty lives ; and more, he will shortly be
the master of the whole world," was the answer. " Oh, Mahmud," the
Sultan said, " you know the extent of my empire and my wide-spreading
power. Who is this Khan of yours, who presumes to call me his son,
and speaks to me in such an arrogant tone ? How great is his army —
how extended his power?" To which he replied, " The army of Temudjin
is to that of the Sultan like the light of a lamp beside the sun ; like the
face of a monster compared to that of a Rumelian Turk." The result of
this interview was the arranging of a treaty of peace between the two
sovereigns. After which the envoys returned home to their master.*

Meanwhile the caravan I have named above made its way to Otrar
which, as I have said, was governed by Inaljuk Gair Khan. We are
told he was offended at the impertinence of one of the party, who is said
to have been a Hindu, and who addressed him very familiarly, but he
was doubtless more moved by the chance of confiscating so much wealth
which had come in his way, for he was famous for his avarice, and he
determined to put them to death and to seize their treasure. He
apparently treated them with great civility, but meanwhile sent a
despatch off to Muhammed, in which he represented to him that these
people who came in the guise of merchants were really spies. This
crafty letter had the desired effect. Muhammed's suspicions were
aroused, and he sent back word that Gair Khan was to do what
prudence suggested. The latter accordingly invited the merchants to his
palace, where he gave them an entertainment, and then had them secretly
murdered ; but one of the victims managed to escape. We are told he
was a camel driver, who had gone to one of the public hot baths, and
managed to escape by the fireplace. He returned to Jingis and reported
to him the slaughter of the envoys.t

Jingis Khan was naturally enraged. He sent off envoys to complain
to Muhammed about his subordinate's treachery, to acquaint the Sultan
that the greater number of the murdered envoys were Mussulmans, and
to remind him of the very different treatment his subjects had met with
in Mongolia. He demanded that Gair Khan should be surrendered,
and offered him war as the alternative of refusal. The bearer of the
message was a Turk named Bagra, whose father had been in the service
of Sultan Takish. But Gair Khan was too powerfully connected to allow
the Sultan to surrender him, nor does he seem to have been pleased with
the tone of the message, for he put Bagra to death, and sent back the
two Mongols with their beards cut.| Jingis Khan was so moved
by this atrocity that he wept and could not rest. He chmbed a
mountain, where, uncovering his head and throwing his girdle over his

* Erdmann, op. cit, 357, 358. D'Ohsson, i. 203, 204.

t Tabakat i Nasiri, 271, 272. Notes. Petis de la Croix, 146-148.

I D'Ohsson, i. 207, 2p8> Petis de la Croix, 148.

28 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

shoulder, he invoked the vengeance of God, and passed three days and
nights fasting. Abulfaraj, to whom we owe the account, adds that on
the third night a monk dressed in black appeared to him in a dream and
bade him fear nothing, that he would be successful in the campaign he
meditated. On awaking he repeated the dream to his wife Obulgine,
the daughter of Wang Khan, of the Keraits. She assured him that the
monk was a bishop who was in the habit occasionally of visiting her
father and of giving him his blessing. Jingis Khan appealed to the
Uighur Christians if they had any such bishop among them. They
accordingly summoned Mar Denha, upon which Jingis said that
although the bishop was similarly dressed to the apparition which he had
seen that his face was different. The bishop then said it must have
been one of the Christian saints who had gone to him. After this
adventure, we are told, Jingis treated the Christians with especial con-
sideration.*

It will be confessed that Jingis Khan had enough provocation for the

invasion he made of the West, but he had other reasons than those I

have enumerated. The Khalif, who had grown jealous of the power of

the Khuarezm Shahs, also made overtures to the Mongol chief. We are

told that he summoned his advisers about him, and represented to them

the danger the Khalifate stood in from the ambition of Muhammed, and

that he was determined to enter into communication with Jingis Khan,

whose vizier, Mahmud Yelvaj, was a Muhammedan. The council, we

are told, was much divided. The minority approved his suggestion, but

the majority urged that it was impious and wrong to make allies of

infidels in struggling with good Mussulmans. The Khalif, in reply, said

that a Muhammedan tyrant was worse than one who was an infidel, and

that Jingis had numbers of Mussulmans about him, one of his chief

ministers being one. His view prevailed, and a suitable envoy was

chosen. In order that he might not be discovered in traversing the very

crooked gauntlet he would have to pass, it was determined to write his

passport on his bald head. Having given him the message he was to

deliver, they then tattooed his credentials in a few words on his head,

in the violet colour called by them nil {i.e., Indian blue), in the manner

(De la Croix says) they do to pilgrims at Jerusalem, and then sped him

on his way. The envoy reached the chancellary of Mahmud Yelvaj in

safety. He was received in secret audience by Jingis Khan, and when

asked for his credentials bade them shave his head. They did so, and

found that the Khalif proposed that he and Jingis should attack the

empire of Khuarezm on either side. At that time it would seem that

Jingis was not disposed to fight, and gave the envoy a diplomatic answer,

but the Khalif's invitation no doubt formed a considerable ingredient in

the motives which afterwards moved him. This invitation, which

* Erdraann, op. cit., 614, Petis de la Croix, 149-151.

JUCHI KHAN. • 29

eventually brought so much disaster upon the Mussulmans, has drawn
much blame down on the Khalif s head. Mirkhond compares him to
the three devout pilgrims in the fable, who one day met in the fields with
a heap of rotting bones. They began to dispute about them, but could
not agree as to what the animal was. They then determined to pray
consecutively to God to revivify the animal. The first had hardly
finished his prayer when a great wind arose and brought the bones
together, when the second was praying the bones were covered with
flesh, while in answer to the prayer of the third the object began to move
with life. They then found it was a lion, who sprang upon them and
devoured them.*

In the year 12 16 Jingis sent his general, Subutai, against an army of
Merkits which had assembled on the Altai mountains, under command
of Khudu or Khodu, the brother of Tukta Bigi, the chief of the Merkits,
and the latter's three sons Jilaun, Jiyuk, and Kutulkan Mergen. The
Merkits were badly defeated, and Kultukan was captured and conducted
before Juchi. He was a famous archer, whence he got his soubriquet of
Mergen. Juchi, who was his father's chief huntsman, wished to save
his life, and appealed to his father. The latter refused, urging that the
Merkits had been among their deadliest foes, and that after conquering
so many kingdoms they could well dispense with one man. He was
accordingly put to death.t

The authors who recount this story would make out that the whole
Merkit nation was thus exterminated, but we read in other accounts that
two years later a Mongol army was in pursuit of a body of Merkits which
had fled westwards to the country of the Kankalis, and according to
Ibn al Athir and Muhammed of Nessa, this army was commanded by
Juchi in person.J There is some confusion in the accounts. Some of
them call the leader of the Merkits Tuk Tughan.§ Rashid calls him
Khudu, and he is called Huodu in the Yuan Shi.|| The two latter
authors make the Mongols be commanded by Subutai, and it is probable
that they confused the expedition of 12 18 with that of 12 16.

To continue our story, the Mongols had pursued the Kankalis in the
direction of Jend, had overtaken them between the rivers Kabli and
Kamadj — the Kaili and Kamich of Erdmann — and had completely
defeated them. It is very probable that this battle was fought in the
valley of the Chu.

Muhammed was returning from Irak, where he had left his son Rokn
ud din in charge, and had reached Samarkand when he heard of the
approach of the fugitives under Tuk Tughan. He consequently marched
in the direction of that town, by way of Bukhara, to prevent them

* Petis de la Croix, 138. t Erdmann, op. cit., 333. D'Ohsson, i. 156.

D'Ohsson, i. 209. Note. § D'Ohsson, i. 208. Raverty, Tabakat i Nasiri, 268. Note. 4.

[| Bretscbneider, Notices of Mediaeval Travellers, &c., 174. Note, 303.

30 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

crossing into his territory. He then heard that they were being pursued
by an army of Mongols under a son of Jingis himself. This induced
him to return to Samarkand for reinforcements, with which he again
advanced towards Jend, thinking, in the quaint language of the
chronicler, " to bring down two birds with one arrow." He pushed on
towards the scene of the recent struggle, where numerous dead bodies
were lying about, among which was a wounded Merkit who was still
alive. From him he learnt that the Mongols had retired after their
victory. He pursued and overtook them in a place called Karaku,
perhaps the lake Kara kul. The Mongol chief (who, according to Ibn al
Athir, was Juchi himself) sent word to Muhammed that their two
kingdoms were not at war, that they had already entrapped the prey
whom they were in search of, and that he had orders to treat the
Khuarezmians as friends. He also offered Muhammed a portion of
the booty and prisoners whom he had captured from the Merkits.
Muhammed, whose forces were much more numerous than those of the
enemy, replied that if Jingis had given no orders on the subject that God
had ordered him to attack the Mongols, and that he would win his
approval by destroying the pagans. Then the two armies prepared to
fight ; the great trumpet, Kerrena, fifteen feet long, was blown, the brass
timbrels, called Kus, the drums, fifes, and other warlike instruments
sounded the charge.* Major Raverty says the right wings of either
army, as is often the case in eastern, as it has frequently been in western
battles, broke their respective opponents. The Mongols then attacked
the Khuarezmian centre. The Sultan was in some danger when his
gallant son Jelal ud din, who had been victorious on the right, charged
the Mongols in flank, and saved the centre from defeat. The fight was
maintained with great obstinacy until nightfall, when the two armies
retired to a short distance confronting each other. The Chinese author
translated by Gaubil adds a curious fact to those reported by the western
writers. He tells us that Pitu, the son of Yelu liuko, whom Jingis had
appointed king of Liautung, took part in this fight on the side of the
Mongols, as did his relative Yelu kohay. The former was badly
wounded, but seeing Juchi surrounded by the enemy he rushed to the
rescue, and both managed to force their way out.t

After the fight the Mongols lighted an immense number of fires to
deceive the Khuarezmians, and decamped quietly during the night to
join the camp of Jingis.^ The site of this battle is not very easy to
determine. One account says it was in the country of Kashgar,§ other
accounts say on the frontier of the country of the Jetes, while one says
it was within the borders of Khuarezm. This seems to show it was on
an indefinite frontier, and strengthens the identification of it with some
place in the valley of the Chu.

• Petis de la Croix, 159-161. t Gaubil, Histoire de Gentchiscan, &c., 36.
I Tabakat i Nasiri, 268, 209. § Id.

JUCHI KHAN. 31

Sultan Muhammed, we are told, having thus witnessed and beheld
with his own eyes in this encounter the warlike feats, the activity, and
the efforts of the Mongol forces, the next day retired from that place, and
fear and dread of them took possession of his heart and mind, and he
never again came against them.* He retired to Samarkand, where he
was seized with unaccountable irresolution although his forces probably
numbered 400,000, but they were wanting in the discipline and soldierly
virtues of the Mongols. Nor had they the latter's incentive to fight. To
them victory would bring little but barren honours, while to the Mongols
it would open the gate to the rich treasures of Transoxiana. We are
told that Juchi was well received and much praised for his conduct by
his father.t

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1219,1 Ji^gis, who had summered his
horses on the Irtish, in the country of the Naimans, marched westwards
with the main army. This he presently divided into four divisions, one
of which, under the command of Juchi, was sent against Jend and
Yanghikent. With him marched the ulus Bede, that is, the Uighurs.§
He first attacked Sighnak, which afterwards became the capital
of the White Horde. In order to avoid bloodshed, he sent an envoy
to summon its inhabitants. He chose for this purpose a Mussulman
named Hassan Haji (?>., the pilgrim), who had been in Mongolia as a
trader. II He urged upon the inhabitants the prudence of coming to
terms with the Mongols. This counsel was rudely declined, and in the
popular tumult which followed in the bazaar he was torn to pieces.
This treacherous conduct enraged Juchi, and he determined to press the
attack with the utmost vigour, relays of fresh men continually replaced
those who were wearied out, until the place was captured. This was after
a seven days' siege. According to Mirkhond, all the garrison was put to
death, and more than one-half of the principal inhabitants paid with
their lives for the murder of Hassan. The town and the rest of the
inhabitants were spared, inasmuch as the Mongols needed it as a
base, a magnificent mausoleum was raised in the chief place in the
city to the memory of Hassan, and a splendid funeral was accorded to
his remains according to the Muhammedan custom.'ff This account
seems so circumstantial that we must adopt it rather than the conven-
tional description of its fate followed by Erdmann and D'Ohsson. Juchi
gave the government of Sighnak and the surrounding district to Hassan's
son.** The fate of Sighnak overawed the neighbouring towns. Uzkend
determined to surrender, and when the Mongols were within two days'
march of it they sent in their submission, the governor and garrison
meanwhile retiring to Benaket. Juchi treated the town with great con*

'■ Id,, 270. t Abulghazi, 107. I Bretschneider Notices, &c., 59- Note, 87.

^ Erdmann's Temudjin, 371. 1| Abulghazi, 112. D'Ohsson, i. 221.

f De la Croix, 175, 176. ** D'Ohsson, i. 222. ]

32 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

-I

sideration, and having levied a contribution of food merely, forbade it to
be plundered, and advanced towards Eshnash. Von Hammer and
others identify this town with'Tashkend, considering the name to be a
corruption of El Shash, but it is written Hanasa in the Chinese authority
translated by Gaubil, nor was Tashkend at all in the direction taken by
Juchi. It is probable that all three towns were situated north of the
mountains separating the valleys of the Sihun and Chu. We are told
Eshnas made a gallant defence, and was not captured without some
bloodshed.* He then captured Bakhaliaket or Barkhaligkend, and after-
wards advanced upon Jend. It was a famous town in the east, having
been the birthplace of several celebrated men. From it, according to
Mirkhond, twenty Scythian envoys went to meet Alexander, praying him
if he were a god to show it by doing good to men, and if but a man to
reflect on the uncertainty of his condition, instead of proceeding further
with the design to rob them of their goods and quiet.t At this time it
was ruled by a petty dynasty. The name of the ruler was Kutlugh Timur,
whose father had submitted to the Khuarezm Shah and was a dependent
of his. He was very rich, and on the approach of the Mongols thought
it prudent to retire westwards towards Khuarezm with his treasures.
The inhabitants meanwhile determined to defend the town. Juchi sent
an emissary named, Chin Timur, to counsel them to submit, and he
reminded them of the fate of Sighnak. They would have killed him but
that he promised to persuade the Mongols not to touch the city. When
he reported the result of his journey and the condition of the place,
he, according to Khuandemir, suggested to Juchi that he should storm it
on the side where the inhabitants deemed it most inaccessible, namely,
where it was defended by a ditch. His suggestion was adopted. Three
false attacks were made elsewhere, and the battering engines were
planted at the weakest part of the defences. When the day for the
attack had arrived, the latter were assailed amidst great shouts and the
sound of timbrels, drums, &c. ; the battering rams were planted, and the
Mongol slingers drove the besiegers from the wall. This was at dusk.
When suspicion had been lulled, Chin Timur placed his bridges on the
ditch and planted two ladders against the wall, one of which he mounted
himself. The walls were scaled, the gates were opened, and the
Mongols let in before the garrison was properly aroused. Thus, says
Petis de la Croix, was the city of Jend taken without any loss, for the
Mongols, meeting with no resistance, did not destroy any one. The
inhabitants were ordered to leave the town and to go into a neighbouring
plain, where they remained for nine days and were numbered. The
Mongols then plundered the houses, and having planted a garrison there
under the orders of Ali Khoja, who was a Muhammedan from Bokhara,
and had been with the Mongols before the war, as I have mentioned,

* De la Croix, 177. t De la Croix, 177.

JUCHI KHAN. 33

they allowed them to return, only two or three of them, who had abused
Chin Timur in his conference with the inhabitants, were killed.*

Juchi now despatched a tuman or division to capture ,the town of
Yanghikent, which was situated on the Jaxartes, two days' journey from
its outfall into the sea of Aral. There also he placed a commander.
Soon after this the ulus Bede, ?>., the Uighurs, were permitted to return
home, and Juchi replaced them by a body of 10,000 auxiliaries from the
Kankali steppe, under the command of Ainal Noyan, and sent them
towards Khuarezm. They went on with the advance guard, but these
unruly nomades killed the commander Ainal Noyan set over them, and
afterwards scattered and sought refuge about Amuyeh and Meru.t

While Juchi was subduing the towns on the lower Jaxartes, his
brothers were conquering those further east, and his father advanced on
Samarkand and Bokhara. After the fall of those towns Jingis sent his
three eldest sons, Juchi, Jagatai, and Ogotai, against Khuarezm, where
there were at this time three commanders, Khumar Tikin, Moghol
Hajib, and Feridun. The first of these was the eldest brother of the
famous Turkan Khatun, the mother of Muhammed Khuarezm Shah,
and he had been appointed governor of Urgenj by his nephew.

Urgenj was then very populous, and its people were Hving an easy
life, not suspecting the storm which was about to break over them.
When the Mongol advance guard approached the gates and carried off
some horses and asses, the hyperbolic Abulghazi would have us believe
that they were pursued by 100,000 horsemen from the town, who overtook
them at a garden situated a farsang distant, and named Baghi-Kurrem,
/.<?., Garden of Delights ; there the Mongols had planted an ambush, and
such a carnage ensued that but ten men escaped of the 100,000 ! ! ! The
Mongols pursued them as far as a place called Tenure, and ravaged
the whole country round. On the following day they beleagured the
town.J Juchi sent in a summons for it to surrender, telling its people
that it had been given him by his father, and that he wished to preserve
its beauty intact. This summons was not obeyed, and the siege
proceeded. It lasted for seven months, the Mongol catapults, for lack of
stones, having to be served with balls made out of the neighbouring
mulberry trees soaked in water ; the besiegers further attempted to divert
the waters of the Oxus above the town, and sent 3,000 men to dig the
necessary ditch, but the garrison attacked and destroyed these workmen.
The siege work was hampered by the quarrels of the two brothers Juchi
and Jagatai, and to punish them Jingis superseded them and appointed
Ogotai, whose generous and docile disposition was well suited to restore
peace. This policy was successful, and the siege was pressed on.
Gaubil's Chinese authority tells us the inhabitants had planted their best

* Petis de la Croix, 178-183. Erdmann, op. cit., 372* 373- D'Ohsson, i. 222, 223.
t Erdmann, 374. J Abulghazi, 118,

34 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

troops along the river, and had constructed ten entrenchments. They
had also prepared a well armed fleet. Kopaoyu, who had been an officer
of the Kin empire, but had passed over to the side of Jingis on the
tatter's great victory in 121 r, was ordered to attack the fleet. We are told
he made a number of fire arrows, which he discharged during a wind, and
which set the boats in a blaze. Under cover of the confusion and smoke
caused by this fire the Mongols attacked and forced the entrenchments
and captured the town.* Its inhabitants were ordered to evacuate it, the
artisans, consising of 100,000 families, were set apart ; the girls and boys
were reduced to slavery ; the rest were distributed among the soldiers'
twenty-four to each, and all were then slaughtered.

Abulghazi says it is reported that the Sheikh Nadjmud din Kubra, son
of Omar the Khivan, whose name had a world-wide repute, was then at
Urgenj. The Mongol princes sent to ask him to go out, so that he might
not be trodden under by the horses. He replied that he was not alone?
but had relatives and slaves. They then bade him go with ten persons.
He replied, he had more than ten. Then they said he might go out with
100 persons. He said he had more than 100. Then said they, take
1,000 persons ; but he replied, " In happifer days I knew all these people,
who were my friends. How can I abandon them in their misfortune ?
No, I cannot leave." At this moment the Mongols arrived at his house,
and after sending several of them to Hades, he ended by himself
receiving the crown of martyrdom. It is said (/.<?., in the Koran, sura ii,,
verse 151), "We belong to God, and we return to him."t This very
problematical story, partially constructed out of the old history of the
fall of the cities of the plain, one only quotes as illustrating eastern
modes of thought. Its details are entirely contrary to what we know of
Mongol poHcy, which was not over tender to Mussulman saints.

Juchi was much piqued at being superseded, and, after the capture of
Urgenj, he, according to the Persian authors, retired to the deserts of the
Kirghiz Kazaks, and subdued the Kankalis and other tribes there;
probably making himself master of the various nomades who lived in the
steppes between the Yaik and the Jaxartes.

The Yuan chao pi shi and the Ts ing cheng lu, however, say that after
the fall of the city all three brothers repaired to their father's camp. It
was probably after this he retired in dudgeon. J The cause of the
quarrel with his brothers, which led to important results afterwards, is
perhaps to be found in the fact of the ambiguous circumstances sur-
rounding his birth,§ and which made it possible for people to suggest
that he was a bastard, a soubriquet that is not easily forgiven. It was
perhaps because of this suspicion that his father made his brother Ogotai
and not himself the head of the house. He spent his time in hunting,
and was master of the hunt in the establishment of Jingis. When in

* Op. cit., 37. t Abulghazi, 119, 120. J Bretschncidef, 66, 67. § Vide ante.

JUCHI KHAN. • 35

1224 Jingis returned home from his Indian campaign, he ordered Juchi
to go and meet him at Kolan Taslii, near the Jaxartes, and drive a vast
body of wild animals, so that they should concentrate there and he might
enjoy his favourite sport. Juchi himself did not go, but he had the
myriads of wild asses his father loved to hunt driven to the appointed
rendezvous. His father had given him orders to conquer the country
north of the Black Sea, including, according to Rashid, Ibir Sibir,
Bulgaria, Kipchak, Baschguerdia {i.e., Hungary), Russia, and Circassia ;
but the lazy hunter neglected this duty, and was content with the
appanage he had already acquired. This consisted of the Eastern
Kipchak, a great part of which was known in later days as Desht Jitteh.

Irritated at Juchi for not prosecuting the conquest of the desert tribes,*
Jingis had on his journey homewards from Persia sent him several
summons to go to him. He had excused himself on the ground of his
bad health, and he was in fact unwell. When Jingis arrived once more
at his ordu, in February, 1225, a Mangut also arrived there from Juchi's
country, who reported that he was well and that he had seen him
recently engaged in hunting. Jingis, we are told, was convinced his son
had wilfully disobeyed him, and determined to bring him back to his
obedience sharply ; and his two other sons, Ogotai and Jagatai, had in
fact set out with the advance guard, Jingis himself proposing to follow on
that errand, when news arrived that he was dead.t Juchi died in 1224,
and according to M.Veliaminof Zernof, he was buried near Seraili (.?Serai).J
He was then forty-eight years old.

Whether Jingis had the intention to displace his eldest son from the
heirship of the Mongol empire, either from his questionable birth or from
his repeated disobedience or not, it is clear that his death made matters
more easy for such a revolution. According to Mongol law a sovereign is
always succeeded by his eldest surviving brother, and thus the immediate
heritage on Juchi's death fell not to his sons but to his brother, and by
the will of Jingis, Ogotai was in fact named his heir. Juchi's family
succeeded, therefore, not to the Imperial dignity but only to their father's
special ulus or appanage, which was apparently conterminous with
Khuarezm proper and the steppes of the Kankalis; the Ural, the Jaxartes,
and the Oxus being the rivers which watered it.

The senior wife of Juchi was Bekutemish, the daughter of Yakembo,
brother of the Wang Khan of the Keraits. She was one of three famous
sisters, the other two being Siurkukteni, the wife of Tului, and Abika, the
wife of Jingis, whom he afterwards married (being directed thereto in
a dream) to a Urut prince, who was acting as his body guard.§
His second wife was Oki or Ukin Kuchin, the daughter of Ilji Noyan
of the Kunkurats.d Another of his wives was Sultan Khatun, of the

* Abulghazi, 140, 141, D'Ohsson, i. 353, 354. Erdmann, Note, 336.

+ Erdmann, Note, 336. \ Abulghazi, 141. Note, i.

]§ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 93. \ Klaproth, Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 274. Note,

36 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

tribe Imen.* Khuandemir mentions a fourth, also a Kunkurat, who was
called Sarkan.t By these, and probably other wives, he had a numerous
family. Rashid says forty sons, but this is doubtless a mistake for
fourteen, and Khuandemir says expressly he had fourteen sons. He
also left two daughters, one of whom was married to the Khan of the
Karluks, and another to Sighnak Tikin, chief of Almaligh.§

BATU KHAN.

The various sons of Juchi are divided by Rashid into two divisions.
Those of the right hand, i.e., the western division, and those of the left
hand, i.e., the eastern division, a division which probably coincides with
their relationship, those in each section having been by a different
mother. Orda, the eldest son of Juchi, was the head of the eastern
house, and Batu of the western, the latter being in a position of feudal
dependence on the former. This dependence was, however, almost
nominal. We find Batu taking command of the army which invaded
Hungary (to whose doings I shall return presently), and according to
Abulghazi, whose authority, however, on such a point is not of much
value, he was nominated as successor to Juchi by Jingis Khan himself.
He tells us that after the customary mourning Jingis sent his brother
Uchegin to instal Batu, surnamed Sain Khan, or the good prince, and to
insist upon his brothers submitting to him. In case any of them refused
he was to be sent to Jingis to be dealt with by him. When Batu
heard of the approach of Uchegin he sent his sons, brothers, and emirs
to meet him, and then set out himself. The first three days after his
arrival were devoted to mourning for the death of Juchi. After which
Uchegin duly installed Batu, who was recognised by all his brothers. A
great feast followed, in which the Mongols, as was their custom,
presented Batu with the cup, who in turn presented it to them again, and
distributed rich presents. It was in the midst of these rejoicings that
news arrived of the death of Jingis. || This story, as I have said, I believe
to be largely fabulous. Among the Mongols, as among nomadic people
generally, the father left his clans and his herds, rather than any distinct
territory to his sons. The land was merely the pasturing ground of the
cattle, and its area was limited by their necessities. On turning to the
army Ust of Jingis Khan we find that but 4,000 men of Mongol race were
left to Juchi and his family. This is a very good proof of the small
Mongol element there was in the Golden Horde. It formed but the steel
head of the spear, the shaft of which was comprised of heterogeneous
elements.

* /</., 290. Note. t Journ. Asiat., 4th sen, xvii. 108. I Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. io8.
% Von Hammer, op. cit., 93. || Op. cit., 178, 179.

BATU KHAN. ' 37

These four thousand Mongols were divided into four Hezarehs, or
battalions of a thousand, the first one commanded by the Saljiut
Munggur, who commanded the left wing in Batu's army, and was
succeeded by his son Jerkes ; the second by Gingetai Kuman Noyan, of
the Ginget tribe, whose son Huran was a distinguished prince ; the third
by Hushitai, of the Hushin tribe, one of the subjects of Burji Noyan ;
and the fourth by Barku, who was attached to the right wing. A portion
of these Mongols, in the subsequent civil strife which occurred among
the Mongol princes, settled in the territory of the Ilkhans, i.e., in Persia.*

Such was the salt of the army ; the main body was composed of
Russians, Circassians, Magyars, and Turks, of whom the Turks, as I
have said, formed the overwhelming number. This being so, the term
Mongol, as applied to the people constituting the Ulus of Juchi and his
descendants, is in some sense a misnomer, for it only describes the
leaders and the cream of the army. Ulifortunately no name is unexcep-
tionable, but after some hesitation I have decided to designate them as
Tartars, the name by which the mediaeval travellers and the Russian
chroniclers called them, and the name by which their descendants, the
Krim Tartars, the Tartars of Kazan, the Nogay Tartars, &c., are still
known. In using this name it must be remembered, as I showed in the
former volume, that the Tartars proper were a different race, probably of
Tungus origin, and that we only use it in the present instance from its
being so generally diffused as connoting the subjects of Batu Khan, and
in default of a better name. As I have said, I discredit the statement of
Abulghazi about Batu having been nominated to the head of his house
by Jingis, nor did he acquire that dignity for some time and probably
until after his great success as a general.

At this time the princes of the left hand were no doubt the most
important. Orda, Tuk Timur, Singkur, and Siklumt are named as
constituting it, and Orda was the eldest son of Juchi. His mother,
according to Khuandemir, was called Sarkan.J There are reasons for
believing that these princes had the greatest share in the division of
Juchi's heritage. It would seem that soon after Juchi's death they began
an aggressive war upon the neighbouring tribes. From the narrative of
the friar Julian, who travelled as far as Great Hungary, or the country of
the Bashkirs, in 1236, we learn that the Tartars, i.e., the Mongols, then
lived in contact with and had been defeated in battle by them, that
afterwards they formed an alliance together, and as allies, that they
conquered fifteen kingdoms.§ He describes these Eastern Hungarians,
or Bashkirs, as heathens, and as neither having any knowledge of the
true God nor worshipping other gods, but as living like wild beasts.
They did not practise agriculture, ate horses and wolves' flesh, and drank

* Erilmann, 453. tVon Hammer, Golden Horde, 95.

I Journ. Asiat,, 4th sen, xvii. 108. (Von Hammer reads it Oturkan or Olserkan. Golden
Horde, 95. Note.) § Wolff, 266.

38 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

milk, wine, and blood. They had horses and weapons in abundance, and
were very warlike. They had a tradition that the Hungarians had gone
from their country, but did not know where they had gone to.*

But to revert to our story, the Tartars seem to have carried their arms
as far west as Bolghari, on the Volga, the capital of the Eastern
Bulgarians. It is well known that among the ruins of that town, which
still remain, there have been found a number of ancient gravestones with
inscriptions in Arabic and Armenian. Klaproth wrote a paper on these
stones, which was printed in the Journal of the French Asiatic Society.t
The most ancient of these inscriptions are dated in the year of the
arrival of the oppression, and bear a chronogram, which Klaproth has
read 623 of the hejira, i.e.^ the year 1226,+ and his view has been
generally accepted, that the curious phrase and date have reference to an
invasion of Bulgaria by the Tartars in that year.§

Jingis Khan died in 1227, and was succeeded by his son Ogotai. On
the latter's accession he sent, or rather ordered Singkur, who is otherwise
called Suntai, one of the princes of the left division already named, to
march at the head of 30,000 men against the tribes on the lower Yaik or
Ural ; and we read how in the year 1229 the Saksins, the Poloutsi, and
a section of the Bulgars fled and found refuge in Bulgaria, and Suntai
apparently wintered in 1232 in the neighbourhood of Bolghari. || The
Bulgarians appealed for assistance to the Grand Prince George II. of
Vladimir, while the Poloutsi were aided by Isiaslaf Mitislaf of Smolensko
and Vladimir Rurikovitch of Kief, and the Tartars seem to have been
forced to retire once more to the Yaik. Wolff urges that the Poloutsi
probably took part in this struggle, since Kotiak, their chief, in his com-
munications with Bela IV. of Hungary, claims to have twice defeated the
Tartars in former years. U

When the friar Julian visited Great Hungary, as I have mentioned, in
the spring of 1236, he met some Tartars and an envoy from their chief
(doubtless from Singkur).** It is not easy to see why Singkur should
have had charge of the army rather than his brother Orda, unless
perhaps the latter with Batu accompanied Ogotai on his expedition to
China, as Abulghazi says. When Batu made his great expedition into
Hungary Singkur was left behind, apparently in charge of the ulus
of Juchi. It was probably the report of Singkur's want of success
in Bulgaria which weighed with the great Kuriltai which assembled
in 1235, where it was decided inter alia that an army should march
westwards against the Russians. The command of this army was
not given to Orda, the eldest brother, but to Batu, who had probably
shown his prowess in the Chinese campaign. Under him marched his
brothers Orda, Sheiban, and Tangut ; Baidar, the son, and Buri, the

* Id. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., viii. 483, &c. ;7d.,485.

§ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 99. Wolff, 123. 1| Karamzin, Eerman ed., 3. Note, 175.

f Wolff, 124. **Id.,2b6.

BATU KHAN. 39

grandson of Jagatai ; Kuyuk and Kadan Ogul, the sons of Ogotai ;
Mangu and Bejak, the sons of Tului ; and Kulkan, the half-brother of
the Great Khan Ogotai.*

This was not the first time the Tartars had crossed arms with the
Russians. I have in the previous volume described the campaign which
they fought against them under their generals Subutai and Chepe,
whose central point was the great fight on the Kalka. Ibn al Athir tells
us that on retiring from Russia on that occasion they, in January, 1224,
made a raid upon Bulgaria, where they were entrapped into an ambush
and suffered severely. He tells us that during the time when the
Mongols were in Southern Russia the communication with the country
to the north (which was the land of furs to the then civilised world) was
interrupted, and that in consequence the trade in burtasi, /.<?., so called
" Russian leather," and in the furs of the ermine and beaver, was for a
while interrupted.!

Let us now turn, however, to the more important invasion of 1238.
The grand army seems to have assembled on the borders of the Yaik,
and was doubtless composed very largely of Kankahs, Naimans, &c., the
debris of the old empire of Kara Khitai and of the Naimans, and
resembled a huge encampment of the Kirghiz Kazaks of our day, who
are so nearly allied in blood and otherwise with Batu's followers.

The army was divided into three divisions. One marched against the
Saksins, on the lower Volga, whose chief was Pachiman. The town
attacked by this body was apparently the Sumerkent of Rubruquis, which
he tells us took eight years to capture. This probably includes a former
siege by Singkur. While Mangu and Bejuk marched with this army
towards the lower Volga, Subutai, the hero of so many fights, and
especially of the celebrated campaign in which, in company with
Chepe, he forced the Caucasus and defeated the Russian princes on the
Kalka, marched against Bolghari. He doubtless acted the part of
Marshal Moltke in the recent war between Germany and France, and
was the head of the staff and general superintendent of the strategy. He
reduced the Bulgarians (two of whose princes did homage), and when
they afterwards rebelled he was sent to punish them.|

At the time of Batu's invasion George Vsevolodovitch was grand prince
of Vladimir ; his brother Yaroslaf, who had for many years reigned at
Novgorod, had only just seized the throne of Kief, and had left his
famous son Alexander Nevski at Novgorod.§ Thus the three virtual

♦ In the account of this campaign in the former volume, I have mentioned Kaidu, a son of
Jagatai, as having taken part in it on the authority of Wolff, but I believe this to be a mistake.
He is not named, so far as I know, by other writers, and the mistake seems founded on one of
Dlugocz, the Hungarian historian. I have also been mistaken in calling Buri a son of
Jagatai's, as Bergeron in fact calls him. (Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 118. Note.) He was
Jagatai's grandson.

t Defremery Extracts from Ibn al Athir. Journal Asiatique, 4th series, xiv. 459, 4^0.
I Rashid, D'Ohsson, ii. 623. ^ Karamzin, iii. 332, 333-

4o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

capitals of Russia were in the same hands. The grand prince was also
acknowledged as their lord paramount by the Mordvins, who had
suffered much at the hands of his people, while the Bulgarians on the
Kama were also more or less subordinate to him. The. Mordvins,
however, had felt the heel of their patrons too much to be very contented,
and were no doubt ready to help any invaders who might offer them
surcease, and such invaders were now at hand in the persons of Batu and
his followers. The life of Mangu in the Yuan shi tells us that after
capturing Pachiman he joined Batu in his expedition against the
Russians, and fought in person at the capture of Riazan.*

The main army of the Tartars advanced, as I have described,! through
the modern governments of Simbirsk, Pensa, and Tambof, then chiefly
peopled by the Mordvins, who acted as their guides, towards the eastern
frontiers of Russia. These coincided with the eastern boundary of the
modern government of Riazan, then constituting the principahty of Riazan.
I have described this campaign in my former volume as it is told by the
contemporary writers, but a more romantic story is told in the more
modern chronicle of KostromaJ (which was written in the seventeenth
century), perhaps founded on reliable traditions. According to this
account, when Batu appeared on the frontier, George, the Prince of
Riazan, sent his son Feodor with presents to him. Batu accepted them,
and ordered the Russian princes to send him their sisters and daughters ;
and having heard that Feodor had a beautiful wife, an Imperial
princess named Euphrasia, he asked to see her. Feodor replied that it
was not the custom for Christian princes to show their wives to infidels;,
upon which he was decapitated. A few days after Euphrasia, who was
in one of the top rooms of the palace holding in her arms her little son,
Ivan Feodorovitch Postnik, having heard the news of how her husband
had sacrificed his life for her beauty, threw herself from the window, and
thus perished. Another narrative says that she threw herself down from
the church of Saint Nicholas with her child. The site of this deed after-
wards bore the name of uboi, i.e.^ " fall."§ The names in Rashid's MSS.
are frequently very corrupt. In the MS. of Vienna, Riazan is given as
Erjan, while in that of Paris, as given by D'Ohsson, it is further corrupted
into Ban. II The Riazan of those days is now represented by the ruins
and village of Staraia Riazan, ten leagues distant from the modern
Riazan.^ One of the Russian chronicles tells us that during the attack
on Riazan, Ingor, one of its princes, was at Chernigof with a nobleman
named Eupathius Kolurat. When the latter heard of the Tartar
invasion he marched to the rescue, but Batu had already passed on. He
went on in pursuit with 7,000 warriors, with whom he broke the Tartar
rear guard, who thought that they were the warriors of Riazan who had

* Bretschneider, 82. t Vol. i. 136. \ Karamzin, 3. Note, 43.

S Karamzin, iii. 337. Note, 43. || Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 102. Note, 4.

'i Nestor, ed. Paris, Table des Origines, 167.

BATU KHAN. 4I

come to life again, but they were overwhelmed and perished. Mean-
while Ingor returned once more to the principality, which he found
strewn with ruins and corpses. Having collected together the priests
and others who had escaped, he began to inter the dead. The body
of Prince George was found after some trouble, taken to Riazan, and
there buried, and stone crosses were erected over the tombs of Feodor,
his wife, and son, who were buried on the banks of the Osseter, where
the church of Saint Nicholas Zarasky now stands.* Zaras means the
murder.t Karamzin mentions that a great curiosity still exists in the
monastery of Saint John the Evangelist, about thirty-six versts from
Riazan, namely, a golden Mongol tablet, i.e., a paizah, which was
deposited for safety against the depredations of the Mordvins in the
metropolitan church by the Archbishop Misael in 1653.]: After the
capture of Riazan the Tartars proceeded along the Oka and captured
Kalomna, as I have described. § In the battle which followed, where
Roman Igorovitch|| was killed, Vsevolod, son of the grand prince
George, was present, but he escaped to his father at Vladimir. T[ The
Mongols then took and burnt Moscow, which is called Mokos in the
Jihankushai.** They afterwards advanced against Vladimir, the capital
of the principality of Suzdal, and at this time the seat of the grand
principality of Russia. The grand prince had retired, as I have
described,tt and left the town in command of his sons Vsevolod and
Mitislaf. Having invested it, the Tartars sent off a contingent to the
neighbouring town of Suzdal. There they destroyed the church of Our
Lady, and set fire to the palace of the prince and the monastery of Saint
Dimitri. I was misled by Von Hammer and Wolff into stating that the
monks and nuns were spared. It was only the young ones, together
with the young girls, that were spared ; the old ones perished with the
bUnd, the infirm, and the cripples.]:]: After the fall of Vladimir§§ the
Mongols divided into three bodies. One marched upon Gorodctz, on the
Volga, not far from Nishni Novgorod; another upon Galitch, situated on
the river Kostroma, and known as Galitch Merski from the Meriens
who lived there ; || || while a third marched upon Rostof and Yaroslavl,
and proceeded to destroy the various towns of the grand principality,
which I have already enumerated.! IT When the grand prince fell in
battle on the Sitti, there perished with him his nephews Vsevolod and
Vladimir, the sons of his brother Constantine. His son Vassilko was
taken prisoner, but he refused to take food ; and on being pressed by the
Mongols to join their banners, he refused with scorn, and called them

* Karamzin, iii. 339-341. Note, 45. t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 102.

I Karamzin, 3. Note, 45. % Vol. i. 139.

il He was the nephew of George of Riazan (Karamzin, iii. 341), and not his brother, as Wolfif
says, 141.

U Karamzin, iii. 341, ** D'Ohsson, ii. 619, tt Vol. i. 139.

II Karamzin, 3. Note, 46. 5§ Vol. i. 139. |||| Karamzin, 345. Note, 46.

■[•f Vol. i. 140.

42 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

tigers, polluted with blood, enemies of Christ, and enemies of his
country. " You shall never be my friends," he said, " you are doomed to
perdition. There is a God, and you shall be destroyed when your cup is
full." They accordingly put him to death, and threw his body into the
forest of Scherensk. Cyril, bishop of Rostok, afterwards found the
corpse of George ; it was beheaded, but he recognised it by its rich
garments. That of Vassilko was also recovered, and father and son were
deposited in the same tomb.*

On their march towards Novgorod they captured Volok Lamsky (now
called Volo Kolansk),t Tuer, and Torjek. The last place having resisted
them was destroyed, according to the Mongol law under such circum-
stances. The Tartars advanced as far as the lake Seliger, where the
Volga springs, " The villages," says the chronicler, " disappeared, and
the heads of the Russians fell like grass before the sickle."| Torjek was
captured on the 14th of March, and if we consider that the battle on the
Sitti was fought on the 4th, we shall have a measure of the terrible
vigour of the invaders.

So far the history of the campaign is tolerably plain. At this point,
however, difficulties arise. We know, as I have said, that the Tartars
retired towards the south, and that they laid siege to and captured
Koselsk, in the government of Kaluga, and somewhat south-west of
Moscow.§ According to the chronicle of Nikon they afterwards went
again to Riazan. || Rashid says that after taking Koselsk they went into
cantonments, i.e.^ encamped ; and this, the main army may well have
done somewhere in Central Russia, and not improbably near Riazan,
while different contingents made expeditions in various directions. A
second body, under Bereke, the brother of Batu, attacked the Kipchaks,
no doubt in their homeland, the Desht Kipchak, between the Volga and
the Don, and compelled their chief Kotiak to escape to Hungary. This
district was afterwards assigned as a camping ground to Bereke. A
third army, under Sheiban, Bujek, and Buri, marched against the
Marimes, a branch of the Chinchaks, as we read it in the corrupt Paris
text of Rashid.^ I have suggested that these Marimes may have been
the Marl or Cheremisses, but inasmuch as Karamzin mentions the
conquest of the Mordvins of Murom and Ghorokhovetz, the former town
on the Oka, and the latter on the Khasina, it may well be that the
Marimes of Rashid were the inhabitants of Murom, and that Chin-
chakes is merely a corruption of Chudes, the generic name for the
various Ugrian race of South-eastern Russia. A fourth army was sent,
under Kadan and others, against the Caucasian mountaineers, and
defeated the Circassians and killed their chief Tukan. This was in the
autumn of 1238. Later in the year Kadan, Buri, and others, no doubt

* Karamzin, iii. 347. t Wolff, 145. J Karamzin, iii. 349. $ An\c vol. i. 140*

I) Karamzin, iii. Note, 47. ^ D'Ohsson, i. 626.

BATU KHAN, . 43

with the same contingent, laid siege to Mangass or Mikes.* It would seem
that Mangu took part in this campaign, for we are told in the Yuan shi
that in the winter of 1238 and 1239 he invested Asu Mie kieze, and took
it after three months' siege.t The name Asu means here Alan. This was
doubtless the capital of the Alans or Ossetes, which is called Magass by
Masudi. D'Ohsson identifies it with a place called Mokhatschla, on the
Cherek, a tributary of the Terek.t This they captured after a siege of
six weeks, and in the spring of 1239 sent Kukdai to attack Derbend.
Meanwhile the main army under Batu wintered, as I believe, somewhere
in Central Russia, probably near Riazan.

On Batu's retreat Yaroslaf, prince of Kief and brother of the late grand
prince George, went to Vladimir to occupy the vacant throne, " to reign,"
in the quaint language of Karamzin, "over ruins and corpses."§ He
buried the dead, collected together the fugitives, and began once more
to restore order to the desolated provinces, and then invested his elder
brother Sviattosaf with the principality of Suzdal; the younger one, Vladimir
Dimitri, with Starodub ; and the grandsons of his elder brother Con-
stantine, Boris, Gleb, and Wasili, with Rostof, Bielosero, and Yaroslaf. ||
Nor was he so weak that he failed to defeat the Lithuanians in the
neighbourhood of Smolensko and Pskof. In the spring of 1239 the main
body of the Mongols under Batu was again in motion. This time
against the 'inhabitants of the Dnieper, the later Malo-Russians, and
their clients the Karakalpaks or black bonnets, the Turkish representatives
of the later Slavic Zaporogian Cossacks.*[[ Against what in fact was
alone Russia in the eyes of Nestor and the other old chroniclers, for
Great Russia or Muscovy, as we now term it, was no part of the primitive
Russia, which was limited to the districts of Little Russia. While Kief
lost its paramount importance by its sack in 11 69, as I have mentioned,
it was by no means extinguished, and in the hands of some of its princes
obtained an intermittent importance only second to that of Vladimir. It
became in fact the capital of the south-west districts of Russia, those
districts which are now called Malo-Russian.

When Batu marched against the grand prince George II., the latter's
brother Yaroslaf Feodor was prince of Kief, but he had only been so for
a few months. On his brother's death he moved to Vladimir, and
succeeded to the principality, as I have mentioned. The throne of Kief
was thereupon immediately seized by Michael of Chernigof, the son of
Vsevolod the Red,** who ever since the year 1224 had carried on a
struggle with the Yaroslaf first named for the possession of Novgorod.
Michael's son Rostislaf was given the town of Galitch as an appanage,
but having made a raid into the lands of Daniel, the prince of Volhynia

*D'Ohsson, ii. ii8and626. t Bretsch., 83. J Les Peuples du Caucase, 23. Note,

§ Id., iv. 2. I! Wolff, 149. If Rashid, D'Ohsson, ii. 627.

** Wolff, 148.

44 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and Gallicia, he was driven away and sought refuge in Hungary * There
he married a daughter of Bela IV., the Hungarian king.

It would thus seem that on the approach of the Tartars the princes of
South-western Russia, instead of being united, were at variance with
each other, and could offer no decent resistance to the enemy, who now
marched upon Kief, the mother of the Russian cities. On their approach
Michael fled westwards to Poland, to Duke Conrad of Mazovia,t and
thence, after a short stay, he went on to Silesia. While staying at
Neumarkt, in that district, his people were attacked, his treasure robbed,
and one of his grand-daughters was killed.|

While one army attacked Pereislavl, on the Trubetch, twelve German
miles south of Kief; another attacked Chernigof, on the Desna, about
the same distance to the north of the capital, where Mitislaf, cousin of
Michael of Kief, ruled. Both towns were captured and destroyed, as
was Glukhof, in the government of Chernigof. I have already described
the capture of these towns and of their metropolis Kief, nor have I
anything to add to that account.! It was apparently in the autumn
of 1239 that the princes Kuyuk, Mangu, and apparently also Buri,
that is, a son of each of the three brothers, Ogotai, Tului, and
Jagatai, were summoned to return home by the Khakan Ogotai, whose
wife Turakina was determined that her son Kuyuk should succeed his
father Ogotai. They accordingly left the grand army and made their
way back to Mongoha. This is not only stated by Rashid,|| but also in
the Chinese account followed by Gaubil. Wolff, who has made Kuyuk
take an active part in the campaign, has done so, as he says,*[[ on the
authority of the monk Roger, who, by the way, does not mention a
Kuyuk but a Coacton ;** and I have followed in his footsteps in the
former volume, but it is quite clear to me now that this view is erroneous,
not only from the statements already quoted from Rashid and Gaubil,
but from all the circumstances surrounding the accession of Kuyuk, and
I am quite sure that Rashid's authority must be followed in denying to
Kuyuk any part in the Hungarian campaign.

The plan of that campaign was a skilful one. While Batu with the
main army advanced upon Hungary directly, two other armies were sent
to outflank that great natural fortress on either side, one through Poland
and the other by way of Wallachia. The most northern of these armies
was, according to Rashid, commanded by Orda, Batu's elder brother,tt
while the western writers make it be led by Baidar (whom they call
Peta), the son of Jagatai ; the probable explanation being that, as was
usual in Mongol armies, the chief command was divided, and that Orda
and Baidar had a joint command. The statement of Dlugocz, that

* Karamzin, iv. 4, 5. t Wolff, 151. J Id., 153. § Vol. i. 141, 142.

II D'Ohsson, ii. 627. ^37i. Note. ** Von Hammer, op. cit., 118. Note.

tt D'Ohsson, ii. 627.

BATU KHAN.

45

Kadan had a share in this northern campaign is clearly a mistake, which
is only aggravated by the gloss which Wolff has put upon it in his note.*
The Caidan of Dlugocz was clearly the Kadan who commanded in
Transylvania.! This northern army, under Baidar and Orda, seems
to have marched westwards from Kief by the great route which leads
through Schitomir and Rowno, in Volhynia, and to have wasted the
districts ruled over by Daniel, the brave prince of Gallicia. Vladimir of
Volhynia, otherwise called Lodomeria, one of his towns, was captured.f
I have already described the raids made upon the districts of Lublin and
Cracow. § The place where the fight there described, which was fought
with the Palatine of Craco\v, was called Great Turksko, near Polamiez,
on the banks of the Czarna. ||

As I have said, after this, the northern army was divided into two
sections. The contingent, which made a detour through Sieradia,
Lancitia, and Cujavia, was probably commanded by Orda, and it seems
to have rejoined the main army near Breslau.H I have already suffi-
ciently described this march and the subsequent fatal battle of Lignitz,
where so many of the first men in Poland perished.** I may add that
the figure of Henry II. on his tomb at St. Jacob's, at Breslau, is
represented with its feet on a prostrate Tartar. A representation of the
lower portion of this tomb may be seen in the second edition of Colonel
Yule's Marco Polo. Besides other souvenirs of the fight already named,
I may mention that a family of Tader still exists, which was named after
the ruthless victors, while a tradition exists in the families of Haugwitz
and Rechenberg that only two members survived the fight, to one of
whom Henry is said to have addressed the words, " Haugwitz, rdcJie den
berg" /.<?., Haugwitz, defend the hill, whence the name of Rechenberg.
The Jesuits also found materials for some of their religious dramas in
the terrible slaughter of the faithful. tt Among the colonies of Germans
founded in Silesia by Bishop Bruno to occupy the land left desolate by
the invaders, Wolff mentions Liebenthal, Pilgersdorf, Hennersdorf,
Johannesthal, Matzdorf, Rosvald, Schlakau, Pittarn, Schlatten, &c4t

The short campaign of this division of the Tartars in Moravia is, as I
have said, not easy to follow, and the difficulty is increased by the
probability that it has been confused with an invasion of the Comans a
few years later. There are three popular Sagas relating to this campaign
which Wolff has dissected in his sixth chapter. In one of these we are
told that on the approach of the Tartars the neighbouring inhabitants
took refuge, partly in the wooden town of Stramberg and partly on the
mountain Kotusch, where they were blockaded by the invaders. At
length, on the evening of the feast of the Ascension, i.e., of the 8th of

* Op. cit., 163. + Vide infra. I Wolff, 154 and 162. Karamzin, iv. 14.

§^nf«, i. 142, 143. II Wolff, 163. f Wolff, 170. **^«f«, vol.i. 143, 144.

tt Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 115. J I Wolff, 193.

46 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

May, there fell a tremendous deluge of rain, which swelled the neigh-
bouring rivers until they burst their banks and swept over the camping
ground of the Tartars ; many of whom perished, while the remainder
retired. We are told that in this neighbourhood gingerbread cakes in
the shape of hands and ears are eaten at the Ascension tide, in memory
of the fact that the Tartars were in the habit of cutting off these
members ; and we are told further, that in digging the foundations of
the church of Stramberg, in 1660, there were found many cauldrons
and instruments in the shape of hoe blades, which perhaps had
belonged to the invaders. In confirmation of this Saga, which was
only recorded by Palacky in the seventeenth century, it seems tolerably
certain that the Tartars were in Northern Moravia in the early part of
May, 1 24 1. Stramberg is a little town situated on a mountain a short
distance from Neutitsch, whose crest is crowned by some ruins marking
the site of a town called Sternberg, which was founded in 1242 by Idislaf
of Chlumec, son of Divish of Davikhof ;* and if the legend applies to
the Tartar attack, it doubtless refers to some Slavic wooden fortress
which existed previously on the same site, a site, as Wolff shows, the
focus of many legends and tales of the old heathen days.

A second Saga centres about Hostein or Hostyn, a mountain not far
from Bistriz, which was crowned in early times by a temple to Radegast,
and in later ones by a church dedicated to the Virgin. This Saga is a
good type of the way in which popular legends grow and get distorted,
and being so, is an instructive example.

As I have said, Michael, the prince of Kief and Chernigof, had fled
from the Mongols, and after some wanderings had found refuge at
Neumarkt, whose Slavic name was Sreda, whose'citizens seem to have
received him badly, to have plundered his treasure, and inter alia to
have killed one of his grand-daughters.f

This adventure was transferred to Batu in an old German legend of
St. Hedwig, dating from the fourteenth century. In this edition of it the
wife of Batu, having a great desire to see different peoples and their
customs, set out with a great following and much treasure, and eventually
reached the Silesian town of Neumarkt, whei^e, in order to possess them-
selves of her treasure, the townspeople slew her and her followers, except
two young girls, who reported the event to Batu. The latter thereupon
invaded Poland and Silesia.J This legend was again distorted in a poem
entitled " The War between the Christians and the Tartars," which was
found at Koniggratz in 18 17, in which we read that the daughter of the
Tartar chief Kublai, with ten noble youths and two maidens, beautifully
dressed, set out for the west and were slain by the Germans in a wood,
upon which the Tartar Khan set out to revenge them. He bade his
magicians, soothsayers, and astrologers foretel the issue of the battle.

* Wolff, 213. t Wolff, 153 and 161. \ Id., 161.

BATU KHAN. • 47

They accordingly split a reed in two, called one half of it Kublai and the
other half the king, and said some magical sentences over them, where-
upon the two halves began to struggle with one another, and eventually
that called Kublai won. The battle having commenced the Christians
at first had the advantage, but the magicians brought out the split canes
and aroused the enthusiasm of the Tartars, who thereupon defeated the
Christians, and captured Kief and Novgorod, after which they divided
into four bodies. They overran Poland and advanced as far as Olmutz,
the Tarters having been reinforced, the Christians, who were encouraged
by Wneslaf, retired fighting to the hill of Hostinof, which they
beleagured. The Christians defended it bravely, and cut down twenty
trees, whose trunks they rolled down upon the Tartars as they advanced.
There was, however, no spring on the hill, and the garrison began to
suffer from thirst, nor were the prayers they offered to the Virgin
answered ; and, beginning to despair, they thought of surrendering,
when Wratislaf renewed his entreaties at her altar, a violent thunder-
storm then came on which fed the rivulets on the mountain. Soon
after a general muster of the people of the surrounding districts came to
the rescue, the battle was renewed, and the Tartars were beaten, or, as
the story says, " the Hanna was freed from the Tartars." Wolff has
pointed out the anachronisms in this story, the mention of Kublai, whose
name was not known probably in Central Europe until the end of the
thirteenth century, the murder of his daughter, which is clearly another
edition of the story told above of Batu's daughter. The story of the
split canes, which was perhaps, as Wolff suggests, derived from Marco
Polo. The hill of Hostein is marked by a considerable spring of water,
so that the thirst of the Christians is not accounted for. The district of
Hanna is some distance from Hostein, and not far from Kremsir, where
the river Hanna flows. Nor does the description of Hostinof in the
poem agree with the facts as they occur on the real hill of Hostein. For
these and other reasons Wolff deems the whole story a romance, con-
structed by some Bohemian contemporary of the old German epic
writers.* I have already mentionedt the case of the third Saga, relating
to the capture of Olmutz, which has been so admirably dissected by
Wolff, and shown by him to refer to the Comans and not to the
Mongols.l

We may take it that after the great fight near Lignitz, Baidar and his
army proceeded to waste the eastern fringes of Bohemia and the western
of Silesia, including the towns of Heinrichau, Ottmachau, Glatz,
Hotzenplotz, Leobschutz, &c., and broke into Moravia in the first week
of May, 1 241, by the valley of the river Oppa and the town of Troppau.§

I have already related how Moravia was devastated, and given the

* Wolff, 215-221. t ^«^^» vol. i. 145. I Wolff, op. cit., 219-241*

$ Wolff, 241.

48 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

names of the towns which chiefly suffered.* The whole country, from
the river March in the east to the towns of Orlava and Iglava on the
west, seems to have been harried.t Roger tells us that the Tartars
passed into Hungary by the Hungarian gates, and as we know from old
documents that the towns of Trentschin, Neutra, and Tyrnau were
devastated, Wolff has concluded that by this expression he means the
Hrosinka pass, which crosses the Carpathians south of the mountain
Yawornik from Ungarsch-Brod and Banof on the Olschawa, a tributary
of the March, to the valley of the Waag.| Thence this division
doubtless joined the main army under Batu, which was then encamped
north of the Danube.

Let us now turn to Batu himself with the main army. It would seem
that besides his grievance against the Hungarian king Bela, in that he
had given an asylum to his enemies and had not answered his summons,
he was also invited to invade Hungary by Dimitri, a voivode of Kief
who was a prisoner in his hands, and who hoped to turn aside the
terrible scourge from his own land, and accordingly aroused the
suspicions of Batu by representing Bela as collecting a large army to
attack him.§ Batu apparently advanced by way of Kremenetz, in
Volhynia, which he captured.il He then seems to have traversed
Gallicia, skirting the Carpathians, and at length arrived at the famous
pass, which leads to the districts of Ungvar and Munkatz, in North-
eastern Hungary. The same route, according to Von Hammer, was
followed by the Magyars themselves in invading the land.lF Batu's
army was preceded by a body of 40,000 men, who cut roads and acted
as pioneers through the terribly difficult country.** The incredible
speed at which the Tartars marched, and which was no doubt one
secret of their successes, is shown by the fact that in three days they
covered a distance of nearly seventy German miles, and suddenly
appeared in the neighbourhood of Pesth ;tt but this was clearly only a
body of videttes or skirmishers, for the great fight took place a con-
siderable distance from Pesth, on the river Sayo, about half way between
Munkatz and the capital, and close to the modern town of Miskolcz.
While Batu himself, with the main army, skirted the Eastern Car-
pathians on their outer flank, he apparently detached an army under his
cousin Kadan, the son of Ogotai, which marched upon Kamenetz, in
Podolia, and Chernovitz, in the Bukovina,|$ and thence over the Borgo
pass into Northern Transylvania. This pass was also called the pass of
Rodna, from the town of that name, the centre of the gold mining
enterprise in these districts, which was formerly occupied by Saxon
colonists, but now by Roumans, who have displaced them. Ruins of

* Ante, 145. t Id., 244. I Id., 349, 350. § Karamzin, iv. 15.

II Karamzin, iv. 15. % Golden Horde, iig. ** Id. Note, 4.

tt Golden Horde, 120. H Wolff, 154.

BATU KHAN. 49

the old town of Rodna still remain, especially massive debris of the
church, proving its former importance.

At Rodna, we are told the Tartars found the garrison so threatening
that they made a feigned retreat, whereupon the too confident
Christians returned in triumph, and not only discarded their arms, but
also, according to the monk Roger, an Italian, and no lover of strong
drink, " got drunk in the wild Teutonic manner." (Theutonicorum furia
is his phrase.) While in this condition the Tartars returned and captured
" the town of the gold mines." They were assisted, we are told, by a con-
tingent of 600 Germans, under Count Ariscald. The invaders were
apparently divided into various bodies, and not only ravaged the various
towns of Transylvania, as I have mentioned,* but also the neighbouring
districts of Hungary, and in a document of King Ladislas IV., dated in
1277, we are told how the districts of Marmarosch, Szathmar, and
Solnoker still remained desolate from the devastation they had suffered
at the hands of the Tartars.t It would seem that they marched into
Hungary by the Meszez pass, by way of Zilah and Somlyo, and directly
upon Great Varadin or Wardein, of which Roger, the author of the
Miserabile carmen^ was archbishop, and of whose devastation he was
an eyewitness.

Great Wardein, like most mediaeval towns, was built of wood, with
wooden towers on its walls. The town itself was doubtless open,
but was protected by a strong citadel or fortress. It was easily
captured and destroyed, and as it had resisted, its inhabitants were,
according to Mongol fashion, destroyed. The captors then retired for
some distance, and when the garrison in the citadel thought they had
finally retreated, and returned once more to their houses, they went back
and surprised many of them. They then bombarded the citadel with
seven balistas until they breached its walls, and finally stormed it. The
cathedral and other churches were inside the citadel, and there the
women, old and young, had taken refuge. As they could not force an
entrance into these buildings the Tartars fired them, and their inmates
perished miserably. Women were ravished in the churches, while the
leading inhabitants were conducted outside the town and there
slaughtered, the tombs of the saints were desecrated, and the vessels of
the altar defiled ; nor did the Tartars fail to return again and again to
search among the ruins and the corpses for some new victims who
should have hidden away in the woods and returned in the false hope
that the storm had passed away.t Roger tells us how, when he escaped
from Wardein with a number of his people, he went to Thomas' Bridge
on the Black Koros, where the German garrison refused them permission
to cross, and wished to insist upon their stopping to defend it. They,
however, hurried on to an island where the people of Agra, Waydam,

* AnU, vol. i. 146. \ Wolff, 323- \ Wolff, z^^^l^^, D'Ohsson, ii. 149, 150.

5© HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Geroth, &c., had taken refuge. It was probably such an island as
Athelney, surrounded by marshes, and, we are told, was approached
by only one narrow way, which was protected by fortifications and
barricades. There he determined to stay, but having heard that the
Tartars were close by, the archdeacon prudently slipped away secretly
and made his way to Czanad. The very next day Czanad was attacked,
as Roger says, by another body of Tartars, who had invaded Hungary
from another side.* It would seem that the contingent under Kadan,
having laid waste Northern Transylvania and North-eastern Hungary,
rejoined Batu's main army after the great fight on the Sayo, and pro-
bably in the rich country of Tokay.

Let us now turn to the doings of this army. According to Wolff, it
was led by Subutai Baghatur and Kuyuk,t but, as I have said, Kuyuk
took no part in this expedition, and Rashid distinctly gives the leadership
of this army to Bujek, the son of Tului ; and it is probable that it was
led by the latter and Subutai in conjunction. It seems to have marched
through Moldavia, inhabited by the Vlakhs or Roumans, who were
styled Kara Iflah by the Osmanli Turks, and Kara Ulugh by Rashid.|
This army having crossed the Sireth, attacked the south of Transylvania.
It was this division which chiefly ravaged the various towns of Tran-
sylvania, as I mentioned in the former volume.§ I notice that there is a
town in the district of Gyergyo which is still called Tatarhago, which
name is probably a souvenir of their passage. This army seems to have
followed the valley of the Maros, while that of Kadan marched along
that of the Koros. It was probably the contingent commanded by
Subutai which suddenly appeared before Czanad while Roger was
sheltering there.

Let us continue his story. He tells us he was deserted by two of his
servants, and having heard of the storming of Thomas' Bridge by the
ruthless enemy and the slaughter of its inhabitants, he returned once
more to the island or marsh, which was probably situated in the marshy
district between Bekes and Gyola, where he counselled the people to
fortify their retreat, but he himself, according to his own confession, soon
left again, and hid away in the woods, where he bade his servant bring
him food. The island was captured, and a horrible slaughter ensued, as
I have mentioned.il It was not till after several days that Roger
ventured to visit it, and he gives a most piteous account of the horrors
which he saw, and describes the inhuman skill of the Tartars in finding
out fresh victims in their hiding places as like that of hounds when
hunting boars and hares. They issued orders that those who surrendered
freely should, after a short time, once more return home. A large
number of people, driven by hunger, accepted these hollow promises, and

* Wolff, 327. t Op. cit., 155, 156. J Wolff, 156. D'OhssoD, ii. 628.

^ Vol. i. 146. I Id.

BATU KHAN. 51

the district was more or less repeopled and divided into sections, each
under a petty chief. The Tartars had in fact determined to winter there,
and required food. It was harvest time (July, 1241), and the returned
fugitives were allowed to reap their harvest, but they frequently had to
purchase a respite in their lives by surrendering their wives, sisters, and
daughters to the lustful Tartars, who ravished them before their eyes.
The Tartars appointed officers, whose duty it was to see them supplied
with food, clothing, arms, and horses. There were about a hundred of
these bailiffs, and the one under whom Roger lived had authority over
nearly a thousand villages. These bailiffs were men of taste, and furnished
themselves with the fairest girls ; those who brought them such were
rewarded with presents of sheep, oxen, horses, &c. They generally met
together weekly, and Roger tells us that, in the hope of learning more of
their way of living, of becoming acquainted with some of their grandees,
or of finding a way of escape, he used to attend these meetings with his
bailiff. On one occasion the inhabitants of the various villages were
summoned to meet the bailiffs and to bring presents. Suspecting some
evil play, Roger at length hired himself as a slave to a Hungarian prince.
His fears were well founded, for, having appropriated their gifts, the
Tartars collected the poor people together and slaughtered them.
They now brought together all the provisions they could collect, having
determined to winter there, and afterwards devastated the whole
province, and made a hideous slaughter of the inhabitants. They would
not allow them, doubtless, to consume the winter provisions they them-
selves needed. In the spring of 1242 they once more set out, and, as I
have mentioned,* destroyed Perg with a vast mass of people, only two
girls and those who feigned death amidst the corpses of their relatives
and were stained with their blood, escaped. They then stormed the
monastery of Egres, where they seem to have spared some women and
monks.t This division of the Tartar army seems to have passed the
summer of 1241 on the Theiss, and then probably made its way
towards the middle Danube, in which neighbourhood Batu himself was
encamped.

The story of the fatal battle on the Sayo is told with some graphic
details which I have not related in my previous notice, both in the
Jihankushai and the Chinese annals. In the former we are told that
Batu sent Sheiban with 10,000 men to reconnoitre, and that he returned
in a week reporting that the enemy had a superior force. This was
probably the advanced division to which I have already called attention.^
"When the two hosts faced one another Batu retired to a hill for a day
and night to implore divine assistance. He had also ordered all the
Mussulmans in his army to pray to heaven. Next day he detached
Sheiban with some troops to cross the Sayo, but their attack was

* Vol. i. 147. t Wolff, 331, 332. lAnte,^8.

52 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

unsuccessful, their numbers having been too small. The main body then
rushed upon the Hungarians, and penetrated to the camp of their kelar
{i.e.^ kiraly, the Hungarian name for a king), and cut the ropes of his
tent, upon which his troops fled. The Yuan shi assigns the command of
the advance guard to Subutai, who in face of the strength of the enemy's
army had recourse to stratagem. While Batu crossed the river where it
was shallow and where there was a bridge, Subutai crossed it lower
down where it J^was deeper, and built a bridge by fastening beams
together. Meanwhile Batu had been engaged, and had lost thirty men,
including one of his adjutants styled Ba ha tu. Batu began to be
discouraged and would have retired, but Subutai insisted that they
should go on, and completely defeated the enemy. Some time after
Bature proached Subutai, and said, " while we were fighting together on
the river Tiuming I lost my Ba ha tu because of your tarrying." Subutai
replied, "that while Batu crossed easily at a shallow place, he was
delayed by having to build a bridge over a deep one." At a feast, on
another occasion, Batu did more justice to his brave general, and gave
him the credit of the victory over the Hungarian king.*

After the battle on the Sayo, Bela fled to the woods Dios gior, thence
he probably escaped by way of Szomolnok and Leutschau to the castle
of Piewnicza, south of Sandecz, almost directly north of the battle field,
where he met his son-in-law Boleslaf, of Cracow.t There he did not
tarry long, having doubtless heard of the terrible march of Baidar
through Cracovia, but, adopting the disguise of a pilgrim, he fled along
the Carpathians towards the frontier of Austria, doubtless to rejoin his
family at Oedenburg. A body of the Tartars followed him sharply ; it
marched through the defiles of Zips or Spisky, in the central Car-
pathians, west of Piewnicza and, doubtless mistaking his traces, fell
upon Cracow, which had so recently been devastated, and then marching
through the districts of Auschwitz and Teschen, reached Hungary again
by the Yablunka pass.J Bela reached Neitra in safety, and was escorted
thence to the Austrian frontier by the German colonists. They were
afterwards, namely, in 1258, rewarded for their fidelity by being made
free burghers of Stuhlweissenburg.§ He was made to pay a heavy
ransom by the Duke of Austria, as I have mentioned. || Having rejoined
his wife and young son Stephen, he made his way to Agram, in Croatia.
The Duke of Austria, it would seem, had also insisted, as a part of the
ransom, that Bela should surrender three of his provinces (probably those
of Wieselburg, Oedenburg, and Eisenburg are meant). IT He now seems
to have invaded them, and thus took advantage of the dire necessity of
Hungary to spoil her further.**

The terrible battle of Lignitz and the rapid march of the Tartars

^ Bretschneider, 91-94. D'Ohsson, ii. 620, t Wolff, 310.

%U. |M»^cvol.i. 150. f Wolff, 313. **W.3i9.

I W., 3".

BATU KHAN, 53

through Poland and Moravia had naturally aroused much feeling in
Germany, and measures began to be concerted there for the defence of
the empire. At the wish of King Wenceslaus of Bohemia, and of Henry
Raspe, the Landgrave of Thuringia, a meeting of princes and prelates
took place at Merseburgh, north of the Platen Sea, where it was decided
that old and young should take the cross, and all capable of taking arms
should set out, those who were rich and not so capable, paying for others
who were. This scheme broke down, however, through the fierce
strife between Kaizar and Pope which was then raging, and to which I
shall presently refer ; but as the Tartars continued their march, and
threatened to overwhelm the empire itself, even the fierce combatants of
church and state respectively drew nearer to one another. Konrad IV.,
the emperor's son, a boy of but thirteen years, and therefore but little fitted
to cope with these troubled times, convoked a meeting of notables at
Eslingen, on the Neckar, for the 19th of May, 1241, where a pact
was made that until the feast of Saint Martin, i.e., the loth of November,
and longer if necessary, they should unite in a common crusade against the
Tartars, not compromising meanwhile any of their intentions in the civil
strife just named, and that an army should be assembled at Nuremberg
to march against the invaders, while the Franciscan friars who had been
sent by Pope Gregory IX. to excommunicate the emperor, his sons, and
supporters, were to preach the crusade. This was allowed to be preached
within their dioceses by the Bishop of Costniz, the Archbishop of
Mayence, and the Bishop of Augsburgh.* Presently the news of the
Tartar doings reached Rome, and the Pope himself sent orders to the
heads of the two great orders of friars, and also to the abbots of the
Cistercian monasteries in Germany, to preach the same holy war. The
Tartars were informed by their spies of these movements in Germany,
and we accordingly find that Batu, who was encamped in the country
about Comorn, north of the Danube, sent a detachment to the borders
of Austria, where, according to a letter of the Austrian Duke Frederick
II., dated the 13th of June, 1241, he claims that his people slew 300 of
them.t

The Tartar invasion was synchronous with the terrible strife between
the civil and religious powers — between the emperor and the pontiff—
which caused so much damage and scandal to Christianity. The Kaizar
was the redoubtable Frederick II., and the Pope was Gregory IX. The
former was master of Naples and Sicily, and was determined to put his
foot on all the land beyond the Alps. The Pope, who was equally vigorous
and determined, would not submit to have the land overshadowed by the
double-headed eagle, and the strife had grown very envenomed. While
the Tartars were ravaging Russia, Poland, and Hungary, namely, from

* Wolff, 246. t Id., 250.

54 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

August, 1240, until April, 1241, Frederick was laying siege to the papal

city of Faenza, which he at length captured. On his side, the Pope had

excommunicated him on the 20th of March, 1239, being Palm Sunday,

and had a year later permitted a crusade to be preached against him ;

and, lastly, he had created a party among the princes of Germany, who

were banded together against his great enemy. These consisted of the

treacherous Duke of Austria Frederick II., Otto II. of Bavaria, Otto the

younger and John of Brunswick, Henry II. of Silesia, and the Landgraf

Henry Raspe, all headed by Wenceslaus of Bohemia ; and the Pope had

even gone so far as to decree the dethronement of the Kaizar, and to

nominate another in his place, a claim which was far beyond his rights,

which did not go beyond the crowning of the prince who should be

elected by the rest.* With such an enemy it is not to be wondered at

that Frederick, who was the great mediaeval champion of the civil power,

should have been most careful not to let his rival have a chance of

escaping. It was, consequently, a terrible time of feud and dislocation

for any effort to be organised against the common foe of all, who

threatened to stamp both Kaizar and Pope underneath his heel. When

Bela, the Hungarian king, reached Agram in his flight he despatched the

Bishop of Waitzen with a letter to the emperor and the pope, setting out

the devastation of Hungary, and promising the former to acknowledge

him as his suzerain if he would come and help him.t These letters were

dated the i8th of May, 1241. The bishop first repaired to Rome, where

the pope, who possibly mingled benevolence and diplomacy in his acts,

and who did not wish to see Hungary become an imperial appanage,

took Bela under the immediate protection of the holy see, offered the

same indulgences and immunities to all who would march against the

Tartars as were offered in the case of the crusades, and ordered the

Hungarian clergy to help their king.J From Rome the bishop repaired

to Spalatro, where the emperor was then staying. The emperor replied to

him, "That if he left Italy before the war there was ended, that Germany

would lose the benefit of the blood and treasure it had poured out in his

support, and that if he marched against the Tartars he would expose his

own states {i.e., Naples and Sicily) to attack, since the pope was so much at

issue with him, but he hoped before long to restore peace to the Christian

world ; and, having pacified Italy, he said that he would march at the

head of a great force against the invaders."§ Well might Matthew Paris,

in his commentary on these proceedings, say that God must have been

at enmity with the Christians to permit such feuds in face of the

unbeHevers.il Meanwhile, however, the emperor wrote to his son

Konrad, and to the Swabian princes and dukes to aid in repelling the

barbarians, and he also wrote to the other European sovereigns.

* Wolff, 194-196. t Id., 257 and 314. D'Ohsson, ii. 167.

I Wolff, 314, 315. J D'Ohsson, ii, 166, 167. Wolff, 315, 316. || Wolff, 317.

BATU KHAN. 55

entreating them to make common cause against the enemy. The letter
which he sent on the 3rd of July, 1241, to his brother-in-law, Henry III.
of England, has been preserved by Matthew Paris. He implored him to
render assistance in the work of repelling the invaders, " for," said he,
" if the Tartars penetrate into Germany and find no barriers to their
progress there, other nations will suffer from the terrible scourge which
divine justice, as we believe, has allowed to appear to punish the world
for its crimes, and on account of the decay of piety. He bade him there-
fore use diligence in affording his help, for this people, he said (/.<?,, the
Tartars), have left their own country with the intention of subjugating alj
the west, and of destroying the faith and the name of Christian ; but we
have faith in Christ, who has hitherto enabled us to vanquish our
enemies, and will cause their pride to fall, and the Tartars to be once
more remitted back to Tartarus."*

Matthew Paris tells us the emperor ordered his sons Konrad and
Henry to march against the Tartars. The latter was at the head of
4,000 horsemen and a crowd of foot soldiers, and encountered the
Tartars near Devin, on the river March. Wolff contends that Matthew
Paris is here mistaken, and that the confederates were not the sons of
the emperor, but the bishop of Costniz and the bishop of Freisingen,
who had been promoters of the crusade I have mentioned.t In this
battle, which is mentioned by Haithon, the Armenian, and by the
Dominican Bieul, the Tartars were defeated and driven away.f It was
apparently fought in the autumn of 1241. Batu's army having spent
that season north of the Danube, and having been rejoined by the con-
tingents under Baidar and Kadan, began to move again in December,
1241.

One division, under Batu himself, marched upon Gran, perhaps by
the valleys of the Sayo and the Ipoly. It was an unusually severe
winter, and the Danube was frozen over. To test whether it would bear
their army or not, the Tartars abandoned a number of their cattle on
the opposite bank, and then made pretence of retiring altogether. After
waiting three days, the Hungarians crossed over to secure what they
deemed their booty, upon which the Tartars crossed it also.§ They
crossed on the 25th of December, 1241. I have already described the
siege and capture of the town.|| One incident of the sack is a grim
epitome of the horrible barbarities committed by the captors. Three
hundred of the first ladies in the town were captured in one house.
Dressed in their richest garments they presented themselves before
Batu and implored his pity, offering to become his slaves. He ordered
them to be disrobed and then beheaded. Pity was not to be found in
the code of the ruthless Tartar, whose draconic sentence upon every

* D'Ohsson, ii. 168. * Wolff, 260. I li., 260, 261. $ D'Ohsson, ii. 153.

II Ante, i. 150.

56 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

town which resisted, was destruction. After the destruction of Gran,
Batu apparently spent a considerable time in its neighbourhood. His
people, however, were not idle, and were engaged in desolating
the valley of the Danube, advancing north of that river as far as
Niunburg or Kronnenburgh, two German miles north of Vienna, where
they slaughtered many Christians ;* while south of the Danube they
advanced, as I have described^t as far as Neustadt, south of Vienna,
where they suffered a check at the hands of the Archduke of Austria, the
King of Bohemia, the Patriarch of Aquilia, the Duke of Carinthia, and
the Margrave of Baden who had assembled a considerable army.t But it
would seem that altogether the country west of the Danube fared better
than that east of the river, and that several towns, such as Oedenburg,
Presburg, Neitra, Trentschin, Comorn, Turotz, &c., successfully resisted
the Tartar attack. §

While Batu and the main army remained near the middle Danube, a
contingent was sent under Kadan in pursuit of Bela, as I have
described.il The latter had sent his wife Maria and young son Stephen,
in the spring of 1241, into Dalmatia, and confided them to the care of
the people of Spalatro, but the queen was nervous, and, with a number
of widows whose husbands had been killed by the Tartars, and with her
husband's treasure, she took refuge at the strong fortress of Clissa, a
short distance from Spalatro. H Bela himself remained for a while in
Croatia, and he complains in a document still extant of the way in which
he was deserted by his grandees ; but he seems to have been of a
vacillating disposition, and neither conciliated enemies nor made many
friends. The clergy alone behaved handsomely to him. Inter aim we
are told how the monastery of Mons. Pannoniae made him a present of
800 marks of fine gold. In the early part of February, 1242, having
heard of Kadan's pursuing march, he fled to the Dalmatian coast, and,
having removed his family from Clissa, went to Spalatro. Kadan
pursued him sharply, as I have described.** The Tartars seem to have
left a considerable portion of their forces near Verbacz, where pasturage
was abundant, and to have hurried on with the light troops through the
barren and inhospitable mountains of Croatia, where they pitilessly
slaughtered the inhabitants, without regard to age or sex. Fancying that
Bela was taking refuge at Clissa, they poured a shower of arrows upon
it, and finding this of little use, they dismounted and began to clamber
up on hand and foot, and were met by the garrison rolling down great
stones upon them.tt But Bela had gone to Trau, as they learnt there,
and thence shipped his wife and family to the neighbouring islands of
Lesina and Brazza, while he himself remained on board ship. The two
islands were granted the privilege of having their own bishops and their

• Wolff, 340. + Ante, i. 152. I Wolff, 344- ^ ^d; 339-

fl Vol. i. 151, &c. •! Wolff, 350. ** Ante, I. lit. tt Wolff, 351-

BATU KHAN. 57

own Zupan (the latter, however, to be of the family Geviche), in
recompense for the refuge they thus afforded the royal family * The
Tartars advanced to the outskirts of Trau, and finding it unassailable,
they sent a messenger to summon the town, who spoke in the Slavonic
tongue : '' Kadan, the chief of the unconquered army, bids you know,
if you do not wish to share in the penalty earned by one who is a
stranger in blood to you, deliver the enemy into our hands."f No
answer, at the wish of the king, was given to this arrogant message.
The Tartars then retired. They spent nearly the whole of March,
however, in the neighbourhood, and several times visited the coast towns,
but afterwards returned to Verbacz.

Several documents are extant showing how Bela rewarded the various
grandees who had faithfully served him during this terrible time. Inter
alia we read how the count Detrikus, son of Matthew, was made Ban
of Slavonia. Similar rewards overtook other Croatian notables. The
most important of his friends at this time were the Frangipanni counts
of Veglia, who put not only their men and ships at his service, but also
made him an advance of 20,000 marks. It would seem that they
assembled a considerable fleet from the neighbouring coasts, which acted
as an escort to Bela, when on the i8th of March he set out from Trau.
It was overtaken by a storm on the open sea, between the canals of Zara
and Quarnero, and a portion of the fleet was driven on to the coast of the
peninsula of Nona. A terrible struggle ensued between the castaways
and the Tartars, who were lying in wait on the shore, but the latter
were badly beaten. We are told that on this occasion three young
champions, named Krecz, Yegerlich (called Kupissa), and Raak, with
thirty-eight followers (who came from Syrmia, in Eastern Slavonia, and
of whom twenty-five perished in the struggle), distinguished themselves.
The fight took place before the king's own eyes, and the description is
enlivened by some graphic touches, the Tartars being hemmed in and
slaughtered, we are told, like " geese on a fish-pond." They were at
length defeated and driven beyond the Kerka, near Brezcza.J

The Frangipanni, who had behaved so loyally, were handsomely
rewarded by the king. By a deed of the 5th of April, 1251, they were
granted the counties of Vinodol and Modrus, in Croatia ; and by a deed,
dated four years later, he made over to them the town of Zeng, with
Zubehor, Zoll, &c. ; while in 1263 he heaped fresh honours upon them,
and gave the castle of Zkrad, in Croatia, to the brothers Philip and
Bartholomew Szkalyk de Lyka, who had supplied a contingent of
ships.§

Let us turn once more to Kadan and his Tartars. Finding he could
not reach Bela, he set out at the end of March, 1242, and passed through
Turkish Croatia and the Herzegovina. When he had reached as far

♦Wolff, 358. t/<^. I Wm 363-365. 5 «., 360,361.

1

58 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

south as Drivasto, in Albania, he received orders from Batu to return,
the death of the Great Khan Ogotai having summoned the various
princes back again to Asia. He accordingly marched east through
Bulgaria to meet him.

Batu had remained apparently, as I have said, in the neighbourhood
of Gran. When the news of Ogotai's death reached him he set out
eastwards. This was probably about the end of March. The army
marched with a large convoy of waggons and troops of cattle and horses.
The forests were tramped through on foot, so that the insatiable Tartars
might glean the few victims who escaped them as they advanced into
the country. In Transylvania the ravage had not been quite complete
before, and many towns and inhabitants still remained. These were
trodden under and destroyed. The Tartars then crossed over into
Wallachia, and thence into Bulgaria. This was about the beginning of
June, 1242,* and about the same time Kadan reached Bulgaria and
rejoined Batu with his contingent. On his passage through Bulgaria,
Batu did not fail, in Mongol fashion, to lay waste the whole land. The
King of Bulgaria, Kolowan, appealed to his suzerain, Baldwin II., the
Emperor of Constantinople, for help. Allying himself with the Comans,
who had migrated from Hungary in 1241, he defeated the Tartars in a
first engagement, but was defeated and his country subdued in a second
more unfortunate fight.t It was while in Bulgaria that Batu assembled
the various prisoners whom he had captured, and after he had given
them permission to return home made a great slaughter of them, as I
have mentioned.^ At length, in the winter of 1242-43, the Tartars
once more crossed the Danube.

When the Tartars invaded Gallicia its prince, Daniel, fled westwards
and found refuge with Konrad, Duke of Mazovia and Cujavia, where his
rival Michael of Kief had preceded him.§ When the Tartars passed into
Hungary he returned once more to his principahty, and, turning aside
from Brest and Vladimir on account of the pestilental odour emitted by
the corpses there, he settled at Kholm, a town which he had himself
founded, near the ancient Cherven. It had escaped the general ravage,
and was inhabited by a mixed population of Germans, Poles, &c. It was
beautifully built, and adorned with gardens, an oasis in the general
desert, and from it Daniel commenced the work of restoring prosperity
once more to the devastated country. He was opposed, however, by the
Gallician boyards, who had tasted in his absence a little liberty, and who
seized the salt mines of Kolomna, the dues from which went to support
the princely exchequer. They also intrigued with Rostislaf, the son
of Michael of Kief. Michael had been well treated by Daniel, who had
ceded to him the principality of Kief, to which he had returned.
Daniel defeated the treacherous conduct of the boyards and of the

* Wolff, 368. t/(^.,366. I Ante, vol. 1 153' § Wolff, 381.

BATU KHAN. 59

bishops of Galitch and Pereislavl, drove Rostislaf away from the town
of Galitch, defeated the Poles, from whom he captured Lublin, and
made himself powerfully felt. He is styled Grand Prince by some, and
had certainly in South-western Russia an equivalent position to Yaroslaf
in Central Russia at Vladimir.*

When Batu crossed the Volga he sent the Poloutzian Aktai to apprise
him that he had returned from his campaign in Hungary, and that he
should send his commanders Memmen and Balai with an army against
him if he did not send in his submission.! He then continued his march
towards the Volga.

We have now completed the story of Batu's great campaign. And
what a terrible story it is, what a picture of utter destruction and
desolation. From the German frontier to the Volga hardly a town
survived the passage of the tornado. If towns were an eyesore to
Mongol eyes, as many of their graphic sayings attest, then assuredly
they had done credit to their aesthetic training ; and if the presence of
settled inhabitants, and of those who reap and sow, who knit and weave,
was a menace to the roving soldiery, whose grass needed no tillage, and
whose wealth was in their flocks, they had had their fill of satisfaction.
They had few local ties and scruples, and were on a gigantic scale what
the Turkoman and Kazak frontagers of Persia are on a small one, devoted
to that licentious liberty which is incompatible with town life, and that
obstinate independence which deems most laws the yokes of slaves. If
it be true that man was first a hunter, then a nomade, then a settler, and
that between these forms of life there is perpetual war, and that although
the victory goes unfailingly to the last, that it has to be won at the
sword's point, and is only won when its enemy is entirely extirpated ;
then we have a rauon d'etre for much which crowds these volumes, and
we may accept the campaign of Batu and its results as one chapter in
that mighty warfare between the nomade and the agriculturist, which is
now waning, because the nomade has had his day, but which was then in
the balance, for assuredly, but for the lucky death of Ogotai and the
consequent recall of the Tartar leaders, there is no good reason why an
acre of land in Europe should have escaped being trampled upon by
Tartar troops, and should have been scorched accordingly. I have in
the previous volume collected some of the reasons why the Tartar march
was so successful, others remain. The first and most obvious cause
was that the Tartars were a perpetual standing army. " The nomade
nations," as one historian of Russia says, " are armies, irregular indeed,
but easily put in motion, prompt, and always on foot ; whatever
they leave behind them can be guarded by old men, women, and
children. To such nations war is not an event, for long marches
produce but little change in the habits of a wandering people, their

* Karamzin, iv. 21-24. t Von Hammer, 136. Wolff, 381.

6o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

houses, their provisions, march along with them ; and this is of some
importance in uncultivated plains and uninhabited forests."* There was
no distinction among the Tartars between civilian and soldier, all were
warriors who could carr}- arms, save perhaps a few Shamanist medicine
men. On the other hand, what do we find in Europe at this time ? In
the first place, it was so divided in interests and other respects by its
feudal institutions, that its patriotism was parochial and its strength
frittered away. In the next place, in Russia, and probably in Hungary,
the possession of arms was reserved for nobles and freemen only, and
from these we must deduct the traders and clergy. Now, as the author
just quoted says, speaking of Russia, " continual wars had so much
increased the number of monks, hired servants, and slaves, and so much
diminished that of freemen and landholders, that there remained scarcely
warriors enough to make head against the Poloutzi." These were the
natural warriors, who were trained to arms ; besides them each of the
petty chiefs kept paid guards of mercenaries. These in former times
had been Varangians and Norsemen, but in later days they had also
taken Turkomans into their pay, and we read of Berendeens, Turks,
&c., being in the service of the Russian princes, but these guards had
greatly diminished in numbers. "About the year iioo the guard of the
Grand Prince was only 800 men, and he lost it."t These frail materials
formed the only soldiery in the country, and the crowds who were
collected to repel a sudden invasion were necessarily but a very indif-
ferent militia, and disappeared like chaff in the fire before the terrible
Tartar cavalry, so well disciplined and with such admirable tactics.
Badly armed foot soldiers, with little training or discipline, have never
been a match for such opponents, and especially when they have come in
such multitudes as the soldiers of Batu. Again, not only did they excel
in discipline, training, and numbers, but also in weapons. Here let me
quote from a historian who is too Httle appreciated. He says, " It is
unnecessary to expatiate upon the influence exercised by military arms
in organisation and discipline, and in the general science of war, upon
the history of comparatively modern times. . . . The system organised
by Gustavus Adolphus turned the tide of victory against the Imperial
arms in Germany, and on more than one hard fought field in England,
when used by Fairfax and Cromwell against the ill-regulated valour of
the supporters of King Charles. . . . The dagger screwed into the
muzzle of the musket first placed that weapon on a footing with the pike
at close quarters ; the bayonet attached to the end of the barrel com-
pleted its efficiency without interfering with its use as a firearm. The
firelock and the iron ramrod each made a mark, however small that mark
may have been, upon some portion of the history of the last two
centuries.''^ The same very learned author then proceeds to discuss the

•.Kelly's Russia, i. 68. t Id., 69. I Robertson, Historical Essays, ix.

BATU KHAN. 6 1

superiority of the Frank weapons over those of the Roman colonials,
and of the Normans at Hastings over those of the English, in both cases
awarding the victory to the well equipped. Now, in the case of the
Tartars we have every reason for believing that they were in every way
better armed than their opponents. In the magnificent collection of
armour at the Palace of Peterhof there are some specimens of the body
armour of the Mongols, made with scales of iron overlapping one
another, which testify to the skill of their smiths, and are marvels of
workmanship compared with any contemporary armour then in use in
Eastern Europe. As to the Tartar weapons they have been described
for us by one of the chroniclers. Their armour, he tells us, was made of
buffalo hides, with scales fastened on it. It was impenetrable, and formed
a capital defence. They wore iron or leathern helmets, crooked swords
{i.e., sabres), quivers, and bows. The heads of their arrows were four
fingers broad, longer than those used in the west, and were made of iron,
bone, or horn, and the notches were so small that they would not pass
over the strings of western bows. Their standards were short, made of
black or white yak's tails, and having balls of wool at the top . Their
horses were small, compact, and hardy, and submitted to almost any
hardship. They rode them without stirrups, and made them jump like
deer over rocks and walls.*

It will thus be seen that in weapons and armature also, the invaders
were superior to their opponents, and we cannot wonder, when we gauge
the respective qualifications of either side, that the Mongols should have
been universally successful in the open field. Their engineering skill
was also very superior to anything then known in Europe. We have
pictured for us in the accounts of the Mongol campaigns in China the
elaborate mangonels and other kinds of artillery which they had at
command, and which enabled them to break very readily the more or
less frail barriers of wood or stone, which were then deemed formidable
fortifications ; and we accordingly find that when they had enough time
they were seldom foiled in attacking towns. Towns had this additional
weakness in Russia, that they were so far asunder and so separated by
forests and deserts that they could not help one another. All the odds,
in fact, were in favour of the invaders ; and, as if this was not enough,
the princes both in Russia and Hungary were, if not in actual conflict,
engaged too often, to use a graphic colloquial phrase, in " paddling their
own canoes." The Grand Prince of Russia was a very feeble person,
Karamzin, who is ever tender to princes, speaks of him as having taken
no measures for the defence of Russia, but as having the virtues of his
century, " he decked the churches, made presents to the monks, and
his memory was blest by the people,"t which is fiercely translated by
another writer, " He was an idiot, . . . was solely occupied in

* Thomas of Spalatro, Wolff, 334- t Op. cit., iv. 3-

62 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

adorning the churches, perpetuating mendicity by alms, and fattening
the monks."

In Hungary, Bela was also marked by feeble qualities, and, as I
showed in my former volume, had exasperated or alienated large numbers
of his people. We need not wonder, therefore, at the completeness of
the Tartar success, and if we find cause of admiration from the military
point of view, it must be as an engineering feat, for the marvellous
rapidity with which the land was won, and the ease with which such a
large force was moved and provisioned, and the admirable strategy by
which the whole campaign was marked ; and in gauging this we must
remember that in Hungary, at least, it is probable the Tartars were
assisted by the Comans as guides and counsellors, for they also had a
grievance against the Hungarians, while it would seem from the narrative
of Roger that both Magyars and Germans did not scruple to join the
ranks of the ruthless invaders, driven as much perhaps by terror as by
sympathy.

With these advantages the success of the Tartars was inevitable, and
when we consider their mission, it is only too easy either to be cynical,
or, if our method be not that of Diogenes, to stand aside and despair
entirely of solving the riddle of history ; but we surely may do better
than this. It is not a mere phrase when we speak of the tide of human
progress, and thus postulate for it an ebb as well as a flow ; and the ebb
has its ends and uses no less than the flow. And there was one result at
least of the Tartar invasion which was lasting and most useful, and in
this it was similar to the terrible invasions of the Danes in the further
west at an earlier day. Through the process of parcelling out the kingly
inheritance a considerable danger was overhanging Europe, every
province was becoming a rival of its neighbours, and all the countries of
the west were in consequence disintegrating. It required the sharp iron
of the Danes to weld together the fragments of England into one land,
to make men feel that they had a common heritage to guard, and
common interests to gather round, or, if we would have a more modern
example, we cannot doubt that all the romance and fervid sentiment
which surrounds the term Fatherland in Germany, which has in that
disjointed mass of Uttle principalities formed a pubhc opinion too strong
for any provincial loyalties to withstand, and which has demanded unity
and strength under one head, has been born of the roll of misfortunes
and troubles which division and mutual strife have entailed on her
children, and have made her an ever easy prey to her unscrupulous
neighbours. So it was with the Russians, only in a much greater degree.
That union, that obedience to authority, that terrible patience and
dogged perseverance, which we recognise as the great Russian virtues,
were born doubtless of the terrible troubles which befell the land in
the Tartar and earlier period. So dislocated an4 broken to pieces was

BATU KHAN. • 63

the whole fabric of the State in the eariy thirteenth century, that nothing
but blood and iron, the two remedies of a strong-fisted statesman, were
capable of welding it together, and these were supplied copiously enough
by the Tartars. The need of union against the common enemy created
Russia, out of a patchwork of small rival States with ignoble ambitions.
This at least was one result of the struggle, others will suggest them-
selves as we proceed.

There is a question, however, which forces itself upon us at this
point which is certainly very curious, and that is a comparison of Batu's
conduct in the campaign and his conduct afterwards ; and this is so
much in unison with what the Mongols did elsewhere that it has no
doubt a common explanation. During the war the very spirit of destruc-
tion seems to have accompanied him; after it was over this poHcy ceased.
Tribute and homage were exacted, and also obedience, but otherwise the
victims were treated with comparative leniency, and seldom disturbed at
home. This was quite in character with the precepts of Jingis, " In war
tigers, in peace doves."" War with the Tartars was no play time. It meant,
as it logically means, the destruction of the enemy and all that belongs to
him. At all events, the running of no risks for the sake of sentiment, the
exacting of the most terrible punishment. Rather than leave a
population behind which might grow into an army, everybody who could
embarrass the communications or the retreat of the army was destroyed ;
rather than keep a great mass of prisoners, who must be fed and clothed,
and who would hamper the movements as well as the commissariat of
the army, their throats were cut ; no walls and houses which could be
converted into fortresses were to be left standing ; and following out the
grim notion that war means a terrible struggle for existence, and not a
sentimental game, they deemed everything fair. With your enemy at
your throat, every treacherous method was deemed honest, every cruel
expedient, justifiable. Resistance brought destruction at once, while
submission only purchased safety when it was not compromising
in any way to the victors. The girls and boys, the artisans and handi-
craftsmen, who could be made into slaves and otherwise employed, were
spared and sent to Mongolia in some numbers, otherwise the decree
upon an enemy's land was that it must be desolated. The issue is no
doubt awful, but it is at least logical, and is certainly contrasted with that
decrepit philanthropy which, when two combatants are determined to
fight it out, supplies plaster and medicine to enable them to continue the
struggle longer. When the war was over, then the necessity for such
menaces ceased also. So long as the victors had plenty of broad lands
for pasture, and an occasional opportunity of replenishing their harems
and houses with wives and trinkets by a plundering raid, they left their
neighbours alone, and eventually became demoralised by contact with
them and by the enervating effects of luxury and ease, while their

64 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

former victims were knitting their strength together until they over-
whelmed them, a process which we shall follow in the succeeding
pages.

Of the various districts of Russia one portion alone now remained
independent of the Tartar arms, and that was the principality of
Novgorod, whose fame is widely spread as a member of the Hanseatic
league, as the mother of modern republics, and as the seat of power of
Alexander Nevski, the son of the Grand Prince Yaroslaf, who ruled
there when Batu's army swept over Southern Russia, and whose good
fortune and happy reign form for a few years a bright relief to the
generally dismal annals of Russia at this epoch.

Let us now turn once more to Batu and his Tartars. Batu and his
army had been recalled from the campaign in Europe by the death of
Ogotai, a death which it was suspected in some quarters had been caused
by poison, but which was much more certainly the result of hard
drinking. The death of Ogotai opened up serious questions of
succession. Among the Mongols a man was not succeeded by his son so
long as he had brothers living. When the brothers were exhausted the
inheritance reverted to the family of the eldest brother. Thus, on the
death of Ogotai, whose last surviving brother, Jagatai, died in 1240-1,* the
rightful heirs to the throne were the sons of Juchi. It is true that
Ogotai, on accepting the throne, had exacted a promise that it should
be continued in his family, but such promises, when made in the face of
the custom prescribed by antiquity, are seldom acquiesced in, and we may
beheve that on his death the sons of Juchi looked forward to a reinstate-
ment of their family. Matters were further complicated by the fact that
Ogotai had made a will in which, like his father, he had displaced his
own son from the heritage, and had named his grandson Shiramun to
succeed him.

His chief widow was Turakina, a strong-minded woman, a Merkit,
and therefore, as I have shown, probably a Turk by origin, and having
sympathy also, as it would seem, with the creed of Islam. She was
jealous of the three sisters Siurkukteni, the widow of Tului, Abika,
and Bekutemish, the widow of Juchi, and she determined to secure
the throne for her son Kuyuk.

t Under these circumstances, it is a curious and striking proof of the
rigid discipline of the Mongols and their very loyal attachment to law,
that no attempt should have been made to fill the throne immediately,
but that a regency should have been constituted until " the grand army ''
could return from the west and the princes could be assembled to elect
their chief in proper form. Of these princes Batu was certainly now the
most influential. Although he had an older brother, Orda, to whom he
acknowledged his subservience, his wonderful success and his command

♦ Abulghwi, jsfi Note, t

BATU KHAN, 65

of the army gave him a predominant position. He was doubtless
informed pretty accurately by his aunt Siurkukteni of what was passing in
Mongolia, and of the intrigues which went on at the regent's court, where
there must have been much fear and jealousy of himself, nor would he
like to trust himself there without a strong escort. Besides these general
considerations there was a further one, that he had a personal feud with
Kuyuk, which only intensified his feelings towards that rival. The origin
of this quarrel is thus described in the Yuan-chao-pi-shi. We are told
that Batu sent an envoy from Kipchak to his suzerain Ogotai with the
following message : —

" By the favour of Heaven and an auspicious fate, oh emperor, my
uncle, the eleven nations have been subdued. When the army had
returned, a banquet was arranged, at which all the Mongol princes were
present. Being the eldest, I drank one or two cups of wine before the
others. Buri and Kuyuk were incensed, left the banquet, and mounted
their horses, at the same time reviling me. Buri said : ' Batu is not
superior to me ; why did he drink before I drank ? He is an old woman
with a beard. By a single kick I could knock him down and crush him.'
Kuyuk said : ' He is an old woman with bow and arrows, I shall order
him to be thrashed with a stick.' Another proposed to fasten a wooden
tail to my body. Such is the language that was used by the princes,
when after the war with the different nations we had assembled to
deliberate on important matters ; and we were obliged to break up
without discussing the affairs. Such is what I have to report, oh
emperor, my uncle."

Ogotai on hearing this news got very angry, and at first refused to see
Kuyuk (who had in the meantime arrived from the west); but when those
around him interceded, he severely rebuked his son, and gave him to
understand that the subjugation of some tribes of Russians attributed to
him afforded no reason for boasting, the whole merit being due to
Subutai. As to Buri's case, Ogotai ordered that Batu should apply to his
father Jagatai for judgment.* This incident, which is to some extent
confirmed by Rashid and Rubruquis, doubtless happened in the interval
between the campaign in Central Russia and the attack on Hungary,
and was perhaps a weighty reason for Kuyuk returning to Mongolia.
We can see how it would embitter the feeling of Batu towards him.

For these ample reasons Batu did not hasten his return to Mongolia,
but loitered in his own proper country. As Juchi had been given the
various towns and camping grounds of the Kankalis, which he had
himself conquered, together with Khuarezm, which was apportioned to
him for conquest, so Batu acquired by the same right the dominion over
the wide steppes of the Comans or Kipchaks. These became his
camping ground, while the various Russian princes became his

* Bretschneider, 94, 95.

66 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

tributaries. His elder brother Orda retained his father's portion on the
sea of Aral and Jaxartes, and to him Batu was feudally subservient, a
subservience more nominal than real doubtless, since the importance of
his government much outweighed that of his brother. Other brothers,
as we shall see presently, were provided for elsewhere.

In order to realise the kind of authority which Batu exercised, we
must think of him, not as the sovereign of a settled community, ruling
over cities and agriculturists with fixed settlements, but as the leader of a
great nomadic host, whose herds required wide prairie lands to feed them,
and who moved about as the exigencies of these herds demanded.
We still have in miniature among the Kalmuks and Kazaks, conditions
which answer to this description. Now the greater part of Russia proper
in the thirteenth century, almost all the country in fact, which had
been occupied and settled by Slavic settlers, and whose kernel is known
to us as Great Russia, was in every way unsuited to the life of a nomadic
race. For the most part covered with wood and morass, the towns were
mere clearances in the forest, and were separated from one another by
wide stretches of forest and bog. Such land as had been reclaimed was
under the plough, and was not grass land. This offered few temptations
to the invaders to settle in, especially as the climate was harsh and
severe. This great kernel of Central Russia, however, was bounded on
the south and south-east by a very different kind of land. There were
huge flat plains covered with juicy grasses. The excellence of the
pasture of these plains is best proved by their being the homes of the
famous breed of Ukraine cattle, the famous fat-tailed sheep, and the
hardy Cossack horses. Here were no interminable forests or quagmires,
no boundaries or limits. These steppes or pampas were in effect a very
paradise for a nomadic race, and have from the earliest recorded history
been the homes of tribes of Scyths and Huns, and Turks and Kalmuks.
Here then the Tartar conquerors settled down. The vast prairies which
stretch from the Carpathians to the Balkash sea are threaded by some
famous rivers, and it was on these rivers that the main encampments of
the Tartars were fixed. Batu himself settled down on the Volga, which
waters probably the finest pasture lands in the world, while other and
subordinate hordes were settled on the Yaik or Ural, the Don, and the
Dnieper. As was the universal habit in these districts, there was an
annual migration up and down the river. In summer the camp was
fixed in the north, and as winter came on there was a gradual movement
further south. Except in winter there was probably little actual halting.
During that season a more permanent camp was formed, which, as
civilisation overtook the Tartars, took the form of a small city. The
camp was gathered round the chief's golden tent or sira ordu, whence
the whole encampment, and from it the whole race took its name of the
Golden Horde. This golden tent was styled a serai or palace, and

BATU KHAN. ' 67

what was once but a magnificent yurt became the nucleus of a con-
siderable town, and is well known as Serai, the capital of the Golden
Horde.

It was lucky indeed for Russia, and probably also for Europe, that the
Tartars thus planted themselves without its borders, and did not,
as in Persia 'and China, actually occupy the land itself and become
incorporated with the natives. As Karamzin says, if they had done so,
Russia might still have been a Mongol possession. In other places
a fertile soil and a genial climate won the nomades eventually to
settled habits. The hard conditions of life in Russia repelled the
invaders, who remained perforce nomades, and they occupied only the
grass steppes where the Comans formerly dwelt, and gradually encroached
upon those border districts still occupied at a much later day, not by
Slaves, but by Finnic races, by Mordvins, Cheremisses, &c. The Oka
was the great frontier river between the Tartars and their protegSsy
the Russians, and many a fight will be recorded in these pages as
having occurred there.

During the absence of Batu in Hungary, the Tartars who were left
behind, probably under his brother Singkur, put to death Mitislaf, the
Prince of Rylsk, in the Ukraine.* On his return [Batu summoned the
Grand Prince Yaroslaf Vsevolodvitch to meet him. The latter accord-
ingly went, and also sent his young son Constantine to the court of
Batu's son Sertak, on the Don.t He himself was well received by
Batu, who confirmed him as suzerain over the other Russian princes,
and gave him authority over Kief, whose prince, Michael, had fled
to Chernigof. The example of Yaroslaf was followed by the petty
princes of Suzdal.t Two years later Yaroslaf was summoned to
attend the Imperial court in person, and to assist at the inaugu-
ration of Ogotai's successor Kuyuk, a journey from which he did
not return. The same inauguration was attended by the Franciscan
friar Carpini, who has left us an admirable picture of the state of the
Mongols at this time. King Bela of Hungary had scarcely returned to
his country again when fresh rumours arose as to another attack of the
Tartars. Pope Gregory died on the 21st of August, 1241. Celestin
only ruled for a few days, and the chair of St. Peter was vacant until the
25th of June, 1243, when Innocent IV. became Pope. Bela wrote to
him to have compassion on his kingdom, and to order a crusade in his
defence. The patriarch of Aquilia was accordingly ordered to stir up
the German princes to go to the aid of the Hungarians ; but Bela's fears
proved groundless. The council of Lyons met two years later, and
among the objects there debated was the necessity of taking some
precautions against the Tartars. Solemn prayers were ordered, towns
were to be fortified, roads to be obstructed ; and finally, it was decided

* Von Hammer, Goldca Horde, 1361 Wolff, 383. t Goldea Horde, ia6. I Karamzin, iv. 37, 38.

68 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

to send missionaries in the name of the pope to try and convert the
barbarians, and to prevent them shedding more Christian blood.* To
this pohcy we owe the work of Carpini, whose narrative has been edited
with capital notes by M. D'Avezac, for the collection of old travels
published by the French Geographical Society, from which I shall quote
freely.

John of Piano Carpini was one of the earliest among the Minorite or
Franciscan friars, and was a companion of St. Francis himself. He was
probably born about 1182. He was doubtless an Italian, and belonged
to the lords of Pian di Carpine, in the district of Perugia.t He is first
met with in 1221, as one of the companions of Csesar of Spire, the
celebrated Franciscan preacher ;t and we find him mentioned with
others as undertaking *' a Revival " series of services in Southern
Germany, and especially in the cities of the Upper Rhine. In 1223 he
was appointed custodian of Saxony,§ the following year he was sent to
Cologne, and in 1228 was made Provincial of Germany, and was
renowned as a most active missionary. In 1230 he was made Provincial
of Spain. There he probably came in contact with the Moorish
Mussulmans, and he would seem to have been also intrusted with a
mission to Tunis by the pope. In 1241 we find him again presiding in
Germany, and employed in arousing a crusade against the Tartars,
who had recently won the battle of Lignitz. He was therefore a
person of great experience and dignity, and as such was no doubt chosen
by Innocent IV. to go and interview the terrible Tartars, and seek to
convert them to Christianity. With him went Stephen of Bohemia and
Benedict of Poland. They started on their dangerous mission on
Sunday, the i6th of April, 1245, from Lyons. They traversed Germany,
where they met and received some assistance from the Cardinal Legate
Hugh de Santocaro,|| and then went on to Wenceslaf, the King of
Bohemia, from whom, as an old friend of his .master's, he asked counsel
as to the best route he should adopt. He advised them to go by way of
Poland and Russia. He gave them letters and paid their expenses
during their transit through his country and as far as that of his nephew
Boleslaf, the Duke of Silesia. At Bre^lau he met his companion
Benedict of Poland. Boleslaf imitated his uncle in paying the expenses
of their route until they reached the territory of Konrad, Duke of Lenczy
or Cracow, where he met Vassilko, Duke of Vladimir of Volhynia, and
brother of Daniel, Duke of Gallicia (who was then at the court of Batu).
From Vassilko he learnt some facts about the Tartars, which showed
him what kind of men they were. He accordingly spent some of the
money which he had given to him as alms in buying some furs of
beaver and other animals. Duke Konrad^ the Duchess of Cracow, the

D'Ohsson, ii. 173. 173. t D'Avezac, 468, 469. ' lid., 470.

§ 14., 473. « ^<i'> 481.

BATU KHAN. ■ 69

bishop of the same city, and some knights gave him others ; and they
further commended him to the good graces of Vassilko, and asked him
to do what he could for him. Carpini now went on to Vassilko's capital,
Vladimir of Volhynia, where, being delayed for some days, he improved
the time by trying to induce the Russian bishops to accept the supremacy
of the pope, but a ready excuse was found in the absence of Daniel,
without whom nothing could be done. Vassilko now sent him on, on his
way to Kief, sending a servant with him to protect him from the attacks
of the Lithuanians, the population there being small, the Russian
inhabitants having been killed or carried off into captivity by the Tartars.
At Kief the friars had an interview with the Mongol commissary or
baskak, who counselled them to leave their horses behind, and to get
Tartar horses, which could find food for themselves by brushing the
snow away with their noses, and not to trust to their western horses,
which must starve in a country where there was no garnered hay or other
provender for cattle. They followed this advice, and left Kief two days
after the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, that is, on the 4th of
February, 1246, and entered the country immediately subject to the
Tartars, the first village they reached being Kanief (Karamzin translates
it " town of the Khan"). There Stephen of Bohemia fell ill, and John of
Carpini and Benedict had to go on alone.* Leaving this they reached
another village, where an Alan named Mikheas ruled, who is described
by Carpini as " full of malice and wickedness." He refused to furnish
them with remounts unless they paid him black mail, which they were
accordingly constrained to do. Leaving him on the 19th of February,
they arrived on the 23rd of the same month at the first encampment of
the Nomades. The Tartars came round them terribly armed, and
demanded who they were and what was their business. " We told them,"
says Carpini, "we were envoys of the Lord Pope, who was Lord and
Father of the Christians, who had been sent to the sovereign and chiefs
of the Tartars to exhort them to become Christians, and to remonstrate
with them for having made such a slaughter in Hungary, Moravia, and
Poland, whose inhabitants had done them no harm." They replied that
in regard to these matters they must depute the friars to their chief
Corenza,t and furnished them with horses for the journey; as usual,
taking black mail in the shape of " demanded gifts."! It would seem
from Benedict's narrative that the number of Tartars in this camp was
8,000. § They then went on to the camp of Corenza, who commanded
the Tartar garrisons on their western frontiers. These were planted on

* Id., ^75.

t Benedict calls him Curoniza. (Op. cit., 775-) Von Hammer makes it a corruption of

Khurremshah, and adds the valuable note from Pallas, that Khoremshah is still the title of a

commander of troops among the Kalmuks, so that the name is probably an official and not A

personal one. (Pallas' Reisen, i. 402. Golden Horde, 139. Note, i. 213. Note 11.)

I D'AvezaCi 739. ^ Id. Note of M. D'Avezac, 483. Note,'3. Appendix, 775.

yo HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the right bank of the Dnieper, and numbered 60,000 men. Before they
had an audience, he sent some of his men to ask in quaint terms how
they meant to conciliate him, i.e., what presents they had brought. They
rephed, " The pope had sent no presents, but they were wiUing to give
him somewhat of what they had." This being accepted, they were taken
to his tent, and told how they must bend the left knee three times before
the threshold, and take care not to put their feet on it, i.e., on the cord
which fastened the tent door. " This," says Carpini, " we were careful
to obey, for a breach of the rule is punished with death." Having
entered, the friars, on bended knees, repeated the exhortations they had
previously made and presented their letters, which none however could
read.

After this they were supplied with three attendants and with horses to
take them on to Batu. They left Corenza's camp on the 26th of
February, and rode from dawn till evening, and often during the night,
changing horses three or four times, traversing the whole land of the
Comani {i.e., the steppes of the Nogays), crossing the Dnieper, on whose
right bank Corenza governed, while its left bank was controlled by a
greater chief named Maucy ; then the Don, on whose banks there
wandered a chief called Kartan, who had married a sister of Batu's ; and
then the Volga, where Batu himself ruled. The two banks of the Yaik
or Ural were controlled by two other chiefs.

During the winter the sea was frozen for some distance from the shore,
and the friars travelled over the ice. Before they arrived at Batu's camp
two of the Tartars were sent on to apprise him of their journey. They
had been five weeks in crossing the steppes of the Comani, on whose
eastern borders Batu's camp was placed. The friars encamped about a
league away. Before having an audience they were made to pass
between two fires, so that any bad intentions or any poison they might
carry with them might be counteracted by the fire. Before entering the
tent they were again enigmatically called upon to give presents by
Eldegai (probably Edegu or Idiku), a kind of chamberlain of Batu's.
They made the same reply they made to Corenza, and, as before,
seem to have given presents when admitted to the Khan's presence.
They asked for interpreters, with whose assistance Carpini says the
letters of the pope were transcribed into the Ruthenian {i.e., Russian),
Saracenic {i.e., Arabic), and Tartar {i.e., Uighur) writing. The
letters were then presented to Batu, who had them carefully read.
The friars were afterwards conducted back to their tent. Carpini
complains that they were not given any food except on the first night
of their arrival, when they had a little flour (millet) in a little
dish.* Batu himself at the audience was seated aloft, on a kind of
throne, with one of his wives. His brothers, sons, and other grandees

* D'Avezac, 745.

BATU KHAN. 71

had seats on a bench on a lower level. The inferior people sat on the
ground. The men on the right, the women on the left. The tent, which
was made of fine linen, belonged formerly to the King of Hungary.
Except his relatives none entered the Khan's tent without permission, it
did not matter how high in rank they were. As was customary with
envoys, the friars were seated on the left; on their return from the Imperial
ordu, however, they had seats given them on the right of the tent. In
the midst was a table with golden and silver cups containing drinks.
Whenever Batu or any of the Tartar princes drank, the musicians
played and sang. When he went abroad on horseback an umbrella or
canopy was held over him, and similarly with the greater princes
and their wives. Batu, Carpini describes as genial and kind to his
people, by whom he was much feared ; but he says that he was
exceedingly savage in war, in which he was very skilful, having had a
long experience.*

Benedict, in his narrative, adds little to the relation of Carpini; he
tells us the friars' presents to Batu consisted of forty beaver skins and
eighty badger skins, and that the gifts as well as the givers had to be
purified by passing between fires. After this the friars had to pay
honour to the car in which the golden statue (or probably the golden
tablet) of the Khakan was contained, which they contented themselves
with honouring by a mere inclination of the head.

At length, on the 8th of April, they set out again for the Great Khan's
court. Before leaving they sent some letters back for the pope, but
these were retained until their return, by Mauci. They were in a very
weak state, having fasted during all Lent, and having eaten only some
millet dissolved in water with a little salt, and drank only melted
snow. So weak were they that they were tied on their horses. This is
explained by M. D'Avezac as a practice much used in the east to prevent
fatigue in rapid riding, and consists in putting the legs in bandages.t
The friars rode hard, changing horses five or seven times a day, except
in crossing the desert, where they were mounted on more enduring
animals. They were eight days in reaching the eastern boundary of
Comania, namely the Yaik, which was probably also the eastern boundary
of Batu's special ulus. They then entered the land of the Kangites, i.e.^
the Kankalis, a terrible waste of salt marshes and desert, which, as well
as Comania, Carpini describes as strewn with human bones, and he tells
us that many of the Russians who accompanied Yaroslaf on his journey
to the Mongol court perished there. Its inhabitants, the Kankalis, who
were nomades, had been conquered and reduced to slavery by the
Tartars. After crossing the wastes of the Kankalis they entered the
land of the Besermans, i.e., the Mussulmans,^ the Turkia of Carpini's
companion Benedict. This land was governed formerly, according to

* Id. 484. t Op. cit., 485. Note. + D'Avezac, op. cit., 501-504.

72 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Carpini, by Alti Soldan, who was destroyed by the Tartars, i.e.^ by Ala ud
din, the Khuarezm Shah, and he tells us many mined castles and towns
were situated there. By it he means undoubtedly the empire of Khuarezm.
They entered this country on the 17th of May, having no doubt
skirted along the northern shores of the Aral sea ; and then reached the
valley of Jaxartes and the town of Yankint,* i.e., the well known Yanghi-
kent or new town on the Jaxartes.t Besides this town, Carpini mentions
also Barkhin, i.e., the Barkhalikent of the Persians, Ornas, which is clearly
Urgenj, and Lemfinc (.^ a corruption of Jend). Carpini tells us the valley of
the Jaxartes was marked by ruined and deserted towns. In the borders of
this empire, the same friar tells us, dwelt Buri or Burin and Kadan. He
calls them brothers, but this was not their relationship, Buri was a grand-
son of Jagatai and Kadan a son of Ogotai's. As Rubruquis tells us that
Talas or Taras was part of Buri's domain, we may locate them in the
valley of the Taras.J North of their land lay a portion of Kara Khitai,
which was subject to Batu's brother Sheiban.§ Having crossed a portion
of this they entered Kara Khitai proper, and were entertained at Omyl
or Imil, a town not long before built by Ogotai, and whose ruins still
remain at Chuguchak, on the Imil. It was apparently the capital of
Ogotai's special ulus.

Leaving Imil they skirted a lake containing islands, near which was a
gorge through which in winter there blew a very strong wind. This is
described by other authors, and the lake has been identified beyond
much doubt with lake Alakul. Carpini, however, seems to confuse
this lake with the lake Balkash, unless both were in fact one at
this time, for he tells us he skirted it for several days, keeping it to
the left, and that it was fed by many streams on whose banks were
woods. This doubtless refers to the great plains east of lake Balkash.
There, he tells us, was the camping ground of Ordu, the eldest brother of
Batu. 11 The travellers now passed the first ordu or camp of the Great
Khan, i.e., one of the encampments of one of his wives, for each wife had
her separate ordu or camp. Having stayed a day there they entered the
country of the Naimans on the 28th of June. Carpini says they were
pagans. Their land was mountainous and cold, and even in the midst
of summer, when he passed, there was a fall of snow. Having traversed
the Naiman country, they at length arrived, after three weeks hard
riding through the country of the Mongols, at the ordu or great camp of
Kuyuk, i.e., at Karakorum. Their escort had pushed them on very
rapidly, so that they would arrive in time for Kuyuk's inauguration.^ I
have extracted some of Carpini's statements about his intercourse with
the Great Khan in my former volume, and will now supplement that
account by other details which I omitted. The friars had not an

* Benedict, in op. cit., ^]^^. t Id,., 513. I D'Avezac, 505. § Vide infra,

I This seems to be a mistake. (Vide infra, ch. iv.) % D'Avezac, 753,

BATU KHAN. 73

immediate audience as Kuyuk had not been elected ; they forwarded
however, the translations of their letters which had been made at Batu's
court. After waiting five or six days, they were summoned to an
audience by Kuyuk's mother, i.e., Turakina, in a vast tent of alba ptcrpurea
(? white damask),* capable of holding 2,000 people, which was surrounded
by a wooden dado, painted with various figures.! This was the tent in
which the ceremony of installation was held. Carpini observes more than
once that Yaroslaf, the Russian prince, and himself and his companion,
the envoys of the pope, were especially honoured among the guests.

Among the other magnificent presents which he enumerates were a
splendid state umbrella or portable tent, covered with jewels ; numerous
camels, housed with Baudekin or rich stuff from Baghdad, and on
them howdahs or raised seats; and many horses and mules protected
by armour, some of leather and some of iron. There was also a splendid
tent of red cloth, which had been made in China. In this was the
Imperial throne, which was made of ivory, marvellously carved and
ornamented with gold, precious stones, and pearls. It was placed on a
circular platform, around which were ranged benches for the grandees,
and below these again others for those of inferior rank. Besides the three
state tents, there was another made of white felt, used by Kuyuk's wives.
Carpini says that this was divided into two parts. In one of which the
Khan dispensed justice, while the other pertained to his mother, i.e., to
the harem. He tells us that among the victims to justice was one of the
Khan's aunts, who was accused of poisoning Ogotai, and who was put to
death, a fact of which we have no other evidence, but which the friar
can hardly have manufactured. About the same time the Grand Prince
Yaroslaf also died. It was supposed he was poisoned, since he sickened
and died after partaking of some food from the hands of Turakina, the
empress mother. She afterwards wrote to his son Alexander to go and
receive investiture of his father's kingdom, but he deemed it prudent to
stay away. After some delay the friars were conducted to the Imperial tent,
but were remitted back to the Khan's mother. The reason for their not
being admitted, Carpini was told, was, that the Khan was preparing an
expedition against the west, and did not wish them to know. The delay
was most unwelcome to the friars, whose money was consumed, while
the greedy Mongols let them have little to eat ; and they would have
perished but for the good offices of a Russian named Cosmas, who was
the Imperial goldsmith. It was he who had made the ivory throne. He
had also carved the Imperial seal, and explained to them its inscription.
It was from him, and from certain other Russians and Hungarians,
who knew Latin and French, and who, having been three years there,
also knew Mongol well, that the friars learnt so much about the internal
economy of the court.

* D'Avezac, 524. Note, 2. t Id..y 754. 755-

74 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

They at length received orders, through Chinkai, to communicate what
they wished to say in writing. After some days they were interrogated
by the chancellor Kadak and his deputies, Chinkai and Bela, through
the medium of a Russian interpreter named Timur, whose name points
him out as of Turkish descent. They were asked if the pope had any
people by him who understood Russian, Saracenic {i.e., Arabic), or
Tartar. They replied, " No, but that whatever was told them should be
faithfully translated and forwarded." This was at length done, and the
Khan's message was duly translated into Latin in the presence of his
officers. This letter has been published by M. D'Avezac,* and runs as
follows : —

" Dei fortitudo, Cuyuc can omnium hominum imperator, magno Papse.
Litteras certissimas atque veras, consilio habito pro pace habenda
nobiscum, tu et cuncti populi christiani qui in occidente consistunt, nobis
per tuum nuncium transmisisti ; qui, sicut ab ipso audivimus et ut in tuis
litteris habebatur, pacem velletis habere nobiscum. Igitur si pacem
desideratis hauere nobiscum, tu papa, imperatores, reges omnes,
cunctique potentes civitatum, et terrarum rectores, ad me pro pace
diffinienda nullo modo venire differatis, et nostram audietis responsionem
pariter et voluntatem. Tuarum continebat series litterarum quod
deberemus baptizari et effici christiani : ad hoc tibi breviter respondemus
quod non intelligimus qualiter hoc facere debeamus. Ad id etiam quod
in tuis Htteris habebatur : quod miraris de occisione hominum et maxime
christianorum ac potissime Hungarorum, Polonorum et Moraviorum ;
tibi breviter respondemus quod etiam hoc non intelligimus. Verumtamen
ne hoc sub silentio transire videamur, taliter tibi duximus respondendum:
quia precepto Dei et Chingiscan non obedierunt, et malum consilium
habentes nuncios nostros occiderunt ; quare Deus eos deleri praecepit ac
manibus nostris traduxit. Ahoquin nisi Deus fecisset, homo homini quid
facere potuisset? Sed vos, habitatores occidentis, Deum adoratis, et
solos vos christianos esse creditis, et ahos contemnitis ; sed quomodo
scitis cui gratiam suam conferre dignetur,? Nos Deum adoramus et in
fortitudine ipsius ab oriente usquo ad occidentem delebimus omnem
terram. Quod si homo fortitudio Dei non esset, homines quid facere
potuissent ? "

The Khan wished to send some of his people back with the friars as
bearers of his letters, but they dissuaded him from doing so for several
reasons which are set out. 1st, they were afraid they would see how
disunited the Christians were ; 2nd, that they would be spies upon their
land ; 3rd, they were afraid that violent hands might be laid on them,
and thus bring destruction upon the Christians, for it was a Mongol
maxim to have no peace with those who killed their envoys, &c. At
length on the day of St. Brice, 2.^., the 1 5th of November, they took their

* Op. cit, 594-

BATU KHAN. . 75

departure, bearing with them the Khan's letter duly sealed. The seal
bore a legend, which was thus translated by the Russian jeweller
Cosmas : — " God in heaven and Kuyuk on earth, by the strength of God^
the seal of the emperor of all men." They went to bid good-bye to the
queen mother Turakina, who gave them and their servant each a cloak
of fox skin and a kaftan of honour.* They set out with the envoys of the
Khaliph, but after fifteen days parted company with them, the latter
trending south wards.t It was winter, and the friars suffered much from
the cold. It was the 9th of May when they once morp reached Batu's
camp. On the 2nd of June they arrived in that of Mauci, and, passing
once more that of Corenza, reached Kief on the 9th of June. They
were received with great honour by the Dukes Daniel and Vassilko,
whom they induced to acknowledge the supremacy of the pope. They
then proceeded onwards through Poland, Bohemia, and Germany,
crossed the Rhine, and went on to Lyons, where they delivered the
Great Khan's letters to Innocent IV., who shortly after made Carpini
Archbishop of Antivari and Metropolitan of Dalmatia.J

From Carpini's narrative we gather that in 1245, when he traversed the
Kipchak, Batu himself, with his main horde, was encamped on the Volga.
His brother-in-law Kartan, otherwise written Karbon and Tyrbon,§ com-
manded on the Don. On the east of the Dnieper was Mauci or Maucy,
who has been conjecturally identified by M. D'Avezac with Mauchi, the
second son of Jagatai ; while on the west of that river was Corenza or
Curoniza. || As we shall see presently, Batu's brothers had appanages in
other districts close at hand. Those of the Western Horde were no doubt
immediately subordinate to himself, while those of the Eastern Horde
were subordinate to Orda. He also seems to have had commissaries in
the various towns where the dependent Russian and other princes held
their Courts. These latter were effectually cowed. In 1244 we find four of
them, namely, Vladimir Constantinovitch of Ughtsh, Boris Vasilkovitch
of Rostof, Gleb Vasilovitch, and Vasili Vsevolodvitch at Batu's court.
They deemed it more prudent to seek the patronage of the Tartars than
to make common cause against them. The next year Constantine, son of
Yaroslaf, with his brother and nephews, Vladimir Constantinovitch, his
nephew Vassilko of Rostof, with his sons Boris and Gleb, and Vsevolod,
with his son Vasili, were there. In 1246 Sviatoslaf, Vsevolodvitch, and
his brother Ivan, with their sons, also went.^

These dependents were treated with considerable rigour, and in some
cases with marked severity, as in the case of Michael, the Prince of Kief
and Chernigof. He had put to death the Mongol envoy who had
summoned the former city when the Tartars first marched westwards.
He had then fled to Hungary, but being received very coldly there, he

* D'Avezac, 596 and 779. t Id., 779- I Id., 598. | Id., 588.

I Vidt ante, 69. H Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 137-

76 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

made his way back to Chernigof. When he arrived the Mongol officers
were engaged in taking a census of the inhabitants for the poll tax. By
them Michael was ordered to repair to the Tartar court. He went
there, accompanied by his grandson Boris of Rostof, and one of his
principal boyards named Feodor.* When summoned before Batu, he
was made to pass between two fires, and was then ordered to prostrate
himself before the tablets of Jingis Khan. He replied that he did not
object to do obeisance to Batu himself or to a living prince, but to adore
images of dead men was repugnant to a Christian.! As he persisted in
his refusal, Batu ordered him to be put to death. Karamzin says he
accordingly took a consecrated wafer from his pocket, which he divided
with Feodor, and sang aloud the Psalms of David. In vain the young
Prince Boris entreated him to comply, and the boyards of Rostof offered
to take the sin on their own shoulders and to perform expiatory penance
for it. " I will not lose my soul for you," said the prince, and throwing
off his mantle, he said, " Take these worldly vanities, I wish to gain
eternal glory." He was then put to death, and his head was cut off by
an apostate from Putivle named Doman. Feodor shared his fate, while
Boris was allowed to return home. The two victims were made saints
by the Russian church4 Carpini, in describing the death of Michael,
merely says he was kicked in the stomach, and his head was then cut
off.§ He tells us another story which shows the brutal way in which the
Tartars treated their dependents. He says that Andrew, Duke of
Cherneglove, i.e., of Chernigof, || was accused before Batu of stealing
Mongol horses and selling them elsewhere. Although the charge was not
proved, he was put to death, upon which his widow and younger brother
went to ask that the Khan would not confiscate the principality. Batu
ordered the young prince to marry the widow, according to the Mongol
custom ; both parties refused from religious scruples, but were violently
compelled to submit.^

This was not, however, the universal treatment received by the vassal
princes, thus we are told that Daniel, Prince of Gallicia, having been
summoned to Batu's court, was admitted to an audience without the
preliminary ceremonies. Batu, addressing him, said, " You have for a
long time refused to come, but have effaced your ill conduct by your
obedience." Daniel diplomatically made obeisance before the Tartar
chief, and saluted him with a draught of kumis. He was congratulated by
Batu for thus conforming to Mongol customs. The latter was so pleased
that he presented him with some wine, as he was not accustomed to
drink kumis ; and after a stay of some days he sent him home. The
patriotic Karamzin says he returned with the shameful titles of servant

* Karamzin, iv. 40, 41. t D'Avezac, 621.

Karamzin, op. cit., iv. 42, 43, § Op. cit., 621, 622. || D'Avezae, op. cit., 527 and 623.

^ Carpini, op. cit., 623, 624.

BATU KHAN.

11

and tributary of the Khan* This prince was with the horde when
Carpini passed through on his travels. By his submission to the Tartars,
Daniel of Gallicia acquired great authority among his neighbours,
and Bela, the Hungarian king, who had been at issue with him, began to
fear that his patrons would, in support of their proteg'e^ make another
raid across the Carpathians ; he accordingly proposed an alliance to him,
and Leon, the son of Daniel, was married to Constance, the daughter of
Bela. Daniel was also on good terms with the Pohsh princes.t He was
a skilful statesman as well as a king, and before this had begun to look
around for some allies on whom to depend in case he should have to
struggle with the Tartars. Byzantium, which was the metropolis of his
faith, was then threatened by the Arabs, Turks, and Crusaders, and
he accordingly turned his eyes further west to Rome, the common centre
of Western Christendom. He sent word to Innocent IV. that he wished
for a reunion of the churches, and that he was ready to march against
the Tartars under the Latin banner. This was in 1245 or 12464
Innocent sent him the title of king, named him his dear son, and
ordered the Archbishop of Prussia to go to GaUicia to ordain some
bishops there, and decreed that all the ceremonies of the Greek rite
which did not conflict with Roman dogma should be preserved.
Daniel replied, " he wanted an army, and that a crown was a useless
ornament so long as the yoke of the barbarians was laid upon
Russia," and he continued for some time to play a diplomatic game.
The pope's legate became irritated and left the country, and it
was only by the intercession of the Polish princes, who were Roman
Catholics, and that of his mother that he submitted and agreed to accept
the crown and royal insignia which the pope had sent him.§ It was on
the 7th of May, 1253, that he was crowned at Drohiczin by the pope's
legate, the abbot Opizo of Messana.|| Thenceforward Daniel styled
himself king, and the pope issued a brief to the people of Bohemia,
Moravia, Poland, and Servia, engaging them to assist the Gallicians
against the Tartars. IT

It was not only Daniel who had this correspondence with Rome. We
find that Innocent also wrote to Alexander Nevski, reminding him
that Yaroslaf, his father, had promised the friar Carpini, when he met
him in Tartary, that he would join the Roman Church, and that he would
have done so but for his death, and bidding him follow his good
example. He ended by praising him greatly for not having acknow-
ledged the authority of Batu, for the pope had not then heard of
Alexander's journey to the horde, to which I shall refer presently.
Having summoned a council of learned men, he replied in curt terms to
the pope's advances, " We follow the true faith of the church, and neither

* Karamzin, iv. 44. t /rf.,'45. 46. 1 1^-, 61. Note, 7. § Id., 62, 63.

II Id. Wolff, 390. 1 Kararazin, iv. 63.

78 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

wish to know nor adopt yours." The patriotic Karamzen dwells with
pleasure over this emphatic answer.*

On the death of the Grand Prince Yaroslaf, Alexander Nevski of Nov-
gorod, who had not as yet acknowledged the Mongol supremacy, was sum-
moned to the court of Batu. He went with his brother Andrew, and was
well received ; but, like their father, they had to travel further and go to
the court of the Grand Khan.t Yaroslaf, says Karamzin, had been
succeeded as Grand Prince (at Vladimir), according to custom, by his
brother Sviatoslaf, but during the absence of Alexander and Andrew, their
younger brother Michael, Prince of Moscow, surnamed the Brave, drove
his uncle Sviatoslaf from the throne. He was himself, however, shortly after
killed in a battle with the Lithuanians. This was in 1248. Alexander
and Andrew were well received by the Grand Khan Kuyuk. The former
was given authority over all Southern Russia, including Kief, while
Andrew was assigned the throne of Vladimir or Suzdal, and their
dispossessed uncle in vain presented his complaints before the horde.
He died two years after the return of the young princes, namely, in 1251,
at Yurief.} Andrew was of a proud, independent temper, and more
given to hunting and amusement than to good government. He seems
to have given umbrage to the Mongols, who sent a prince named Nevrui
(? Nurus) and two officers named Kotiak or Kaitak and Alibuga against
him. On their approach he fled. The Tartars accordingly spread
over the province of Vladimir, and harried the cattle and the people
there. They killed the Voievode of Pereiaslavl, as well as the wife of
the young Yaroslaf, Yaroslavitch, and retired with a rich booty.
Andrew fled to Pskof, and thence to Sweden.§ Meanwhile his brother
Alexander Nevski repaired to the camp of Batu's son Sertak, who, now
that his father was growing old, was taking the lead in affairs. He
succeeded in conciliating Sertak, and obtained the grand principality of
Vladimir, which his brother had so badly governed. He was received in
that town with great rejoicings.il The same year, i.e.^ in 1252, Oleg,
Prince of Riazan, who had for some time been a prisoner at the
Mongol court, returned home again.^ It would seem that the Tartars
heard of the tortuous policy of Daniel of Gallicia, and of his intrigues
with the PoUsh princes, for we find that in 1254 a Mongol army, com-
manded by Nevrui, Kaitak, and Alibuga, laid waste the greater part of
his dominions, as well as the districts of Sendomir and Cracow in
Poland.** This expedition is mentioned in a letter of the pope
(Alexander IV.) to the bishop of Cracow, and written on the 4th of
February, I256.tt

Let us now turn once more to the doings of Batu. We have already
given several reasons why he should have absented himself from the

/rf.,81,82. tw.,80. lu. §/</., 83-85. Iiw.,85.

H Von Hammer, 140. ** Wolff, 392. ttW. Note.

BATU KHAN. 79

Kuriltai where Kuyuk was elected Grand Khan. Nor did he after all attend
it. The family of Juchi was represented there by some of his brothers,
among whom Orda was one, for we find him with Mangu appointed to
try their great uncle Utsuken for treason.* The election was held in
August, 1246, but the reign of Kuyuk was not protracted. He died in
April, 1248. There is some mystery about his death. He was marching
westwards, and Siurkukteni had warned her nephew Batu of his
approach. The latter was himself marching eastwards, and had reached
the Alaktag mountains, as the authorities say, to do homage ; but it
would seem that a struggle was impending between the two, and
Rubruquis, whom we shall quote largely from presently, suggests that
Kuyuk did not come by his death fairly. He reports that Brother
Andrew said he died from having taken a certain kind of medicine which
Batu had caused to be given to him. He himself had heard a different
story, viz., that as Batu was on his way to meet him he sent forward his
brother Stichan (? Sheiban), who went to meet Kuyuk, and should have
presented the cup to him ; a quarrel arose, and in the struggle they killed
each other. He further says that he himself stayed a whole day in the
house of Stichan's widow.t This account seems very probable.

An opportunity had now arrived for deposing the family of Ogotai
from the over-chiefship of the Mongols, and Batu was determined to
avail himself of it. He did not, as he well might, claim the succession
for himself or his brother Orda. He felt, perhaps, that their special
appanages were too far removed from the centre of gravity of the Mongol
world ; but next to being king, the position of kingmaker is surely most
welcome to an ambitious person. He accordingly selected the family of
Tului, related to him both on the father's and mother's side, for special
favour. They had the additional claim of having their special appanages
in Mongolia itself. Batu accordingly fixed upon his cousin Mangu for the
post of Khakan, and to secure his election he summoned a Kuriltai in his
own country of Alaktag. Against this meeting the princes of the family
of Ogotai protested, declaring it to be irregular to hold it anywhere
except in the Mongol country proper ; but they nevertheless sent Timur
Noyan, the governor of Karakorum, to subscribe in their name to what
should be decided.l The result of this meeting was the selection of
Mangu as Grand Khan. It was decided to convoke a second Kuriltai
on the banks of the Onon, where the ceremony of inauguration should
be carried out, and meanwhile Ogul Gaimish, the widow of Kuyuk, was
appointed regent. Batu sent his brothers Bereke and Tuka Timur with
an escort to conduct Mangu to the borders of the Kerulon.§ The family
of Ogotai, and Yissu Mangu, the de facto ruler of the Khanate of Ogotai,
refused to attend this second Kuriltai, declaring that none had a right to
the throne but the family of Ogotai. Batu and Siurkukteni sent many

* AnU, i. 163. + Op. cit., 296. I D'Ohsson, ii. 246. § Id., 251.

8o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

envoys to induce them to do so, and to argue with them that it required
a grown and experienced man to govern such an empire ; but as they
persisted in their refusal, he, after a delay of a year, ordered Bereke to
proceed with the installation.* This Kuriltai was held in February,
125 1, t and Bereke and Tuka Timur received magnificent presents there
for themselves and their brother Batu.|

The ceremony was followed by the trial and punishment of several
persons who had taken part against Mangu. Among these, we are told,
was the famous general, Ilchikadai, who was arrested at Badghiss, in
Khorassan, and handed over to Batu, who had him put to death.§
Buri, the grandson of Jagatai, who seems to have been a close ally of
Kuyuk's, and against whom Batu had an especial grudge, as I have
mentioned, was also handed over to the latter for punishment and put to
death, || as is reported both by Rashid and Rubruquis.^ The latter's
version of the quarrel is that Buri, not having very good and fertile
pastures, one day when drunk addressed his men, saying, " I am of the
stock of Jingis Khan as well as Batu ; why, then, cannot I pasture my
herds on the Volga like he can?" This being reported to Batu, he
ordered Buri's people to take him to him bound. When asked if he had
spoken the words he confessed that he hnd, but that he was drunk at
the time. *'How dared you name me when you were drunk?" said
the exacting Khan, and he had him decapitated.**

It was shortly before this, namely, in 1247, that we read of Batu in a
more tender light. Rusudan, the beautiful Queen of the Georgians and
daughter of Queen Thamar, seems to have won his heart, or at least the
repute of her beauty had reached him, and we find him sending her
envoys and presents, and an invitation to go and see him. As she at
the same time received other presents and another invitation from
Baichu, the Mongol general in Persia, and dare not, probably, trust
herself with either Lothario, she sent envoys in return to each, and sent
in addition her son David as a hostage to Batu. Baichu, irritated at her
refusal to go to him, set up her nephew David, the son of Lacha George,
who was then an exile in Asia Minor, as a rival. Baichu sent for him, and
then sent him on to Kuyuk, who ordered him to be put on the throne.
Vahram, Prince of Cham'khor, in Asia Minor, accordingly conducted
him to Mtskheta, the ancient capital, where he was consecrated. After-
wards, accompanied by the greater part of the Georgian princes, and the
Armenian princes Avak, Chahanshah, and Alpugh, he proceeded to
Tiflis.

When Batu heard of this he sent his ;proiege David, the son of
Rusudan, with an escort to Kuyuk. Meanwhile the pretty queen was

* D'Ohsson, ii. 252. , t'Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 134. Note, 2.

I D'Ohsson, ii. 271. § U., ii. 259. || Id., ii. 267. T Bretschneider, 95,

** Bretschneider, 95, 96.

BATU KHAN. . 8 1

pressed again by both the Mongol leaders to go to them, and, fearing
one as much as the other, she poisoned herself. Kuyuk decided that
Batu's/r^/<?^^ should be subordinate to the other David,* a decision not
likely to make the master of the Golden Horde more amiable.

We have now reached a period when considerable light is thrown on
Mongol affairs by the narrative of the Franciscan friar Rubruquis, which
I partially used in the former volume, and from which I now propose to
abstract some more facts. William Rubruquis has been supposed until
lately to have been a native of Ruysbroeck, in North Brabant, but M.
D'Avezac and Colonel Yule have shown good grounds for making him a
native of Rubrouck, a commune in the canton of Cassel, arrondissement of
Hazebrouck, in the department du Nord, ?>., in the district of French
Flanders.t When Louis the Pious was in Palestine, rumours reached
him that Sertak, the son of Batu, was a Christian. Deeming this a
favourable opportunity for spreading the faith, he commissioned
Rubruquis to go to the Mongol camp with letters from himself to Sertak,
asking permission for him to settle in Tartary and there to preach the
gospel. He set out from Palestine, accompanied by another friar named
Bartholomew, of Cremona. Having embarked at Constantinople, they
crossed the Black Sea and landed at Soldaia, in the Crimea, on the 21st
of May, 1253. There they had an interview with the governor of the
town, who offered them choice of either wheeled cars with bullocks, or
horses to transport their party in. They were counselled, however, by
some merchants to buy carts of their own, such as were used in the
transport of Russian furs. With these they would not have to unpack
their baggage at every post, as they would if they took horses. They
afterwards found, however, that the carts took two months to do a
journey which might have been done on horseback in one month. They
took with them some fruit, muscatel wine, and cakes, which they had
bought at Constantinople, and which they were told would be very
grateful to Sertak. Besides the two friars and their clerk Cosset, there
also went with them a Turkoman convert and a boy named Nicholas,
whom they had redeemed from slavery— five persons in all. They rode
on horseback, while their baggage occupied four carts. They also took
two men with them to take charge of carts and of the horses. Rubruquis
tells us there were forty fortresses between Kherson and Soldaia, of
which almost every one had its distinct dialect. Among others there
were Goths there, who spoke the Teutonic tongue. North of this district
there was a well wooded and watered country, and after that a plain
extending for a distance of five days. It then became very narrow, and
had the sea on either hand, and was traversed by a deep ditch. Our
author's description clearly refers to the isthmus of Perekop. Here, he

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 210.
t Marco Polo, 2nd ed., ii. 536- Ante, vol. i. Introduction, xxiii.

82 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

tells US, the Comans took refuge from the invading Mongols, and were
driven to such straits that they even ate one another. On the borders
of this steppe there were many salt lakes, whence the people of Russia
chiefly drew their supply, paying- a tax to Batu and his son of two pieces
of cotton for each cart load. A similar tax was imposed upon the export
of salt by sea, which was carried on on a considerable scale. Three
days after leaving Soldaia the travellers met with the Tartars, and, as
Rubruquis says, he now seemed to enter upon an entirely new world.*
He tells us how the Tartars surrounded them on horseback, and asked if
they had ever been among them before. They then began to beg for
food, and the travellers gave them some cake. When they offered them
a flask of wine they asked for another, saying men could not walk on
one leg. They then asked them the object of their journey, and whether
they were going of their own free will or at the instance of some one
else. The friars replied, they had heard that Sertak was a Christian,
and that they were the bearers of letters from the king. They then
wished to know what they had in their carts, and whether they had gold,
silver, and precious garments with them. This Rubruquis refused to
disclose. They then conducted him to their captain, named Scatai or
Scatatai (probably Jagatai), who was a relative of Batu's, and to whom
the Emperor of Constantinople had written, asking him to assist them.
They provided them with horses and cattle for this journey, and ceased
not to beg for everything they could see, and when they were refused
called Rubruquis bad names; but they stole nothing.! The friar, whose
notion of giving was somewhat mercenary, says it was no use giving
them anything for they never made any return ; but he contradicts
himself, for he says they gave him milk to drink. On leaving them he
deemed he was escaping from the hands of devils. On the following day
they arrived at the camp of Scatai, which was in process of migration,
the yurts being placed on carts. The procession seemed to Rubruquis
as large as a city. He was astonished at the number of horses and
cattle and the flocks of sheep, and was told that notwithstanding he only
had 500 herdsmen, of whom one-half were on another pasture. Their
boy conductor went on to announce their approach, and presently
messengers came to them to ask what presents they bore. They sent
their master a flask of wine, some cake, and a dish of apples and other
fruit, but he was vexed that they did not offer him any precious cloth.
They approached him with fear and shyness. He was seated on a
cushion holding a lute in his hand, and his wife sat beside him. The
latter, Rubruquis says he beUeves, must have had her nose amputated,
for she seemed to have none, it was so flat, and the place where it ought
to have been, as well as her eyebrows, which looked very ugly, were
coloured with some black ointment. Rubruquis told his message,

* Op. cit., 220. t Id., 238, 239.

BATU KHAN. * 83

which, as he had been warned, he repeated the same terms. He asked
Scatai to accept a small present, since he, as a monk, had neither gold
nor silver to offer, and could only offer him some food as a blessing. He
accepted it and distributed it among his followers. Rubruquis then gave
him the letters of the Emperor of Constantinople, which, being written
in Greek, had to be sent to Soldaia for translation. He was then offered
some cosmas {i.e., kumis). This the priests of the Russians, Alans, and
Greeks who lived there insisted upon their people not drinking, and
deemed one who drank it no longer a Christian; and Rubruquis hints that
to comply with this queer prejudice, which he elsewhere confesses pre-
vented many of the people to whom kumis was almost indispensable,
from being converted, like wearing trousers does in our own day among
the negroes of Africa, he excused himself, saying he had plenty to drink.
Scatai was inquisitive to know what their message for Sertak was, and
what their letters contained. They explained that they went to speak to
him of the word of God ; and as to their letters, as they were sealed, he
could not disclose them, but they only contained a message of good will
and friendship. Rubruquis then explained to his host, through an
interpreter, whose stupidity he enlarges upon, the Christian message he
bore, but Scatai did not answer, and merely moved his head. He tells
us the people of these parts did not use money, nor would they sell their
goods for gold and silver, but only bartered them for pieces of cloth, and
when money was shown to them they rubbed it with their fingers and
smelt it to see if it was copper. Scatai at length sent them on with a
guide and two porters, and also presented them with a goat for food, and
several skins of milk and kumis. The travellers set out northwards, and
after some suffering crossed the well known Scythic dyke, which is
mentioned by Herodotus, and which was then partially occupied by
officers of the Tartars who collected the salt dues. Having given them
some cake, they received in return another goat and several skins of
milk, and were provided with eight oxen. They then entered the steppe
again, and for ten days found no water except in certain stagnant pools
and two rivulets. They then marched eastwards, with nothing to relieve
the dreary steppe but the tombs of the Comans, with the sun oppres-
sively hot, and their servants by no means too civil, and made their way
from one post station to another. At length, a few days before the
festival of Saint Mary Magdalene, they arrived at the river Don. At the
point where they touched it the Tartars had organised a portage, the
boatmen being Russians. They first took over the travellers, and then
their carts, putting one wheel in one boat and the other in another, tying
the boats together, and then rowing them over. Their cattle and horses
were sent back by their guide to the former halting place, and when they
asked for more they were told that in consideration of supplying the ford
with boats the ferrymen were relieved of the duty of furnishing post horses.

84 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The travellers were consequently delayed there for three days. On the
first they were given a borbota (?), on the second some rye bread and a
little flesh, and on the third some stock fish. The river, says Rubruquis,
was as wide as the Seine at Paris, and there was a second ford some
distance further south, which was used in the winter. The streams were
well stocked with fish, but the Tartars only ate those wbich were very
large and could be carved like sheep {i.e., no doubt sturgeons). At length
the ferrymen became more accommodating, and supplied them with
sumpter cattle. They themselves travelled on foot, and reached the
camp of Sertak on the 2nd of August.

His camp was about three days journey from the Volga, and it was of
considerable size. He had six wives, while his eldest son had two or
three more. Each wife had a separate yurt and about two hundred carts
or arabas. The friars were first taken to a man named Coiac {i.e.,
Kuyuk), a Nestorian, who was a kind of chamberlain. By him they
were sent on to another named Jamia* or Jam, whose duty it was
to receive envoys. . In the evening Kuyuk summoned them to his
presence. " He was seated in his glory," says Rubruquis, " and had a
lute played before him, and some people danced." The friars excused
themselves for not taking him any presents on the ground that they were
clerics, and neither gave nor received gold and silver and precious
garments, and their only treasures were their books and the chapel in
which they performed the service. He seems to have been conciliated
by this answer, gave the travellers some milk, and asked them for their
blessing. Rubruquis spoke to him of the emperor and of the King of
France, whom he had heard of from a previous traveller named Baldwin
de Hennonia.t He also met a Dominican, who had gone there from
Cyprus, and told him many things. The friars presented their host with
some muscatel wine and sweet cake, and were summoned the following
day to go and see Sertak, taking with them their books and chapel in
one cart, and bread and wine and fruits in another, many Tartars, both
Christians and Saracens {i.e., Mussulmans), standing around. Rubruquis
was clad in his vestments, with a cushion on his arms, and carried the
Bible given to him by Louis, and the illustrated psalter given to him by
the queen in his hands ; while his companions bore the missal and
cross, and the assistant, dressed in a surphce, carried the thurible. Thus
they approached the entrance to Sertak's tent. The hanging which
generally closed it was raised so that he might see them. The interpreter
and Nestorian, who accompanied them, prostrated themselves, but this
ceremony was not exacted from them. They were warned not to tread
on the threshold in entering or leaving the tent,J and told that they must

* This is probably an official title ; an official with a similar title is mentioned at Mangu's
court. (D'Avezac, 253 and 310.)

t i.e., Hainault. J Vi^e vol. i. 731. Note.

BATU KHAN. 85

chant a blessing. They accordingly entered singing the Salve Regina. At
the entrance to the tent there was the usual sideboard with vessels of kumis
on it. Kuyuk, the chamberlain, took the thurible with the incense from
them, and showed it to his master. The latter and his wife also inspected
the psalter, the Bible, and the cross. He asked if the image upon it
was that of Christ. Rubruquis adds parenthetically that the Nestorians
and Armenians did not put figures on their crosses, and suggests that
they were ashamed of " the Passion." When they had been inspected,
the friars handed Louis's letters and the translations of them into Arabic
and Syriac, which Rubruquis had made at Acre. Having retired, Kuyuk
and some interpreters went with them to translate the letters. These
having been read to Sertak, he replied that before he gave an answer he
must consult with his father Batu. Having left their books and vessels
in charge of Kuyuk, they once more set out on their journey, and on the
third day they reached the Volga. The route they traversed was a
dangerous one, for Rubruquis tells us the Tartars owned a great number
of Russian, Hungarian, and Alan slaves, who were in the habit of
banding themselves twenty or thirty together, and escaping by night and
concealing themselves during the day, supplying themselves with horses
from the Tartar herds. These men were very dangerous to travellers,
whom they were in the habit of attacking. At the Volga they found a
similar ferry to the one they had passed at the Don, in charge of some
Russians and Muhammedans. He tells us Batu lived on the further bank
of the Volga, and from January to August moved northwards with his
people, returning southward in the other six months of the year. The
point where they crossed was the northern limit of this migration, and
therefore probably Ukek, and as Batu had set out southwards, our
travellers sailed down the river to Batu's camp, which Rubruquis
compares to a great city, and to the old camp of the Israelites. He tells
us such a camp was called orda, that word meaning middle, and it
was so named because the chief was there encamped in the midst of his
people, whose tents were strewed all about, except towards the south,
where the entrance was, and which was open. The travellers found
Batu in a large tent, and were bidden not to say anything until he spoke,
and then to speak briefly, and were again warned not to touch the
threshold. They went in barefoot, with their hoods off. Rubruquis says
that Carpini, being a papal nuncio, had changed his habit, so that he
might not be contemned. They stood in the midst of the tent while
they could repeat a miserere amidst a general silence. Batu sat on a
gilded couch, on a platform reached by three steps, and one of his wives
sat beside him, while some of his followers were seated around. At the
entrance was a sideboard with gold and silver vessels on it, ornamented
with precious stones. Rubruquis tells us naively that he looked at Batu
for some time, and that his appearance was like that of John of Bello-

86 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

monte, for his face was covered with red spots. He bade them speak, upon
which they were told to kneel down, and proceeded to urge upon him to
become a Christian, telling him that those who would not believe would
be lost. At this message he smiled derisively, and his companions
jeered. He told him how they had heard that Sertak was a Christian,
and how they in consequence had gone to him as envoys from the
French king, and had been bidden to go to himself Batu. Batu then
asked the name of the Frankish king, and why he was then at the head
of his army, and was told that he had gone to fight against the Saracens.
Batu then gave them some kumis, which was deemed a great honour.
When they returned to their tent they were told that in order that they
might have permission to stay in the country, it was necessary they should
have the Khakan's leave, and that Rubruquis and his interpreter must go
on to Mangu Khan at Karakorum, while his companions returned to Sertak.
They naturally separated with great grief. They were provided with horses
and food, and travelled with Batu down the river, for the space of five
weeks, along the Volga. On the way the travellers suffered a good deal.
They met with two Hungarians and a Coman, who had been baptised,
and wrote out a copy of the Hours of the Virgin and of the Office of the
Dead for them. By them they were supplied with some meat and other
refreshment. The Coman told Rubruquis he had been baptised in
Hungary, and that he had been much questioned by Batu in regard to
the friars, and had told him the rules of their order. At length, on the
feast of the Holy Rood, they were overtaken by a Mongol, who told
them he had been deputed to conduct them to the court of Mangu Khan.
He was a truculent person, and was very frank with them about the
difficulties of the four months' journey there, and of the small scruples
he should have in abandoning the travellers ; he overlooked their
wardrobe, making them leave behind everything but necessaries, and
they were furnished with a furred cloak and trousers, made of sheep's
skin, with the wool still upon it, and boots, also felt socks and fur
hoods; and at length the second day after Holy Rood they set out
over the' terrible Nogay steppes, having the Caspian on the south and
Great Bulgaria on the north. After riding twelve days from the Volga
they reached the Yaik, which Rubruquis tells us flowed from Pascatir, i.e.,
the land of the Bashkirs. This steppe was then inhabited by the
Cangli, /.<?., the Kankalis. They changed horses three and four times
a day, and sometimes travelled two or three days without meeting
anyone. The friar quaintly tells us how he was provided with a strong
horse, being corpulent, and how it behoved them to make no complaints,
since they were lucky even to have horses at all.* He is nevertheless very
querulous, and complains that there was no end to the hunger and thirst,
the cold and weariness which he suffered, for his conductor gave them no

* Op. cit., 276,

BATU KHAN. 87

meat except in the evenings, when they had a shoulder-blade of mutton,
&c., and some broth. In the mornings they had only something to
drink or a little boiled millet. Often they had to eat their meat nearly
raw or half cooked, as they could not find any dried dung with which to
make up their fires, for wood there was none. At first their guide
contemned his charges greatly, but presently they became more respected,
and, we are told, they were conducted by the camps of rich Mongols for
whom the friars were expected to pray ; and Rubruquis regrets that he
had not a good interpreter with him, to take advantage of his oppor-
tunities for furthering his master's work.

Having proceeded eastwards for a considerable time, the travellers
at length on the eve of All Saints, i.e.^ on the 31st of October, turned
more to the south, and passed over certain mountain ridges (probably
the high lands south of Akmolinsk).* Having gone southwards for eight
days, and seen many wild asses on the way, they at length reached a
fertile district bounded by high mountains {i.e., the Alexandrofski range),
and on the eighth day after the feast of All Saints they reached Kenchat
(that is Kenchak, not far from Merke).t There the governor came out to
meet them, with ale (cervisia) and cups. It was the custom for the
people of Mangu to thus treat those who came from Batu, and vice versa.
The people of the country told him it was watered ty a great river,
whose waters were largely diverted by canals and sluices for artificial
irrigation, and that it did not fall into the sea but was lost in the swamps.
This river was doubtless the Chu. Rubruquis found many vines there
and drank of the wine. As he passed this way Rubruquis made inquiries
about the city of Talas and a colony of Germans, who had been settled
there by Buri. The latter had been put to death, as I have already
described, by Batu, while the Germans had been removed by orders of
Mangu to Bolac, a town a month's journey from Talas {i.e.^ Pulad, near
lake Sairam),:}: where they were employed in digging for gold and in
making armour. Rubruquis tells us he passed within three days of this
town in journeying eastwards, and soon after he entered the country
subject immediately to Mangu, namely, the district of Kara Khitai. His
journey onwards I shall consider when we write of the Khanate of
Jagatai in a later volume.

Having spent some time at Mangu's court, and been deputed by him
to carry letters to his master Louis IX., he returned again. His return
journey, he tells us, was made further north and in the summer. When
he had travelled some twenty days he heard that the King of Armenia
had passed by, and soon after met Sertak, who with his family was on
his way to Mangu's court ; and after some diplomatic phrases, he
learnt from Kuyuk, Sertak's dependent, that the books and other
treasures he had left behind were safe. He arrived at Batu's court

* Schuyler, i. 404. t Schuyler, i. 402. I Vol. i. 734. Note.

88 .HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the same day on which he had left it the year before, and met his
companions, who had been well treated by the King of Little Armenia,
whose journey I shall presently describe. He apparently found Batu
encamped in his old quarters on the Volga, and having obtained
permission to return home by land, the sea route being closed in winter,
and being provided with a Uighur guide, he set out by way of Serai,
which Rubruquis tells us had only recently been founded by Batu, on
the east of the Volga, where it divides into three channels, and then by
the town of Sumerkent, on the Lower Volga, and by way of the Eastern
Caucasus into Persia.

The mission of Rubruquis was followed by that of a more important
person, namely, Haithon, the King of Cilicia or Little Armenia. He
had succeeded to the throne on marrying Zabel or Isabel, the only child
of Leo II. He was crowned in 1224, and abdicated in favour of his son
Leo III. in 1269, when he became a monk.* He had sent his brother
Sempad to attend the inauguration of Kuyuk, and, as we are told in the
narrative of his journey, when Mangu Khan mounted the throne, the
great " Basileopator " and general, Batu, who lived with a great multitude
of people on the river Athil {i.e., the Volga), sent an invitation to Haithon
to go and visit him, and also Mangu.t He had previously {i.e., in 1252)
sent a priest named Basil as an envoy to Batu.j Having disguised
himself for fear of the Seljuki Turks, whose sultan at this time was
Alai ud din, son of Kaikobad, and who hated him because of his friendly
intercourse with the Mongols, he at length arrived at Kars, where he met
Baiju Noyan, the Mongol general, and other grandees, who treated
him with honour. He next stopped at a village named Vardenis, at the
foot of mount Arai, in Armenia, whose site is elaborately discussed by
Klaproth.§ There, there was a palace of a prince named Kurth, a
Christian Armenian, whose sons were named Vache and Hassan. He
remained there until they brought him some of his treasures, which
were necessary for presents, and which were sent him by his father
Constantine, who was an old man. When the chief patriarch Constan-
tine heard that Haithon was passing this way, he sent the abbot James,
an eloquent and wise man, who had previously been on an embassy
to the Greek Emperor John, the bishop Stephen, the abbot Mekhitar, of
Skevra, as well as Basil, the priest, who had returned from Batu, Thoros,
a priest, his companion, and Karapet, another priest, to him. He
passed through the country of the Aghuvans {i.e., the Albanians), and by
the defile of Derbend. Thence he went to Batu and his son Sertak, "who
was a Christian." We thus see that the rumour of Sertak's having been
a Christian, which Rubruquis had found to be so vain, had reached other
ears besides those of Louis the Pious. Haithon was received with great

• Klaproth, Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 272. t Id,., 274. \ Id., 212.

% Op. cit., 275. Note, 2.

BATU KHAN, • 89

honour by the two, and was sent on to Mangu by a very long road
beyond the Caspian.

He set out on the 13th of May, and having crossed the Yaik, arrived
at Hor, midway between Batu's and Mangu's camps, which is no doubt
the river Or, giving its name to Orsk. It falls into the Yaik. He
crossed the Irtish, and entered the land of the Naimans, and
arrived at Kara Khitai on the 13th of September. This is probably a
mistake for Karakorum, for Kara Khitai had been left long behind.
The narrative goes on to say that on the festival of the elevation of the
cross he had an audience with Mangu, who was seated in all his glory,
and Haithon offered him presents. He was received with special
honour. He was given a warrant or diploma, with a seal, to guarantee
that neither himself nor his country should be molested, and also given
a letter of enfranchisement for the churches of his kingdom. He left
again on the ist of November, and returned by a different route. I shall
have more to say about him when I treat of Khulagu.

Two years after Mangu's accession, i.e., in 1254, Iz ud din, the joint
sultan of Rum, was summoned to Karakorum. Afraid that his brother
Rokn ud din, who had long been his rival, and to whom he had given a
joint authority with himself, would take advantage of his absence to oust
him from his position, he determined to send his third brother, Alai ud
din Kaikobad, who accordingly set out (taking with him many presents)
by Avay of the Black Sea and the Golden Horde. He was accompanied
by one of the principal Seljuki generals named Seif ud din Tarentai, and
by Shuja ud din, governor of the maritime districts. Iz ud din sent a
letter to Mangu, in which he excused himself for not going just then as
he had to make way against his enemies, the Greeks and Armenians ;
he said that he hoped to be able to go before long, and that he had sent
as his substitute a younger brother who had joint authority with him.*

Soon after this party had set out, the partizans of Rokn ud din, who
wished to circumvent his brother, despatched the chancellor Shems ud
din and the Emir Seif ud din Jalish with a forged letter, purporting to
have been written by Iz ud din to Tarentai, ordering the latter and his
colleague to return to Iconium. They overtook the travellers at the ordu
of Batu, with whom they had an audience, and to whom they explained
that Iz ud din, having discovered that Tarentai had formerly been struck
by lightning (and was therefore an inauspicious person), could not be
presented to Mangu, while Shuja ud din was a doctor, skilled in magic,
and carried with him some drugs with which to poison Mangu. He
had therefore sent the two bearers of the letter to replace them. Batu
ordered the baggage of the two former envoys to be examined, and there
were in fact found among them some drugs and medicinal roots, among
other things scammoni. Batu ordered Shuja ud din to take some of

* D'Ohsson, iii. 95.

90 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

these drugs himself, which he did except the scammoni. Batu was
thereupon convinced that these things were not poisons but drugs. He
decided that all four officers should go on to the ordu. The former two
with their young master, and the latter two with the presents. Alai ud
din, whose mother was a daughter of the beautiful Armenian queen
Rusudan, died on the way, hke so many travellers who had traversed the
terrible route leading to Karakorum, and the officers went on alone.
They pleaded their several master's cause, and Mangu ordered Rum to
be divided between the two brothers.*

Besides his authority over his special ulus, Batu had a joint authority
elsewhere, and notably in the country south of the Oxus, which was not
disposed of by Jingis Khan's will, and which was apparently meant to be
a joint possession shared by the masters of the three great Khanates.
Thus we are told that when Jingis Khan evacuated Persia, Juchi
appointed Chin Timur as his deputy in Khuarezm. When in 1230
Chormagun was ordered by the Khakan Ogotai to attack the Khuarezm
Shah Jelal ud din. Chin Timur was ordered to follow him with the troops
of Khuarezm to subdue Khorassan. He remained there as governor,
and, we are told, had four colleagues ; Kelilat, nominated by the Khakan,
Nussal by Batu, Kul Toga by Jagatai, and Tunga by the widow and son
of Tului.t

On the death of Chin Timur in 1235, Nussal, who was a very old man
and almost a centenarian, took his place as governor of Khorassan4
Chin Timur's chancellor was a Uighur, named Kurguz, who, being a skilled
penman, had been taken into Juchi's service, and had taught his children
writing. When Chin Timur was made governor of Khuarezm, he was
nominated his secretary and eventually his minister. This post he
retained under Nussal. As the latter was practically incapable, there
were two candidates for the post. Kurguz, who was supported by his
countryman Chinkai, who had great influence with Ogotai, and Ongu
Timur, the son of Chin Timur, who was supported by Chinkai's rival
Danishmend Hajib. The quarrel between the two was protracted, and
eventually both repaired to the Imperial court, where, after hearing both
sides, Ogotai decided against Ongu Timur ; " but," he added, " as you
belong to Batu, I will remit the matter to him, and he will punish you."
Chinkai thereupon interceded for him, saying, " Ongu Timur says ' the
Khakan is the lord of Batu. Is it right that a dog hke myself should be
the cause of two sovereigns deliberating over me. The Khakan had
better decide.' " " You speak well," said Ogotai, " for Batu would not
spare his own son in a similar position to yours." The companions of
Ongu Timur were thereupon punished as calumniators, and Kurguz was
given the government of all the country south of the Oxus. §

When Khulagu set out to conquer Persia in 1253, each of the Mongol

* Id., 96-98. t Id., 103, 104. I Id., io8. $ Id., 109-115.

BATU KHAN. 9 1

princes furnished a contingent of troops for the work, due doubtless to
their having common rights in Khorassan, and we are told the con-
tingent sent by Batu was commanded by the prince Alakai,* son of
Sheiban, with Ko'tar Oghul and Kuli.t It is probable that the rights of
the heads of the several minor Khanates in Khorassan, &c., were not
territorial, but that they were entitled to share a portion of the revenue
drawn from thence. This was also the case in China, and we are told
in the Yuan shi, under the year 1236, that the emperor (2>., Ogotai)
granted [to the empress dowager, the princes, and princesses appanages
in China. Among these we are told that Waludo and Batu, ?>., Orda and
Batu, received the department of P'ing Yang in Shansi. Yelu Chutsai,
the famous minister of Ogotai, having presented a report in which the
system of appanages was condemned, " the emperor ordered darughas or
governors to be appointed over the places given as appanages, and that
the princes and others should merely receive the revenues from their
lands.'

Batu Khan died in the year 1255 or I256.§ The name Batu
in Mongol means hard, durable,! He was entitled Sain Khan (2./.,
the "Good Khan"), and Marco Polo and the chronicler of Kazan
make two distinct persons out of the two names.^ Herberstein has a
curious story about his death, which is clearly fabulous. He tells us that
according to the annals "Batu was killed by Vaslaf, king of the
Hungarians (who on his baptism was named Vladislaus, and was enrolled
among the saints), for he had carried off the king's sister, whom he had
accidentally met with during the spoiling of the kingdom, and the king,
moved by love for his sister and by the indignity of the deed, pursued
him ; but when he made his attack upon Batu, his sister took up arms in
cause of the adulterer against her brother, which so enraged the king
that he slew his sister, together with the adulterous Batu." These things
were done in A.M. 6745 (a.d. 1237).** I need not say that Batu did not
die in 1237, and that St. Vladislaf of Hungary did not live until long
before Batu's time, i.e., from a.d. 1076 to 1095.

Fraehn has given three coins, without dates, as having been struck at
Bolghari during the Batu's reign, but I deem it much more probable that
they were struck during the reign of Bereke, v/ho was a Mussulman
and an innovator upon ancient Mongol customs. Among the earlier
Mongols, as is well known, coined money was unknown. I shall refer
again to these coins in the next chapter.

• Bar HebrsBus calls him Bulgai.
t Golden Horde, 146. Note. I Bretschneider, 103. D'Ohsson, ii. 79. Note.

§ Klaproth, Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xli. 274. Note, i. Abulghaii, 180. Note, 6.

II NouY. Journ. Asiat., xii. 274. Note, i. Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 108. Note, 2.

% Yule, ii. 493, 494. ** Op- "t., ii. 5i.

92 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

SERTAK.

For some time before his death Batu took little share in the government
of the Khanate, which was intrusted to Sertak. He had, as we have seen,
immediate command of the Mongols encamped between the Don and
Volga, while his father lived on the Volga. Here, like the Grand Khan,
he encouraged the priests of various religions, and it was probably some
Nestorians who had been at his court who spread the news in the west
that he was a Christian. This was reported by the Muhammedans, and
the Pope sent him a letter in 1254 to congratulate him.* The Armenian
historian Chamchean tells us that he had been brought up by Christian
nurses, that he was baptised, and hved like a Christian. He tells us,
further, that he was permitted to do this by his father, that Christianity
was tolerated, and that he forbade the churches to be taxed. He adds
that it was by his and his father's influence that the Armenian and
Georgian princes under the jurisdiction of the Mongol general Baiju
were well treated.t Rubruquis was quite persuaded that the Christisinity
of Sertak was all a pretence.

Batu, according to Rubruquis, had sixteen wives, each of whom had
her own estabUshment. His chief wife was Borakchin.t She was
probably the mother of his four sons Sertak, Tutukan, Andewan, and
Ulaghji. As he left brothers, it is clear that according to Mongol
laws of succession none of these sons were entitled to the throne, but
rather his eldest surviving brother, who would appear to have been
Bereke. Nevertheless we find Sertak named as his successor. It came
about thus : Mangu Khan convoked a Kuriltai to meet in the spring of
1256, in a place called Orbolguetu, where he entertained the various
princes and others magnificently for two months, and gave them splendid
presents. Apropos to this feast, D'Ohsson tells a story from the
Yuan history, that in 1253 Batu had sent one of his officers named
Tobdja to ask from Mangu a present of 10,000 golden ingots. According
to M. Hyacinthe, no million silver roubles in value, of which he had
need to buy a pearl. The Khakan sent him 1,000, saying, " If we thus
lavishly squander the resources collected by Jingis and Ogotai, how can
we reward the princes ? "§

To this Kuriltai Batu sent his son Sertak, who set out in 1255, and
was met on the way by Haithon. It was while on his way that news
arrived of his father^s death, and we are told that thereupon Mangu
appointed Sertak as his successor, and dismissed him with magnificent
presents. Von Hammer! and D'Ohsson*![ both say he died on his way
home ;** but the Armenian Chamchean, who was probably informed by

♦ D'Ohsson, ii. 336. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 211, 212.

I Golden Horde, 143. D'Ohsson, ii. 337. § Op. cit., ii. 320. Note. |) Op. cit., 142.

H ii. 336. ** See also Frffihn Bull, St. Petersburgh Acad., iv. 233.

SERTAK KHAN.

93

the Armenian Prince of Khachen named Jelal, a resident for some time
at Sertak's court, and who was his companion on his journey, says he
was poisoned by his relatives Park 'hachah] and Parak 'hsar. Bar
Hebrasus also says he was killed on the way. Klaproth has pointed out
that in the names mentioned by the Armenian historian we find Bereke,
the well known fourth, and Berekjar, the ninth son of Juchi.* The
account is very probable, and I have no hesitation in accepting it.

We are told by Rashid that on the death of Sertak, Mangu nominated
Ulaghji (who was his brother, and not his son, as D'Ohsson says,)t to
succeed him, and named his mother Borakchin regent.f This nomina-
tion is doubtful, and so is the statement that he shortly after died. I
beHeve, with Von Hammer, that he was the same Ulaghji who was
appointed his lieutenant in Russia by Bereke, and who thus filled
towards him much the same position that Sertak did towards his own
father Batu. If he was nominated as Khan, it would seem, therefore,
that he immediately gave place to his uncle Bereke, who was the rightful
heir, and whose history we will reserve for the next chapter.

Note I.— Since writing the above chapter, I have met with a passage which
throws some light on a difficult part of the Mongol history of this period. It
has always seemed strange to me that an obscure son of Juchi's like Singkur
should have been chosen to command the armies of his ulus in the interval
between the death of Jingis Khan and the great expedition under Batu in the
west. I have nevertheless followed Wolff § and Von Hammer || in identifying
the Suntay of Abulfaraj with Singkur, a view to some extent confirmed by
Vassaf, who speaks of Suntay as the brother of Batu.^ Let us now examine
the ground more closely. At the great Kuriltai held by Ogotai in 1235, it was
determined to send an army into the countries of the west, and we are told by
Raschid that accordingly Kuktai and Subutai Bahadur were given command
of an army of 30,000 men, and ordered to conquer the country of Kipchak, of
Saksin, and of Bulghar.** This agrees with the Chinese authorities, which
tell us that Ogotai in 1235 withdrew Subutai from China, where he had been
very successful, in order to give him another command.tt Abulfaraj also tells
us, in his Syriac chronicle, that when Ogotai sent an army of 30,000 cavalry
under Churmaghun Noyan into Khorassan, he ordered a similar army to
march against Kipchak and the country of the Bulgars, under the command of
Sunati Agonista. In the Arabic chronicle of the same author he is called
Sontay or Sitay Behadur. This conversion of Subutai into Suntai occurs also
in some places in the narrative of Rashid, and is due to the confusion of
diacritic points in the script. In the Armenian rescension of Abulfaraj,
in which there is not a similar difficulty, the name is written Sapada

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 290. Note. + Golden Horde, op. cit., 143. J Id.

5 Op. cit., 124 and 266. [| Golden Horde, 98, 99. % Golden Horde, op. cit., 98. Note, 7*

** St. Martin, Mcmoires sur TArmenie, «. Note, 4. tt D'Ohsson, ii. 78, 79-

94 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Bahadur. Agonista is derived from a well known Greek word signifying
athlete or hero, and is a mere translation of Behadur.* This makes it pretty
clear that Suntay is a corruption of Subutai, and that it was that renowned
general, and not Singkur, who commanded the Tartars in their attack on
Bolghari. The great expedition was despatched in 1235. The very next year
the Dominican friar Julian was travelling, as I have said, on the Volga. His
journey was an interesting one, and we may add a few more facts about it.
There was a tradition among the Hungarians that their nation had come from
the east, but they did not know whence. In 1230 they sent four brothers to
explore, but after three years' fruitless search, they returned without finding the
desired cradleland of their race. One of them named Otto, a merchant,
reported, however, the existence of a nation in the east which spoke the
Hungarian tongue, but he died shortly after. Bela IV., the Hungarian king,
being interested in this question, despatched in 1234 four Dominican friars, of
whom Julian was one, to explore. They traversed Hungary and Bulgaria, and
at length reached Constantinople, where John of Brienne was then reigning.
Thence they navigated the Euxine, and in three days reached the town of
Matrika (near the modern Fanagoria), whence they passed through Zichia and
Alania, ^^., Circassia and the country of the Ossetes, of whose inhabitants JuHan
gives some account. There they could find no one to accompany them through
ear of the Tartars, who were not far off. As they ran short of provisions,
the friars determined that two of their number should be sold as slaves to
enable the other two to continue their journey. But as they could not find a
merchant, and did not understand the arts of ploughing and grinding corn, two
of them determined to return, while the other two, Bernhard and Julian,
persevered, and after a stay of six months, during which they suffered great
hunger, living on a little millet, which they obtained in barter for some spoons
and other objects which one of them carved out of wood, they at length
found some companions, with whom they travelled for seven and thirty days
through deserts, having only twenty-four cakes, baked in the ashes, to eat, and
in constant dread of being killed by their companions, who suspected they had
gold with them. Bernhard fell ill on the way, and wished Julian to leave him,
but he succeeded with great trouble in conveying him onwards until, on the
twenty-seventh day, they reached the land of the Saracens {i.e., the Muham-
medans). The people who lived there Julian calls Veda. I believe them to
be the Berdas or Merdas of other authors, who, we are told, were Mussul-
mans. The travellers reached the town of Bunda. (?) There they found no
shelter, and had to camp out in the fields in the rain and cold, but Julian and
his companion received some alms from the prince and people, who were
favourable to the Christians. Thence they went on to another town, where
Bernhard died in the house of a hospitable Saracen, and Julian, in order to
prosecute his journey further, became the servant of a Saracen priest and his
wife, with whom he went on to Great Bulgaria, In a large city there, which
possessed 50,000 warriors, by which no doubt Bolghari is meant, he learnt from
a woman, whose husband had been there, that he was only two days' journey

* St. Martin, loc cit.

SERTAK KHAN.

95

from Hungary {i.e., Great Hungary), the place he was]^ searching for.
Following her instructions, he arrived in fact there. When the people learnt
he was a Hungarian they entertained him in their houses, inquired about the
king and people of their Christian brothers. He tells us they conversed freely,
he understanding them and they him. They were heathens, and had no gods,
and lived like wild beasts; they did not practice agriculture, ate horse and
wolf flesh, drank milk, wine, and blood; had abundance of horses and
weapons, and were very warlike. They knew the Hungarians had migrated
from their country, but did not know whither they had gone. He doubtless
refers to the Bashkirs. The Tartars were near neighbours of theirs. They
had not been subjected by but had in fact beaten them, and had afterwards in
alliance with them subjected fifteen kingdoms. He met some Tartars there,
and also one of their envoys who could speak Hungarian, Russian, Cumanian,
German, Saracenic {i.e., Arabic), and Tartar. He said that the chief of the
Tartars was five days' journey away, and was about to march against
Germany, but was waiting for the progress of another army which was going
to Persia. This was in 1236, and therefore the very year after the great
Kuriltai, and the army referred to is doubtless that commanded by Subutai.
On hearing the news of the march of the Tartars, Julian returned home by a
nearer route through the country of the Mordvins.* In 1237, news having
arrived in Hungary of the advance of the Tartar king, Bela sent Julian on
another journey to explore and report. He again traversed Russia, and found
that the Tartars had conquered Great Hungary and Great Bulgaria, and he
gives a confused account of their further doings which is of small value.t

Note2. — In his account of the various tribes of South-eastern Russia,Rubruquis
speaks of the Moxel or Mokshas, a section of the Mordvins, and tells us their
lord or sovereign, " with a great number of his people, were killed in Alemannia"
(i.^.jGermany), " for," he says," the Tartars led them to the frontiers of Alemannia,
where they offered to submit themselves to the Alemanniens, hoping in this
way to free themselves from the Tartar yoke."t He implies that the Tartars
destroyed them on account of this intrigue. This notice, which had escaped
me, shows how the army of the invaders grew, snowball fashion, wherever
it went through the incorporation of conquered tribes.

^ote 3.— My deceased friend, the late antiquary Thomas Wright, supplied M.
D'Avezac with a copy of some verses taken from a poem written by John de
Garlande, apparently soon after the Tartar invasion, and entitled, " De
Triumphis Ecclesise," from which I quote as follows :—

" The seventh book opens with an account of the inroads of the Tartars ;
he describes them as cannibals :

" Gens est sasva nimis, Sathanasque domestica, pestis
Ecclesise, fidei idissona, c^dis amans.
Limpha. merum, panis, caro, piscis, friget, obundat,

Incandit, nutrit; vivit in sede probra.
Excedit gens ista feras quod mundus abhorret ;

Cur ? quia naturam calcat iniqua suam.
Quseris forte modum calcandi ; sanguinis haustu
Emadet hamani, se furor iste bibit.

Wolff, 263-267. t /<i., 269-274. I Op. cit., 251, 252.

96 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Esuriens hominem^corrodit homo ; leo nullus

Came leonina viscera laxa replet ;
Non lupus ungue lupum lacerat ; gens ista colurnis

In vepribus vertit membra veruta foco.
Famam.Virgilius monstrum depingit habere.

Sub plumis oculos instabilesque gradus.
Illi mille dedit Hnguas figmenta loquentes;

Falsis permutat sic modo vera loquax
Fingit fama tamen qujedam conformia vero.

Nam mihi pro certo presbiter ista tulit :
Presbiteros terrae prosternunt, sic crucifigunt

Illos prostatos, excruciantque diu.
Matres occidunt, puerosque per ubera matrum

Flentes, clamantes, ire, perire sinunt.
Hac Feritate refert has fama bibisse medullas

Humanas : feritas quid scelus ista timet ?

* « * ♦ •

Pingaes et teneros et moUes et generosos

Et pulcros horum rex coquit igne sibi.
Plebs vorat annosos, nigros, duros, scabiosos,

Hirsutos, tremulos; hoc non abhorret opus.
Quod sequitur vere faciunt : muliebria truncant

Guttura, post veneri corpoa juncta sua;.
» * * * *

Hi quia sunt diri nequeunt pietate poliri.

His periere Tyri Pergameique viri.
Cor gustando ferum, foetus truncant mulierum,

Sanctum (me miserum!) non venerantur Herum.

* m m * *

Istis Cnmani servire mali didecerunt,

Qui vacui, vani, falsa dolosque ferunt.
Hi sunt christicolee falsi, sine lege, severi.

H4c de fraude scholas proposuere quaeri.

" He goes on to speak of the Jews as holding secret correspondence with
them, and beheving their prince to be the expected Messiah :
" Consimiles sacra dant judasis sordida Divo

Viscera ponendo, mundificant male se.
Se mal6 mundificant ponendo viscera Divo

Sordida judseis dant sacra consimiles
Dljm circumcisd pro pelle merentur Apelle

Nomen, cognomen hoc valet esse suum.
Ha; gentes miserae mortem mis^re per orbem :

Destructas leges pec mala cuncta leges.
Quid referam plausus quos perfida dat synagoga ?

Nuntia quid promam, perfidiamque suam ?
Munera praetereo quae mittit clam vel aperte.

Dum sibi Messyam credit habere suum,
Spes sua messe caret : expectans tempore tanto

Messyam, sterilem spem miseranda fovet.

"After some religious reflections, this author again describes the devastations
they committed wherever they came :

" Prostratis monachis aras et templa cruentant
Hisque boves statuunt, carnipedesque ligant.
Impedit Ecclesiam fera dum discordia legum,
Tartareos acuit liber ad arma furor.

SERTAK KHAN. 97

In claustris sacrisque locis concumbere fceda

Gens audens; vollit sancta sepulcra solo.
Sanctorum capsas confringit, et eruit ossa ;

Et gemmis, auro, fcemia mcecha nitet,
Mundis Ecclesise pannis immunda perornat

Membra, sacros calices trectat, et inde bibit.
Catholici fulsi comitantur eos, vacuusque

Vespilio, cupidus fur, homicida, rapax."*

W^/^4.— Abulghazit tells us that Juchi's capital was called Kok orda, /.<»., the
Blue Horde. This was probably the later Seraichuk. Klaproth tells us that,
according to a short history of Jingis Khan and his family, written in Jagatai
Turk, the camp of Batu was at a place called Utch kandak.:|: I cannot throw
any light on this name, but it would certainly seem from the narrative
of the friar Julian that before the great campaign in Europe, and before
the conquest of the valley of the Volga, the ulus of Juchi had a fixed
camping place, for he tells us in his second letter, describing his journey in
1237, that ihe Tartars were then ruled over by Chayn, i.e., by Sain Khan or
Batu, who lived in the great city of Hornah.§ It may be that by this the
Ornas of other writers is meant, i.e.^ Urgenj, which was a city belonging until
the time of the Great Timur to the ulus of Juchi. M. Wolff deems the word
Hornah a corruption of Ordu.|| It will be well before passing on to say a few
words about some of the towns founded by the Mongols on the Volga, and we
may naturally begin with their famous capital Serai. It is first mentioned by
Rubruquis, who tells us it was founded shortly before his passage through the
country on his return home. The name is Turkish, and means a palace. It
is a mere translation of the Mongol term Ordu. It occurs frequently
elsewhere, thus the royal residence of the house of Jagatai was called Sali
Serai.^ We also read of Arhenkserai and Zenjir Serai. Ak Serai was the name
given to his palace at Kesh by Timur.** Baghi or Bakshi Serai, i.e., the
Garden Palace, was the name of the capital of Krim. We are all familiar
with the derivatives Caravanserai and Seraglio. The town therefore took its
name from the Imperial residence around which it clustered. We must now
consider its situation. This is by no means a simple matter, and the Russian
authorities are at issue with two of the most ingenious and learned foreign
authors who have treated of the question, namely J. H. Miiller and Colonel Yule.
The latter has argued that there were two Serais on the Volga, between which
we must carefully distinguish ; the one founded by Batu and the other by
Janibeg Khan, each one answering in position to a famous cluster of ruins still
existing, and he identifies the Serai of Batu with the ruins situated at
Selitrennoi-Gorodok, or Saltpetre town, near Astrakhan. With this view I
most cordially concur. In the first place, I may mention that Frjehn, the
distinguished numismatist, has shown very conclusively to my mind that the
Tartars of the Golden Horde had three mint places in whose names Serai
occurs. Serai proper, Serai el Jedid or New Serai, and Seraichuk or Little

* D'Avezac, op. cit., 528-530. Note.

t Op. cit.,180. I Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 274. Note, i. § Wolff, 273.

II U, f Sherifuddin, Hist, de Timur, i, 2 and 21.

** Muller, Ugrische Volkstamm, ii. 561.

98 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Serai. Seraichuk is a place whose site is well ascertained, and which was
situated on the Yaik or Ural. Frashn, in a special memoir, has argued very
conclusively that Serai el Jedid is quite a different place from Seraichuk, and
as both Serai and Serai el Jedid occur as contemporaneous mint places, it is
clear that these two were also different towns. This view agrees exactly with
that urged by Colonel Yule, that we must distinguish the Serai of Batu from
the later Serai of Janibeg Khan, which was doubtless the New Serai of the
coins. The statements of Pegolotti, that Serai was a day's journey from
Astrakhan, of Abulfeda, that it was two days' journey from the outfall of the
Volga, of the Persian geographer Sadik, that it was four days' journey from
Derbend, of the chronicler Nikon, that it was two days' journey from
Astrakhan by water,* and of Ibn Batuta, that he reached Serai in three
days from the same city, are only consistent with the Serai mentioned by these
authors having been situated near Astrakhan and not near Tzaritzin, and the
Serai they mention is doubtless the old Serai. On the other hand, the ruins
near Tzaritzin are actually called to this day the Serai of Janibeg Khan by the
neighbouring Tartars.t Fra Mauro, as Professor Bruun and Colonel Yule
have pointed out, puts two cities of Serai on the Akhtuba, calling the northern
one, i.e., the Serai of Janibeg Khan, '• Great Serai," while Pegolotti, having
carried his merchant from Tana (Azof) to Gittarchan (Astrakhan), takes him
one day by river to Sara, and from Sara to Saracanco, ?>., Sara Kunk or Great
Serai eight days more.J The Saracanco of Pegolotti, I have no doubt, is the
New Serai of the coins, whose extensive ruins near Tzaref have been so
diligently explored by M. Grigorief. I shall have more to say about it in a
future chapter. We will now confine ourselves to the Southern Serai, Its
foundation by Batu was probably rather nominal than real, that is, he fixed its
site, which was probably the place where his winter quarters were generally
planted, and he probably built a number of wooden buildings, forming his more
permanent palace or ordu. It was probably Bereke who became a Mussulman,
and who is credited by one author (Jenabi)§ with the foundation of the
city, who built its first imposing building in the shape of a mosque, while it
was reserved for Uzbeg Khan, as we shall presently see, with the aid of his
Egyptian workmen, to make the city one of the most famous and beautiful
then existing. The remains at Selitrennoi-Gorodok are still very extensive, and
I will abstract the account of them by Pallas. He sa>s : —

" The abandoned saltpetre work called Selitrennoi-Gorodok is situated in the
midst of a hilly tract, extending to upwards of ten versts in length ; here, along
the banks of the Akhtuba, on a place from one to two versts broad, we
discovered in every direction heaps of rubbish, traces of buildings, and tombs
of brickwork, being the ruins of an extensive city of the Nogays. There had
been a small fort erected on a hill, which unquestionably contained the
principal and most elegant buildings of the place, and was surrounded by a
strong wall ; but at present the fort, which was oiginally built for the pro-
tection of the saltpetre work, is in a ruinous state, together with its dependent
buildings. We particularly remarked the remains of two buildings, the most

*Muller, op. cit., 569, t Muller, op. cit., ii. 571. \ Yule's Marco Polo, i. 6, ii. 537,

§ Golden Horde, 150. Note, 5.

SERTAK KHAN^ 99

magnificent of which has lately been cleared of its rubbish, with a view to
discover treasures; the other, if we may judge from the existing ruins, appears
to have been a dwelling-house with many apartments. The former of these
buildings, as is evident from its foundation and sepulchral walls, has been the
family mausoleum of a Khan, with a superstructure which probably was a house
of prayer.

" This venerable place, as we were informed, has been plundered of many

treasures, and whole coffins covered with silver. The fabric forms an oblong

square, in a direction from N.N.E. to S.S.W., about twelve fathoms long, and

eight fathoms and a half broad, when measured on its southern point. We

could distinctly trace two equal divisions, on the northern side, beneath which

were the sepulchral vaults, as is obvious from the tombs that have fallen in ;

while the southern division, especially on its portico, has been ornamented

with Gothic pilasters, columns, and arches, the fragments of which are still

distinguishable. Its foundation walls are nearly two .fathoms high, and

upwards of two ells thick. In the whole brickwork, which consists of beautiful

broad squares, disposed in the most regular manner, there is a degree of taste

and elegance of which I have nowhere seen an instance among the ruins of the

Tartars. The outside of the walls is not only embellished in all the interstices

between the bricks with glazed earthen ornaments, of green, yellow, white,

and blue colour, in triangular and other figures, but we also observed on the

principal front of the building, the remains of Gothic stucco-work, which was

decorated with glazed figures, such as artificial flowers, shellwork, nay, whole

tablets in the Mosaic style.

" But the tooth of time, and the depredations of the vulgar, have many years
since converted these remarkable vestiges of antiquity into heaps of ruins.
Formerly whole cargoes of bricks were carried from these buildings to
Astrakhan ; though, on account of the excellent cement, the workmen who
were employed in demolishing entire walls, were obliged to destroy at least
two-thirds of the bricks. Tradition relates many extraordinary stories of the
coins and precious relics which were formerly dug up and collected here in
great quantities, but I doubt whether many of those antique treasures have
been rescued from the plundering barbarians, and judiciously consigned to the
antiquarian; or whether any of them have been transmitted to the Cabinet of
Russian Antiquaries, which belongs to the Imperial Academy of Sciences."*

The neighbourhood of these ruins is surrounded with a number of kurgans
or mounds, proving that the site was that of a large city. F. H. Miiller tells
us that not long before he wrote a number of these were opened by
Kybuschkin, the director of education in the government of Astrakhan, at the
cost of the State. In more than twenty places walls built of dressed stone and
cemented with lime were found, as well as floors made of similar stones. In
the graves were found silver and copper coins, petrified shells, pieces of marble,
bones, and urns with ashes in them, as well as metal utensils.t Having described
the site of the capital, let us now examine one or two other Mongol settle-
ments on the Volga. Marco Polo, in describins: the travels of his father and

* Pallas' Travels, i. 164-166. t Op. cit., ii. 576.

lOO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

uncle, tells us that on leaving Bolgara they proceeded to a city called Ucaca.
which was at the extremity of the kingdom of the lord of the Ponent.*
Abulfeda tells us that almost midway between Serai and Bular (i.e., Bolghari),
on the western bank of the Itil, and fifteen days' journey from each, was the
little town of Ukek, as far as which, and no farther, extended the horde of the
Tartars in the land of Bereke.t Ibn Batuta, in his journey from Astrakhan
tells us he went to Ukek, which was ten days' journey from Serai, and one
day's journey from the mountains of the Russians.^ These statements as to
Ukek being a frontier town of Kipchak are illustrated by an extract from
Antoniotto Usodimare, who wrote about the middle of the fifteenth century, and
who tells us the empire of Uzbeg commenced in the province of Borgaria {i.e.,
Bulgaria), that is to say, with the town Vecina and ended with the town
Cerganchi {i.e., Urgenj).§ According to Schmidt, Ukek in Mongol means a
dam or fence of hurdles, whence and from the fact of its not being named
before the Mongol invasion, it is probable that it was of Mongol foundation, 1|
Colonel Yule says it was the site of a Franciscan convent in the fourteenth
century, and it was finally destroyed by Timur.^ It occurs as a mint place on
coins of Tuktagha, dated 1306.** In Russian documents it is written Uwek
or Uwesh, a corruption compared by Fraehn with that of Azak into Azof. This
form occurs early, for in Wadding's fourteenth century catalogue of convents
it occurs as Uguech. Anthony Jenkinson, in Hackluyt, gives an observation
of its latitude as Oweke, 51.40, and Christopher Burroughs, in the same
collection, gives it as Oueak, 51.30.tt There can be little doubt that its site
is marked by the village of Uwek, six miles south of Saratof, on the right bank
of the Volga. Burroughs, who travelled this way in 1579, tells us there
formerly stood there a fine stone castle, called Oueak, around which a town
formerly gathered, which, according to the report of the Russians, was
swallowed up by the earth by the justice of God for the wickedness of its
inhabitants. Ruins of the castle and handsome tombs, evidently constructed
for people of high rank, still survived ; on one of which, he says, could still be
seen the figure of a man on horseback, who held a bow in his hand and had a
quiver by his side. On another was an escutcheon with characters engraved
on it which he took to be Armenian. On another stone was another kind of
writing.|J Armenian gravestones, as is well known, have been found at the
neighbouring town of Bolghari. These ruins have all disappeared under the
pressure of Russian Philistinism, and amid the sighs of Fraehn. Falk, on his
journey through here in 1769, found only a grave and wall enclosing a large
square space. He tells us that Tartar coins were found there by the saltpetre
miners, of which he obtained some.§§ Erdmann visited the site of the town
in 181 5, and tells us that there were several mounds round it in which ruins
and Tartar coins were found. |||| Levchine, who also passed this way in 1769,
found in several places holes where the inhabitants quarried ancient bricks,
and also potsherds of a beautiful fabrique. Besides coins there were also found

* Yule's Marco Polo, i. 5. t Frahn, Mems. St. Petersburg Acad., 6th ser., iii. 78.

: Id. § Id., 81. II Id., 74. H Marco Polo, i. 9. ** Frsehn, op. cit., 77.

+t Yule, loc. cit. II Fraehn, op. cit., 83. §§ Falk, Beitrage, &c., i. 114.

III! Erdmann, Beitrage, &c., ii., part i, 71.

\

SERTAK KHAN. lOl

rings, earrings, copper vessels, and even gold jewels, which were disposed of
to the goldsmiths at Saratof. Fraehn has described a small find of seven
coins, including three of Uzbeg Khan, one of Janibeg, and another of
Berdibeg's, a copper seal, and a small silver figure, which were found
there * Abulghazi says that the Itil (i.e., the Volga) flows past Ukek,
then reaches the village of Jemer, and thence passes on to Serai, t
Von Hammer adds that Freehn, in the margin of the MS., has written that
Jemer stands for Belshemen.l Jemer is undoubtedly the place called
Sumerkent by Rubruquis, kent being the well known Iranian termination
to topographical names, which has been illustrated by M. Lerch, of St.
Petersburgh, and occurs so frequently in Transoxiana and Turkestan. §
Rubruquis tells us how, on his return from his journey to the Great Khan, he
on his way towards Serai struck the Itil where it divided into three
branches ; one of these again divided into four lesser streams, so that he
crossed seven rivers altogether. On the middle branch, he tells us, was the
town of Sumerkent. It was unwalled, but when the river was inundated
it was surrounded with water. He tells us the Tartars attacked it for eight
years before they captured it, and that it was inhabited by Alans and
Saracens (/.<?., Muhammedans). Rubruquis visited the town, where he met a
German and his wife, with whom his man Goset had spent the winter, having
been sent there by Sertak that he might ease his court. Rubruquis tells us
that Batu and Sertak, one on one side the river and the other on the other,
were wont to descend as far as this place in their winter migration, but no
further, crossing over the frozen surface of the Volga when they had occasion,
and taking shelter among the woods on its banks in severe weather. He tells
us a few sentences further on that Serai was situated on the eastern bank of
the river, and implies that it was close to Sumerkent. || This description,
which is that of a traveller who actually visited the town, is not quite con-
sistent with the paragraph quoted from Abulfeda, and the latter seems to
be a mistake. The Sumerkent of Rubruquis v/as situated at the lower
extremity of the Volga, and within the Delta of that river. That it was
further south than Serai, Batu's capital, is clear from his statement that it marked
most the southern part of Batu's migration. The description is consistent
only with the neighbourhood of Astrakhan, or rather with the ruins of old
Astrakhan, and I have no doubt myself that Sumerkent represents the town
which appears for the first time in the fourteenth century under the new name
of Haji Terkhan, and which will occupy our attention on a future occasion.
The facts mentioned by Rubruquis about its capture by the Tartars and its
being inhabited by Alans and Mussulmans, and also its situation in the
network of the Lower Volga, shows that it is the same town referred to by
Rashid ud din and the Chinese authors, ruled over by Bachiman, the details of
whose capture I gave in the former volume.*[ As I have said, it was virtually
displaced by Astrakhan, which, together with another famous town on the
Volga, namely, Bolghari, will occupy us in a future chapter.

* Op. cit., 85-87. t Golden Horde, g. Note 4. Mems. St. Peters. Acad., 6th ser., iii. 78.

I Loc. cit. § See also Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 343., Note 5.

I] Op. cit., 379, 380. H Ante, vol. i. 138.

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

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CHAPTER III.

BEREKE AND THE DESCENDANTS OF BATU.

BEREKE KHAN.

BATU had three brothers of the whole blood, namely, Bereke,
Berkejar, and Bure, also called Muhammed. These three
brothers all had the same mother, namely, Sultan Khatun,*
and all belonged therefore to the same ulus or grand encampment.
Bereke was present, with several of his brothers, at the inauguration of
Ogotai as Grand Khan in 1229.!

It was a Mongol custom to intrust the more skilful princes with the
command of separate armies, and afterwards to make over to them as
their special inheritance the districts they succeeded in conquering.
When Batu set out on his great expedition westwards, we are told
that Bereke went into the country north of the Caucasus to conquer
the Kipchaks there. The subjugation of the district north of the
Caucasus, with its heterogeneous tribes and difficult topography, occupied
the Mongols for a long time, and was not in fact ever definitely com-
pleted. A few words may fitly be said here about it. It would seem
that after Mangu had captured the city of Bachiman (z>., Sumer-
kent), he rejoined Batu and took part in the capture of Riazan.
After the campaign in Northern Russia, in 1237 and 1238, three
armies were despatched to conquer the tribes of the Northern
Caucasus. This was in the autumn of 1238. Mangu and Kadan
marched against the Circassians, whose chief, Tukan or Mukan, was
killed-l They would seem to have afterwards (namely, in 1238 and 1239),
marched against the Ossetes or As, the Alans of other writers, who were
the next neighbours and often the close allies of the Circassians, and
after a siege of three months captured their capital Mokhshi (called
Mangass or Mikass by Rashid). In the Yuan shi we are told that Sili
ganbu conducted the assault.§ This town of Mokhshi, about which I
shall have more to say presently, became a mint place of the Tartars.
Rubruquis tells us expressly that the Alans were subjected by Mangu
Khan himself, and that on his return he passed a castle of the Alans

* Klaproth, Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 290. Note. t D'Ohason, ii. 8.

I Rashid, quoted by D'Ohsson, ii. 626. St. Martin, Memoires sur rArmenie, ii. 368.

$ Bretschneidcr, 83.

I04 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

which belonged to Mangu.* He tells us the Alans were skilled in
metallurgy. Elsewhere he tells us that Zichia, i.e., the country of the
Circassians proper, was not when he passed a part of the Mongol
dominions.! It would seem that the country of the Ossetes was so, and
further, that it was an especial appanage of the Khakan Mangu. This
accounts for what is otherwise a very strange fact, namely, that so many
Alans should be mentioned as serving in the Mongol armies in China,
and as being otherwise in the service of the Great Khan there.

While Mangu marched against the Circassians, Sheiban, Bujek, and
Buri marched against the Merims, a portion of the nation Chinchak. I
have suggested that these may have been the people of Murom,| but
it is possible that by them the Lesghs, or else the Chetsentses
are meant. The Lesghs were not completely subdued, however, and
remained independent when Rubruquis passed this way.§ In the spring
of 1239 Kukdai, we are told, was sent to capture Timur kahalia (lit the
iron gate), i.e., Derbend, on the Caspian. || Rubruquis tells us how it was
protected with high walls without ditches, and with towers built of great
dressed stones, but that the Tartars battered down the tops of the turrets
and the bulwarks on the walls, laying the turrets even with the walls.*I[
It was subject to them, and commanded one of the most important roads
in the world, namely, the only really practicable trade route through the
Caucasus. While these expeditions were prosecuting their work
and during the winter of 1238-9 we are told that Bereke defeated the
Kipchaks and made the chief of the Mekrits prisoner.**

The term Kipchak or Coman has in my view received too wide a
connotation. It was properly applied to the nomades who lived on the
river Kuma, which district was the Kumestan of Edrisi. This was the
Desht Kipchak proper, whence the Comans or Kipchaks extended their
raids into the country of the Don and the Ukraine. When, after their
defeat by the Mongols, a large body of the Kipchaks migrated into
Hungary, one portion remained behind in their ancient camping ground,
and it was against this section apparently that Bereke marched. The
modern Kumuks probably descend from these Comans. The Mekrits,
named by Rashid, bear a name which was borne by a Turkish tribe on
the Sehnga, and another in the country of the Uighurs. I think it
very probable that it here meant the race which then occupied the
Little Kabardah, that is, as I have elsewhere shown,tt the Malkars,
&c., the broken Turkish tribes who now live in the mountains behind the
Ossetes.

Bereke afterwards subdued the steppe country watered by the Kuma
and the Terek, an admirable camping ground for his ulus. There he

* Op. cit., 381. t/^.,2i6. I Ante, ^2. § Op. cit., 380, 381.

I Bretschneider, 83, IT Op. cit., 382. ** D'Ohsson, ii. 626. BretBchneider, 83.

tt Journal Anthrop. Inst., 1874, 466, 467.

BEREKE KHAN. 105

apparently settled down, with his capital probably at Majar, on which
more in the notes. The district was afterwards known from him as
Desht Bereke. When Rubruquis passed through the Kipchak in 1253,
he tells us Bereke had his camping ground towards Derbend.

There he had levied contributions on the travellers who were on their
way from the countries south of the Caucasus to the camp of Batu.* He
tells us Bereke was a Muhammedan, and would not allow anyone at his
court to eat pork, and that he had been ordered to transfer himself to the
other side of the Volga, as Batu was unwilhng that the Muhammedan
ambassadors should pass through his camp, for he saw it was not for his
profit.t On the inauguration of Mangu Kakhan in 125 1, Bereke and his
brother Tuka Timur were intrusted by Batu with the duty of seeing him
properly installed. In this both the Persian and Chinese authorities are
agreed, f

On Batu's death Bereke became, according to the Mongol law of
inheritance, his next heir, for in the East a man's son succeeds to
the throne only when all his brothers are dead. Sertak's transcient
reign, therefore, was an usurpation, and on his death Bereke was duly
appointed chief of the Golden Horde by his cousin, the Kakhan Mangu.
Abulghazi says he gave a great feast on his accession, and also sent
presents to his suzerain. The same author thus describes his conversion.
He says he was one day at Seraichuk, which had been founded by his
brother, when he met a caravan from Bokhara. Having summoned two
Bokharians, he questioned them about their faith. This led to his
conversion. He then summoned his brother Tuka Timur, and persuaded
him to follow his example.§ Other less trustworthy Turkish authorities
make out he was converted by a dervish from Khuarezm, named
Seifeddin.H We are told again that he long concealed his conversion,
and it was only when Tuka Timur proclaimed his that he also acknow-
ledged it, and persecuted those who would not become Muhammedans.
The Tartars, who despised Islam, sent to offer Khulagu the crown of which
he was unworthy.^ He was the first Mongol ruling prince to adopt "the
faith," and the fact was a notable one, for I believe that although the
Mongol empire must inevitably have fallen to pieces eventually from its
size and- unwieldiness, yet the immediate cause of its collapse was the con-
version of the western Khanates to Muhammedanism, and the consequent
raising of a very powerful barrier between them and the eastern supreme
authorities. In the case of Bereke, however, the conversion had no
ieffect on his loyalty, which remained constant to his cousin Mangu. It
is important to remember that he belonged to the Hanefitish sect, and
was therefore a Sunni Moslem, like the Turks of Asia Minor, and
not a Shia, like the Persians.** This accounts for much that is difficult

* Op. cit., 263. t Id.. 264. I Bretschneider, 106. § Op. cit., 181.

Golden Horde, 150. % Id. Note. ** Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 150.

I06 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

in the after alliances of the horde. He collected at Serai many learned
and pious men, and was tolerant enough to allow those of both the rival
Moslem rites to live there.

The Grand Prince Alexander Nevski, with his brother Andrew of
Suzdal, and Boris of Rostof, son of Vassilko, went to the court of the
new Khan with presents, to congratulate him on his accession. They
were received by his lieutenant Ulaghji {i.e., by his nephew already
named). Karamzin suggests that one object of their visit (a very
hopeless one) was to save the northern parts of Russia from an invasion
of Tartar tax-gatherers. Kuyuk had sent commissaries into Russia to
collect taxes. It would seem that their operations were confined to the
principalities of Kief and Chernigof.* They first chose one out of every
three children, who, with all the unmarried who could not pay the tax,
were made slaves. A general tax was then imposed upon all — rich and
poor, big and small, young and old — consisting of five skins for each
individual, namely, the skin of a white bear, of a black fox, of a sable, a
beaver, and a polecat.t After the accession of Mangu,| he sent, we are
told, one named Bidje Bierko [i.e., Bierko, the secretary) to take a census
of the people.§ He seems to have gone to Suzdal, Riazan, and Murom, and
to have appointed head men over lo, loo, and i,ooo, i.e., decurions, cen-
turions, and temniks. || Thus early did the Mongols begin that systematic
bleeding of their victims by the tax-gather, which, far more than their
swords and spears, laid waste and made desert the countries where they
settled. According to Karamzin, it was only out of craft, and to secure
them as aUies, that an exemption was made in the case of monks and
ecclesiastics.^ When Alexander Nevski returned from the Horde he was
accompanied by Gleb, the Prince of Bielo ozero, who proved in person
his nation's proud boast that it can assimilate very easily with other
races; by marrying a young Christian Tartar, "hoping," says the
historian, "to secure some advantage thereby to his unfortunate
country."**

Shortly after, the Grand Prince, with the Princes of Rostof, Suzdal,
and Tuer returned once more to the horde, when they were told that
Novgorod must also submit to pay tribute. That proud and rich
republic had hitherto escaped the fate of Southern Russia, and was
independent of the Tartars, but their peremptory orders could not be
long withstood, and the great hero of the Neva had to go there himself
with the unwelcome news. This was ill received by the Novgorodians,
but after much turbulence and much pressure from the Grand Prince
Alexander, they were brought to reason by the news that Bierko and

* KaramziOi iv. 91, t Golden Horde, 151.

I The date is somewhat uncertain. The continuators of Nestor date it in 1255 and 1257.
Nikon and another Russian chronicler in 1257 (Golden Horde, 151, Note, 3). The Yuan shi
in 1253 (Bretschneider, 179). 1257 is the most probable date.

§ Bretschneider, 179, || Karamzin, iv. gi. ^ Id. ** Id., gz.

BEREKE KHAN. I07

Kassachik^ were on the Volkhof with their forces. The Russian
historian tells us that after this the Tartar officers went from house to
house, register in hand, to number the people and to award the capitation
tax.t The conquest of the Tartars opened the way for the traders of
Khuarezm, who now invaded Southern Russia and farmed the imposts
there. Their exactions were very cruel. Those who could not pay were
made slaves, and the people became so exasperated that at Vladimir,
Suzdal, and Rostof many of them were killed. Among the victims was an
apostate named Zozimus, who, having been a monk had turned Muham-
medan, and was then a protege of Khubilai. He distinguished himself by
his cruelties to his former co-rehgionists. His corpse was thrown to the
dogs. A Tartar publican named Buka, who lived at Ustiuge, and who
had violated a young Christian girl named Mary, afterwards won her
heart, and was persuaded by her to be baptised under the name of John.
Karamzin tells us that he became famed for his virtues and his piety.
While engaged in hawking he one day determined to build a church to
St. John the Baptist. The site is still known as Sokolieou goriou, i.e.,
Mount of Falcons.J The death of the Khivan tax farmers irritated
the Tartars, and to appease them and to secure exemption from
supplying a contingent of troops, Alexander Nevski repaired to the
court of Bereke at Serai, where the tolerance of the Khan had recently
allowed the Metropolitan Cyril to found a fresh Eparchy, which
took the name of Serai, and to which the see of the Southern
Pereislavl was shortly afterwards added. § Alexander's journey was
successful, both in justifying the treatment of the tax-gatherers and
in regard to the contingent, but he was detained at the Tartar court
during the spring and summer, and died on his journey homewards at
Goroditz, on the 14th of November, 1263. The news of his death was
received with consternation in Russia, where his prowess had so often
recalled to the Russians their ancient days of glory. In the words of
the Metropohtan, " the sun of Russia had set."

At this time Daniel, Prince of Gallicia, raised for a while the hopes of
the Christians and the Slaves. I mentioned how he had submitted to
the Pope, and had afterwards withdrawn his submission. In 1257 we
find Alexander IV. writing to him and teUing him how he had forgotten
the wellbeing of the Church which had crowned and consecrated him,
and threatening him with an interdict and the weight of the secular arm
if he did not submit;! but like Frederick II. he braved such threats.
He also braved more dangerous enemies. Twice he went to the succour
of Bela, the Hungarian king, against the Emperor Frederick, and among
the glories of his garniture his Greek dress decorated with gold lace,
his sword and saddle adorned with precious stones and work in relief,
and his Tartar arms are mentioned.^ A feud had arisen in regard to

* Karamzin, iv. 94. t/rf.. 94-96. J Op. cit.,106. § Karamzin, iv. 108. ll/d.,64. f/rf.

97.

I08 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the various claims to the heritage of Frederick, Duke of Austria, who
was recently dead. Daniel had, as the ally of the Hungarians, ravaged
Western Bohemia, and burned the outskirts of Troppau. He boasted
that neither Vladimir nor his brave father had carried war so far into
Germany. On the other hand, he was no less successful against the
pagan Lithuanians who were at this time ruled by Mindug, the real
founder of the Lithuanian power, who held court at Kernof, and to whom
the petty princes of Lithuania were subject. Daniel had married his
niece, but Mindug, who was jealous of Tortivil and Edivid, brothers
of this princess, compelled them to escape to Vladimir of Volhynia.
Daniel took up their quarrel, and persuaded the Poles and the Germans
of Riga, z.(?., the Livonian knights, as well as the barbarous tribes of the
Yatviages and Samogitians, to take up arms against him. He also
captured Grodno and other towns. Meanwhile Mindug, seeing the
approaching hurricane, became a convert to Christianity, and put himself
under the protection of Pope Alexander IV., who gave him the title
of king, and otherwise incited him against Daniel, who was looked upon
at Rome as an apostate ; but he could not make head against Daniel,
whose son Roman captured the towns of Novogrodok, Slonin, and
Volkovisk, while Schvarn, another son of Daniel, married his daughter.
Mindug again relapsed into paganism, and bitterly avenged himself on
the borders of Livonia and Mazovia, and the Russian provinces of
Smolensko, Chernigof, and Novgorod.*

These successes and the advice of the Poles and Hungarians
encouraged him to cross weapons with the Tartars, whose enemy he
declared himself to be ; they thereupon entered Lower Podolia and cap-
tured Bakota, whence they were driven by his son Leo, who also captured
one of their baskaks or governors, while their chief general in the west, the
Khoremshah, whom we have already mentioned,t was foiled in an attempt
to capture Kremenetz. This in turn encouraged Daniel, who rapidly
captured the various towns between the Bug and the Teteref, which were
governed by Tartar baskaks. He was about to besiege Kief when he was
recalled from his victorious march by an attack of the Lithuanians.
The Tartars were not long in returning, their new general, being the
renowned and cruel Burundai,| who took part in Batu's Hungarian cam-
paign,§ the successor to the Khoremshah. They, too, as we have seen, had
a quarrel with the Lithuanians, and demanded from Daniel if he was the
friend or the enemy of their Khan. If the former, they bade him send an
auxiliary army to march with them into Lithuania. This was sent under
Vassilko, his brother, and the country was ravaged with fire and sword,
the miserable inhabitants taking refuge in the woods. The Yatviages
suffered the same fate. Pleased with his Gallician aUies, Burundai now

* Karamzin, iv. 98, 99. t Ante, 69.

The Buruldai of Rashid ud din. (Bretschneider, 85. Note.) $ Wolff, 124 and 396.

BEREKE KHAN. I09

retired, and South-western Russia had peace for a short time. Daniel
determined to abide his time, and meanwhile to fortify his newly, built
towns, but Burundai's suspicions were at length aroused. He entered
Gallicia and bade Daniel attend him in his camp, or in default to expect
due punishment. Daniel sent him his brother Vassilko, his son, and
John, Bishop of Kholm, bearing presents. " If you wish to convince us
of your sincerity," said the sagacious Tartar general, " then raze your
ramparts to the ground." It was useless to disobey, and the towns of
Danilof, Stoyek, Kremenetz, Lutsk, and Luof were stripped of their
walls, or rather of their wooden ramparts, which were burnt. The
burning of the walls of Vladimir in Volhynia, we are told, was a grateful
sight to Burundai, who, having spent a few days in the palace there, went
on to Kholm, whence Daniel escaped, intending to pass into Hungary.
This town was for a second time saved from destruction ; on this
occasion by the presence of mind of Vassilko. Having l)een sent with
two Tartar murzas to persuade the inhabitants to surrender, he took a
stone in his hand, and throwing it on the ground, said, " I forbid you to
resist." The voivode of Kholm understanding his meaning, replied in
simulated anger, " Begone, you are the enemy of our ruler." Vassilko
knew how strong the place was, and wished it to resist, while the
Tartars, who hated long sieges, passed on to Poland.*

The Polish princes, who dreaded the impending deluge over their
country, appealed to the Pope for help, and Alexander IV. issued an
order on the 26th of June, 1258, to the Dominicans in Germany,
Bohemia, Moravia, and Pomerania to preach a crusade against the
Tartars, and on the 17th of December of the same year issued orders to
the Teutonic knights to join their Polish neighbours ; but this crusade
came to nothing. Central Europe was then torn asunder by feudal
fights. Richard of Cornwall and Alphonso of Castile were struggling for
the Imperial crown. Ottokar II. of Bohemia was at issue with the
Hungarians. The Teutonic order had hard work to make headway
against the heathen Prussians, while the Polish princes were themselves
quarrelling, and Casimir of Kujavia had a^ispute with Boleslas of Great
Poland.t It was at this juncture that the Tartars, led by Nogai and
Tulabugha, appeared in Poland. The former was a famous chief, of
whom we shall have much more to say presently, and the latter a grand-
son of Batu's, both of them no doubt very young men, and probably both
under the control of Burundai. Vassilko, the brother, and Leo and
Roman, the sons of Daniel, were with the Tartars. They passed the
recently fortified town of Lublin, marched to the Vistula, destroyed the
nunneries at Zavikhost and Lyssen, and approached Sendomir, where a
crowd of people had found refuge. Its commander was Peter of Krempen.
The Tartars promised, through the Russian princes who were with

* Karamzin, iv. 100-193. t Wolff, 397.

no HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

them, that if he surrendered the town, the inhabitants should be spared
but they broke their promise and slaughtered them mercilessly. This
was on the 2nd of February, 1259. Von Hammer gives a long list of
the victims, who are known as the martyrs of Sendomir. Their
bodies were buried in the church of St. Mary of Sendomir, and in com-
memoration of their martyrdom Pope Boniface VIII. granted the church
an indulgence.* The Tartars then went on to Cracow, which they also
destroyed, its prince Boleslas taking refuge in Hungary. Having ravaged
the country as far as Bythom in Oppeln, they retired with a crowd of
Christian slaves.t

The Tartars entered as a factor into the pohtics of other European
kingdoms, nor can the history of the latter at this time be followed
without postulating their influence. It would seem from a letter of Pope
Alexander IV., written in 1259, that Bela, the Hungarian king, had
received proposals for a treaty from them, and had written com-
plaining bitterly of the want of sympathy Rome had shown in his
sufferings. He had in consequence threatened to revenge himself by
the new alliance. The Pope enlarged in his reply on the forlorn state
which the Church itself had been reduced by the attacks of the
Emperor Frederick. In order to protect itself and its children, it had
incurred grave debts which embarrassed it. The Pope refers to the
proposals which it seems had been made to Bela, that his son should
marry a Tartar princess, and that he should surrender his daughter to a
Tartar prince ; that one-fourth of the Hungarian nation should act as
the advance guard to the Tartars in their proposed campaign against the
Christians, in return for which one-fifth part of the booty should be
surrendered to them ; that no tribute should be exacted from them, nor
would the Tartars molest their kingdom, while they were to undertake
that their ambassadors should not be escorted by more than one hundred
persons. The Pope inveighed against such a monstrous policy, alike
contrary to religion and honour, and bade him remember the general want
of good faith shown by the Tartars. He told him that the calamities which
afflict nations are a consequence and a punishment for their iniquities,
and bade him ward them off by exhibiting a zealous care for piety and
justice within his realm, and he ended by excusing his inabihty to supply
him with 1,000 bahsteers, and by telling him that the indulgences he
would offer for a crusade would be much more valuable to him than such
a contingent.! The Christians were kept in constant excitement by the
dread of a new irruption. In a letter addressed to the Archbishop of
Bordeaux in 1260, the Pope invoked the necessity of a common alhance
amongst the princes to oppose the common danger, and denounced
those who should make terms with the enemy. These facts should not

* Golden Horde, 154, 155. t Wolff, 397, 398. D'Ohsson, ii. 181-183.

I D'Ohsson, ii. 174-178.

BEREKE KHAN. Ill

be forgotten. It is the other side of the shield. We are too apt to
remember in the history of Christendom of the thirteenth century only the
fierce Erastianism and worldliness of the struggle, and to forget that
when Europe was a mere congeries of broken fragments, made so by the
feudal system, that the only power which was respected by all was
constantly raised in favour of common action against the terrible enemies
who laid Eastern Europe prostrate for so long ; but the danger seemed
as yet far off, and the only measures apparently taken in France were the
ordering of processions, prayers, alms, and other meritorious acts on the
first Friday of each month,* and nothing could apparently stop the
insai;ie rivalries and struggles of the various princes. Thus in 1260,
while the ruins which the Tartars had made far and wide in Poland had
hardly ceased smoking, we find Bela of Hungary and a posse of princes,
including Daniel of Gallicia, fighting a bloody battle with Ottokar of
Bohemia and some other confederates, in which 30,000 men perished on
the side of the Hungarians alone.t

A new crusade against the Tartars was preached by the Polish
bishops in the autumn of 1263, and the Teutonic knights, who had a
terrible work already on their hands in struggling with the Lithuanians
and the Prussians, were ordered to assist.| Winter was the season
chosen by the Tartars for their campaigns. The rivers were then frozen,
and so were the marshes, and therefore the roads were good, the
crops were harvested, and the booty, instead of being scattered over
pasture and forest, was gathered in the homesteads and barns, ready for
the plunderers. In the winter of 1263 and 1264, in alliance with the
Russians and Lithuanians, they made a fresh inroad into Poland,§
and in 1264, in alliance with Swarno, a descendant of Roman,
who sixty years before had fallen on the field of Zavikhost, they
invaded Poland, and were defeated at the battle of Puta Statt by the
Voivode Peter of Cracow. || This proves that the Russians were already
showing their capacity for assimilating themselves and were marching
shoulder to shoulder with their masters. They were also beginning a
fresh chapter in their intercourse with their closely related but inde-
fatigable foe Poland, that vast plain without a single mountain rampart,
and as open to attack on all sides as a helpless unarmed woman. It
would have indeed fared badly with the Christian world if the Tartars
had been able to give undisturbed attention to it, and had not had their
energies distracted by quarrels among themselves. We have now
reached a period when their colo£;sal power began to show signs of this
inevitable weakness.

Bereke was faithful in his allegiance to Mangu as long as he lived.
How faithful he was may be best gathered from the fact that on
certain of the coins struck, as I believe, in his reign, we find on one side

D'Ohsson, ii. 179. t Wolff, 399. I Id. f Id., 400. || Golden Horde, 174.

112 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the inscription, " Mangu, Supreme Khan/' and on the other, " Money of
Bolghari."* Bolghari was at this time apparently the only mint place of
the Golden Horde. Marco Polo tells us that Serai and Bolghari were
the two residences of Bereke Khan.

According to Rashid ud din, Mangu Khan died in the beginning of
I257,t but, as Von Hammer says, this is at least two years too soon. He
really died in the spring of 1259. Notwithstanding the difficulties raised
by the family of Ogotai at his accession, the prompt measures he took to
secure order seem to have cowed opposition, and' during his reign he
was obeyed without question in all parts of the Mongol world. His heir
according to Mongol law, was his next brother Khubilai, who was at the
time of Mangu's death engaged in a distant expedition in China, from
which he did not make haste to return. The position of the youngest
son, or hearth-child, in the Mongol community was one of great
importance. As in the ancient tenure of Borough English in England,
he heired his father's house and immediate surroundings, while the other
brothers had their portions elsewhere, and he consequently had immense
influence with the courtiers and those immediately round the fountain
of power. It was thus that Tului, the youngest son of Jingis Khan,
acquired the influence which enabled his sons to eventually occupy the
throne of the Mongol empire. It was the hearth-child who ruled during
the interregnum between one Khakan and another, and who summoned
the general Kuriltai to superintend the burial of the dead Kaizar and the
inauguration of his successor. This Kuriltai was a very important
element in the Mongol polity. Although there was a rule of succession
recognised, yet no Khakan was deemed legitimately seated on the throne
until he had been duly elected by the various representatives of the wide
Mongol world meeting together in the old Mongol land. How rigid this
rule was, may be remembered by those who have read the account of the
accession of Mangu, and how obedience was refused to him although he
had been elected at a Kuriltai, because that Kuriltai was a provincial and
not a general one.

We are accordingly told that on the death of Mangu, Arikbugha, his
youngest brother, summoned the various princes to meet in the dead
Khakan's ordu to elect a successor. Khubilai perhaps feared some foul
play, or deemed it expedient to hurry matters forward, and on the plea
that the princes of the houses of Juchi and Jagatai were too far off, he
summoned a special Kuriltai at Kai ping fu, in China, and there,
supported by his brother Muke, by Kadan, son of Ogotai, and Togachar,
son of Utsuken Noyan, brother of Jingis Khan, he was elected Khakan
on the 4th of June, 1260.

This was clearly an illegal election, and precipitated matters. Kara-
korum, the capital of the Mongol empire, the heart and centre of its

* Frsehn, Resc. Num. Muh., 196. t St. Martin Memoires, &c. , 277. Golden Horde, 159, Note, 3,

BEREKE KHAN. II3

administration, was controlled, as I have said, by Arikbugha, who had
been appointed its governor. There can be little doubt that he was an
ambitious person, and had determined to secure the throne for himself.
He was supported by Kotoktai, the chief wife of Mangu, by the latter's
three sons, Ustai, Yurultash, and Siregi or Shireki, by Alghui and other
grandsons of Jagatai, and by Arkadai Oghul, the son of Kulkan.*

One of his supporters, Dureji, was also in possession of Peking, so
that he controlled both capitals of the empire. On the other hand, there
sided with Khubilai the princes who assisted at his inauguration, arid
also Utsuken, Jingis Khan's youngest brother, who must have been a
very old man of between eighty and ninety.t Arikbugha appointed his
cousin Alghui to take charge of the Khanate of Jagatai ; Khubilai
nominated Apisga, son of Buri, to the same position. He was also sure
of the support of his brother Khulagu.

The policy of the Golden Horde and its chief Bereke has been, as I
believe, entirely misunderstood by D'Ohsson and Von Hammer, who
have followed the late authorities, Mirkhond and Abulghazi. It seems
to me clear from two considerations that Bereke supported the cause of
Arikbugha. In the first place, coins with Arikbugha's name were struck
at Bolghari,^ and no coins were struck there with Khubilai's name upon
them. In the next place, it is very curious that in the list of the Khans
of the Golden Horde contained in the Yuan shi the name of Bereke does
not occur,§ as if he was not recognised by Khubilai's descendants
in China. It must also be noted that Bereke had a long and severe
struggle with Khulagu, Khubilai's very faithful supporter in Persia.
These facts seem to me conclusive.

The statement of Mirkhond about Bereke and Arikbugha having
fought a great battle with one another is incredible when we consider
that he names the river Kerulon as the site of the struggle. As Schmidt has
said, the Kerulon, in the east of Mongolia, is an impossible situation for a
fight with the chief of the Golden Horde. I hold then that in the
struggle between Arikbugha and Khubilai, Bereke sided with the former;
but this was a mere episode in the history of the Golden Horde. A
much more serious matter was the feud that arose, as I have said,
between Bereke and Khulagu. I have already mentioned how the
Mongols, south and north of the Caucasus, had a rival policy in regard
to Georgia and its queen, Rusudan, in the days of Batu, but the causes
of quarrel were now much more potent.

When Khulagu marched westwards into Persia, he was accompanied,
as Batu was in Hungary, by princes belonging to the other Khanates,
each of whom seems" to have had command of a contingent of men from

* Wassaf, 22. t Golden Horde, 160.

X These coins bear on one side the inscription " The Great Khan Arighbugha," and on the
other " Money of Bolghari." (Frashn, loc. cit.) § Bretschneider, 106.

Q

114 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

his own people. The object of this probably was to act as a check upon
the chief commander, and to prevent him using his army for the
furtherance of his ambition rather than in the service of the cause.
With the contingent from the Golden Horde went, as I have said, Kuli,
the son of Orda ; Bulghai, the son of Sheiban ; and Kutar, the grandson
of Tewel. On the march into Syria, Bulghai died at a feast, and Kutar
was suspected of having caused his death. Khulagu sent him, in
accordance with the Yassa of Jingis Khan, to Bereke to be tried. He was
found guilty and remitted to Khulagu for punishment. Khulagu put him
to death.* Soon after Kuli died, and Bereke suspected that he had been
poisoned. The families of the three princes made a hasty retreat from
Persia, and embarked at Derbend for the Kipchak. Another, and per-
haps the most important grievance of all was the fact that Bereke, who
was a Mussulman, was naturally much irritated at the conduct of
Khulagu towards the Khaliph and the terrible slaughter of the faithful
that occurred in his Syrian and other campaigns.

Again, Bereke filled the post of agha or patriarch among the princes of
the Mongols. That post, according to the laws of Jingis, carried with
it the subordination in many ways of the other princes, and Bereke
patronised Khulagu somewhat pointedly, and seems to have sent him
some harsh messages. Lastly, Bereke claimed the provinces of Arran
and Azerbaijan as belonging to the Khanate of Juchi, whose army
sometimes wintered south of Derbend ; while they had been assigned to
Khulagu ir^ Mangu's disposition of the western lands, and in consequence
a fierce strife arose about them. This is the statement of Wassaf,t
which is confirmed by that of Marco Polo.l The increasing tension of
the relations of Bereke and Khulagu was a warning to the contingents of
troops belonging to the Golden Horde which had marched with the
latter that they had better escape. They accordingly scattered, one
section reached Kipchak by way of Derbend, as I have said ; another,
under the generals Nigudar and Ongujia, traversed Khorassan, pursued
by Khulagu's forces, and took possession of Ghazni and the neighbouring
district ;§ a third body, two hundred in number, took refuge in Syria,
then subject to the Mamluk Sultan Bibars, who ordered that they should
be well treated and supplied with barley and other grain, robes of
honour, sugar, &c., and on their arrival at Cairo he went out in person
to meet them, assigned them quarters at Luk, outside Cairo, furnished
them with horses, &c., and persuaded them to embrace Islamism. Their
chiefs were given the titleof Emir, while the rest of them were incorpo-
rated among the Mamluks.i Bibars was a Mamluk. The Mamluks were
a corps of soldiers originally founded by the Egyptian Sultan Salahuddin,
and consisted of young Turks, chiefly from the Kipchak, who were

* Von Hammer, Ilkhans, i. 216. t Von Hammer's ed., 93. J Yule'e ed., ii. 495.

5 D'Ohason, iii. 379, 380. || Makrizi, i. 181.

BEREKE KHAN. - II5

bought as slaves. Salih VI., descendant of Salahuddin, rewarded them
for their faithfulness by giving their corps the pre-eminence. When the
Mongols overran the Kipchak, a great number of young Turkish captives
were sold, and augmented this force considerably; they were much
trusted by the Sultans, who chose from among them their chief officers.
Their chiefs had now become Sultans of Egypt, Bibars had belonged to
the Kipchak tribe of the Alborhs. He was the bitter enemy of Khulagu
whom he had recently defeated and driven out of Syria. His full name
was Rokn ud din Bibars el Bundokdar. He was a Kipchak Turk by
birth, and had been sold by the Mongols to the Venetians, by whom he
had been again sold at Sivas to the Ayubite Sultan Malik el Moassem
Turanshah, who put him in the Life Guards, and gave him the title of
Bundokdar, i.e., pillar of the faith. He was then in the service of his
successor, the Mamluk Sultan Seifuddin Kotuz. It was by his advice
that Khulagu's envoy was put to death in July, 1260, and it was he who
defeated Khulagu's general Keitbuka on the 3rd of September of the
same year, and recovered Syria for the Egyptians. When returning
from this campaign, the Sultan having refused him the government of
Aleppo, he killed him while hunting, and made himself Sultan.* Such
was the truculent person who now ruled in Egypt, and under whose
patronage the Khaliphate was revived at Cairo in the person of Abul
Kasim, the uncle of -the last Abassidan Khaliph of Baghdad, Mostassim.

As I have said, he received the Mongol fugitives hospitably, and they
were converted to the faith. Having questioned them about their
country, Bibars determined to send envoys to Bereke, and chose for the
purpose an old employe (a jamdar) of the Khuarezm Shah Jelal ud din,
named Seif ud din Keshrik, who knew the country and language, and
the Jurisconsult Majd ud din, together with two of the Mongol fugitives.t
These envoys were bearers of a letter, in which Bibars assured Bereke of
his friendly feeling towards him, urged him to fight against Khulagu,
boasted of the number of his troops, consisting of Turks, Kurds, and
Arabs ; recounted the Mussulman and Frank princes who were his
vassals, and ended by telling him of the recent arrival in Egypt of the
fugitives, who had told him he was their master. He also sent him a
solemnly certified genealogy of the Khaliph Hakim, whom he was about
to have duly inaugurated. These envoys left with provisions for several
months, but the doctor fell ill at Constantinople (probably of home
sickness), and returned to Egypt.+

Let us now revert to the quarrel between Bereke and Khulagu. The
tension having at length become too great, a body of 30,000 men, under
Nogai, the cousin of the murdered Kutar, was despatched by Bereke to
attack his rival. Wassaf describes the advance of this army in
very turgid phrases. The passage has been well translated by Colonel

* Wolff, 403. 1 D'Ohsson, iii. 384, 385. I Makrizi, i. 188. D'Ohsson, iii. 385.

Il6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Yule. It runs as follows : — " In the winter of 662," i.e.^ 1262, " when the
almighty goldsmith covered the river of Derbend with plates of silver,
and the furrier of the winter had clad the hills and heaths with ermine.
The river being frozen hard as stone to the depth of a spear's length, an
army of Mongols went forth at the command of Bereke Oghul, filthy as
ghuls and devils of the wilderness, and as numerous as the rain drops,
their waves rolled over the frozen river with the speed of the wind and of
fi.re. The rattling of their waggons and horses' hoofs was like thunder
and lightning. With the flaming fires of rage did they advance as far as
the Kur. The army of Khulagu marched against them."*

Nogai, having passed the defile of Derbend, encamped in the district
of Shirvan. The army of Khulagu set out meanwhile from Alatak
(his summer residence, situated in the mountains about the sources of
the Euphrates). It was made up of contingents from the different
provinces of Persia. His advance guard, under Shiramun, son of the
great Chormagun, was completely defeated, but another body, under
Abatai and Basmahgai, was equally successful near Shaburan or
Shabran.t Nogai was put to flight. The forces of Khulagu thereupon
having occupied Shamakhi, set out again for Derbend, the famous
fortress defending the eastern flanks of the Caucasus. This was
captured after a three days' struggle, and eight days later Nogai was
again defeated. This was on the i6th of December, 1262.

Khulagu had sent his eldest son Abaka to assist his two generals.
When Nogai had been beaten, they begged him to return to his
father, while they pursued the enemy ; but this he would not consent to
do, and the army accordingly advanced, commanded by Abaka and nine
other leaders, namely, Shiramun, Abatai, Turan Behadir, Batu, Saljidai,
Chaghan, Belarghu, Kodos, and Ilkai Noyan.| They advanced to the
Terek, and came up to Nogai's camp, which they found abandoned.
The steppe was strewn with tents, horses, mules, cattle, and sheep, and
also apparently with women and children. For three days the pursuers
revelled in their booty, and made free with the maidens they found in
the camp.

While thus given up to debauchery, Bereke arrived with a large army
from the north. A fierce fight ensued on the 13th of January, 1263,
which lasted from dawn till sunset, and ended in the defeat of Khulagu's
army, which in retiring across the frozen Terek broke the ice, and thus a
great number of the soldiers perished. Abaka was pursued by Bereke
as far as Derbend. Meanwhile let us revert somewhat.

The envoys who had been sent by Bibars met on their way some
ambassadors who were going to Egypt from Bereke. The former were
well treated by the Emperor Michael Palaeologos, who paid the expenses

* Yule's Marco Polo, ii. 496. Von Hammer's Wassaf, 93.
t Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 123. Note. J Golden Horde, 167.

I

BEREKE KHAN. II7

of their journey onwards. Their audience with the Emperor was at

Aniah {i.e., ^nia), whence they reached Constantinople in twenty

days, and went on by Istambul to Deksaita (? Odessa), which was the

port of embarkation for Sudak. The sea passage generally took ten

days, but with favourable winds two days. Having arrived at the top

of the mountain of Sudak, they found Tabuk or Taiuk, the governor of

the district, who furnished them with horses and conducted them to

Krim, which was inhabited by Kipchaks, Russians, and Alans. Having

gone on a day's journey, they entered a great plain, where they met

Tukbuka (? Tulubuka), who commanded the whole province, and was

set over a tuman or 10,000 horsemen. After journeying for twenty days

over a steppe covered with tents and herds, they reached the river I til

{i.e., the Volga), where the camp of Bereke was. They tell us the river

was as big as the Nile, and was navigated by many Russian boats. The

travellers had been supplied with sheep and other provisions on their

route. On nearing the Ordu, the Vizier Shiref ud din, who was a native

of Kazvin and spoke both Arabic and Turk, came out to meet them. He

furnished them with very good lodgings and with meat, fish, milk, and

other provisions. They were at length admitted to an audience, and

rigidly observed the prescribed etiquette. Entering on the left side they

delivered their letters, and then passed on to the right, where they

knelt down. No one was allowed to enter the Khan's tent with a sword,

knife, mace, or other arms. It was forbidden to tread on the wooden

threshold of the tent, to remove one's armour except on the left side of

the tent, to carry a bow which was strung or in its case, or arrows in a

quiver, to eat snow, or to wash one's clothes within the camp. In all

this the narrative of the envoys exactly confirms those of the Christian

missionaries Carpini and Rubruquis. The tent of audience would hold

100, or according to others 500 men. It was covered outside with white

felt, and lined inside with rich silken hangings, decorated with pearls

and precious stones. Bereke was seated on his throne with his legs

propped up with cushions, as he had the gout. Beside him sat his chief

wife Tagtagai Khatun. He had two other wives, Jijek Khatun and

Kehar Khatun, but none of them had given him any children. He had

but little beard, and his face was big and of a yellow colour. His hair

was plaited into tresses hanging beside his ears, from each one of

which there hung a precious stone of great value. He was dressed in a

robe of Chinese silk, with his head covered with a cap. His boots were

made of red velvet. He did not wear a sword, but had a gold belt

decorated with stones, from which hung a purse of green Bolghari

leather. In this girdle or belt were inserted some black horns, bent and

incrusted with gold. About him were fifty or sixty emirs sitting on

seats.* The envoys having been admitted presented their letters, and

* Quatremere, Makrizi, i. 214, 215. Notes.

Il8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the vizier was ordered to read them ; they then passed on from the left
side to the right, and were placed against the wall of the tent
behind the emirs> They were supplied with kumiz and cooked honey,
after which meat and fish were handed them. After they had eaten, the
Khan ordered that they should be lodged in the quarter of his favourite
wife Jijek Khatun, and the following morning they were received by that
princess in her tent. They had several audiences with Bereke, who
asked them many questions about Egypt, about elephants and giraffes,
and one day asked if the report was true that there was a giant's bone
thrown across the Nile which served as a bridge. The envoys rephed
that they had not heard of such a thing.*

The Sultan's letter was translated into Turkish by the Kadhi of the
Kadhis, who lived near Bereke. A copy of it was read before Bereke, who
seemed much pleased with the contents. He at length sent the envoys
back again, accompanied by an embassy of his own. They arrived
safely in Egypt in the year 1263. They reported that each princess and
emir at the court of Bereke had an imaum and a crier, who cried out the
hours of prayer, and that the children in the schools were taught from
the Koran.t While these envoys were on their way to Bereke the latter,
in view of his impending struggle with Khulagu, had himself despatched
two envoys, whose arrival at Constantinople I have already mentioned.
These envoys were named Jelal ud din el Kadhi and the Sheikh
Nureddin Ali. With them arrived the commandant of the Genoese, and
envoys from the Emperor Michael, and from Iz ud din. Sultan of Rum.
Bibars was then on his way home from an expedition into Syria, in
which he had captured the town of Karak. They were received in a
grand audience by the Sultan, and there Nureddin presented a letter
from Bereke, in which he set out that he had become a Mussulman,
together with his brothers, their children, and a great number of emirs,
giving the name of each and the tribe to which he belonged ; that he
was the enemy of Khulagu, against whom he intended to fight, in order
to strengthen and restore the faith to its ancient grandeur, and to
revenge the death of the Khaliph, the imaums, and other Mussulmans who
had been put to death contrary to justice. He asked Bibars to send an
army to the Euphrates to cut off Khulagu's retreat and recommended to
his favour Iz ud din, the joint Sultan of Rum, and the rival of Rokn ud
din, who was \}!\q protege of Khulagu, Bibars received the envoys with
great honour, gave them a splendid feast, and paid them visits every

* In regard to this report, M. Quatremere tells us it was founded on a very ancient Arabic
tradition. In " The History of the Conquest of Egypt," written by Abd al Hakam, we are told
that a giant named Auj, having been killed by Moses, his body fell across the Nile and made a
bridge. Schiltberger, the Bavarian traveller, tells us that there was a bridge in Arabia made
out of a giant's leg-bone, which united two rocks separated by a deep chasm. Travellers to
Arabia had to cross this bridge. A toll was charged, from the proceeds of which oil was bought
with which to oil the bone, and thus prevent it decaying. (Op. cit., 218. Note. )

t Id., 215.

BEREKE KHAN. 1 19

Tuesday and Saturday, the two days on which he was accustomed to
play at tennis.*

The newly founded Khaliphate was then represented by Hakim bi amr
allah, and we are told he caused the khutbah, or Friday state prayer, to
be pronounced in the presence of Bereke's ambassadors. The names of
Bereke and Bibars were mentioned together in the prayer, and after-
wards the Khaliph had a conference with the Sultan and the envoys, in
which various points of the faith were discussed. Some days after
Bibars presented the envoys with some rich robes of State. On
their return they were accompanied by two ambassadors from Bibars,
namely, the emir Fares ud din Akush Masudi and the sherif Amad ud
din Hashemi. They bore with them a letter written by the scribe
Mohi ud din ben Abd aldaher. This letter was written on seventy
sheets of paper of Baghdad. It contained, we are told, all the verses of
the Koran, and all the traditions which urge that war should be made on
the infidels ; then followed the passages and traditions referring to
Egypt, an account of the shrines there to which pilgrimages were made,
and of the mosques where prayers were said for the Sultan, with pro-
testations of amity for Bereke, and a recital of all that could flatter that
prince, irritate him against his enemies and increase the Sultan's import-
ance in his eyes. The tale of the Egyptian army was told, and the results
of its prowess were narrated. The letter was read over to the Sultan,
who made some alterations and additions. The presents which Bibars
sent form an interesting catalogue of what was then deemed most valuable
in the East. Among them was a copy of the Koran, traditionally said to
have been written by the Khaliph Othman. It was contained in a case of
red silk embroidered with gold, and this in another of leather ; a throne
decorated with carved ivory and ebony, a silver casket with a lock of the
same metal, carpets for saying the Namaz or prayer upon, of different
kinds and colours, curtains of different kinds, numbers of seats, cushions,
and stands for torches, splendid swords with silver handles, musical
instruments in painted wood wrapped in cases, silver lamps and candle-
sticks, saddles from Khuarezm, bows from Damascus with silken cords,
wooden spears of Kana whose iron heads had been tempered by the
Arabs, beautiful arrows in leathern boxes, warming pots of the stone of
Beram, great enamelled lamps with chains of silver gilt, black eunuchs,
young girls skilled in cookery, parroquets of gorgeous plumage, Arab
horses, dromedaries, swift and active mules, wild asses, and monkeys,
saddles for the dromedaries, bits and bridles, woollen saddlecloths for
the mules, silk dresses for the monkeys, and several giraffes with
painted saddlecloths and bridles.t Among the presents there was also a
turban which had been to Mecca, for Bibars had commissioned one of
his officers to perform the pilgrimage to that town in Bereke's name.f

* Id., 215. Note, t Quatremere, op. cit,, 216. Note. J D'Ohsion, iii. 390. 39i-

120 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Abul Kasim, the first of the Cairene line of Abbassidan Khahphs,
was the brother of Mostansir, the predecessor of Mostassim, the last
Khaliph of Baghdad, who was killed by Khulagu. He had been defeated,
and lost his life in a struggle with the Mongols on the 20th of
November, 1261, when he was attempting to recover Baghdad,* and
was succeeded by El Hakim bi emir illahi Abul Abbas Ahmed, who had
escaped in the recent struggle with the Mongols, and found refuge in
Egypt. He was the fourth in descent from the Khaliph Mostereshid,
who had been killed by the Assassins in 1135.! On the 5th of August,
1262, the new Khaliph pronounced the khutbah in presence of the Sultan
and his courtiers, in the name of Bibars, ruler of Egypt and Syria, and
of Bereke, ruler of the Kipchak. Bibars also sent couriers to Mecca
and Medina to order the name of Bereke to be inserted after his own in
this solemn Friday state prayer of the Mussulman world. The same
thing was done at Jerusalem.^ A copy of the khutbah was also
sent to Bereke, and likewise the 200 Tartars who had sought refuge
in Egypt.

We can well believe that in this sumptuous hospitality there was
something more than mere friendship on the part of the Great Sultan
for a valuable ally and a recent convert to the faith, that it rather
represented the patriotic yearnings of the Kipchak slave for his old land
and its ruler, and that the Mamluk Sultan was only too pleased to be
able to intervene in the affairs of his old land as the dispenser of the
luxuries and surroundings of civilisation ; and it was from this source, as
we shall see presently, that the Khanate of Kipchak received its culture,
and was eventually converted from a mere camp of Nomades into a
State with solidly built cities and a well organised administration.
This culture acted no doubt beyond these limits, and among much that
was deplorable gave a new life to the Russian form of Greek civiUsation,
and prevented it from dying of mere inanity, as it did at Byzantium.

The envoys and their charges were shipped on a large vessel, with a
great number of archers and arbalisters, with provisions for a year. The
party was detained at Constantinople by the Greek Emperor, on the plea
than Khulagu would be suspicious of their intentions, and that he was
his ally. After fifteen months of delay, he allowed the Sherif to return
to Egypt. Fares ud din Akush was detained for two years, during which
time the greater part of the slaves and animals which he took with him
perished, and the other presents were much spoiled. § When news of
this treacherous conduct on the part of the Greek Emperor reached
Bibars, the latter summoned the patriarchs and bishops, and asked their
canonical decision in regard to one who had broken his word. They all
replied that he ought to be excommunicated. He then despatched a
monk who was a Greek philosopher, a bishop, and a priest to the

*/d.,369. t/d., 391. lid. § Quatremere, op. cit., 217. Note. B Makrizi, i. 240.

BEREKE KHAN. 121

Emperor to convey their excommunication to him. He also wrote him
a very severe letter.

Meanwhile Bereke, who had ^doubtless heard of the detention, had
made an attack upon the empire, and approached Constantinople.
Michael thereupon sent out Fares ud din Akush, who had probably been
gained over, to say that the detention had been at his own instance, and
that Michael wished to be the friend and ally of Bereke as he was of
Bibars. Upon this the Tartars retired. Fares ud din was released, and
allowed to continue his journey, and Michael sent an envoy with him on
his own account, offering the Khan his friendship and a tribute of 300 silk
robes. On his audience with Bereke, Fares ud din laid the blame of his
delay on the Emperor, whereupon the Tartar Khan reminded him of his
former story, and said he should inform Bibars and leave him to punish
him. Iz ud din, the Sultan of Rum, had written to Bibars to inform him
of Fares ud din's tortuous conduct, and telling him that he had been
largely bribed by Michael. On his return to Egypt the latter was there-
fore arrested, and the precious objects which he had received, and which
amounted to 40,000 dinars, were confiscated.*

Three months after the envoys of Bibars had left Cairo, there arrived
there a body of 1,300 Mongols and Behadurs {i.e.^ warriors) who had
migrated from Khulagu's kingdom. Soon after, we read that Hosam-
eddin, son of Bereke, who had gone to Cairo to cement the friendship
of his father and Bibars, died, and on the 9th of November, 1262, Bibars
attended his funeral, marching on foot with the crowd.t The next day
there arrived another body of Tartars, whose chiefs were Keremun,
Amtaghiah Nokiah, Jerek, Kaian, Nasaghiah, Taishur, Bentu, Sobhi, Jau-
jelan, Aj-Karka, Adkerek, Kerai, Salaghiah, Motakaddem, and Daragan.
The Sultan went out to meet them. When they saw him they dismounted
and kissed the ground before him. He received them well and gave
them State robes, and then went to visit the tomb of Bereke's son. A
third body of Tartars soon after arrived, and were also received with
honour; their leaders were given the title of emir. At Bibars' solicitation
they became Mussulmans and were circumcised.]:

In August, 1265, Bibars sent one of his chamberlains, Shuja ud din
ben Daiah the Hajib to prevail upon Bereke to cease his incursions on
the territory of the Greek Emperor, who had asked for his intercession.
He also sent him three turbans that had been to Mecca, two marble
vases, some balm, water from the wells of Zemzem, and three pictures
representing the ceremonies of the pilgrimage to Mecca, drawn on gilded
paper which he had made at Bereke's instance. §

This contest with Byzantium has been described at some length by
Pachymeres and Metrophanes. The former dates it in 1265 and the

Defremery, Makrizi, 218. Note. t Makrizi, op. cit., i. 221, 222. Ilkhans, i. 218.

I Makrizi, i. 222, % D'Ohsson, iii. 393> 393- Makrizi, ii. 19,

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

latter in 1264.* I have previously referred to the strife between
the two brothers Rokn ud din and Iz ud din, who were joint
Sultans of Rum or Asia Minor. The latter had allied himself
with the Egyptian Sultan Bibars, and had incurred the jealousy
of Khulagu. Pressed hard by his brother and the Mongols, he
took refuge at Constantinople, where he was well received by Michael
Palasologos, who had recently won back for the Greeks the Byzantine
crown, which for fifty-seven years had been usurped by the Franks.
With Iz ud din there went his general Ali Behadur and his equerry
Oghuslu. Michael was not powerful enough to quarrel with Khulagu, and
was in fact negotiating with him for a marriage with his daughter, he
readily, therefore, fell in with a suggestion of Iz ud din that he should
make him a grant of land in Rumelia. He granted him the Dobruja,
i.e., the land between the Danube and the sea, a name probably con-
nected in etymology with the Dobiros of Thucydides.

Iz ud din accordingly crossed the water from Nicomedia to Scutari,
and took with him the Turcoman tribe Saltukdede, with some
other Turk families, who all settled in the Dobruja. These were
the first Turks who settled in Europe, and the date of the occurrence
was 1263. The number of the emigrants was from 10,000 to 12,000
families. One day a proposal was made to Iz ud din at a feast
to dethrone the Emperor and seize the throne. News was taken
to Michael, who seized the conspirators and imprisoned the Sultan
and his son at the castle of Enos, on the south coast of Rumelia,
fifty miles from Constantinople. Upon this Rokn ud din, the former
rival of Iz ud din, sent messengers to Bcreke begging him to invade the
Byzantine dominions and release his brother. Iz ud din also found
means to send Bereke a letter, and to conspire with Constantine, the
King of Bulgaria and the protegd of Bereke. The latter sent a con-
siderable army, which crossed the frozen Danube and marched to the
Haimus, chased the Imperial forces from one place to another, and
at length laid siege to Enos. The Emperor gained the hill of Ganos,
whence he escaped by sea to Constantinople. The Bulgarians, under their
King Constantine, assisted with a contingent at the siege. One section
of the defenders was for surrendering the castle, the other for killing the
Sultan Iz ud din. At length terms were made with Constantine, by which
the Sultan was to be surrendered to him but not the castle. The Tartars
retired with their prize. His mother, sister, and two young sons,
however, were carried off to Constantinople, and his riches were con-
fiscated.t The Turcomans who had settled in the Dobruja were
carried off to the steppes of Kipchak. They were settled there, and the
Sultan was granted an appanage in the Crimea. There he held the two

• Stritter, iii. 1047, &c.
t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, J76-179. Stritter, iii. 1046-1060.

BEREKE KHAN. 1 23

towns of Soljak and Sudak, where he died in 1279. A mosque in
Moldavia, where he also had an appanage, bore his name.*

Let us now revert to the strife between Bereke and his rival Khulagu.
The latter returned to Tebriz in a very ill humour after the defeat of his
troops, and gave orders for raising another army. He wreaked his
vengeance on the merchants from Kipchak, who were then at Tebriz,
whom he seized and put to death, and confiscated their goods. Wassaf,
in a peculiarly business like tone, says that much that was seized did not
belong to these traders, who were mere agents for people elsewhere.
Bereke made reprisals, and put to death the merchants in his dominions
who were subjects of Khulagu. Upon this the latter enlarged his opera-
tions. Bokhara was at this time garrisoned by contingents from the several
Khanates, and we are told that of the sixteen Hezarehs (or regiments)
there, five belonged to the Golden Horde, three to the Emperor's mother
Siurkukteni, and the rest to the Balghkul, i.e., to the common property
of the Imperial family. Khulagu ordered the retainers of the Golden
Horde at Bokhara to be driven out of the city into the adjoining plain.
They were there slaughtered, their goods were plundered, and their
women and children were reduced to slavery.t

In the next year, ?>., 1264, rumours were abroad that another army
was meditating an assault from Kipchak, and Khulagu sent the Sheikh
Sherif Tebriz to Lesghistan to make inquiries. He was captured and
taken before Nogai, who demanded of him bitterly why Khulagu had put
to death mere traders and dervishes instead of attacking warriors and
nobles. The Sheikh tried to excuse his master on the ground that he was
much excited by the civil strife between his brothers Khubilai and
Arikbugha. He also told him how the civil war had been quelled, and
how Khubilai had named Khulagu, Ilkhan and Padishah of the country
from the Oxus to the borders of Syria, and had sent him 30,000 youfig
Mongols to reinforce his army. This news cooled the ardour of Nogai,
and the Sheikh returned to Khulagu with the news that, although he had
not secured peace, he need not fear any attack. | Khulagu died on the
8th of February, 1264, and was succeeded by his son Abaka.

In 1265 Nogai, as the general of Bereke, made another incursion by
way of Derbend. Yashmut, the brother of Abaka, who commanded the
frontier from Derbend to Alatak, crossed the Kur and encountered the
Kipchak army near the river Aksu. After a severe struggle, during which
Nogai was wounded in the eye, the army of the Golden Horde was
forced to retire in disorder to Shirvan. Upon this Abaka in turn crossed
the Kur, but hearing that Bereke was on the other side with a formidable
army, which rumour put at 300,000 men, he recrossed the river, broke
down the bridges, and encamped on its southern bank. The two armies
faced one another for fifteen days, and their archers practised across the

* Golden Horde, 187. t Wassaf, 94. J Ilkhans, i. 221.

124 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

river upon each other, when Bereke marched westwards, intending to
cross near Tiflis ; but he died on the way, and his army retired. His
body was taken to Serai, while his troops dispersed.*

I must now revert a Httle to mention some other events of interest that
happened during the reign of Bereke. Probably piqued by the family
alliance that Khulagu had made with Michael Palseologos in agreeing to
marry his daughter, Bereke aimed at a similar alliance, and proposed to
Bela IV., King of Hungary, that either one of his own daughters should
marry Bela's son, or that one of Bela's daughters should marry his son.
I have already described how the King of Hungary deputed the question
to the Pope Alexander IV., and how he decided that it would be
scandalous to marry a Christian princess to a heathen.

It was during the reign of Bereke that the elder Poli, uncles of Marco
Polo, visited the Kipchak. The Poli were Venetian merchants, and had
a house at Constantinople and another at Soldaia in the Crimea. In
1260, we find that two of the partners, who were brothers and were
named Nicplo and Maffeo, setting out from Constantinoplet on a trade
venture to the Crimea. They laid in a store of jewels, and set forth from
Constantinople, crossing the sea to Soldaia ; having stayed there a while
they went on to the court of Bereke Khan, whose residences Marco Polo
tells us were at Serai and Bolghari. He was esteemed, he tells us, as
one of the most liberal and courteous princes that ever was among the
Tartars. He treated the two brothers with great honour, and they
presented him with all the jewels they took with them. When they had
been a twelvemonth at his court there broke out the war, already
described, between Bereke and Khulagu, who is called "Alau the Lord of
the Tartars of the Levant " by him.t He has devoted four chapters to the
struggle between the two Khans, but they consist merely of conventional
phraseology, and furnish us with no details to add to the account already
given. He tells us that in consequence of the war no one could travel
without peril of being taken, at least on the route by which the two
brothers had gone to Serai, so they determined to go onwards. Quitting
Bolghari they proceeded to Ukek, and thence passing the great river
Tigris {i.e., the Volga), they travelled across a desert for seventeen days'
journey, meeting with no towns or villages on the way, but only with
Tartar encampments, and at length reached Bokhara. §

Bereke died, as I have stated, near Tebriz, in 1265. He left two
sons, one of whom had four sons, the other one, but none of them
succeeded to the throne. Abulfeda tells us they lived in the town of
Saksin. The fame of Bereke was very wide spread. As over-lord of
the Russian princes, as the ally of Bibars, and the rival of Khulagu, he
fills an important page in history. His subjects long after his death

* Golden Horde, 172. Ilkhans, 254. D'Ohsson, iii. 418.
Yule's Marco Polo, Introduction, 14, 15. I Op. cit., text, 4, 5. $ Id.,

MANGU TIMUR KHAN. 1 25

called the steppe that lies between the Volga and the Ural after his
name. It was known as the Desht Bereke. Even so late as the time of
Abulfeda the Mongols of the Kipchak were called the Barkai Tartars.
Bibars, the Sultan of Egypt, called his son, Muhammed Bereke Khan, no
doubt after his friend and ally the chief of the Golden Horde.

It was the intercourse which Bereke had with Egypt and Byzantium
which first enabled the Tartars to secure sufficiently skilled artisans
for the building of costly structures, while his conversion to Muham-
medanism made his court the resort of the peddlars and merchants
of Persia and other homes of Islam. This conversion was a very serious
matter in other ways. It commenced a process of disintegration,
in consequence of which it was found impossible presently to
keep up even a formal obedience to the Great Khan. Islam is too
proud a faith to yoke itself at the chariot wheels of peaceful Buddha or
of the Fetishism of the Shamans ; and it is further, as we know in
numberless other cases, a great civilising power among semi-barbarous
races. We shall find that from this date, however well the Tartars
of the Russian steppe kept up their renown for martial virtue, that
they ceased to be the ferocious creatures they were but a generation
before, when they desolated Khorassan. While they became, by
accepting the law of the prophet, an important factor in the world of
nations who were bound together by the freemasonry of the Crescent.
That great brotherhood was as yet largely free from the fierce strife
which separated Sunni and Shia at a later period, while in regard to
literature and art the very heyday of its prosperity was fast dawning.

Bereke, as the first important Mongol convert, becomes under these
circumstances an important historical figure ; but we must on with our
story.

MANGU TIMUR KHAN.

Bereke, judged by Western rules of succession, was a usurper, but
according to the law of the East, which prevails with the Mongols and
Turks, and prevailed also in the mediaeval times among the Russian
princes, brother was succeeded by brother, at least until the nephews
were sufficiently old to reign. It is the inevitable and probably
the only feasible plan of succession among nomadic and predatory
peoples, where the strong man is chosen to fill the place of chieftain. On
Bereke's death his brother Berkajar survived him, but he did not succeed
to the throne, nor did Bereke himself found a line of rulers. One son of
his, named Hosameddin, is mentioned as dying in Egypt in 1262 ;*

* Ilkhans, 218.

126 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

another one, named Salah ud din, as among the leaders of the Mamluks
there.* On Bereke's death the inheritance passed again into the
family of Batu.

Batu left four sons, Sertak, Tutukan or Toghan, Andewan, and Ulaghji
or Ghulasji. Sertak is given a son named Kanju in Rashid's lists,
but as he does not occur in history he was doubtless now dead. On the
extinction of the line of Sertak, Tutukan's descendants became the heirs
to the Khanate. Tutukan or Toghan, i.e.^ the falcon,t had five sons,
Bartu, Mangu Timur, Burasinku, Tuda Mangu, and Udaji, of whom
Bartu was probably at this time dead. The mother of Mangu Timur was
sister to one of the wives of Khulagu. They were both daughters of
Buka Timur, whose mother Chichegen was the fourth daughter of Jingis
Khan, so that both on the father's and mother's side he was directly
descended from the great conqueror.^ We are told he granted the
country of the Ak Orda or White Horde to Behadir, the son of Sheiban,
and to Ureng Timur, the son of Tuka Timur, he gave the towns of Krim
and Kaffa in the Crimea. Von Hammer, in pursuit of a strange theory,
would make out that this Tuka Timur was the grandson of Orda, Batu's
eldest brother, and further suggests that Ureng Timur was the grandson
and not the son of Tuka Timur, thus removing him by four generations
from Orda, an impossible theory. I have no doubt that Ureng Timur
was the son of Tuka Timur, the youngest brother of Batu, the
founder of the Blue Horde, to which I shall return presently. Orda
and his family lived far to the cast, and were far removed from Mangu's
frontiers.

Mangu Timur was nominated to the Khanate of Kipchak by the
Khakan Khubilai, but he did not long retain his allegiance to him.
When Arikbugha submitted in 1264, his cousin Kaidu, one of his chief
supporters and the heir to the pretensions of his grandfather Ogotai,
refused to acknowledge Khubilai, and returned to the special ulus of his
family on the river Imil. Endowed with considerable talents, he
succeeded, we are told, in gaining the friendship of the princes who
ruled the ulus of Juchi, and with their assistance recovered the country
watered by the Imil which belonged to Ogotai and Kuyuk.§

Gaubil tells us that after the death of Mangu, Kaidu earned a con-
siderable state for himself in the country of Olimali (/.^,, Almaligh), made
himself popular among the people there, and among the chiefs of the
tribes who camped north-north-east of Turfan and west and north of the
Altai, and also won over several princes of his family. || That Mangu
Timur was won over seems clear from the subsequent proceedings, and
from the further fact that on his coins the name of Khubilai does not
appear. Early in 1267, we are told that Bibars, the Sultan of Egypt,

* Makrizi, ii. 218. t Golden Horde, 248. J Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 250.

§ D'Ohsson, ii. 360, 361. || Op. cit., 471. Ante,\Q\.\.\'ji^.

MANGU TIMUR KHAN. 1 27

wrote to Mangu Timur to condole with him on the death of Bereke, and
to incite him against the son of Khulagu {i.e.^ the Ilkhan Abaka) *

In 1269, we read of envoys of Mangu Timur being at Damascus, and
there meeting those of the Greek Emperor and of Abaka, the Ilkhan of
Persia.t Mangu Timur continued the struggle which Bereke had begun
with Abaka, but we do not hear of any direct invasion of Persia, which
was probably prevented by the rampart the Ilkhan had erected near
Derbend. In the year 1270, according to Makrizi, the Egyptian Sultan
received a letter from Bisou Nogai informing him of his conversion to
the faith. He is called a relative of Bereke's and the commandant of his
army, and was no doubt the Nogai previously mentioned.!

Let us now turn to the intercourse of the Tartars with the Russians at
this time. On the death of Alexander Nevski, in 1263, the grand
principality of Vladimir fell to his brother Andrew, who, however, only
lived a few months, and was in turn succeeded by his brother Yaroslaf
of Tuer. The people of Novgorod were engaged in the early years of his
reign in a very sanguinary war with the Danes and their allies the
Knights of Livonia. This was not much favoured by the Grand Prince,
but as his dependents at Novgorod were an obstinate race, they had
their own way, and as further they got rather the worst of it in the
struggle, he was constrained to assist them.

The position of Novgorod at this time was a singularly interesting one.
Perhaps the most important member of the Hanseatic league, its
merchants were very rich and enterprising, and it possessed municipal
liberties which might have been the envy of Lubeck and Hamburgh in
later times. The Grand Prince, by a special treaty, had undertaken not
to appoint any but natives as magistrates there, and they were to be
personcE gratcE to the possadnik. The dues he received were not called
a tax, but were styled presents. He even undertook that neither
himself nor his boyards should acquire any demesnes in any of the
possessions of Novgorod, namely, in Beyitzi, Volok, Torgek, Vologda,
Zavolochia, Kola, Permia, or among the Petchorians or Yugrians, He
was permitted to visit the town of Russa in the autumn. While at
Ladoga only the officer who went for the fish and hydromel supplied to
his table was admitted. He undertook that the citizens should not be
transferred from their own lands, willingly or otherwise, nor seized as
debtors, and that his grandees who visited the republic should pay for
the horses, &c., which they used. The citizens on their part undertook
to pay a customs tax of a squirrel skin for each small boat, cart, and bale
of linen or hops.§

Novgorod at this time had a quarrel with its neighbour Lithuania.
Mindug, the king of the latter country, as well as Tortivil, Prince of

* Makrizi, ii. 48. f Ilkhans, 258. D'Ohsson, iii. 426. \ Makrizi, ii. 82.

§ Karamzin, iv. 114-116.

128 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Polotsk, his brother-in-law, had been assassinated in 1263. Tortivil's
sons took refuge at Novgorod. Mindug's son Voichelg, after a reign of
sanguinary cruelty at Novogrodok, had been baptised during his father's
lifetime, had then retired from the world and founded a monastery on the
banks of the Niemen, where he lived. On his father's murder he left
his retreat, headed an army, and exacted a terrible vengeance. He was
speedily acknowledged as king, and 300 Lithuanian families took refuge
at Pskof, the younger sister of Novgorod. The citizens of Pskof put a
relative of Mindug's named Dovmont, who had been baptised, at their
head without Yaroslaf's consent, and ravaged the province of Gerden,
a Lithuanian prince. It was at this time that the alhed Novgorodians
and Pskovians had a bloody struggle with the Danes, who were the
rulers of Esthonia, and their allies the famous German Knights of
Livonia. As I have mentioned, the struggle was a severe one, and many
lives were lost, the balance of advantages being against the Russians.*
The Grand Prince, although he disapproved of the war, agreed to assist
his protegesy and his troops with those of his dependents, the princes of
Suzdal, accordingly assembled at Novgorod. There also went Amragan
or Arghaman, the chief Baskak or Tartar commissioner of Vladimir, and
his son-in-law Haidar, who took part in the council, and approved of the
Russians attacking Revel ; but the Danes and the Livonian knights
were cowed by the preparations, and agreed to surrender the country on
the banks of the Narva to the Russians.t

Shortly after this, in the year 1270, the people of Novgorod quarrelled
with and drove Yaroslaf away for his incapacity and tyranny. Like
his brother Alexander, he seems to have been on good terms with the
Tartars, and he now appealed to them for help, and sent Ratibor as his
envoy to report how his master had been driven away, and how the
people of Novgorod had determined to kill himself (Ratibor) and others
merely because they had demanded the tribute which was due to the
"Khan. The latter had already despatched an army, when it was recalled
at the instance of Vasili, Yaroslaf's brother, who explained that the
Novgorodians had good reason for expelling Yaroslaf, and that the story
of Ratibor was untrue. Yaroslaf then marched alone against his
rebellious subjects, with whom peace was at length made, at the inter-
cession of Cyril, the Metropolitan of Kief. A treaty was drawn up
between them, which is still extant in the Russian archives, and
Karamzin tells us the deed is sealed with a leaden seal, and there is a
note on the back stating that Schevgn and Banchi, the envoys of the
Khan, had come in his name to reinstate Yaroslaf on the throne of
Novgorod, showing, as he says, how servilely dependent the Russian
princes had become.

Meanwhile perfect tranquillity reigned in the Grand Principality, or, to

♦ Id., 121-125. 1 Karamzin, iv. 125, 126. Golden Horde, 255, 256.

MANGU TIMUR KHAN. 129

use the phrase of Karamzin, "it supported in silence the yoke of
siavery."* Gleb, the Prince of Bielosersk made a journey to the horde
and returned safely.t On the other hand, Roman, the Prince of Riazan,
had the temerity to speak slightingly of Islam, the faith the court
had recently adopted. He was cut limb from limb, and his head, after
being stripped of its skin, was exposed on a lance.J Notwithstanding
(this severity. Christians were tolerated at the court. In 1269, Metro-
jphanes sent in a description of the bishopric of Serai. He is first
named as Bishop of Serai in I26i.§ He apparently died in 1269, for we
are told that in that year Theognost was nominated Bishop of Serai
and Pereislavl by Cyril, the metropolitan of Kief.|| In 1272, the Grand
Prince went with his brother Vasili and his nephew Dimitri Alexandre -
vitch to the horde, but died on his way home.

On the death of Yaroslaf, he was succeeded as Grand Prince by
his brother Vasili, Prince of Kostroma ; his nephew Dimitri and he
were both candidates for the suffrages of the Novgorodians. The former,
however, prevailed, inasmuch as he controlled Suzdal, the granary of
Novgorod, whence he had stopped the export of grain, and thus threatened
a famine.^ The authorities followed by Von Hammer would make out
that Vasih, with the assistance of the Tartars, marched against and
pillaged Novgorod, while his nephew Sviatoslaf of Tuer, ravaged the
towns of Volok, Bejesk, and Wobogd on the Volga.** In 1275, Vasili
went in person to the horde.

Meanwhile let us turn to Gallicia. Daniel, the brave prince of that
country, had died in the year 1266, after a reign which, although its latter
days were overclouded by the terrible Tartar invasion, had shed great
lustre on his kingdom, while he had by his various alliances made himself
respected, not only by the Christians but even by the Tartar Khans, so
that his country was far more free than the neighbouring Russian States
from their oppression.tt After his death, his sons Leon, Mitislaf, and
Schvarn became respectively princes of Peremysl : of Lutsk and Dubno,
and of Galitch, Kholm, and Droguichin, while his brother Vassilko, as
Prince of the Southern Vladimir, was acknowledged as their feudal
superior by the young princes. Soon after this Voicheig, the Monk
Prince of Lithuania, who wore a monk's hood over his royal robes, and
was therefore known as the wolf in sheep's clothing, after uniting many
of the petty principalities of Lithuania in his own hands, resigned hjs
power in favour of the young prince Schvarn, already named, and
again became a monk. This so aroused the jealousy of Leon, that the
latter assassinated Voicheig after treacherously inviting him to an enter-
tainment. Schvarn did not long oytlive his promotion, and was
succeeded as king of Lithuania by Troiden, who was still a pagan.

* Op. cit., iv. 133. t Golden Horde, 256. J Karamzin, iv. 133.

§ Golden Horde, 173. O Id., 256.

^ Karamzin, iv. 147 ,'148. •* Op. cit., 236. ft Karamzin, iv. 138.

S

I30 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Vassilko, who died shortly after, was succeeded by his son Ivan
Vladimir, while Leon inherited Galitch, Kholm, and Droguichin, which
had belonged to his brother Schvarn, and fixed his capital at the new
town of Lvof.*

The Lithuanians did not naturally forget the outrage committed on
their prince Voichelg, and we read how in 1275 they captured Droguichin,
slaughtered most of its inhabitants, and then crossed the Dnieper
and laid waste the inner recesses of the principality of Chernigof.
Leon appealed to the Tartars for assistance against the Lithuanians.
They accordingly sent an army, which was joined by contingents
sent by some Russian princes, but the result was not successful, and
the Tartars in retiring carried off the cattle, goods, and even clothes of
their allies ; and, as one of the annalists says, " pointed the moral that
an alliance with infidels is as bad as war itself."t

Irritated by the ill luck of the Tartar arms, Nogai sent a fresh army to
attack Grodno, and ordered the Gallician princes to lay siege to
Novogrodek. The former was defended by a garrison of Germans, who
had been planted there by Troiden, as similar colonies had latterly been
planted in the larger towns of Poland.J The allies gained no advantage
except that they carried off considerable booty.

I have mentioned how the Grand Prince Vasili went to the court of
Mangu Timur in 1275. He died on his return at Kostroma. During his
reign the Tartar publicans made a fresh census, and levied new taxes
upon Russia, but, as the Khans encouraged commerce and the people
were growing wealthier, this was not much felt.§ The tax had hitherto
been half a griwna, levied on each plough, which counted for two
peasants, but it was now increased.!

The Grand Prince Vasili was succeeded in 1276 by his nephew
Dimitri, the son of Alexander Nevski, a name which is connected with
a dreary period in Russian history. While he set out for Novgorod to
receive the allegiance of that great city, the princes Boris of Rostof, Gleb
of Bielo Ozero, Feodor of Yaroslavl, and Andrew of Gorodetz the brother
of Dimitri, marched their troops southwards, at the command of Mangu
Timur, to assist the Tartars in their campaign against the Yasses or
Ossetes, who rivalled the usual fame of mountaineers in submitting
uneasily to the yoke. The allies, on the 8th of February, 1278, captured
the town of Tetiakof, situated on or near the site of the modern fortress
of Vladikaukas. The grateful Tartars divided the spoil with the
Russians.^ On another side we read how Mangu Timur sent Theognost,
the Bishop of Serai, three times to Byzantium as his envoy to the
Emperor.

Meanwhile Russia was suffering from the jealousies and quarrels of its

• Kararazin, iv. 138-142. t /i., 149. I /<<., 150. Lelewel Hist, de Pologne, i. 39.

I Karanxrin, iv. 151 and 156. || Golden Horde, 257.

IT Karamzin, iv. 157. Golden Horde, 257.

MANGU TIMUR KHAN. 13I

many princes, and the Tartars were naturally reaping the fruits of such
disorder. We read that in 1278 they burnt Riazan. Gleb, Prince of
Rostof, on the other hand, returned from a visit to the horde well laden
with booty while his son Michael and Feodor, Prince of Yaroslavl, entered
the Tartar service,* surely a degrading mercenary duty for Christian
princes to be performing. In 1279, on the death of Boleslas, King
of Poland, the Tartars and Russians in alliance devastated the districts
of Lublin and Sendomir, and although they were beaten on the 3rd
of February, 1280, at Goslic, near Sendomir, they returned home with
their plunder. The following year Andrew, the brother of the Grand
Prince, incited by some of the boyards, conspired against his brother,
conciliated the Tartars by presents and flattery, and basely obtained
from them the title of Grand Prince, and Mangu Timur sent his
" voivodes " Kawghadi and Alchidai with an army to assist him, and with
an order to the various dependent princes to join him with their troops.
They dared but obey, and the Grand Prince seeing himself deserted fled.
The Tartars then proceeded to react the part they performed in the days
of Batu. Murom, the environs of Suzdal, Vladimir, Yurief, Rostof,
Pereislavl, Tuer, and Torjek were ravaged, and they advanced as far as
Novgorod. They burned and pillaged the houses, churches, and
monasteries ; carried off the sacred images, the precious vessels, and the
books with jewelled covers ; troops of people were marched off as slaves,
and the nuns and wives of the priests were made the victims of Tartar
lust, while the poor peasants who sought refuge in the deserts perished
there from hunger. Pereislavl having'dared to resist them, received the
most dire punishment, and, as one chronicler says, " There was not a
survivor who had not to grieve the death of a son or a father, of a
brother or a friend ;" Andrew, the son of Alexander Nevski, meanwhile
fraternised with the Tartars and sent them back to the Great Khan with
his acknowledgments.t Thus was Russia at this time the victim more of
its own sons than of the ruthless foes whom they called in to their help.

It was in the reign of Mangu Timur that the Genoese greatly extended
their colonies in Southern Russia. They had hitherto shared the
Crimean trade with the Venetians, but now determined to monopolise it
altogether. With the consent of the Tartars, they founded factories at
Kaffa, and built bazaars and shops there, and then surrounded the settle-
ment with a rampart and ditch, and they rapidly monopolised the chief
trade in corn, stock, fish, and caviare : the Venetians being Hmited to
their small settlement at Old Tana.

Architectural remains and inscriptions still survive to testify to their
ancient importance. The Genoese retained their power and influence
in these parts until the fall of the Eastern empire, when they were
almost exterminated by the Turks. Marinis tells us, in 1665,

• Golden Horde, 258. t Karamzin, 160. Golden Horde, 259.

132 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

that Getioese families still survived at Tanais or Azof. Among these
were some of the famous name of Spinola.* The rise of the Genoese
supremacy was probably due to the influence of Ung Timur, to whom the
city of Krim had been granted, as I have said, by Mangu Timur.

Krim was a neighbouring town to Kaffa, and from it the Crimea
derived its name. It was one of the most prosperous towns of Asia. So
large was it that a well mounted horseman could hardly ride round it in
half a day. It is now represented by the poor village of Old Krim on
the Churuxa, near Kaffa.t

Those who know wliat the three months' journey from the Crimea to
Khiva means will not fail to appreciate some of the benefits which the
strong-handed Tartars conferred upon this district. We are told that
although the people of Krim were rich they were also avaricious. Ihey
hoarded up their gold and neglected the poor, and they built mosques
to make themselves a name rather than for the sake of religion. With
Kaffa, Krim was the great entrepot of the slave trade, by which the
supply of Mamluks, &c., was furnished ; and we are told that the
Egyptian sultans obtained the privilege from the, Greek emperors of
sending annually one ship for the purchase of such slaves in Circassia
and the Lesser Tartary. Sometime after they possessed themselves of
Kaffa, the Genoese also occupied Sudak, Balaklava, Azof, and Cherson.
The Venetians took refuge at Old Tana, not far from Azof, which was
their mart in these parts for a long time-l

I shall postpone the account of Nogai's intercourse with the
Bulgarians to a later chapter, and shall now revert to the Eastern
politics of the horde.

Khubilai Khan had in 1265 nominated Borak to the Khanship of
Jagatai, intending him to make head against his rival Kaidu. He,
however, made friends with the latter, and seized on Turkestan, which
was an Imperial appanage and did not belong to his Khanate. The two
allies agreed to divide Transoxiana between them, but on Kaidu's
withdrawal for a while Borak seized a portion of his friend's territory.
Kaidu having returned, was defeated on the banks of the Sihun by his .
treacherous friend. We are then told that Mangu Timur sent an army
of 50,000 men, commanded by his uncle Berkejar, to assist Kaidu.
Borak was beaten, but the three princes afterwards made peace and
divided Transoxiana between them.S Borak took two-thirds of Trans-
oxiana, while the remaining third was divided between Kaidu and
Mangu Timur. This peace was ratified in the year 1269. As Borak
complained of the smallness of his heritage, it was agreed he should
invade Khorassan. He accordingly did so in the following spring, but
was badly beaten, and soon after died. This was in the year 1270. ||

* Karamzin, iv. 386. t Id., 145. ; Von Hammer, 254, 255.

♦ Ilkhans, 259, 260. D'Ohsson, iii. 428-431. I D'Ohsson, iii. 429 and 432.

MANGU TIMUR KHAN. 1 33

It would seem, as I have said, that Mangu Timur inherited Bereke's
strife with the Ilkhan Abaka, and we are told by Wassaf that he
marched an army of 30,000 men against him. Abaka in turn posted a
considerable army close to the defiles of the Caucasus, and built the wall
called Siba, at Derbend, to protect his frontier.* The two rivals seem
then to have made peace, and, according to Abulghazi, were on amicable
terms for the rest of their Hves, and frequently exchanged presents.!

We are told consequently that Mangu Timur sent to congratulate
Abaka upon his victory over Borak, and offered him presents of
gerfalcons and other noble birds.:}: Abaka outlived Mangu Timur, and
died in 1282. It is probable that Mangu Timur was withdrawing
from his older poUcy. We read that in 1275 Khubilai sent his sons
Numugan and Kukju and some other princes to make head against
Kaidu and his confederates, and appointed Numugan as governor
of Almaligh. Among the princes sent with the latter was one named
Toktimur, who proposed to Shireki, the son of the Khakan Mangu,
to put him on the throne. The conspirators seized Khubilai's two sons,
as well as the general Hantung. The former were handed over to Mangu
Timur, chief of the ulus of Juchi, and the general to Kaidu. Khubilai
having sent troops against the rebels, the latter were defeated, and
Toktimur, discontented with Shireki, set up Sarban, the son of
Jagatai, in his place, and sent messengers to inform Kaidu and Mangu
Timur of the fact. Toktimur was himself shortly after killed by Shireki,
to whom Sarban submitted.§ Shireki, we are told, sent him to Kochi
Oghul, grandson of Juchi, but on passing through the district of Jend
and Uskend his escort was overpowered by some of his own retainers
who nomadised there, and he was released. ||

This Kochi Oghul, grandson of Juchi, was assuredly no other than
the Kapge, son of Orda, son of Juchi, who is mentioned by Abulfeda, and
who tells us he was the lord of Ghazni and Bamian and the neighbouring
provinces, and that he died in the year 1 301. IT The direction taken by
the escort, which in marching from the country of the Imil towards
Kochi Oghul went by way of Uzkend and Jend, makes it nearly
certain that they were bound for Ghazni. Now the history of Ghazni at
this period is singularly obscure. As I have mentioned, in 1262, when
the quarrel arose between Bereke and Khulagu, the contingent of the
Golden Horde which marched with the latter scattered, and one of them
under Nigudar and Onguja fled eastwards and seized upon Ghazni and
other districts bordering on India.** There can be small doubt that it
was over these emigrants that Kochi Oghul ruled, and his name is
perhaps disguised in the Onguja above named ; but let us on with our

* Wassaf, 95. t Abulghazi, 182. J D'Ohsson, iii. 456.

^ D'Ohsson, ii. 452-454- yi»tf, vol. i. 176. U Id., 454-455. T Op. cit., v. 170.

134 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Story. Numughan is called Lemghan by Wassaf, who tells us further
that Mangu Timur sent him back to his father with suitable state.*

Mangu Timur, according to Novairi, died in the month rabi ul ewel
679 (?>., in the year 1280), of a tumour in the throat, which he had
pierced,t and he left nine sons, namely, Alghui (whose mother was called
Chichek), Buzluk, Seraibuka, Toghrul, Bulakhan, Tudan, Tukta, Kadan,
and Kutukan. Rashid names a tenth son Abaji.

The Mamluk Sultan Kalavun had sent two envoys, named Shems ud
din Sankur el Gutmi and Seif ud din el Khas Turki, to the court
of Mangu Khan with a present of sixteen sets of State robes, of which
some were for Mangu Timur, others for Nogai, others for Aukji,J others
for Tuda Mangu (who succeeded him on the throne), for Tulabugha, and
for the Khatuns Chichek, Elchi, Tunkin or Tutelin, Kadaran or Tataian,
Sultan, and Khutlu ; for Maou or Madua, the commander of the left
wing ; for Tira, commander of the right wing ; for Kalik, wife of Kukji,§
and for the Sultan Ghiath ud din, son of Iz ud din, the late governor of
Rum. The envoys also took with them all kinds of objects fit for
presents, magnificent stuffs, beautiful robes, precious jewels, bows,
cuirasses, and helmets, to be distributed to the grandees according to
their rank. On the arrival of the embassy Mangu Timur was already
dead, and the presents were given to his successor, by whom the envoys
were magnificently entertained. They were afterwards received by Nogai
and the other princes. || Mangu Timur, we are told, was styled Kilk,
which means an embroidered cloth, and which Von Hammer connects
with the English word quilt.lF He was the first of the sovereigns
of Kipchak to coin money in his own name. On some of these coins
he styles himself, " Mangu Timur the Supreme," and on others " the
Just." They were nearly all struck at Bolghari.** The only exception
is a coin mentioned by M. Soret, struck in the year 665, the first of
Mangu Timur's reign, at Krim.tt

* Wassaf, 127. t Makrizi adds that he died at Aktukiah. Op. cit. ii. 201.

I Makrizi calls him the brother of Mangu Timur and styles him King, but Mangu Timur
had no brother of that name. I believe him to be the person who lower down is called the
agha or patriarch among the Mongol princes, and who was the grandson of Bereke
D'Ohsson, in his translation of a passage of Novairi, calls him Edekyi, (Op. cit., iv. 750.)
§ He is called Abaji by D'Ohsson, loc. cit.
0 Makrizi, ii. 200. Novairi in D'Ohsson, iv. 750. 751. ^ Golden Horde, 261.

** Fraehn, op. cit., 648.
tt Froehn publishes a coin of Mangu Timur with a mutilated inscription, on which he read
hypothetically " Moneta Chorasmiae," but the two letters which alone remain of the name
won't bear this reading. Nor is it probable that Mangu Timur exercised much, if any,
authority in Khuarezm. It would seem in fact to have then formed part of the government of
Tiansoxiania, which was under the control of the Imperial commissary Massud Bey, for in 1272
the llkhan Abaka, who was then at peace and on cordial terms with Mangu Timur, sent an
army under Yussuf and Kargadai, the sons of Chin Timur, of Churgadai, and Ilabugha against
Khuarezm. This army devastated Urgenj, the capital, and Khiva and Karakush, two of the
chief towns of Khuarezm. (D'Ohsson, iii. 457, 458. Ilkhans, i. 271, 272.) This makes it
exceedingly improbable that Mangu Timur should have had authority or struck coins at
Khuarezm.

TUDA MANGU KHAN. 1 35

TUDA MANGU KHAN.

We now reach a period when, to use a French phrase, the solidarity
of the Khanate of Kipchak was giving way. Nogai, who had become
very powerful by his experience in war, by his alliance with the Byzantine
empire, and by the number of tribes who obeyed him, held a separate
court of his own, and was fast thrusting aside the feudal bonds which
made him the servant and not the peer of the Lord of Serai, and events
were ripening which made his path in this direction more easy. He had
faithfully served both Bereke and Mangu Timur, although it would
appear that he had not very cordially, if at all, adopted the faith of
Islam, and remained attached to that cosmopoHtan religion which was
patronised by the early Mongol Khans. The Mongol law of succession,
which was admirably suited to a pastoral or predatory life, gave rise to
difficulties under more settled conditions, and was the ready means of
intrigue. A sovereign who had once occupied the throne did not like
the heritage to pass away from his descendants to the descendants of his
brother ; and we have lately witnessed in Turkey the lever which may be
made out of this natural prejudice for opening huge rents in the civil
structure. Again, however reasonable it may be that brother should
succeed brother where the children are still children, it loses much of its
force when these children are grown men and themselves fit to take
charge of the helm of the State. It was thus now. Mangu Timer's
elder brother Bartu had a son, Tulabugha, who had, as I have mentioned
already, distinguished himself as the companion of Nogai in the cam-
paign in Lithuania. He was the eldest son of the eldest son, and was
now quite old enough to rule, but the Mongol law of succession excluded
him in favour of his uncle Tuda Mangu, the younger brother of Mangu
Timur.

I have explained how the Russian Grand Prince Dimitri was displaced
by his younger brother Andrew, and how the latter was supported by the
court at Serai. It would seem that on the retreat of the Tartar forces
which had installed him, his partisans were overcome, for we find him
once more repairing to Serai in the beginning of Tuda Mangu's reign.
The Tartars were only too glad of such an opportunity, entered the
province of Suzdal, and ravaged it in various directions, and also
advanced in the same rwthless manner upon Pereislavl.* Andrew himself
returned from the horde in company with the Tartar grandees, Turai
Timur and Ali.t Dimitri thereupon repaired to the court of Nogai, and
was by him reinstated on the throne of Vladimir. About the same
time that potent chief married his daughter to Feodor, the son of
Rostislaf, Prince of Smolensko and Pereislavl. On the other hand, we

J Karam^in, iv. 164. t Golden Horde, 259.

136 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

read of a visit paid by the'metropolitan Maximus to the court at Serai,
doubtless in connection with the see there.* Tuda Mangu, who feared
Nogai, was constrained to accept his decision in regard to the Grand
Principality, the two brothers Dimitri and Andrew made outward
show of reconciliation, and even the turbulent people of Novgorod, who
had espoused the latter's cause, deemed it prudent to submit to
Dimitri.t

Let us now turn our view to another part of Russia. The principality
of Kursk was at this time governed by the two princes Oleg and
Sviatoslaf, both descended from the ancient line of Chernigof. The
former reigned at Rylsk and Vorgol, and the latter at Lipetsk. Ahmed,
the Mongol baskak or commissary of Rylsk, who farmed the taxes there,
had performed his office in a very tyrannical manner, and had built two
villages near Rylsk, where many bad characters, who plundered the
neighbourhood, found asylum. Oleg, at the request of Sviatoslaf, went
to Serai to complain ; and the Khan gave him a small body of Tartars,
with orders to destroy Ahmed's two villages. This was accordingly
done. Ahmed was then at Nogai's court, and he represented to the
latter that Oleg and Sviatoslaf were his secret enemies. " Send your
falconers to catch swans in Oleg's country," he added, " and summon
him to your presence, and you will find that he will not obey." Oleg was
not disposed to trust himself at Nogai's court to answer these attacks,
and on the approach of Nogai he fled to Serai, while Sviatoslaf found
refuge in the forests of Voronej.

Nogai's troops handed over thirteen boyards with some poor
travellers to the vengeance of Ahmed, who, having put the former to
death, released the latter, gave them the bloody garments of his
victims, and bade them return home and show them as a warning to
those who should offend a baskak. The villages which Ahmed had built
were again tenanted, and became rich with plunder, while the princi-
pality became almost deserted, the people fleeing before Ahmed's agents,
who exposed to view the mangled remains of the boyards. Ahmed
himself repaired to Nogai's court, and left his two brothers in charge.
Sviatoslaf now emerged from his hiding-place and put to death a great
number of the robbers, not thinking of the consequences- When
Oleg returned from the horde, having brought together the people and
buried the remains of the boyards, which were still suspended from trees,
he, to avoid the vengeance of Ahmed, declared his brother Sviatoslaf a
criminal, in that he had attacked the plunderers instead of submitting
humbly to the Khan. Sviatoslaf bravely defended his conduct, but
Oleg, having once more been to Serai, returned and put his brother to
death. Well may Karamzin denounce the cowardice and meanness of
the annalists who, in applauding this act, maintain that remonstrance

• Id., a6o. t Karamzin, iv. 163.

TUDA MANGU KHAN. . I 37

to such tyranny was a crime ; but Oleg and his two sons were speedily
punished, being killed by a third brother Alexander, who found means of
conciliating the Tartars. They contented themselves with receiving
presents, and left to the Russian princes the privilege of killing each
other.*

Let us now turn to Tuda Mangu's Eastern pohcy. Noyairi tells us
how in the year 1283 he sent the fakir Mejd ud din Ata and Nur ud din
as envoys to the Egyptian Sultan with a request that they might be
permitted to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, doubtless a vicarious
pilgrimage on his own account. Makrizi tells us he also asked that a
standard of the Khahf and another of the Sultan might be sent him,
under which he could do battle with the enemies of the faith. This author
wrongly calls him Mangu Timur, who was already dead.t Novairi tells
us further that Tuda Mangu was much devoted to religious exercises.
Neglecting the affairs of State, he surrounded himself with sheikhs
and fakirs, and lived an austere life. He was given to understand that
the State wanted a ruler, and accordingly he resigned the throne to
Tulabugha.t

This is confirmed by Abulfeda,§ who tells us he abdicated in favour
of Tulabugha and dedicated himself to God, and by Makrizi, who
says he voluntarily renounced the throne of Kipchak, announced his
intention of devoting himself to a religious life, and that he advised his
subjects to elect Tulabugha as their chief. || This, according to Novairi,
was in the year 686, i.e.^ ii%'].

Tulabugha was in a sense the rightful heir to the throne, and repre-
sented the senior branch of the family of Batu Khan, being the eldest son
of Bartu, who was the eldest son of Toghan, who, although he was
Batu's second son, became by the extinguishment of the family of Sertak,
the head of the family ; but his father had never ruled himself, and he
lacked the prestige, which in the East counts for a great deal, of having
had a sovereign for his father. It is generally supposed that he
succeeded to the throne as the actual ruler of Kipchak, and this view
is endorsed by the names of Von Hammer, D'Ohsson, Frashn, &:c., yet I
believe it to be erroneous.

He is not named among the Khans of Kipchak by Abulghazi, nor yet
in the very ample Hst of Khuandemir. By both of these authors Toktu
or Toktugha is made the immediate successor of Tuda Mangu.lf This is
the case also in the list of the Khans of Kipchak given in the Yuan shi,**
which may be considered as the official list of the Khans kept at the
headquarters of the Mongol world. Marco Polo also, in his 24th chapter
makes Toktu the immediate successor of Tuda Mangu.tt But we may
go further. Apparently there are no coins known with the name of

* Karamzin, iv, 166-171. t Makrizi, part ii. 64. Note, 65. + D'Ohsson, iv. 751.

% Annals, v. 89. |I Op. cit., ii. 91. <[ Abulghazi, 183. Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 114.

** Bretschneider, 106. 1+ Op. cit., ii. 491.

138 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Tulabugha upon them. Those assigned to him by Fraehn and others are
so assigned on the ground of their dates; but this is a very unsafe guide in
such a question, for we actually find a coin of Tuda Mangu which seems to
be dated in 1288, two years therefore after his retirement from the world.*
I have small doubt myself, therefore, that Tulabugha was never a Khan
at all. My own view is that when Tuda Mangu retired from the world he
continued to be the titular Khan, while Tulabugha controlled the govern-
ment; a kind of mayor of the palace to the Roi faindant, a sort of secular
ruler like the Tipa of Thibet in old days, or the Tycoon in Japan, or
probably more nearly like to the position filled by the Great Timur in his
early years as the first subject of the Khans of Jagatai. He doubtless
commanded the armies and otherwise controlled matters, but Tuda
Mangu continued meanwhile to be the figurehead of the State and the
nominal ruler of the Khanate. Tulabugha had distinguished himself a
few years before, as I have mentioned, in company with Nogai in a
campaign in Lithuania. From the account of Rashid it would seem that
his brother Kunjuk-bugha shared his new authority.!

In 1285 we find the Tartars making a terrible invasion of Hungary,
under the leadership of Tulabugha and Nogai, and compelling the
GaUician princes to march with them. This campaign, which was
disastrous for them, I shall describe in a later chapter on the Nogais.
Here it will suffice to say that Tulabugha is reported to have retired on
foot accompanied only by a woman and a sumpter beast.f This disaster
did not, however, prostrate them, for two years later, namely, in
1286-7, we find Tulabugha and Nogai making another great campaign.
This time against Poland.

Boleslas V. of Poland having died without children, Leo, Prince of
Gallicia, deemed it a good opportunity to secure the Polish crown, but the
grandees of Cracovia elected Leshko, nephew of Boleslas. Leo appealed
to Nogai for assistance, which was granted him, but in the battle which
followed he was beaten ; 8,000 of his people were killed, and 2,000 of
them with seven standards were captured. This, as I have said, was
towards the end of 1286.

The principal Polish chiefs at this time were Leshko (the black) of
Cracow, and Konrad of Masovia. The invaders advanced amidst smoking
churches and monasteries through the districts of Lublin, Masovia,
Sendomir, Siradia, and as far as Cracow. Leshko had fled into Hungary,
but his deputy George defeated a section of them near Sendomir. On
Christmas eve they set out from Cracow into Volhynia. At Vladimir
they divided 30,000 boys and maidens, and on leaving left the plague
behind them as a legacy. § The chronicler Dlugos has a lugubrious
story, that this plague, which killed 12,000 men in Gallicia alone, was

* Fraehn, op. cit., 196, 197. t D'Ohsson, iv. 758. I Karamzin, iv. i8ii

$ Wolff, 413. Golden Horde, 264.

TUDA MANGU KHAN. 139

caused by the Tartars having infected the water with poisonous matter
which they extracted from dead corpses.*

According to Karamzin the crushing of Poland was only averted by
the quarrel of the two generals, Tulabugha and Nogai, who separated
and returned by different routes. The former, we are told, on his return
halted in Gallicia, and compelled the princes there, who had been (perhaps
not altogether unwillingly) his companions in his march across the
Vistula, to entertain him,t

In 1286 we read of an attack made by the Tartars, under Ortai, the
son of Timur, who was probably a dependent of Nogai's, upon the
frontier districts of Murom, Riazan, and Wordvva| (? Mordwa).

About this time we find the Tartars of Kipchak engaging in another
campaign against Persia. The latter country was now governed by the
Ilkhan Arghun, who had succeeded to the throne on the nth of August,
1284, by the murder of his predecessor Ahmed. It was probably to
avenge his death that we find the Khan of Kipchak sending an army of
5,000 men to invade Persia. News reached Arghun at Pelsuwan that
Toktu had passed the defile of Derbend and had plundered the
merchants there. He accordingly set out on the 7th of May, 1289, for
Shaburan, but meanwhile the army of Kipchak had deemed it prudent to
retire. In the spring of 1290, while Arghun was at Meragha, news
arrived that a fresh and much larger army was again advancing by way
of Derbend, Arghun set out once more and reached Shaburan on the
nth of May, 1290, and both armies met on the banks of the Karasu,
then forming the boundary between Persia and Kipchak. The army o
the latter Khanate was 10,000 strong, and was commanded by Abaji,
Menglibuka, and Toktu, the sons of Mangu Tim.ur.§ Three hundred of
the Kipchaks were killed, among whom were the two chiefs, Burultai and
Kadai, while among the prisoners was the Prince Jeriktai.|| This
narrative was derived by Von Hammer from Rashid and Binaketi, and
seems all right so far as it goes ; but we can supplement it with a very
valuable notice (unknown apparently to Von Hammer), from Novairi,
whose knowledge of the Kipchak was very intimate, and which enables
us to clear up the further story very materially. Novairi tells us that
Tulabugha sent an army against the country of Kerk(Circassia ? or perhaps
Kirk Majar, the old name of the city of Majar), and ordered Nogai to
march and join him with his tumans.^ The two armies having united,
advanced into the country of Kerk, where they pillaged and killed, and
then retired, but there was much snow about, and Nogai left Tulabugha

* Karamzin, iv. 182. t Id,. \ Golden Horde, 264.

§ Von Hammer says no son of Mangu Timur called Menglibuka occurs in the tables, and I
find that Abulghazi calls the Kipchak generals Toktu and Turktai, the latter probably a cor-
ruption of Toghrul, a son of Mangu Timur, named in the genealogies. (Abulghazi, op. cit., 182.)

II Golden Horde, 265, 266.
% Tuman = 10,000 men, but it is used by the Mongols as equivalent to a division or section.

I40 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and went to his winter quarters, where he arrived safe and sound.
Tulabugha's forces, on the other hand, got lost, and suffered great want.
His men were forced to eat their horses, their hunting dogs, and their
dead companions. He suspected that Nogai had been treacherous to
him, and conceived a violent hatred for him. On his return home from
the expedition he prepared an army to march against Nogai and the
sons of Mangu Timur, who were his proteges. Nogai was an old and
crafty person. He pretended to be ignorant of Tulabugha's feelings
towards him, and when the latter summoned him to his presence to ask
his advice, he sent word to Tulabugha's mother. " Your son is young,
and I wish to give him advice, but I can only do so alone. He alone
ought to know what I wish to tell him, and I wish him to come to me
with a very small escort." The princess advised her son to trust
Nogai, and he accordingly disbanded his forces and ordered Nogai
to go to him. I may add that Rashid tells us that when Nogai went
to see Tulabugha he feigned to be very ill, and even put fresh blood
in his mouth to make-believe he was spitting blood.* Nogai went
at the head of his troops, and with him went Toktu, Buzluk, Serai-
bugha, and Tudan, sons of Mangu Timur. When he drew near the
place fixed upon for the interview, he put his troops in ambush, under
the command of the four sons of Mangu Timur already named, and
went with a few others to see Tulabugha. The latter went to meet him
with Alghui, Toghrul, Bulakhan, Kadan, and Kutugan, other sons of
Mangu Timur, who had sided with him. The two princes met, and were
about to exchange greetings, when the cavalry, who had been in ambush,
came forth. Nogai compelled Tulabugha to dismount, and then with the
assistance of his proteges strangled him. He then addressed the young
princes, and said, " Tulabugha has usurped the throne of your father, and
your brothers who are with him have agreed to arrest you and put you to
death. I deliver them up to you, and you may do with them as you will."
Upon which Toktu had them put to death.t

This account is consistent and clear, and Novairi no doubt got it from
the Egyptian archives, Egypt then being in very close relationship with
Kipchak. He was much more in the way of getting correct information
than Rashid or the writers of Persia, with which country the Kipchak
had only hostile intercourse. It explains the statements of Rashid and
Binaketi about the four tetrarchs or joint sovereigns, which are as they
stand at issue with what we know from the coins and from other sources,
and otherwise quite contrary to Mongol traditions. The confused account
of Rashid has been followed by Abulghazi, and strangely enough the
narrative of Marco Polo, otherwise tolerably correct in its account of the
Kipchak, is hopelessly involved at this point, as Colonel Yule has
shown. X

* Von Hammer, 366. 1 Nov^iiri in D'Ohsson, iv. 751, 752. J Op. cit., ii. 497-499.

TOKTOGU OR TOKTU KHAN. 14I

Tulabugha was killed in the autumn of 1290, and it is probable that with
him also perished his brother Kunjuk, who is made one of the tetrarchs by
Von Hammer. I don't know when Tuda Mangu died. As I have said, we
have a coin of his probably dated in 688 heg., i.e., 1289.* It may be that
he was put to death by Tulabugha and Nogai, as the exceedingly con-
fused narrative of Marco Polo in chapter xxix. of his work imphes. We
have no notice of him after the coin just named- Tuda Mangu was
styled Kasghan, another form of the word Kazan, which means a kettle.t
On his coins he styles himself Tuda Mangu Khan and Tuda Mangu
Padishah. They were struck both at Bolghari and Krim,t and Fraehn
publishes specimens of the years 682, 683, 686, and 688.§ Von Hammer
says his wife was called Kutluk, and that she belonged to the Tartar
tribe.

TOKTOGU OR TOKTU.

The accession of Toktu was the first event of the kind in the history
of Kipchak which was marked by violence. It was in a measure con-
doned by the strong hand with which he held the reins of power
afterwards, and thus secured a period of considerable prosperity for the
Khanate, and by the necessity there was to integrate a power which was
in danger of faUing to pieces. It is not improbable that Rashid's story
already told about the tetrarchs may have had this foundation also, that
during Tulabugha's reign Mangu Timur's sons did set up claims to the
succession, and were supported by Nogai, who no doubt welcomed the
part of Warwick, and liked nothing better than being a king-maker.
Besides Nogai, Toktu had also courted the friendship of Ilkeji or
Bilkeji, the son of Kukju, the son of Bereke who was then Agha or senior
prince of the Imperial family. ||

Toktu's mother was Elchi Khatun, the daughter of Gulmish Agha.^
His name is written Toktu in Arabic and Toktogu in Mongol characters.
On one of his coins published by M. Savilief he seems to style himself
" The just Sultan, Mir Toktu," which is probably the explanation of the
name Toktumir, sometimes given him by the Russian chroniclers.**

When Nogai had put his protege on the throne and pardoned the
chiefs who had taken the part of Tulabugha, he returned home again,tt
and shortly after, in 1291, we read of an invasion by the Tartars in
Poland. They marched in their usual manner as far as Sendomir.{|

Meanwhile let us turn for a while to the Grand Principality. I have
described how Andrew was constrained to retire after attempting to
displace his brother Dimitri. He remained quiet for two years, and then

* Vid.e ante, 138. f Golden Horde, 261.

I Frffihn, op. cit., 196 and 648. J Id. Opusc. Post., 110. (| Golden Horde, 266.

■I Journ, Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 114. ** Soret, Lettre au cap., Kossikofski, Brussels, :86o.

It Novairi in D'Ohsson, iv. 753, \l Golden Horde, 267.

142 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

sent for Tzarevitch from the horde and prepared for war ; but Dimitri
assembhng his feudatories drove away the prince and captured some of
Andrew's boyards. A similar feat of bearding the Tartars was performed
at Rostof, where a number of the invaders who had settled down and
were pillaging the inhabitants were driven away. The Prince of Rostof
sent his brother to justify the conduct of his people, and the Tartars were
either pacified by his presents, or else the internal troubles of the horde
did not allow them to take advantage of such temerity.*

In 1292 Alexander, the son of the Grand Prince Dimitri, went to the
horde of Nogai and there died. The intrigues of Dimitri's brother
Andrew began to have effect at headquarters. We read that he repaired
there with the dependent Princes of Rostof, Bielosersk, Yaroslavl,
Smolensk, and Tuer, and the Bishop Terasi, who were his allies.
Karamzin says he went to Nogai's camp, who was the patron of Dimitri,
but Von Hammer, with greater probability, makes them go to Toktu's
headquarters at Serai. They went partially to have their titles con-
firmed, but also to complain of Dimitri. Toktu accordingly sent his
brother Tudakan,who is called Diuden by the Russian writers. Andrew
himself and Feodor of Yaroslavl performed the disgraceful duty of guides
into the interior of the country. The Grand Prince fled to Pskof to his
relative, the Lithuanian Dovmont, while the Tartars proceeded to seat his
brother on the throne. They had not taken so much trouble, however, for
this very small reward. They proceeded after their wont to attack and
pillage the Russian towns. Murom, Suzdal, Vladimir, Moscow, and
many others suffered ; their inhabitants were carried off as slaves,
and their girls and women dishonoured. The churches were sacked, and
even the iron roof of the cathedral of Vladimir, quoted as a wonderful
piece of workmanship by the chroniclers, was broken. Pereislavl was
deserted by its inhabitants, who took refuge in the woods. Tuer alone
of the cities of Central Russia escaped. Although its prince was absent
at the horde, the boyards and citizens swore on the cross to perish rather
than give up their town. They assembled a large army, which was
reinforced by fugitives from the other desolated districts, and presently
Michael, their young prince, having returned, he was received enthusiasti-
cally by the people. The prudent Tartars, who did not wish to spend
their blood but to acquire treasure, turned aside when they found the
preparations going on, went towards Novgorod, and pillaged the
town of Volok. The merchants of Novgorod sent presents to Tudakan,
with protestations of devotion to Andrew, whom they received with
cordiality.

The succession of the Russian princes resembled very curiously that
of the Tartars. When a father distributed appanages to his sons,
they became their private domains for life, [and when the eldest

* Karamzin, iv. 171.

TOKTOGU OR TOKTU KHAN. 1 43

succeeded to the overlordship of the rest as Grand Prince he retained his
minor appanage. Thus Dimitri, when driven away from Vladimir, tried
to return to his special appanage of Pereislavl, but his march was
arrested at Torjek by his brother, to whom he was obliged to abandon
his treasure. He afterwards fled to Tuer. Michael of Tuer and the
bishop of that ancient town concurred in urging peace upon the brothers.
Dimitri at last consented to abdicate the throne, but he fell ill and died
almost immediately. This was in the year 1294.^

During his reign Russia reached almost the lowest point of its
degradation. The Tartars harried it to and fro, led by its own princes.
In 1293 the Swedes founded the town of Wiborg to overawe the Fins.
This fortress was a menace to the Novgorodians, and was meant as a
focus whence to spread the Roman Catholic faith in Carelia, whence also
to intercept the profits of the trade between the other Hanseatic towns
and Novgorod the Great. On another side the Lithuanians, downtrodden
but cruel, also inflicted deep wounds on the neighbouring Russian
provinces.t

In the year 1294 Toktu, who is here called Toktimur, made a raid
into the principality of Tuer and ravaged the land.j In the early spring
of that year Toktu sent an embassy to Gaikhatu, the Ilkhan of Persia,
who was spending the winter at Meragha. The Princes Kalmitai and
Pulad were at the head of this embassy. They were well received, and
on the 7th of April joined in the ceremony of founding a new city on the
river Kur, which was named Kutlugh baligh or the lucky city.§ Gaikhatu
died the next year, as did also Khubilai, the great overlord of the Mongol
world, to whom Toktu, like the other Western Khans, was to some extent
feudally subject. The same year, i.e., in 1295, Andrew, the new Grand
Prince of Russia, went with his wife to Toktu's camp to pay his respects,
and no doubt also to receive due investiture, and to settle a quarrel
between himself and the dependent princes. Alexander Newrui was
appointed by the Mongols to go to Vladimir and mediate between the
rivals. D We are told he listened to both sides with patience, but
even his presence could not restrain the passions of the contending
princes, who drew their swords. The bishops, Simeon of Vladimir and
Ismael of Serai, intervened and prevented bloodshed. A hollow peace
was made, and the Tartar envoy retired covered with presents, but the
princes were soon at strife again.^ Meanwhile a quarrel between more
important persons occurred elsewhere. This was between Toktu and his
former patron Nogai. The latter had been several times summoned to
the court, but had always evaded the invitation, and at length
matters were brought to a crisis, which I have described further on.**

* Von Hammer, Golden Horde, s68. Karamzin, iv, 171-178.

t Karamzin, iv. 178-180. J Karamzin, iv. 190. Golden Horde, 268.

§ Golden Horde, 269. Ilkhans, i. 404. |] Karamzin, iv* 19a, 193. Golden Horde, 269.

IT Karamzin, iv. 193. ** ViAtf sub. voc. Nogai.

144 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Here I need only say that it ended in the complete defeat and death of
Nogai and the suppression of his family. On the final defeat of Chaga,
Nogai's son, we are told that Toktu gave the appanage of Nogai to his
brother Buzluk, and gave Yanji, the son of Kumush, the inheritance of
his brother Abaji, while he gave two of his own sons, Irbasa and
Beguilbugha, appanages within the old territory of Nogai; the former was
settled on a river whose name D'Ohsson does not transliterate, while the
latter was planted in the country of Saikji on the Don (? Saksin), and in
the neighbourhood of Derbend. Toktu also gave an appanage to his
brother Seraibugha.* Shortly after this, namely, in 1301, Turai, the
surviving son of Nogai, plotted to recover his father's dominions. He
persuaded Seraibugha to rebel against his brother. The latter tried to
draw his other brother Buzluk into the plot, but Buzluk informed
Toktu, who had the conspirators seized and put to death, and he gave
Seraibugha's inheritance to his own son.t In 1307 died Buzluk, Toktu's
brother, and also his son Irbasa, who commanded the forces under him.J
Novairi tells us that in the same year, in 707, i.e., 1307, news arrived in
Egypt that Toktu, irritated against the Genoese and " the pagans of the
northern countries" by reports which reached him that they were in
the habit of capturing Tartar children and selling them to the Mussul-
mans, sent troops against Kaffa. The Genoese took to their ships, so
that not one of them was captured. Toktu, however, seized such of their
goods as were deposited at Serai and in its neighbourhood^

Let us now turn again to the Tartar intercourse with Russia. In the
year 1299 Tartar auxiliaries fought beside the Russians in Poland, and
were defeated near Lublin. || The same year the final death-blow was
given to the ancient precedence of Kief, which had been so long a mere
shadow by the removal of the metropolitan throne to Vladimir, the seat
of the Grand Principality. This was the work of the metropolitan
Maximus.lF

We now reach a time when the principality of Moscow begins to come
more to the front. It was held as an appanage by Daniel, the younger
brother of the Grand Prince Andrew. In 1302 Ivan, the Prince of
Pereislavl and Dimitrof died, and left his province, which from its
population, the number of its boyards and soldiers, and the strength of
its capital, was second in importance only to Rostof among the appan-
ages to Daniel, the Prince of Moscow, who was a brave prince, and had
two years before severely defeated the Prince of Riazan, and dared to
put a number of Tartars to death. Andrew, Daniel's brother, resented
the latter's growing power, and went to the horde to complain of his
occupying Pereislavl,** but meanwhile the Prince of Moscow died
suddenly. He was the first of the Russian princes to be buried in the

Novairi in D'Ohsson, iv. 756. I Id. \ Id. \ D'Ohsson, iV. 757

II Golden Horde, 274. f Id. ** Karamzin, iv. 195, 196.

TOKTOGU OR TOKTU KHAN. 145

church of Saint Michael at Moscow, and he prepared that city to become
the eventual capital of Russia.* He was succeeded by his son George,
who proceeded once more to enlarge the principality by the conquest of
Mojaisk, a dependency of Smolensk.t After a stay of twelve months at
the horde, Andrew returned in 1303 with the Khan's envoys, called
a diet at Pereislavl, and there, in th« presence of the metropoHtan
Maximus, he read out the Khan's message, which announced that his
wish was that there should be peace in the Grand Principality, and that
the princes should cease their strife with one another.^ The Grand
Prince Andrew died in 1304, and was buried at Gorodetz on the Volga.
" None of the princes brought so many calamities on his family as he,"
says Karamzin, " and his reign of ten years was marked by disasters of
various kinds — famine and pestilence, drought and hurricane caused
dreadful destruction." While the palace of the princes of Tuer was
burnt in 1298, with all its treasures, a similar fate overtook, in the next
year, a large part of Novgorod ; and these ills in popular prejudice were
fitly marked by the appearance of the famous comet of 1301, which
exercised the skill of the Chinese astronomers, and was described in
verse by Pachymeres.§ The death of Andrew was no less disastrous
than his reign. I have already remarked how the Russians had adopted
the Eastern laws of succession, by which the eldest male within two
degrees succeeded to the throne. That throne was now contested by
George, Prince of Moscow, nephew of Andrew, and Michael of Tuer, his
uncle, and brother of the two last Grand Princes. The latter, according
to the rules just referred to, was the rightful heir, and was so acknow-
ledged by the boyards of the Grand Principality and by the people of
Novgorod ; but George refused to concur, nor would he listen to the
metropolitan Maximus, and the matter was referred to the Tartars. The
various towns of Russia were in mutual strife and in open war with one
another. The Tartars decided for Michael, who returned from the horde
with the patent of Grand Prince, and having been duly enthroned,
marched against Moscow, which he besieged twice without success, and
finally, apparently contented himself with his own territory.! It would
seem to have been a common fashion at this time for the Russian priaces
to marry Tartar wives. Thus we read that in 1304 Michael, the Prince
of Nishni Novgorod, who had gone to the horde, doubtless to get his
position confirmed, was there married.^

If we turn elsewhere we read that Toktu, in the year 1302, sent an
embassy to the court of Gazan Khan, the greatest of the Ilkhans of
Persia. Mirkhond tells us the chief envoy of Kipchak was Issa Gurkhan,
and that he was deputed to ask for the surrender of the two provinces
of Arran and Azerbaijan, so long an object of contention. Gazan was

* Id., 196, t Id., 197. I Id. § Id., 205. j Id., 212.

1" Id., 212.

U

146 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

irritated at their extravagance, they having required 325 post horses at
each station, and he told them that if they went to conquer his kingdom
they were too few, while if they were merely bearers of a message
that a suite of five persons to each ambassador was enough. As to
the two provinces, he told them they had belonged to his house since the
reign of Khulagu, and that he meant to keep them * Wassaf reports
the arrival of this embassy at some length. He tells us that in the
year 1 303 there arrived three aimaks of envoys with 370 couriers from
Toktu, by way of Derbend. He dates the great defeat of Nogai in the
beginning of the same year, and tells us that Toktu had in consequence
of it become so arrogant that he sent to demand the surrender of the
provinces of Arran and Azerbaijan, and threatened in case of refusal to
put in motion the tribes who encamped from Karakorum to Derbend ;
and as a further gauge of his meaning, he sent no presents except a
bag of millet, as if to say his army was as numerous as the grains in the
sack. Toktu's son Temta (? Tuluk), who feared the consequences, had
sent Issa Gurkan to accompany the envoys as bearer, unknown to his
father, of various presents. Among these, we are told, were Kirghis
Sonkors {i.e., jerfalcons), Karluk oxen, Slave ennines, Bulgarian sables,
and Kipchak mares.

The Ilkhan spoke defiantly to the envoys, and complained to them of
the number of their escort, as I have already mentioned, and in answer
to the symbolical message conveyed by the bag of millet, he ordered
some hens to be brought in and loosened, which speedily ate up the
grain, and he said, " It is well known that the hen, above all things likes
peace and order, and objects to fly about like a dove, while the wolf
destroys the greater part of the herd from mere wantonness."!

On the feast of the Mongol New Year, 1303, which fell on the 17th of
January,Gazan Khan gave a grand reception,which was attended by a large
concourse of notables, including the envoys from the Kipchak.! The
latter were presented with costly robes and other gifts. The twenty-
one jerfalcons they had taken with them were sent to his hunting
establishment. Each of the envoys was presented with pearls to the
value of 1,000 ducats. They were also commissioned to carry a letter
and rich presents for their master, §

While Toktu thus carried on intercourse with the Ilkhan of Persia, we
find him forming a closer tie with the Byzantine empire, the masters
of which had latterly adopted the pohcy of securing the alliance of their
northern neighbours by marriages with their natural daughters. As
Michael had married Irene to Nogai, so we now find Andronicus
surrendering his daughter Maria to the harem of the Kipchak Khan. Her
hand had been offered to him during the struggle with Nogai, but he
postponed the alliance until he had subdued that refractory relative. On

* D'Ohsson, iv. 319, 330. Note. t Wassaf, Ilkhans, ii. 350. I li., 351- 5 H^ "9.

TOKTOGU OR TOKTU KHAN. 147

the termination of the war the match was completed, and Toktu seems
to have paid the price in supplying his father-in-law with a contingent of
troops.*

By these marriages, which had now become frequent, the Emperors
endeavoured to secure the alliance of the Tartars against their trouble-
some neighbours, the Turkomans of Asia Minor, nor was it felt to
be degrading in the artificial atmosphere of Byzantium for the
Christian Emperor to send his bastard daughter to the harems of the
barbarous but powerful Mongols. With the pride that the family of
Jingis generally displayed, it is hard to see how they were satisfied with
" these children without a name," and that they did not aspire to
princesses of more legitimate blood.

In the year 1307 Toktu lost his son Irbasa, who commanded his armies
and also his brother Buzluk.t

Let us now turn once more to the intercourse of the Tartars with the
Russian princes. I have mentioned how Daniel, the Prince of Moscow,
had defeated Constantine, the Prince of Riazan. It seems that he had
also imprisoned him, and probably intended to appropriate his appanage.
George, Daniel's son, deemed that this prize might best be secured by
putting his prisoner, who had been in durance for six years, to death,
which he accordingly carried out.t This was in 1308. Yaroslaf, the
son of Constantine, appealed to the Tartars, who accordingly put him on
the throne. George, however, retained possession of the town of
Kostroma. § In the following year, Vasili, Prince of Briansk, went to the
horde to complain of his unci© Sviatoslaf Glebovitch. The Tartars
suppHed him with a contingent of troops, with which he defeated the
latter. He afterwards, with the same allies, defeated the prince of
Karachef ||

Toktu died in the year 712 of the Hejira, ?>., in I3I3.T[ According
to Khuandemir, he was drowned in a boat in the middle of the Volga.**
Abulghazi says he was buried at Seraichuk.tt After the defeat of Nogai
and his family he became absolute ruler of the Kipchak, and one of its most
powerful sovereigns. He was a pervert from Islam, and reverted to the
old faith of Jingis Khan, and with it adopted that old chief's tolerance.
He patronised the Christians. In the last year of Toktu's reign the
metropolitan Peter dethroned Ismael, the bishop of Serai, and nominated
Warsonof in his place.U

The extent of Toktu's dominion and power is best shown by the
number of his mints. Coins of his are extant struck at Serai, New
Serai, Bolghari, Ukek, Khuarezm, Krim, Jullad, and Majar, and they
range from the year 691, ?>., 1291, to 711, /.^., 1312. The legends on
these coins are very various.

* Golden Horde, 276, &c. t Norairi in D'Ohsson, iv. 757, 75S. % Karamzin, iv. 213.

§ M. II Golden Horde, 279. If Novairi, D'Ohsson, iv. 758. Golden Horde, 279.

**Journ. Asiat., 4th ser.,xvii., 115. 1tOp,cit., 183. JI Golden Horde,279.

148 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Thus he is styled Toktogu, Ghaiyas el Toktogu the Just and Toktubeg*
Frajhn has made a second Khan out of this last name, but, as I think,
without warrant. H e publishes coins struck by him at Serai, the capital
of the Golden Horde and the seat of Toktu's court,* and others struck at
Khuarezm, at the other end of the empire,t while they range in dates
from 693, /.^., 1293-4,10707, i.e., 1307-8. This makes it pretty certain
that Toktubeg is a mere synonym of the Khan Toktu, whose history we
have just been relating.

UZBEG KHAN.

According to Binaketi, Toktu left three sons behind him, Tukel aka,
Ilkasar, and Pirus, but none of them succeeded to the throne, nor were
they in fact heirs to it, since Toktu had an elder brother, Toghrul, who
left issue. The person who now succeeded was Uzbeg, the son of
Toghrul. Toghrul had sided with Tulabugha in the struggle between
him and Toktu,t and had in consequence been put to death by the latter.
In order to secure the throne for his own children, he had sent Toghrul's
young son Uzbeg to live in the dangerous country of the Circassians,
and thereupon married his widow. On his death-bed, having repented
of what he had done, he confessed to his wife, the boy's mother, where
the boy was living, and sent two Begs to bring him home, but before
their return Toktu was already dead.

Toktu's son Tukel did not appreciate his father's generosity, and
determined to seize the throne and to put Uzbeg to death. The latter
was however warned in time, and the two Begs, who had safely convoyed
Uzbeg, fell upon Tukel in the palace at Serai and put him to death. This
is one story reported by Von Hammer.§ Another is told by a continuator of
Rashid, who assigns the controversy to the resentment of certain generals
of Toktu, who disapproved of the proselytising tendencies of Uzbeg, and
who consequently determined to support the son of Toktu. " Content
yourself with our obedience, what matters our religion to you. Why
should we abandon the faith of Jingis Khan for that of the Arabs," had
been their language to him. They now determined to assassinate him at
a feast. He was warned of the plot by one Kutlugh Timur, and escaped
in time. He hastily mounted his horse and fled to his troops, with whom
he returned and put to death Tukel, who is called Tuklughbeg, and 120
of his principal supporters, and rewarded Kutlugh Timur by giving him
the chief post in the government, namely, the charge of the great
province of Khuarezm or Khiva. |I

* R^sc, &c., 203. t Id. Opusc, Post., 296. I Novairi, D'Ohsson, 753,

§ Golden Horde, 282. |I D'Ohsson, iv. 573. ©olden Horde, t%z.

UZBEG KHAN. I49

In 131 5 Baba, a prince of the Golden Horde, who is probably to be
identified with one of the rebel generals, passed with his ulus or tribe
into Persia, and entered the service of Uljaitu, the Ilkhan of Persia. He
then made an invasion of Khuarezm. Kutlugh Timur, its governor,
marched against him with 15,000 troops, but most of his men deserted,
and he had to retreat. Baba proceeded to ravage the province in all
directions. He sacked several towns, and retired with 50,000 captives
and loaded with booty. The hordes of Juchi and Jagatai were generally
on very good terms. At this time Yassavur, a prince of the house of
Jagatai, was encamped at Khojend with 20,000 men, and marched to
the rescue so quickly that he compassed a month's journey in eight days.
He attacked Baba on his return, defeated him, and compelled him to
abandon his prisoners. Uzbeg was greatly irritated at this invasion,
and the irritation was increased by the counsel of Issenbugha, the Khan
of Jagatai, who doubtless wished to see the two hordes north and south
of the Caucasus at war. Uzbeg sent Akbugha, of the race of the Kiyats
{i.e., the Mongol royal race), to Tebriz as his envoy, to demand
satisfaction. He arrived at Tebriz on September, 131 5, and the Emir
Houssein Gurkan, the commander-in-chief on the frontiers of Arran, gave
him a grand feast there. His host, however, presented him with the cup
without rising. The envoy upon this said sharply, " That he could not
accept the cup from a slave who was seated, and who had forgotten
the ancient etiquette of the Mongols, by which a gurkan {i.e., one who
had married into the Imperial family) ought to stand in the presence of
a prince of the blood." Houssein replied that he was there to execute a
mission, and not to regulate etiquette.* At the audience with Uljaitu at
Sultania Akbugha said to him, " If the Prince Baba has acted on his own
accord, let him be delivered up to us. If he did it by your orders, we
counsel you not to winter in Arran, for we shall enter that province with
an army as numerous as the sand of the desert." Uljaitu disowned
the act altogether, and had Baba put to death in the presence of the
ambassador, whom he sent home shortly after with a friendly message.

The previous year Uzbeg had sent envoys to Egypt with magnificent
presents and a letter, in which he congratulated the Khalif Nassir on the
spread of I slamism to the borders of China. In it he said that in his
empire there were now only Muhammedans. That on his elevation to
the throne he had left the northern tribes the option of war or conversion,
that those who had been obdurate had been beaten and reduced to
obedience. Nassir sent envoys back with this embassy on its return,
bearing rich presents with them.t Uzbeg's messengers had been accom-
panied by a representative of the Byzantine Emperor. The Egyptians
returned home in the end of 131 5, and the next year Nassir sent other
envoys, demanding in marriage a princess of the house of Jingis, with

* D'Ohsson, id. Golden Horde, 284. t Novairi in D'Ohsson, ir. 575.

I50 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

suitable presents. These envoys having dehvered their letters, asked
for a private interview, but were told by Uzbeg, through the interpreter,
that if they had anything else to communicate than a simple compliment
they must do it through the Emirs (surely a very constitutional monarch).
The proposition was thereupon renewed in the assembly of the military
chiefs, who were met together to the number of seventy. They feigned to
be much shocked at the demand. Such a thing had never happened
since the days of Jingis Khan. Why should a daughter of Jingis be sent
across the seven seas to Egypt ? The first day they rejected the demand,
but the next, having received the presents Nassir had sent them,
they were more yielding, and ended by giving their consent, but the
marriage was to be postponed for four years ; the first year to be spent
in negotiations, the second for the formal demand, the third for the
mutual presents, and the fourth for the marriage. One hundred tumans
(J.e.y 1,000,000 gold pieces or dinars), besides a great number of horses,
suits of armour, &c., were fixed as the price of the young lady, and a large
cortege of Emirs with their wives was to be sent to escort her.
Impossible conditions were in fact annexed. The Tartars perhaps
deemed it a good opportunity for a large extortion. Nassir on hearing
of the conditions simply dropped the subject. Other embassies
passed between the two, but it was not named. At length Uzbeg
reopened the question on the return of one of Nassir's envoys, named
Seif ud din, who had taken him a present of a royal robe decorated
with gold and jewels. He told him he had assigned to Nassir a princess
of the house 'of Jingis and sprung from Bereke, the former Khan of the
Golden Horde. Seif ud din said that it was no part of his commission
to undertake the resporisible duty of a matchmaker, and that if he waited
his master would send suitable presents. Uzbeg, who was a man of busi-
ness, would not hear of delay, and said the lady should return with him,
and asked for the usual marriage gift. The envoy said he had brought
nothing with him. Uzbeg, with the usual Mongol skill in monetary
matters, bade his merchants advance Seif ud din 20,000 dinars. They
also advanced him a further sum of 7,000 dinars, which he spent in
feasting. He then set out with his charge, with many ladies, and with
the chief Kadhi of Serai.

They embarked on the 17th of October, 13 19, and landed at Alexandria
in the month of April following. When she left the ship, the Khatun
entered a tent of golden tissue, placed on a carriage which was dragged
to the palace by the Mamluks. The Sultan sent chamberlains and
eighteen boats to meet her. On her arrival at Cairo, she was received in
State by the Emir Seif ud din Argun, the Sultan's lieutenant, at the head
of the chief Mamluks, and borne on their shoulders in a palanquin to
the pavilion called Meidan us Sultaniyu. There had been erected a silken
tent, in which she was feasted. Three days after, Nassir gave audience

UZBEG KHAN. 151

to the envoys of Uzbeg and those of Byzantium and Georgia who had
accompanied them. The princess, taken from the Meidan to the " Castle
of the Mountain" in an araba drawn by a mule, was at length conducted
to her apartments in the palace, which had been decorated in a fashion
hitherto unknown among the Mussulmans. Eight days after, the marriage
contract was drawn up, by which the Sultan paid over 30,000 mitscals,
from which were deducted the 20,000 dinars already advanced. The
envoys and the attendants on the princess were sent home with rich
presents for themselves and the Khan, This account, which is taken
fronj Novairi, gives a good view of the mercenary tactics of the Tartars
in their marriage transactions, and of the luxury of the court of Egypt at
that date.*

Let us now turn our attention to Russia. We have described how
Michael became Grand Prince, and how he struggled with and at length
compelled George, the Prince of Moscow, to keep the peace with him.
He lived chiefly at Tuer, and ruled both the Grand Principality and also
the appanage of Novgorod by his lieutenants. The democratic citizens
of the latter district having made a successful and sanguinary expedition
against Finland, began to quarrel with Michael on the ground that he
had not kept the terms of the treaty with them. He accordingly seized
Torjek, and brought them to submission by cutting off their supplies
of corn. Peace was ratified through the intervention of David
archbishop of Tuer. This was in 1312. It was apparently in the
following year that Michael was summoned to the horde, and arrived there
to find Toktu dead and his successor on the throne. There he had to
stay for two years, doubtless against his will, and as the Carelians and
Swedes used the opportunity for attacking Novgorod, it naturally caused
great discontent there. George, the Prince of Moscow, deeming the
troubled waters good to fish in, sent his relative Feodor of Kief to seize
Michael's partisans at Novgorod, and he was soon master of that
republic. He too was now summoned to the horde to answer the
charges of Michael, and left his brother Athanasius in charge of
Novgorod. This was in 131 5.t

Michael had already set out to recover his own, and was assisted by a
Tartar contingent, commanded by Taitimur, Omar Khoja, and Indrui.
He marched upon Novgorod with these allies and the troops of Vladimir
and Tuer. The troops of Novgorod met him at Torjek, and a fierce
fight took place in the early spring of 1 316. Michael won the battle, and
compelled his opponents to pay a large tribute, and to surrender
Athanasius and some of the boyards as hostages.

While Michael was thus asserting his authority, his rival George of
Moscow was circumventing him by more peaceful methods. He so
ingratiated himself into the favour of the young Khan Uzbeg that he

* D'Ohsson, iv. 652-657. Golden Horde, 284-286. t Karamzin, iv. 217. Golden Horde, 286.

152 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

appointed him chief of the Russian princes, and gave him his sister
Konchak in marriage. She was baptised and received the name of
Agatha, which fact, as Karamzin says, seems very inconsistent with
Uzbeg's usual zeal for the Muhammedans. Having been three years at the
Tartar court, George returned with an army of Tartars and Mordvins,
the former led by Kawgadui, Astrabit, and Ostref (? Chosref). Michael
sent envoys to him to say that if it was the Khan's wish he would
surrender the Grand Principality to him, but he asked to be allowed to
retain his hereditary appanage (Tuer). The ruthless George answered
this temperate message by ravaging the villages of Tuer as far as the
Volga. Michael then summoned his boyards and told them his
story. They gladly undertook to support him, and having assembled his
forces he fought a battle against his nephew at Bortnovo, not far from
Tuer. This was in December, 1318. He was completely victorious,
and freed an immense number of captives whom the Tartars were
carrying off. He also captured George's wife, his brother Boris,
and Kawgadui, Uzbeg's deputy. The latter he treated with great
civiHty, made him some handsome presents, and sent him back to
the Khan. George fled to Novgorod, where he raised an army and
marched towards the Volga. Michael, who seems to have been a very
humane person, suggested that their quarrel should be remitted to the
Khan for decision, and meanwhile he consented that George should be
treated as Grand Prince. At this juncture Agatha, the latter's wife,
unfortunately died at Tuer, and it was suggested that Michael had poisoned
her. George repaired with a large body of boyards and notables to the
horde, while Michael intrusted his case to his son Constantine, a boy ot
twelve years of age, and no match for his crafty opponent.*

George intrigued successfully, and also distributed gold freely among
the leading Tartars. He was supported too by Kawgadui, and it was
determined to summon Michael to the horde in person. A Tartar
named Akhmil was sent to bring him.

The Grand Prince, who had a presage that this journey would be
his last, made a disposition of the appanages among his sons, and set out
against the advice of the boyards. He met Uzbeg on the shores of the
sea of Azof, and near the mouth of the Don. He distributed presents
among the chief Tartars, and for six weeks lived in peace among them,
when suddenly Uzbeg ordered the grandees to judge of the matters in
dispute between the uncle and nephew, and to decide impartially which
of them deserved punishment. The trial took place in a tent adjoining
the Khan's, and there Michael was accused by several baskaks, /.<?., Tartar
commissioners, of not having paid the whole tribute fixed by the Khan.
These he answered successfully ; but Kawgadui, his principal accuser,
was also one of his judges. At the second sitting of the court he was

* Karamzin, iv. 221-22G. Golden Horde, 257.

UZBEG KHAN. 153

led in with a cord about his neck, and charged with having taken up
arms against the Khan's ambassador, and with having poisoned the Khan's
sister. " One cannot distinguish envoys in a battle," said the Grand
Prince, "but I saved the hfe of Kawgadui and sent him back covered with
honours. As to the other charge, I call God to witness, as a Christian,
that I never committed such a horrible crime." But the judges were
obdurate. The Chinese prisoner's yoke, called the cangue, was fastened
round his neck, and his rich garments were divided among the guards,
At this time Uzbeg set out on a hunting expedition with his army and a
troop of tributary princes and ambassadors. These were occasions of
great festivity, when each soldier donned his richest uniform and
mounted his best horse : in which merchants from India, Byzantium,
and Cathay offered their treasures in the vast camp. Michael went with
the rest, for Uzbeg had not yet pronounced judgment. He spent his
time in religious exercises, and as his hands were bound, a page turned
over the leaves while he . sang the psalms. Meanwhile Kawgadui made
him undergo the indignity of a public exposure in the market place. He
refused to escape, pleading that he would not make his country the
victim of his imprudence. The horde had already crossed the Terek,
and was encamped near Derbend, and near the Ossetian town of
Tetiakof, which Mangu Timur, in alliance with the Russian princes, had
captured in 1277. Uzbeg, who was young and disposed to be just, long
delayed his sentence ; but at length, induced by the representations of
Kawgadui, he ordered the execution.

The fatal day arrived, and having blessed his son Constantine and
repeated the religious services, a crowd of people came in sight, and with
them his nephew George and Kawgadui. They ordered the executioners
to enter the tent and finish their work. The attendants were driven out ;
he was then seized by the cangue, thrown down and trampled under by
the Tartars ; and lastly, a Greek or Russian named Romanetz thrust
a knife into his side and dragged his heart out. This happened on
the 22nd of November, 13 19, and the place of martyrdom was
beyond the river, which bears the fitting name of Ajissu or Bitter Waters.
Like his relatives Boris, Gleb, and Michael of Chernigof he was made a
saint. His tent was plundered by the Tartars, as was customary.
George and Kawgadui then rode up to it and looked in at the naked
corpse, where the Christian was reproached by the Muhammedan in the
words, "He is your uncle, will you permit his corpse to be outraged ?"
One of George's attendants then threw his mantle over the remains.
These were conveyed to the town of Majar on the Kuma, and thence
to Moscow, and were buried in the monastery of Saint Saviour in
the Kremlin.* Thus perished another of the Grand Princes, the victim
rather of his own ruthless relatives than of Tartar brutality, and thus

* Karamzin, iv. 226-234. Golden Horde, 290, 291.
W

154 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

did the Prince 'of Moscow sustain the character which, two centuries
later, gave his descendants a wide notoriety for unscrupulous vigour.
The reign of Michael was marked by two or three minor incidents in
which the hands of the Tartars had a part. Thus we are told that in
1 316 Constantine, Prince of Rostof, having died at the horde, his son
Vasili returned to his capital with two Tartars named Sawlich and
Kasanji, whose extortions were long remembered. Such officials bore
the harmless title of ambassadors. In 1318 Kochka, who filled such a
post, had 120 men put to death at Kostroma, pillaged Rostof, with the
church of Our Lady there, and the monasteries and villages in the
neighbourhood, and carried off a number of the inhabitants.*

The church fared well at the hands of the Tartar Khan. The
metropolitan Maximus had died in 1305. His position was seized by an
abbot named G^rontius, but, at the instance of the Prince of Gallicia, the
patriarch Athanasius deposed him, and in 1308 consecrated Peter, Abbot
of Volhynia, metropolitan of Russia. It was he who deposed Ismael
the Bishop of Serai, as I have mentioned. In 13 13 he accompanied
Michael to the horde, and obtained a diploma from Uzbeg granting
special favours to the clergy, which was thus phrased : —

" By the will and power the grandeur and grace of the most high and
immortal God. Uzbeg to all our princes, great and small; to our
voivodes, grandees, appanaged princes, superior and inferior officers;
to our learned men and doctors of law, our men of letters, baskaks, and
ambassadors, our couriers and receivers of tribute, our scribes, our
envoys en route, our huntsmen, falconers, and all people of high, mediate,
and low degree ; our grandees in all our provinces and uluses, wherever
by the power of the eternal God our rule is established and our word
is law.

" It is forbidden to injure in Russia the metropolitan church, of which
Peter is the head, or his subordinates ; to seize their property, wealth, or
people. He is empowered to judge his own people in all cases of theft
and plunder, according to right and justice, and he alone or his deputy
is to be arbiter. All his subordinates in the church are to obey him
according to the ancient laws, and according to our former orders and
those of the Khans our predecessors. No one is to meddle with the
affairs of the church, since they are divine. He who disobeys us in this
will commit sin against God, and he will suffer from his anger and from
our punishment. . . . We promise for ourselves, our children, and
the governors of our provinces, not to meddle with the church's affairs ;
and we forbid anyone to interfere in its towns, districts, villages, chases,
and fisheries, beehives, lands, fields, forests, towns, or places under its
bailifs; its vineyards, mills, winter quarters for cattle, or any of its
properties and goods. . . . That the mind of the metropolitan may

* Karamzin, iv. 336 and 390.

UZBEG KHAN. 155

be always at peace, so that with an upright mind he may pray to God for
us, our children, and our nation. Such is our wish according to the
poHcy of the Khans our fathers. . . . Our baskaks, customs officers,
receivers of tribute, scribes, &c., will take care that all the Basilicas
of the metropoHtan are unharmed, and that no one does them injury.
That the archimandrites, abbots, priests, and other ecclesiastics are
also respected. When imposts such as those from customs, the plough-
tax, and that for transit or requisitions of farm produce, and for the
post service are made, or in cases of general levies of our subjects in time
of war, nothing shall be demanded from the cathedral churches, from the
metropolitan Peter, or any of his clergy, for they pray to God for us and
protect our army. Who is ignorant that at all times the Eternal gives
means of sustaining life or providing for war ? . . . We desire that
nothing shall be demanded for the support of our envoys, ourselves,
or our horses. ... If anything be demanded from the clergy it
shall be returned threefold, and those who use violence against it shall be
duly punished. It is forbidden to employ the servants of the church, such
as painters, masons, carpenters, huntsmen, falconers, &c., for our pur-
poses. . . . Anyone who condemns or blames this religion shall not be
allowed to excuse himself, but shall suffer death. The brothers and sons
of priests and deacons, living at the same table with them, shall enjoy the
same privileges. Any priest not immediately subject to the metropoHtan
shall not be deprived of his office, but shall pay tribute. The priests,
deacons, &c., who enjoy the immunities we grant them shall pray for us
unceasingly with a pure heart. Evil to him who neglects to do so.
All authority in the church is given to the metropolitan, so that he
may exact rigid conformity. . , . It is thus we have decreed the
present ordinance, which we shall see duly carried out.

" Given at our camp the year of the hare, the i st month of autumn, the
4th of the ancient days."*

This document pomts several morals. It shows, in the first place, how
terribly down-trodden at this period the Russians must have been. How
every act and movement of life was under surveillance and subject to
taxation, and how the hungry tax-collectors, many of whom, according to
Karamzin, were Jews from the Crimea and the Kuban, sucked like an
army of leeches the very life-blood of the nation.

It shows, on the other hand, to some extent how the church acquired
its paramount influence in Russian life. It was the only institution
in the country free from taxes and claims. Its property was essen-
tially a sanctuary, and its dependents privileged people, while such
diplomas as that given by Uzbeg, by concentrating and centrahsing
the whole authority in the metropolitan and making him absolute,
created that discipUne in religious matters which can best be compared

Karamzin, iv. 390*395

156 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

with the condition induced in the Roman Catholic church by the policy
of the Vatican in our day.

Uzbeg's tolerance was very Catholic, and not confined merely to the
Greek Christians, for we read that a year before the metropolitan Peter
appeared at the horde, the Pope John XXII. had written Uzbeg
a letter, in which he thanked him for the kindness he had shown the
Christians.*

Let us now turn to the Tartar doings elsewhere. The expedition of
Uzbeg and his army towards Derbend, which the Russian chroniclers
describe as a grand hunt, was that and something more ; it was a
demonstration against Abusaid the Ilkhan of Persia. The Egyptians,
doubtless in concert with him, made an attack at the same time upon
Diarbekr. It was decided at a council of war that the emir Irenchin
should defend the latter province while the Ilkhan in person marched
against Uzbeg,t The emir Taremtaz was sent on as an advance guard
to the frontier. Meanwhile Serai Kutlugh, brother of Kutlugh Timur, on
behalf of Uzbeg, ravaged the country far and wide.

Taremtaz was not strong enough to resist Uzbeg's powerful army, in
which, we are told, each warrior had three horses, and he retired to
Abusaid's orda.t Uzbeg, who was a zealous Mussulman, visited the
tomb of the emir Pir Houssein Perwana, and was told at the mosque
there that the guardians of the tomb had been robbed by Serai Kutlugh's
troops of 30,000 sheep and 20,000 cattle and asses, and that two Tartars
had entered in at the windows and stolen the sacred carpets. He ordered
the robbers of the carpets to be put to death, and issued a sharp Yarligh,
/.<?., mandate, to the emirs Kutlugh Timur and Issa to halt the troops,
and to inform th^m that the stolen herds must be restored. He also
presented the guardians of the tomb with several bars of gold, polished
on both sides, called sum, each worth twenty gold pieces. He also gave
them some sable and ermine skins. " On the following morning," says
the gloriously inflated Wassaf, " when on the green sea the golden ship
unreefed its morning sails," that is, he explains, " when the sun had
thrown its dazzling banners of light over the edge of the tower of the blue
enamelled castle, the hoarse trumpets were sounded, and the march was
continued towards the river Kur."

It would seem that Uzbeg was induced to invade Persia by a report
that Choban, the Ilkhan's general-in- chief, who was now in Khorassan,
meant to rise against his master, for we are told when he reached the Kur
he inquired from the guardians of the tomb how it was that Choban did not
appear, and where he was. Choban was in the neighbourhood of
Bailakan. The emir Issa Kutlugh, who had marched into Arran, had
lost nearly all his mules and horses with the plague, and such distress
reigned in the Sultan's own camp through the mortality among the cattle

* Goldett Hofde, Jtgo. t D'Ohsson, iv. 613. J Ilkhans, ii. 27%,

UZBEG KHAN. I 57

and the dcarness of everything, that a load of straw, only worth ten
dirhems, was sold for forty-five ducats. • Messengers were sent to
summon the various armies. As soon as Choban heard of his master's
peril he set out post haste for Derbend. Uzbeg was told of his approach,
and that he was marching with ten tumans, i.e., 100,000 men, from
Karjagha directly upon Derbend, and thus threatening him in rear. He
gave orders to retire. The army retreated hastily, but lost several
prisoners to Choban, who pursued it rapidly. This campaign took place
apparently in the winter of 131 8- 13 19.*

In this year we unfortunately loose the assistance of three of the best
Eastern historians, namely, Rashid ud din, Binaketi, and Wassaf, and
become largely dependent on the Russian annalists.!

Michael had intrusted his young son Constantine to the generosity of
Uzbeg's wife, who protected him and also such of the boyards as put
themselves under her aegis. On his return home George took his
young cousin with him. When the sad news of the martyrdom of
Michael reached Tuer, its people put his eldest son Dimitri on his
father's throne, and set out dressed in mourning to ask for the surrender
of their late master's ashes. George agreed that the corpse should be
exhanged for that of his Tartar wife Konchak, the sister of Uzbeg, and
a mournful cavalcade set off down the Volga to escort it home. About
this time, /.<?., in 1320, we read of a Tartar commissary named Baidar
being at Vladimir and committing great excesses there. We are also
told that the prince John Danilovitch made a journey to the horde, while
another prince named George Alexandrovitch died there.;]: Dimitri, the
son of Michael, seems to have now repaired to the horde, and there
secured the punishment of Kawgadui, the instigator of his father's
murder. The next year, i.e.., in 1321, a Tartar deputy named Tayanchar
went to Kashin with a Jew to collect the arrears of taxes. He com-
mitted considerable depredations. §

Meanwhile George, the Grand Prince, was prosecuting his plans in
Russia. He compelled the Prince of Riazan to submit to him, and
extracted from his cousin Dimitri of Tuer a treaty by which he agreed to
pay him a tribute of 2,000 roubles and to resign all pretensions to the
Grand Principahty. This is the first occasion, according to Karamzin,
when roubles are mentioned. They were not coins, but pieces of silver four
inches long and of the thickness of one's finger, weighing 2I Russian ounces.
A number of these old roubles are preserved, and may be seen in the
splendid room devoted to Russian coins at the Hermitage at St. Peters-
burgh. George now went to Novgorod and prosecuted a war against the
Swedes. On his return he found the Tartar Akhmil had been once more
in the Grand Principality, making sad ravage there, had devastated

* Ilkhans, ii. 271-27 , 372-380. Golden Horde, 290. t Golden Horde, 291.

I Golden Horde, 293. % Id,

158 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the town of Yaroslavl, under the plea of restoring order, and had
returned.in triumph to his master. He also heard that his cousin had
solicited at the horde the Grand Principahty for himself, and that the
Tartar Sewinj Bugha had arrived at Tuer with the Yarligh or patent of
investiture. George wished the people of Novgorod to supply him with
some troops, but the prudent merchants there declined. He then
repaired to Pskof, where he was amicably received, but where he found
the people unable to assist him, as they were engaged in war with the
Esthonian Knights, who were at this time, says Karamzin, commanded by
David, Prince of Lithuania, known in the history of the Teutonic order
as the " Castelan of Garden." Returning once more to Novgorod,
George made a favourable peace with the Swedes, the Lithuanians, and
the Ustiughes, and having thus won the regard of the Novgorod people,
he deemed it prudent to repair to the horde to try and regain his former
influence there. He travelled by way of Permia, and descended the
Kama to the Volga.

Meanwhile let us turn to the doings at the horde. In 1323
Uzbeg lost his wife Beilun, and in the same year the Pope John XXIL
sent him a brief asking him to send back the Christians who had been
driven away from Soldaia in the Crimea by the Muhammedans. In the
same year an army of Tartars made an invasion of Lithuania.* They
also kept up an intermittent intercourse with the Eastern empire. Thus
we read that in order to conciliate them the Emperors supplied their
chiefs with beautiful girls for wives. The chronicler Cantacuzenus
qualifies the statement by the questionable argument that they were
maidens of plebeian origin.t This did not entirely pacify the Tartars,
for we read that in 1319 a number of them made an incursion as far as
Adrianople. The next year they made a similar raid into Thrace. In
1 324 an invasion took place on a much larger scale. We are told that
they were 120,000 in number, and were led by their chiefs Taitach
(? Kaitak) and Toghlu Toghan. They ravaged Thrace for forty days, and
captured a great booty and many captives. The Emperor's nephew took
measures against them. Having put Adrianople in a state of defence, he
planted his army .near the Hebrus, and there fought a bloody battle
with a section of their forces, which was badly beaten, many of them
being drowned in the Hebrus. Having spoiled the corpses and carried
off other plunder, the Romans returned to Didymotichum. This was, it
would seem, but a contingent. When the news of the disaster reached
the main army they sent a division to punish the victors and to inter the
dead. Having buried the corpses, this division returned, not to the main
army, but to their own homes. Meanwhile the Emperor, having collected
a considerable force, marched with them against the main army. The
Greeks and Tartars were separated by the river Tuntza. Each party

* Golden Horde, 292, 393. t Stritter, iii. 1104.

UZBEG KHAN. 1 59

was afraid to attack the other, but we are told that the Emperor with a
few of his followers held a colloquy with Tasbugas/ one of the Tartar
chiefs. The Tartar began by asking who they were. The Emperor
replied by an interpreter who spoke Greek and Mongol, that they were
people like themselves, on the look out for what they could get. That
they, the Tartars, behaved neither justly nor in a manly fashion, but were
only robbers, who approaching by stealth adopted a hostile method,
and imposed servitude on mere peasants unused to war. It would be
more manly if they were to announce their coming and to fight
with soldiers trained to war, then if they vanquished, they might
fairly carry off the others as the reward of their victory. Tasbugas
replied that all this was nothing to them, who were under another ruler,
and who according to orders, were willing to advance or retire, or to stay
where they were. He also inquired if it were true that some of his
people had recently been defeated by the Romans. The Emperor
answered that if such a thing had occurred it was not his soldiers who
had beaten them, and that he had not heard of it, but it might be that
they had suffered elsewhere in making an incursion, a disaster which
might perhaps have been repeated again there, if the river had not divided
them. Tasbugas assented, and ended by affirming that those were
very cruel who transfixed innocent people with darts. Having spoken
thus he retired, unaware that he had been having a colloquy with the
Emperor himself. After this the Tartars withdrew and returned to their
own homes again. This was in i324.t They seem at this time to have
made frequent visits to Thrace, and to have taken part there in the
rebellions and struggles of a very unsettled period.

I have mentioned how George, the Prince of Moscow, repaired to
the horde to try and regain his former influence. He was speedily
followed by his nephew, the Grand Prince Dimitri of Tuer, who having
met his father's murderer plunged a sword into him, and thus revenged
himself. This was on the 21st of November, 1325. His body was
removed to Moscow and buried in the church of the Archangel Michael.
Dimitri by this act of violence had courted the vengeance of the Tartars.
It was, however, delayed for ten months, and his brother Alexander
was allowed to return to Tuer with the Tartar commissaries. He was,
however, at length executed, together with the Prince of Novossilk, a
descendant of Michael of Chernigof, who was also accused of a capital
crime. They were put to death on the river Landraklei. Dimitri's
brother Alexander was nominated Grand Prince in his place. He also
held his court at Tuer. Ivan Danilovitch now became Prince of Moscow,
and repaired for investiture to the horde. With him went Constantino

* Probably the Tashbeg, son of Choban, mentioned by Mirkhond as being sent against the
Circassians. (Golden Horde, 293. Note, 4.)

t Stritter, iii. 1107, iioS.

l6o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Michaelovitch of Tuer, and an envoy of the people of Novgorod named
Kolesnich.

In the summer of 1327 there appeared at Tuer a cousin of Uzbeg's
named Cholkan (he is called Shevkal by Karamzin). His father Tudakan
had led an army into Russia four and thirty years before. He was
accompanied by bands of Tartars. A rumour spread that his object was
to make an end of Alexander, the Grand Prince, and to occupy his
throne, to divide the various Russian towns among his grandees, and to
convert the Russians to Muhammedanism. The feast of the Assumption,
when a large gathering of Christians took place at Tuer, it was said, was
fixed for the slaughter. The rumour was doubtless false, for Cholkan
had only a few of his people with him, and such an act was entirely
ontrary to Uzbeg's ecclesiastical policy ; but these rumours, as Karamzin
says, soon arise and spread very fast among ignorant and downtrodden
people. The young prince himself was infected with the panic. Having
killed Michael and Dimitri, he was persuaded the Tartars were about to
exterminate his race.

The citizens were easily persuaded, they rushed to Michael's palace,
where the Tartar prince was lodging. Meanwhile the Tartars were
aroused, and planted themselves in the garth. They fought
desperately, but were overwhelmed by numbers ; some took refuge in
the palace, which was fired by Alexander, and Cholkan and his people
all perished. Even the Tartar merchants were put to death. This act
of madness, which is fitly called the vespers of Tuer by Von Hammer,
soon brought a terrible vengeance. Uzbeg summoned Ivan, Prince of
Moscow, and conferred on him the Grand Principality of Russia. He
also gave him an army of 50,000 men, commanded by five temniks, of
whom four were called Theodor, Chuk, Turalik, and Singa.* With him
also marched Alexander Vasilivitch of Suzdal and his people. It was a
strange and crafty policy thus to exact vengeance from the Russian
ruler at the hands of another Russian prince.

At the approach of the terrible army Alexander fled to Pskof, and his
brothers Constantine and Vasili to Ladoga. It was winter, and the
ground was thickly covered with snow. The capital Tuer, the towns of
Kashin and Torjek, with the neighbouring villages were devastated, and
the inhabitants put to death or carried off into slavery, while the people
of Novgorod appeased the Tartars by a fine of 2,000 roubles, &c.t This
victory was very welcome at Serai, where about this time Ivan Yaro-
slavich, Prince of Riazan, was put to death, and his son Ivan Karotopol
mounted a throne " still stained with his father's blood."

The accession of Ivan (surnamed Kalita or "the Purse," from
the alms' bag he carried round his neck), to the throne of the
Grand Principality was a famous epoch in Russian history. Moscow

* Golden Horde, 294- Karamzin. iv. 234. t Golden Horde. 2gs< KaramziOj iY> 256.

UZBEG KHAN. l6l

then became the capital of Russia, and it was from this period that
the parties to the great struggle which led eventually to the expulsion
of the Tartars from Russia ranged themselves fairly on either side.
At this epoch also the Russians of the North began to get very isolated
and separate from the Russians of the South and West, /.<?., from the
people of Kief, Volhynia, and Gallicia. These latter districts became the
prey of the Lithuanians, who, having suffered terribly at the hands of the
Russians and the Livonian Knights for many years, now began that
career of conquest which made them a terrible menace to Muscovy for a
long period. I have mentioned how, about 1275, Lithuania was ruled by
a prince called Troiden. He seems to have been succeeded by Lutewer,
who was reigning in 1291, and he in turn by his son Viten.* Viten was
assassinated by his master-of-the-horse Gedimin, who usurped the throne
and who founded a famous dynasty, he is described as brave and
ambitious. Having reunited the ancient principality of Pinsk to
Lithuania, he married his sons Olgerd and Lubart to the daughters of
the Princes of Vitebsk and Lodomiria. They succeeded to the heritage
of their fathers-in-law, and thus enlarged the territory subject to
Gedimin.

Meanwhile George Danilovitch, Prince of Volhynia and Gallicia,
having died in 131 6, was succeeded by his sons Andrew and Leo, who
determined to attack their neighbour the ambitious King of Lithuania,
They took advantage of a struggle he was engaged in with the Teutonic
Knights to invade his borders, but having successfully finished his
German war, he marched against them, and fought a savage battle under
the walls of Vladimir. With him were Russian soldiers from Polotsk,
while the enemy was supported by a contingent of Tartars. Gedimin
won a complete victory, and having captured Vladimir, marched upon
Lutsk, the capital of Leo. He won his way as much by his clemency as
his sword. Having passed the winter at Brest, he advanced in spring
upon Ovrutch and Gitomir, dependencies of Kief, and then to the
Dnieper. Stanislas, Prince of Kief, in alliance with the Princes Oleg
of Pereislavl, Leo of Lutsk, Roman of Briansk, and a body of Tartars,
met him on the river Irpen. They were however defeated, Oleg and
Leo were killed, Stanislas and Roman fled to Riazan, and Gedimin,
having distributed the captured booty, laid siege to Kief, which was at
length obliged to open its gates. The clergy and inhabitants having
sworn allegiance to the Lithuanian King, the latter, who was still a
heathen, left his Christian nephew Mindug there, and proceeded to
conquer Southern Russia, as far as Putivle and Briansk. Such is the
story told by the historian of Lithuania. Karamzin questions its details,
but in the main it probably represents pretty accurately the overwhelming
of South-western Russia by the Lithuanians. It seems certain, however,

* Karamzin, iv. 398, 399.

1 62 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

that there were baskaks of the Khan at Kief in 1331, which was still
governed by a Russian prince, while it was in the year 1324 that the
Princes Leo and Andrew of Volhynia perished, and were succeeded by
George, a young off-shoot of the great Daniel, who calls himself " Prince
and sovereign of all Little Russia." In letters still extant, which he wrote
to the Teutonic Knights, he undertook to protect the country of the
latter from the Tartars.* He lived sometimes at Vladimir and some-
times at Luof. It is probable that he was dependent on Gedimin. The
latter now took the title of Grand Prince of Lithuania and Russia, and
held his court at the famous city of Vilna. He preserved the old
customs of the people, patronised the Greek religion, and allowed his
people of that faith to acknowledge the metropolitan ; he wrote to the
pope telling him he had protected the Franciscan and Dominican friars
in his dominions, and asking him to restrain the Livonian Knights who
plundered his country, and it was only when the latter continued their
attacks that he refused to receive the pope's envoys. He allowed free
trade in his dominions to the merchants of the Hanseatic league, and
remitted ten years' taxes to all handicraftsmen who settled in
Lithuania. Besides dominating over the districts of Little Russia, he
was also master of Polotsk or White Russia.! Such was the power
which grew up in Western Russia at the time when Moscow became the
capital of the Grand Priacipality. As was usually the case now that the
Golden Horde was in the hands of a strong master, the condition of its
dependents much improved. This was due largely to the judicious
conduct of Ivan Kahta. Like his predecessors, he looked upon Vladimir
as a mere official capital, and resided in Moscow, his own appanage, and
he determined at length to make that the de jure as well as the de facto
capital. He persuaded the metropolitan to move his seat from
Vladimir, and on the 4th of August, 1 326, he laid the foundations of the
first stone church there, and dedicated it to the "Assumption of the
Virgin."!

One of the first acts of the Grand Prince was to make a journey to
the horde in company with Constantine, a younger brother of Alexander
of Tuer, and of some merchants from Novgorod. They were well
received by the Tartars, who, however, insisted that Alexander, the
author of the vespers of Tuer, should be handed over to them for punish-
ment. An important deputation, representing the Grand Prince, the
people of Novgorod, and accompanied by the archbishop Moses and a
superior officer named Abraham, went to Pskof to entreat Alexander to
submit himself to the Khan. He reproached them, but said he would
nevertheless go for the sake of his country ; the people of Pskof, however,
gathered round him, and offering to die for him, told him not to obey.
These citizens were then rich, for Pskof divided the German trade with

* Karamzin, iv. 263. t li., 266. J /d,, 271.

UZBEG KHAN. 1 63

Novgorod. They put their walls in order, and also built a fortress
at Izborsk.* Ivan with the dependent princes upon this marched against
them. He ordered the metropolitan to put Alexander and his people
under an interdict, a proceeding until then unknown in Russia. Still the
citizens stood by him, but he determined to escape to Lithuania, in order
to free them from the interdict. He was well received by Gedimin, and
after a while returned home again to his people, who now separated from
Novgorod and put him on the throne.t

About 1230 there died at the horde Timur, the son of Uzbeg, who had
killed "the Khan beyond the mountains" (? of Circassia). His death
caused great grief there. | We also read that in this year the Tartar
Beg Hasan was killed by his wife, and Feodor, Prince of Starodubsk,
was executed, being the fifth Russian prince who had fallen a victim
at Serai since the accession of Uzbeg. On the other hand, we are told
how the bishop of Serai received certain privileges from the Khan. This
year Pope John XXH. again sent Uzbeg a letter commending the
CathoHcs and their bishop Mancarolo to his good graces. §

Ivan seems to have made several journeys to the horde. Thus he
went in 1332 with Constantine, the young Prince of Tuer, and had
scarcely reached home again when the Tartar envoy Saraichik was sent to
summon him again. He returned to Russia the following year laden with
honours.il The horde was becoming a cemetery of Russian princes. In
1333 Boris of Dmitrof died there. We also read that Dimitri of Briansk
made an attack upon Ivan Alexandrovitch, and was assisted by a Tartar
contingent.^ Kutlugh Beg, called Kadlubeg by the Polish writers, was
one of Uzbeg's vassals or governors, and held dominion in the Krim.
We read that in the summer of 1333 he with the Princes Demetrius and
Kaizibeg (? Hajibeg) made a raid into Podolia. They were defeated by
Prince Olgerd. Their people were driven down towards the mouth of
the Dniester, and eventually were scattered in the Dobruja and the
Nogay steppe.

It was in August, 1333, that a pact was made on the Kuban between
Kutlugh Beg, on behalf of Uzbeg, and the Venetian consul, by which the
Venetians at Tana were granted a space of ground behind the church of
the Hospital for a trading mart. This was where their consul lived, and
where their magazines were. It was agreed that they should pay a tax
of three per cent, upon the commodities they sold, and dues were charged
on their ships according as they had one or two sails, while it was agreed
that the settlement of the duties should be made in the presence of an
agent of either side.**

In the same year, /.<?., 1333, the great traveller Ibn Batuta was in the
Kipchak. He tells us he landed at the port of El Kirash, in the steppe

* Karamzin, iv. 273, 274. 1 1^-, 276. t Golden Horde, 296.

§ Id.;297. I Id, H Id. ** Id., 298 and 25.

1 64 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

country of Kipchak, and speaks of this steppe as treeless, and as having
neither hill nor wood on it, and tells us how the inhabitants (as they do
still) burnt dung for fuel. The greater part of the people of Kaffa, he
says, were Christians. Thence he went on by way of Krim towards
Serai, travelling on an araba over the steppes. He remarks how
although these abounded in cattle yet theft was unknown, it having been
suppressed by the law "that any beast stolen was to be restored ninefold,
and if the culprit had not enough for this his children were to be taken,
and if he had no children then he was to be slain himself." The first
town he mentions was Azak, situated, as he tells us, on the sea shore,
where Uzbeg Khan had a deputy. Thence he travelled towards the
Kuma and to the city of Majar. Our ingenious traveller was surprised
at the honourable position held by the women ; he remarks as strange
that they went unveiled, and he tells us they were given to almsgiving
and other good works. From Majar he went on to Beshtau, the famous
five mountains now occupied by the Circassians, but where Uzbeg had
an ordu or camp. There Ibn Batuta tells us he witnessed a moving city,
with its streets, mosques, and cooking-houses, the smoke of which
ascended as they moved along. Ibn Batuta was evidently much
impressed with the power and grandeur of his host, and he tells us he
was one of the seven great kings of the world, the others being the
Takfur of Constantinople, the Sultan of Egypt, the King of the two
Iraks {i.e., the Ilkhan), the Khakan of Turkestan and Mavera un nehr,
the Maharajah of India, and the Faghfur of China.

Every Friday after prayer the Khan sat under a golden canopy on a
throne covered with silver plates and richly jewelled. His four wives sat
beside him on the throne, two on either side. Before it stood two
of his sons, one on the right the other on the left. In front of him
sat his daughter. When any of his wives came in, he rose, took her by
the hand, and showed her to her place. They were all unveiled. Then
came the great emirs, who sat on chairs right and left of the throne.
Next to them stood his nephews and the other princes of the blood.
Next again the sons of the great emirs in their order of precedence.

When all was ready the people entered according to their rank, and
having saluted, returned to their seats. After evening prayer, the
supreme queen returned, followed by the others, and attended by
beautiful slaves. The women, who were separated on account
of any uncleanness, were on horseback ; the rest were in carriages,
were preceded by cavalry and followed by handsome mamluks. Ibn
Batuta tells us he was very well received by the Sultan, who sent him a
present of some sheep and a horse, with a leathern bottle of kumiz. He
tells us that the Sultan's wives were highly honoured. Each one had a
separate estabhshment for herself, her followers, and servants, and each
visitor at the horde was expected to pay his respects to each of the wives

UZBEG KHAN. . 1 65

of the prince. He tells us it was in consequence of his having done so
that Uzbeg Khan received him.* He goes on to say how he had heard
of the fame of the city of Bulghar, and wished to test for himself the
stories he had heard about it, and at his request Uzbeg furnished him
with a guide. It was ten days' journey, he says, from the Tartar camp,
and he stayed three days there. He describes how the night was so
short that he had barely time to recite his evening prayer before he had
to begin that of midnight, and then that called el witr, when he was
overtaken by the dawn.t There he was told of the land of darkness,
situated forty days further north, where travellers had to go on sledges
drawn by big dogs, and during the whole journey the roads were covered
with ice, upon which neither the feet of man nor the hoofs of beasts could
take hold. The dogs, however, he says, had nails which clung to the ice.
None went there except merchants, each with some hundred sledges
loaded with provisions, drinks, and wood, for there were neither trees,
stones, nor horses there. The guide on these occasions was an
experienced dog, for which, as much as a thousand dinars was paid. He
formed the leader, and with him were three other dogs, who stopped
when he stopped. The master, he tells us, never chastised this leader ;
at meals the dogs were fed first. The trading with the natives was done
by barter, the merchant depositing his goods and then retiring, and next
day finding sable and ermine skins, and the fur of the sinjab in their
place. If the merchant was content he took this with him ; if not, he
left it and more was added. Sometimes the natives would withdraw
their own goods and leave those of the merchants. The latter, says the
old traveller, did not know whether they were mankind or demons they
had to deal with.t After his return to Uzbeg, Ibn Batuta set out again
with him for Haji Tarkhan or Astrakhan, where he had his winter
quarters, and he tells us that in the winter, when the river and adjoining
waters were frozen over, hay was strewn about in immense qnantities on
the ice, on which he travelled. §

Uzbeg had married a daughter of the Greek Emperor. Ibn Batuta
calls her the Khatun or Lady Beilun. This seems a generic name for
princess; one so named, a wife of Uzbeg's, died in 1324.II She was
doubtless a daughter of Andronicus II., who followed the pohcy of the
Emperors of his house in allying himself with the Tartar chiefs. Von
Hammer suggests that the match between Uzbeg and the princess was
arranged when the metropolitan Theognost went to Constantinople as
Uzbeg's envoy.^ The young wife of Uzbeg, it would seem, was enceinte
on Ibn Batuta's arrival, and was about to pay her father a visit, intending
to leave the child with him, and our traveller requested permission to
accompany her. This was at first refused, Uzbeg being apparently

* Ibn Batuta, Trans,, ^^. t U>, 78. 1 1^-, 79- § Z^. I Golden Horde, 298. Note, 3.

f li,, 399.

1 66 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

jealous of him, but. after some diligent flattery he at length received
permission. Uzbeg accompanied them for a day's journey, and they had
an escort of about S,ooo men, 500 of them being cavalry. They first
arrived at Ukek, which our author says was a moderately sized town, but
very cold. He tells us further, it was ten days distant from Serai.

At Ukek the travellers left the Volga, and in ten days arrived at
Sudak, i.e., Soldaia, their intention, as Colonel Yule suggests, being
doubtless to travel by sea. They seem, however, to have changed their
minds, and to have completed their journey overland. They passed
through a town which Ibn Batuta calls Baba Saltuk or Babatagh in the
Dobruja, which was named from Saltuk, whose tomb is still reverenced
there.* This was the frontier of the Turks he says, and on leaving it
they had an eighteen days' journey before reaching Rum, i.e.^ the
Byzantine dominion.t The first Byzantine town they reached was
Mahtuli. He tells us he paid his respects every morning and evening
to the princess, who treated him very kindly, and made him several
presents, inUr alia were fifteen horses.

MahtuU was twenty-two days from Constantinople, The Emperor
having heard of his daughter's approach, sent out some ladies and nurses
with an escort to meet her. The road being bad, they had to leave their
carriages behind and to joroceed on horse and mule back. The post
roads of the Mongols, it must be remembered, were very good. The
Tartar escort having returned home, she now proceeded with her own
people. She had a mosque with her, which was set up at every stage, as
in the case of her husband, and in which daily prayers were said, but this
was left at Mahtuli, and after leaving that town the saying of the Muezzin
ceased. She drank wine and, evidently to Ibn Batuta's horror, ate swine's
flesh ; some of her Kipchak servants alone said their prayers with our
traveller. " Thus," says he, " were tastes changed by entering into the
territories of infidelity." At a day's journey from the city the princess's
brother went out to meet her with about 5,000 cavalry in armour. He
met her on foot as he was her junior. When she had kissed his head he
passed on with her. Next day her elder brother, who was heir-apparent,
went out accompanied by 10,000 horse. In this case both dismounted
to greet one another. They then went on together. When she reached
the city, the greater part of the inhabitants came to meet her in hoUday
attire. The crowd was so great that Ibn Batuta got separated ; he was
told, however, that when she met her parents she alighted, kissed the
ground before them, and [also their horses' hoofs.l They entered Con-
stantinople at sunset amidst a tremendous ringing of bells.

The porters refused to admit Ibn Batuta until a special permit was
obtained from the Emperor by the princess, when he was also given a
letter of safe conduct, to enable him to pass about the city as he liked,

* Golden Horde, 299. t Ibn Batuta, 80. J U., 82.

UZBEG KHAN, • 167

and was lodged next to his charge, who sent him provisions morning
and evening. On the fourth day he was introduced to Andronicus. He
tells us he was searched before entering the palace, for fear he should
have any concealed weapons. He found the emperor and empress
seated on their throne, with their daughter, whom he had accompanied,
beside them, while her brothers were seated below. He was kindly
treated, he tells us, and was asked about Jerusalem, the temple of the
Resurrection, the cradle of Jesus, Bethlehem, the city of Abraham (z>.,
Hebron), Damascus, Egypt, Irak, and the country of Rum. A Jew, he
tells us, acted as interpreter. Andronicus presented him with a State
robe, and a saddled horse with one of his own umbrellas, which was a
mark of protection. An officer was also appointed to escort him about
the city. He mentions seeing St. Sophia, which, however, he would not
enter as he would not make obeisance to the cross at its door. He also
tells us there were other churches, monasteries, &c., almost innumerable.

Th^ people of Kipchak who had accompanied the princess, seeing she
wished to be a Christian and to remain at Constantinople, asked
permission to return home, which was granted them. Ibn Batuta
accompanied them, and received a present of 300 dinars and 2,000
dirhems in money from the princess, with dresses of cotton and woollen,
and horses from her father. He had been at Constantinople a month
and six days, and returned once more to Astrakhan. Finding that
Uzbeg had gone thence to Serai, he followed him thither, and
reported the result of his journey, and was reimbursed his travelling
expenses. There he met the famous sheikh Nejmeddin El Khuarezmi,
who behaved, he tells us, proudly before Uzbeg, but humbly with the
poor and his pupils. The former visited him every Friday.

From Serai he went to Khuarezm, a journey of forty days, which was
travelled in carriages drawn by camels. He passed on the way the city
of Seraijuk, situated on the river Ulugh su {i.e., the great river,
this was the Yaik), which he tells us was crossed there by a bridge like
the one at Baghdad. Khuarezm, he tells us, was the largest city of the
Kipchak Turks, and was subject to Uzbeg, who had an emir there as his
viceroy. He tells us he had never met better bred or more liberal people
than those of Khuarezm, nor any more friendly to strangers (surely a
curious contrast to the present Uzbeg lords of Khiva). He tells us they
had one commendable practice. When anyone absented himself from
his place in the mosque, he was beaten by the priest in the presence of
the congregation and fined five dinars, which went towards the repair of
the mosque. Each mosque was provided with a whip for the purpose.*
The prevailing sect at Khuarezm, he tells us, was that of the Schismatics
(z.^., the so-called Kadarits, who denied predestination), but this they
kept secret as Uzbeg was a Sunni. He also describes the celebrated

* Ibn Batuta, 86.

1 68 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

melons of Khuarezm, which he tells us were green outside with red flesh,
very sweet and somewhat hard. They were cut into oblonj pieces and
dried, and were carried as far as India and China, where they were much
esteemed as dried fruit.* From Khuarezm he went on towards India, by
way of Bokhara and Samarkand.

Let us turn once more to Russia. The various princes kept up a
string of visits to the horde, and the Grand Prince Ivan was there again
in 1334. Meanwhile Alexander of Tuer, who had for so many years been
a practical exile at Pskof, was growing weary of his expatriation, "Alas,"
he said, "if I live in exile my children will be without inheritance." He
accordingly determined to pay a visit to Uzbeg in person, but to prepare
the way he sent his young son Michael Feodor, who returned with a
Tartar deputy named Abdul.t The news they brought was reassuring,
so he determined to go himself. When he was presented to the Khan
he addressed him thus: "Great King, I deserve your anger, and I submit
my fate to you. Act according to the dictates of heaven and your own
heart. To you belongs the right to pardon or punish me. In the one
event I shall thank God for your clemency, in the other I offer you my
head." Uzbeg was appeased by this language, and granted him the
principality of Tuer. He was accompanied home by the two Tartars
Kindak and Abdul, and he sent his son Feodor to the horde, where
Ivan Kalita once more repaired with his two sons Simeon and Ivan. His
object in going there was to undermine the position of Alexander, of
whom he was jealous. He was himself a persona grata at the Tartar
court, where he had always been subservient. He now poisoned Uzbeg's
mind against his rival, suggested that he was an irreconcilable enemy of
the Tartars, and the head and front of the Russian opposition. Uzbeg
thereupon despatched his envoy Istrochei to bring Alexander and other
princes his friends to Serai. The crafty Ivan, to remove all suspicion
from his own shoulders, returned himself to Moscow. Alexander set out
amidst bad omens ; a hurricane blew so fiercely that the rowers could
scarcely control their oars. He was accompanied by Roman Michael-
ovitch of Bielozersk and Vasili Davidovitch of Yaroslavl, while his young
son had already preceded him. The presents offered by the Prince of
Tuer were received in silence. For a month matters remained undecided,
and Uzbeg's wife and some of the Tartar grandees seem to have
interested themselves on his behalf; but, urged on probably by Ivan's
sons, who had now arrived, the authorities were immovable. Having
received the sacraments in his tent with his son, they were both put
to death, and their bodies hewn limb from limb.j The date of the
martyrdom was the 28th of October, 1339, and they were the sixth and
seventh Russian princes who were thus victims during Uzbeg's reign.
As Karamzin says, he doubtless thought it good policy to thus strike

* Ibn Batuta, 86. t Karamzin, iv. 284. Golden Horde, 300. \ Karamzin, iy., 290, 291.

UZBEG KHAN. 1 69

terror into the dependent princes, but in fact he merely strengthened the
hands of the Grand Prince at the expense of his subordinates.

Ivan was very ambitious. He probably saw that the degradation to
which Russia had been reduced was due to its power being frittered
away by its feudal institutions, and he determined to get into his own
hands at least the ancient appanages of Vladimir.

Alexander, Prince of Suzdal, having died in 1333 without children,
Ivan seized the throne and displaced Constantine, Alexander's brother.
He married one of his daughters to Vasili, Prince of Yaroslaf, and
another to Constantine of Rostof, and followed this up by dictating
the internal policy of those principalities ; and it was because Alexander
of Tuer was in some sense a rival that he pursued him so ruthlessly.
He largely justified his ambition by restoring order and exacting
obedience to the laws within his borders, and thus making the Grand
Principality a contrast to the surrounding appanages, where lawlessness
largely prevailed.* He surrounded Moscow with a wooden wall, rebuilt
the Kremlin, originally called Kremnik, or burnt stone from the volcanic
rock on which it was placed,t and built several churches, among others
that of St. Michael the Archangel, which became the burial place of the
Russian princes.| Meanwhile trade flourished. The Hanseatic league
furnished Russia with the products of the northern seas, while the
Genoese traders at Kaffa and Azof distributed those of a more southern
latitude, the merchants being provided with safe conducts by Uzbeg.
The first of the great Russian fairs was organised at Kholopigorodok, at
the mouth of the Mologa, where a great concourse of traders assembled
annually.§ Seventy inns there provided for the needs of the visitors, and
7,200 pounds weight of silver was collected in the shape of dues by the
Grand Prince. || These dues and the increasing prosperity of the country
increased also the relative wealth of the Princes of Moscow. Periodical
censuses and perennial imposts, which were apparently introduced
by the Tartars, were another potent instrument in breaking down the
feudalism of Russia and pouring a stream of wealth into the lap of the
Grand Prince. With this he bought special demesnes elsewhere, as in
the governments of Novgorod, Vladimir, Kostroma, and Rostof. His
most important purchases were the towns of Uglitch, Bielosersk, and
Galitch ;% but probably the most potent revolution introduced by him
was acquiring the post of farmer of the taxes in Russia on behalf of the
Tartars, and it was under the pretence that such was the will of the
Khan that he required the stiff-necked burghers of Novgorod, in 1337, to
pay a double tribute. " Armed against the Russians," says Kelly, " with
the dread inspired by the Tartar name, and against the Tartars with the
money of the Russians, intoxicating the Khan and his courtiers with

Karamzin, iv. 300. t Id., 413. Note, 52. I Id., 301. § Id., 303.

il Kelly's Russia, i. 85. Note. H Karamzin, iv. 308,

Y

I70 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

gold, and adulation in his frequent journeys to the horde, he was enabled,
as lord paramount, to bring about the first union of all the appanaged
princes against his competitor the Prince of Tuer. . . . From the
Kremlin which he fortified, he proclaimed himself the arbiter of his
kinsfolk; he reigned in their principalities by the medium of his boyards;
he arrogated to himself the right of being the sole distributor of gifts,
judge, and legislator; and if the princes resisted and dared to wage war
against him — a war of the public good — he hurried to the horde, purse
in hand and denunciation on his lips, and the short-sighted Uzbeg,
deceived by this ambitious monitor, was impolitic enough to disembarrass
him of the most dangerous of his competitors."* His renown attracted
many celebrities to his court, among others, we are told that the Tartar
Prince Chetmurza was baptised under the name of Zacharias, and settled
at Moscow.t

Ivan died in the year 1340. It was apparently in the latter months of
his reign that we read of the rebellion of the Prince of Smolensk, who,
having allied himself with the great Lithuanian Gedimin, ventured to
break off his vassalage to the Tartars. Uzbeg sent his envoy Tawlubeg
{i.e., Tuklughbeg) and the emir Mengkukash to bring him to his senses,
and ordered the Russian princess to assist them. They marched two
armies, one led by the Prince of Riazan, the other by the dependents of
the Grand Prince, which advanced until in sight of Smolensk, when,
either deterred by its fortifications or soothed by a payment of black
mail, they withdrew.^

On Ivan's death his sons went to the horde to secure the succession.
Constantine Prince of Tuer, and Constantine of Suzdal had pretensions
to the throne, but the Grand Prince had left his family too rich to make
them fear competitors in the eyes of the Tartars, who were soon
appeased by a heavy largess. We accordingly find that Simeon, son of
Ivan, was duly nominated Grand Prince. While he adopted his father's
humility towards the horde, he acquired the title of " Proud " from his
rigorous attitude towards the other princes. §

We have now reached the term of Uzbeg's life. "It was," says
Karamzin, " at this time that the Russian proverb originated, * Near
the king near to death.' " The princes went to the horde as if they were
bound for the last judgment. Happy those who returned safe and sound.
The oldest Russian will extant is the one made by Ivan Danilovitch
when he set out on one of these journeys. || * Von Hammer mentions nine
such victims among the Russian princes.lf

Let us now turn shortly to Uzbeg's intercourse with other powers.
Karamzin remarks how he was on terms of friendship with Pope
Benedict XXII., who had great hopes of his conversion. He allowed

* Kelly, i. 83, 84. t Karamzin, iv. 303. J Id., agS. Golden Horde, 302.

S Karamzin, iv. 315- II I<i-, 304- If Golden Horde, 303,

UZBEG KHAN. 171

him to introduce Christianity into the countries bordering on the Black
Sea, and it was during Uzbeg's reign that the Yasses or Ossetes were
converted by the monk Jonas Valent. This we learn from the letters of
their princes, called the Princes of the Alans, written in 1338, to tell the
Pope that, having been converted eight years before by that monk, they
were then without any spiritual guide.* Uzbeg, his wife, and son several
times sent envoys to the Pope. In the year 1340 Benedict, in a letter
addressed to him, mentions the arrival of two Genoese, Petromer de
Lorto, formerly governor of Kaffa, and Albert, his companion, as the
Khan's envoys, accompanied by Helym of Hungary, a minor friar, the
envoy of his son Tinibeg.t

This friendly intercourse on the part of a rigid Muhammedan like
Uzbeg is a matter of some interest. As Kelly says, it is remarkable that
Muhammedanism stopped short at the Russian frontier. It has nowhere
apparently, except in Bosnia, made a permanent conquest of a purely
Arian race ; and while there can be small doubt that Uzbeg forced the
faith of Islam upon his Siberian subjects and proteges, his far-seeing
prudence or some other potent cause led him to treat Christianity with
great deference. Like his predecessors, he was in a state of chronic
quarrelling with the Persian Ilkhans. I have described his campaign
beyond Derbend in 1319. In 1327 Choban, the commander-in-chief of
the Ilkhan's forces, and his eldest son Jelad were executed by the com-
mand of Abusaid. He left nine other sons, the eldest of whom, the emir
Hassan, had been governor of Khorassan and Mazanderan, while
Hassan's son Talish governed the provinces of Ispahan, Kerman, and
Fars. Hassan and Talish, on their father's flight, went first to
Mazanderan. Thence they escaped to Khuarezm by way of Dabistan,
where they were well received by Kutlugh Timur, Uzbeg's deputy.
Having made their way to the court of Uzbeg, they were also hand-
somely treated by him, and shortly after they shared in a campaign
which he ordered against Serai-Majar, and the Circassians. Hassan
was wounded there and died. Talish died shortly after. t

A few years later, namely, in 1334, Uzbeg determined to make an
invasion of Persia by way of Derbend. Abusaid the Ilkhan was pre-
paring to meet him when he suddenly died at Karabagh, and was
succeeded by Arpa Khan. The latter marched against the invaders in
the middle of the winter. When opposite each other, Arpa Khan
detached a division to take Uzbeg in rear, but the latter was saved by
the arrival of his dependent Kutlugh Timur, who soon after died, and
Arpa Khan retired.§

Uzbeg seems to have made another attack on Persia in the last year
of his reign. II He died in 1340, after a reign of twenty-eight years,

* Karamzin, iv, 425. Note, 62. t Id. X D'Ohsson, iv. 685. Golden Horde, 296.

§ Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 132. Golden Horde, 301. D'Ohsson, iv. 720.

(1 Golden Horde, 303.

172 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

which was the most flourishing period in the history of the Kipchak.
His realm extended, in the alliterative phraseology of Eastern writers,
from Solgat in the Krim to Sogd in Transoxiana, a distance of six
hundred fersenkhs. In Khuarezm he was represented by his deputy
Kutlugh Timur, and in the Krim by Kutlughbeg.* On his coins Uzbeg
is called Ghaiyas ud din Uzbeg Khan, Muhammud Uzbeg Khan, Uzbeg
Khan the Just, &c. His coins occur from the year 713 (/.^., 1313-14)
to the year 740 {i.e., 1 339-40). They were struck at Serai, Khuarezm,
Mokshi, Bolghari, Azak, and Krim.t Mokshi and Azak first occur
as mint places in his reign. His strong religious tendencies are
shown by the mottoes on the reverses on his coins, on which we
read, "The Succourer of the Faith," "The Exalted Great Khan,"
&c. We also find on them the blazon which was put on Solomon's
seal, i.e., a falcon or eagle on a sunlion.l Langles says Uzbeg
was not originally a Muhammedan, but that he was converted by four
doctors from Persia, named Seyid Sheikh Muhammed, Sheikh Kolkat,
Sheikh Ahmed, and Sheikh Hassan Kerkan.§ So great was his influence
in Asia that the important tribes of the Uzbegs beyond the Ural,
who were probably converted during his reign, adopted and still retain
his name, II while the principal square of Cairo was called Esbekye after
him.

The names of three of his wives are recorded, one the daughter of the
Emperor Andronicus, to whom we have already referred ; Sheritumgha,
the mother of Janibeg, and probably also of his other sons, Timur,
Tinibeg, and Khidrbeg ;^ and Taidula, a Christian, who gave her name,
according to the tradition reported by Karamzin, to the famous iron
capital of Russia, Tula.**

It is curious to find that Uzbeg still kept up the intercourse of the
Golden Horde with China, and we are told in the Yuen shi or Imperial
annals of the Yuen dynasty how, in 1336, he sent an embassy to the
Emperor asking for the payment due for his appanages in China, viz..
Ping yang in Shansi, Tsin chau in Cheli, and Yung chau in Honan.
This money was required for the establishment of post stations to
faciUtate the movement of troops. The envoy reminded the Emperor
(who was evidently still considered as the nominal sujrerain) that the post
stations within his master's dominions were not kept up by the Emperor
but by Uzbeg himself.tt

* Golden Horde, 303.

+ Fraehn Die Munzen der chane von ulus Dschutschi ans der Samlung Fuchs, 6-10.

X Golden Horde, 304. § Forster's Voyage du Bengale, &c. Appendix, 368.

Khuandemir. Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 115. Abulghazi, 184. ^ Golden Horde, 309-31

** Karamzin, quoted in Golden Horde, 411.

tt Bretschneider Notices of Medieval Geography, &c., 105.

JANIBEG OR JANBEG KHAN. • 1 73

TINIBEG KHAN.

Uzbeg had four sons, Timur (whose death I have already mentioned),
Tinibeg, Janibeg, and Khidrbeg. Tinibeg is called Insanbeg or Insan
by Western writers, but this seems to be clearly a mistake. He is called
Tinibeg not only by the Russian writers but in the Pope's letter, in which
he acknowledged receiving an envoy from him.* Tinibeg only occupied
the throne a few months, when he was murdered by his younger brother
Janibeg. According to the chronicle of Troitzki, Janibeg also killed his
brother Khidr Beg.t

JANIBEG OR JANBEG KHAN.

Notwithstanding the murder by which he secured the throne, Janibeg
ruled very exemplarily, and is much praised by Eastern writers for his
wisdom and justice. " He was," says Ibn Haidar, "just, God-fearing,
and the patron of the meritorious." Mewlana Saad ud din Testasani,
one of the two pillars of Arabic learning in the eighth century of the
hejira (the other being Seid Sherif Jorani), dedicated to him his work
entitled " Telkhisol Miftah." It was an epitome of the philosophical
encyclopaedia of Sekaki, called " Miftah" or the Key. Like his father, he
was a great patron of learned men, who resorted to Serai in large
numbers during his reign.

On his accession the Russian princes and the metropolitan Theognost
received a summons to attend and do honour to their new sovereign.
The Grand Prince Simeon was very civily treated. Theognost was
detained, and pressure was put upon him to pay an annual ecclesiastical
tribute out of his large revenues, information about which was apparently
furnished by the Russians. Theognost cited the various documents by
which his predecessors and the Russian clergy had been exempted from
taxes. The latter were much pleased with the address of their hierarch,
who, instead of assenting to a regular taxation, persuaded Janibeg to
content himself with the payment of a lump-sum of 600 roubles.| It was
probably on this occasion, says Karamzin, that Theognost received from
Taidula, the widow of Uzbeg, with the assent of the Khan, a special
exemption from taxation. The edict had a scarlet tamgha or official
signature.!

Alexander, Prince of Pronsk, had been murdered by Ivan Korotopol,
Prince of Riazan, about 1339, when he was on his way to the horde with
tribute. II Alexander's son Yaroslaf sought assistance from Janibeg, who
sent an officer named Kinduk, and apparently an army, with him. They

Karamzin, iv. 425. Note, 62. t Id. \ Id., 319. § Id., 426. Note, 62. | Id., 300.

174 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

besieged Ivan in his capital. He was captured and put to death, and a
portion of his principahty was added to Yaroslaf' s. The Tartar con-
tingent who had assisted him, as usual, plundered the district.* We also
read that at the accession of Janibeg Constantine of Rostof, Constantine
of Suzdal, and Vasili of Yaroslavl went to the horde to get a confirmation
of their authority.!

In the year 1343 the Tartars made a raid into Poland, which was the
same year devastated by locusts. The Tartars were invited by Dasko,
whom Casimir had made governor of Przemisl, and by Daniel Ostreg.
Casimir hastened against them, and prevented their crossing the Vistula
near Sendomir. Having spent some days in ravaging the neighbourhood,
and tried in vain to capture Lubhn, they once more retired. About the
same time strife arose at Tana between the Tartars and the Genoese and
Venetians. It arose out of a trade dispute between a Genoese and a
Tartar, in which the latter was killed. Janibeg accordingly called upon
the Genoese to leave the] town. They ^treated his message cavalierly,
and sent him an insolent reply, and not only so, but proceeded to arm
their galleys and to plunder the coast. In February of 1344 they
attacked the Tartars, who were besieging the town, killed 15,000 of them,
and destroyed their siege apparatus, and the latter were at length con-
strained to give up the attack. Two months later some Tartar envoys
appeared at Genoa to offer reparation, and peace was accordingly
ratified.! Shortly after we find the Grand Prince Simeon and his
brothers Ivan and Andrew once more at the horde.

Let us turn our attention elsewhere for a short time. Gedimin, the
founder of the Lithuanian kingdom, died in 1341, leaving each of his
seven sons an appanage. He was succeeded in his chief authority by the
second of these, named Olgerd, who surpassed all the rest in bravery
and skill. We are told he avoided drinking both wine and hydromel,
nor did he engage in frivolous amusements, but devoted himself to
improving his position. § Olgerd apparently reigned at Vitebsk, Unuti
at Vilna, Narimant at Pinsk, and Kestuti at Troki.

Olgerd, who was ambitious, in alliance with his brother Kestuti, pro-
ceeded to displace Unuti and Narimant from their appanages and to
make himself sole monarch of Lithuania. Narimant took refuge with
the Tartar court. || Constantine, Prince of Tuer, also went to the horde
to settle a dispute with his nephew Vsevolod of Kholm, the son of the
famous Alexander. Constantine having died while among the Tartars,
they thereupon gave the principality to his nephew Vsevolod, but the
lattefs victory was short lived. Vasili of Kasin, another brother of
Constantine's, secured the countenance of Sheritumgha, Janibeg's mother,
and other influence there to enable him to displace his nephew, who had

* Karamzin, 319, 320. t Id., 426. Note, 62. J Golden Horde, 307.

(j Karamzin, iv. 325. |) Id.

JANIBEG OR JANREG KHAN. 1/5

to content himself eventually with his smaller heritage of Kholm.* In
1352 the Khan sent Ahmed with a special yarligh or patent of office for
Vasili.t In 1345 a Tartar Beg named Emir made a descent on the town
of Alexin, and plundered the house of the metropolitan there.t The
same year (z>., in 1345) the black plague appeared in Russia. It seems
to have originated in China, where 13,000,000 people became its victims.
Thence it spread over the Mongol world. The country on both sides of
the Caspian was devastated by it. Khuarezm, Turkestan, Serai, and
Beshdeshe (? the village of Wesedef below Yenotacwsk on an arm of the
Volga),§ all fell under its influence. The Armenians, Abkhazians, and
Circassians ; the Jews, the Genoese, and the Venetian colonists in the
Krim were decimated. || It also swept over Greece, Syria, and Egypt.
The Genoese ships carried it to Italy, France, England, and Germany.
Fifty thousand people, says Karamzin, were buried in one cemetery in
London. At Paris the distracted people wished to exterminate the Jews,
whom they charged with having introduced it. In 1 349 it appeared in
Scandinavia, and thence passed to Pskof and Novgorod. One-third of
the inhabitants of Pskof perished. Each priest found as many as thirty
bodies daily for burial in his church, and the service for the dead was
performed for them en masse. The cemeteries being full, the bodies
were baried beyond the walls and in the forests. The contagion was so
dangerous that the rich even could not find nurses. Children fled from
their parents, and the despairing people devoted their wealth to the
service of religion. Winter put an end to the plague.^ It seems to have
been a violent dysentery or cholera, and was marked by an effusion of
blood, after which the victims lived but two or three days. Its effects
among the nomades were doubtless terrible. Such diseases when they
attack strong hearty people, for the most part flesh eaters, are singularly
fatal, and the history of the spread of such scourges as small-pox,
measles, &c., in Siberia and North America is a grim story.

On the 15th of February, 1347, a treaty was made between the
Venetians and Janibeg, of which the terms at full length are set out by
Von Hammer. It was made in the name of God and Muhammed. The
document was addressed by Janibeg to all his commanders of tumans (/>,,
10,000 men), his millenarians, centurions, and decurions, and all those
subject to Mogolbeg ; to all the barons and rulers of the city, and to all
the gumrukje (/.<?., the customs officers), to his envoys, messengers, &c, ;
and he ordered that a piece of ground be set apart at Tana, separate from
that occupied by the Genoese, where the Venetians might do their
trafficking. Reference was made to a former ordinance, no doubt the one
issued by Uzbeg, to which I have referred, and detailed instructions were
given as to the amount of duty which was to be paid for imports, for

* Karamzin, iv. 349. Golden Horde, 309. t Golden Horde, 309.

t /</., 308. § Id. n Chronicle of Trotski, quoted by Karamzin, iv. 437. Note, 75.

51 Karamzin, iv. 300, &c.

176 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

shipping dues, for the various customs-charges, &c. Provisions were
inserted regulating the intercourse of the merchants and Tartars at Tana,
whose governor is styled Sichibeg. The document was signed with a
red tamgha or seal, and was dated from Gulistan in the year 748, the
22nd Ramasan («>., 15th February, 1346), which was the year of the pig
in the Mongol cycle, in the presence of Mogolbeg of Thuazi, Yagaltai,
Yerdhezin, and Kutlughbugha.

In 1346 the Grand Prince Simeon made another journey to the horde,
and returned laden with gifts. We now find him getting into conflict
with his powerful neighbour Olgerd of Lithuania, who was still a
heathen. The latter sent his brother Koriad to ask the Khan's assistance
against the Germans, who were pressing him hard. Simeon having told
the Khan that Olgerd was a dangerous person, the Tartar chief, contrary
to the comity of nations, surrendered the envoy Koriad to Simeon.

Olgerd was not at this time in a position to beard Michael. His
neighbour on the west was the powerful Casimir of Poland, who had in
1339 conquered Gallicia and the neighbouring province of Volhynia,* and
as a zealous Roman Catholic, had begun that policy of persecution of the
followers of the Greek faith in that province which the Poles have ever
practised; the priests were oppressed and the ritual changed. This threw
the people into the arms of the Lithuanians, and induced also the
Russian metropolitan to urge upon his master the Grand Prince that he
should treat Olgerd generoiisly. Simeon accordingly released Koriad
and paid his ransom, and even gave his relative Julienne, the daughter of
Alexander of Tuer, to the still pagan King of Lithuania, on condition
that his children should be brought up as Christians. Having secured
the Russian princes, Olgerd with his various satellites, including his
brothers Kestuti and Lubart, mustered their forces and drove the Poles
out of Volhynia.t

In 1349 Theognost, the metropolitan, made another journey to the
horde, doubtless to get a renewal of the privileges granted him by
Taidula. He was followed the following year by the Grand Prince
Simeon with his two brothers, and later in the year by Constantine of
Suzdal.t

In 1351 the Tartars, impelled by famine, made a raid into the district
of Bratislaf, then under a Russian prince, and Louis of Hungary, who was
his protector, assisted in driving them away.§ In conjunction with the
PoHsh King Casimir, he, in 1354, crossed the Bug and captured a young
Tartar Prince, but the Tartars retained their hold on the Dniester
for some time longer. Gallicia became subject to Poland, while the
western provinces of Russia {i.e., Little Russia) remained in the hands
of the Lithuanians till the sixteenth century.il

Karanuiin, iv. 421. Note, 58. t Id,, 357. I Golden Horde, 309.

§ Karamrin, iv» 337. II Id., 338.

JANIBEG OR JAN BEG KHAN. 177

Thus was broken up effectually the power of the Little Russians or
original Russians, and Moscow and Great Russia became more than ever
the rallying point of the eastern Slaves against the Tartars. This break
up had two important consequences. Many of the inhabitants migrated
and settled down in a semi-nomade state, and organised in military
fashion along the Dnieper and the Don, and formed eventually the two
military repubhcs of the Zarporogian and Don Cossacks.* Another
event which happened at this time, due also doubtless to the utter
feebleness of the Little Russians, was the foundation of the principalities
of Moldavia and Wallachia. It would seem that Moldavia and Bessarabia
were, before the Tartar invasion, inhabited by a mixed race of Slaves and
Turks,t with perhaps a small sprinkling of Vlakhs or Rumans, who were
all subject to the princes of Gallicia. On the destruction of that prin-
cipality, the two provinces became the prey of the Tartars, and its towns
and villages were devastated and almost depopulated. When the
prowess and victories of the Hungarian King Louis compelled the
Tartars to withdraw, the Vlakhs, who lived in the district of Marmaros in
Hungary, and who belonged to the Greek faith, and were consequently per-
secuted by the Roman Catholic Hungarians, migrated under their voivode
Bogdan or Dragosh, settled on the river Moldava, and founded the prin-
cipality of Moldavia, which remained tributary to the Hungarian crown.
Its princes were styled voivodes, and were elected by the people them-
selves.J Wallachia was similarly founded by fugitives from Transylvania,
who migrated under their chief Niger, and founded Tergovitz and
Bukharest. He also founded a line of voivodes dependent on the
Hungarian crown. § We must now revert again to Russia.

Simeon the Grand Prince died in 1353. It would seem, says Karamzin,
from his great seal that he was the first to style himself " Grand Prince
of all the Russias,"i| On his death there were two claimants for the
vacant throne, who made their way to Serai, namely, Ivan Ivanovitch,
the brother of Simeon, and Constantine Vasilovitch of Suzdal. The
people of Novgorod sent the boyard Simon Sudakof to solicit the
position for the latter. Janibeg, however, gave it to Ivan,1[ but the
people of Novgorod refused to recognise him until the death of
Constantine, which occurred a few months later.

Constantine's son Andrew was confirmed by the Khan in the towns of
Nijni-Novgorod, Gorodetz, and Suzdal, which formed his father's
appanage.** Dimitri also succeeded Ivan Feodorovitch of Starodub,
but he had to wait twelve months for the Khan's authorisation, which
alone legitimised his title.tt

* Kelly, op. cit., i. 85. t Pechenegs, &c.

I Until the seventeenth century the Russian language was not only used in the services of
the church but also in the civil tribunals of Moldavia. (Karamzin, iv. 369.)

§ Id., 369. I Id., 345. «T Id., 353. ** Id., 355. tt Id,

?.

178 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The town of Murom, which seems to have remained desert since the
invasion of Batu, was restored by George or Yuri Yaroslavitch in 1351.*
Four years later George was attacked and driven away by his relative
Feodor. Both princes repaired to the horde, where Feodor was duly
invested, and George was handed over to him. Soon after this the
principaUty of Murom was swallowed up in that of Vladimir.t The same
year Vasili was nominated Prince of Briansk by the Tartars, but he died
the following year, and that town fell into the hands of the Lithuanians.}
About the same time Irinchi was sent on some errand by Janibeg to
Moscow. M. Schmidt says the name is Tibetan, which makes it
probable he was a Buddhist.§ He was attended by merchants from the
sea of Azof. II The strife between Vasili of Tuer and his nephew
Vsevolod of Kholm still continued. The latter having appealed to the
Khan, was handed over to his uncle, who treated him as a slave, and
imposed a heavy tribute on his people.lF

The metropoUtan Theognost died in 1356, leaving behind him a
reputation for vigour and avarice. Alexis was appointed in his place
by the metropolitan of Constantinople,** inter alia he consecrated Ivan
as bishop of Serai.tt A year later he was summoned to the horde by
Taidula, the widow of Uzbeg, to whom I have already referred, who in
Tartar fashion had afterwards married Janibeg. She was apparently a
Christian.}! She sent to ask for his prayers as she was very ill. " We have
heard," also wrote the Khan to the Grand Prince, " that heaven refuses
no favour to your senior priest. His prayers therefore may cause the
recovery of my wife." He accordingly went to the horde and sprinkled
her with holy water, after which she recovered.§§ The grateful
Janibeg sent an envoy named Koshak to requite the Russian princes. || ||
Alexis remained a year at the horde, and returned only after the death of
Janibeg.

On the destruction of the power of the Ilkhans in Persia, Ashraf, a
son of the Choban I have previously named, seized upon the chief
authority in Azerbaijan. By his rapacity he alienated the affection of the
people, and also arrayed against him the various sheikhs. One of these
named Abul Hassan Mohayeddin of Berdaa escaped to Serai, where, in
a sermon he preached at the Friday service, he described the misery of
Azerbaijan in such pathetic terms that he persuaded Janibeg and his
people to march against Ashraf. He advanced at the head of 200,000 men,
by way of Derbend and Shirvan. Ashraf on his side collected a force of
90,000 at Tebriz, but the elements fought against him, and when Janibeg
appeared his forces were demoralised. They sustained a great defeat.
Ashraf and his emir and councillor Kaus, were captured. Ashraf was
beheaded, and his head was sent to Trebiz to be suspended at the

* Karamzin, iv. 350. f /d., 356, 357. : Id., 356. § Golden Horde, 311. Note, 2.

\IA. H Karamzin, iv. 357, 358. ** /d., 362. t1 Golden Horde, 311.

11 Karamzin, iv. 440. Note, 83. §5 Id., 363. Note, 83. |!|| Id., 363.

BERDIBEG KHAN. I 79

door of the mosque of Meragha. He had sent a caravan of treasure
consisting of one hundred mule and camel loads, to take refuge in the
castle of Alinjak. This caravan was waylaid by Janibeg's people, which
gave point to the verse,

See how the donkey Ashraf does his fate unfold,
Securing death for self, for Janibeg his gold.

After his victory, Janibeg held a tight rein over and forbade his people
to pillage the enemy's towns. He only stayed forty days in Tebriz, and
having said his prayers at the great mosque of the vizir Alishah Khoja,
went on to Aujan, whence he returned to Kipchak, leaving his son
Berdibeg at Tebriz with 15,000 horsemen. Falling ill on the way, he
sent his general Tughlukbeg to summon Berdibeg, so that he might
instal him as his successor. Fearing that his father might recover,
Berdibeg murdered him. This was done apparently by the advice of
Tughlukbeg.* The body of Janibeg was taken to the Imperial cemetery
of the Golden Horde, near Seraichuk on the Yaik, and there buried with
those of his ancestors.

His reign of seventeen years was the complement of that of his father's,
and the two form the most flourishing epoch of the history of the Golden
Horde, and a dismal contrast to the period which follows. He was
called the Good Janibeg by the Russian annalists.t His coins range
from the year 741 (?.^., 1340-1) to 758 {i.e., 1357), and they were struck at
Serai, Gulistan, New Serai, New GuUstan, the New Ordu, Khuarezm,
Mokhshi, Barchin, and Tebriz.]: On some of his money he styles himself
the " Supreme Sultan Jelal ud din Mahmud Janibeg Khan," On other
specimens we have a legend both in Mongol letters and in Persian, the
former representing his name as " Chambek Khan," while the titles "Just
Sultan Jelal ud din Mahmud" are given in the latter script.§ Riswan-
pashasade and Aali both write the name Janbeg, which is explained by
Von Hammer as meaning " der Seelen furst" (/.^., the prince of spirits).

BERDIBEG KHAN.

Berdibeg succeeded to the throne in the year 1357, and, according to
Russian authors, he proceeded to put to death twelve of his brothers a
piece of statecraft which is very common in eastern countries, and is in
a measure justified by the terrible anarchy so frequent there, arising from
the contests between brothers for the succession. One of Berdibeg's
first acts was to send Itkar to threaten the Russian princes. Upon this
the metropolitan Alexis once more repaired to Serai, and through the
intervention of Taidula he obtained favourable terms for them and also
for the church. A second Tartar, however, soon appeared in Russia

* Golden Horde, 312. 1 Karamzin, iv. 363.

I Fraehn, Description of Fuch's Collection, 10-13. 5 Frs&hn, Resen., &c., 229, &c.

l8o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

who is called the tzarevitch Mamat Khoja by Karamzin. He went to
Moscow to fix, as he claimed, the limits of the Grand PrincipaUty and
that of Riazan. His real object, however, was plunder, and the Grand
Prince replied that so long as he fulfilled the Khan's regulations it was
forbidden for the Khan's envoys to interfere in the internal concerns of
Russia. This temerity of the Grand Prince was probably due to the fact
that Mamat Khoja's invasion was disowned by Berdibeg. Having been
summoned back to the horde, he presumed to kill a favourite of
Berdibeg's, and we are told he was sent off to Ornatch {i.e., Urjenj) to
his uncle. Von Hammer calls him a son of Berdibeg's, but this is, I
believe, altogether improbable, and Karamzin speaks of him as if he
was no near relative of the Khan's.* We shall hear of him again.

Meanwhile we are told that the Grand Prince Ivan, Vasili of Tuer,
and his nephew Vsevolod of Kholm, went to the horde, where they were
confirmed in their governments.

A treaty made between Berdibeg and the Venetians is still extant.
This is dated in September, 1358, the Venetians being. represented by
Giovanni Quirino and Francisco Buono. It is addressed, as Janibeg's
was, to the various grandees, &c., of the empire. Among the rest,
however, we find in this document " the Signori of the Kumani "
mentioned.! It confirms the various privileges granted to the Venetians
by the former diplomas of Uzbeg and Janibeg already cited, and makes
new regulations as to dues, and special provision as to the amount which
was to be paid to Tughlukbeg, the Lord of Tana. The document was
signed at the ordu on the Aktuba on the 8th of the month Shewwal, in
the year 759 of the hejira, being the year of the dog in the Mongol
calendar, and is attested by Asanibei {i.e., Hassanbeg), Megalbei (?>.,
Mogolbeg), Sarabei (? Serai Kutlugh, previously mentioned), Yagaltai,
Tolobei {i.e., Tughlukbeg), and Cotulubeg {i.e., Kutlughbeg). A special
clause was added as to the claims of Kutlugh Timur, the lord of
Solgat.l

The success which Janibeg had gained in Azerbaijan bore but short-
lived fruit, for the deputy or governor whom Berdibeg nominated there,
named Akhitshuk, was killed by the emir Sheikh Uweis, the Ilkhan, who
reoccupied Tebriz.§ Berdibeg, like his predecessors Uzbeg and Janibeg,
renewed the privileges of the Russian church. ||

The Grand Prince Ivan died in the autumn of 1359, and was speedily
followed by Berdibeg, who was killed by Kulpa, with Tughlukbeg, the
instigator of his paricidal crime. With him ended for a while the
prosperous period of Kipchak history. This is neatly affirmed in an
Uzbeg proverb, which says "The hump of the camel was cut off in the
person of Berdibeg."1I On his coins Berdibet^ is styled Berdibeg Khan,

* Op. cit., iv. 365, 366- t Ciolden Horde, 5KJ. I /'/., 521, 522.

% U., 316. Ij Id. Karamzin, iv. Note, 83. H Abulghazi, ed. Desmaisons, 186.

KILDIBEG, KULPA, OR KULNA KHAN. l8l

and also Muhammed Berdibeg Khan. They were struck at Serai, New
Serai, Khuarezm, Gulistan, and Azak. (SaviHef has also published a coin
of his struck at El Aguir, a place whose situation I do not know.) They
range in date from 758 {i.e., 1357) to 760 (?>., 1358-9)-

KILDIBEG, KULPA, OR KULNA KHAN.

We now enter a period of great confusion in the history of the Golden
Horde. Khuandimir, who gives the fullest list of the Khans of Kipchak,
makes Berdibeg be succeeded by Kildibeg. The Russian authors call
Berdibeg's successor Kulpa, and the question arises whether these two
names are mere variants or are, as they have been treated by Frashn,
Von Hammer, &c., the names of distinct persons. The termination beg
is of course only a title, and Janibeg is sometimes styled Jani Khan, while
we find a Mamluk leader in Egypt called Berdi Ghazali, so that the
question we have to decide is whether Kildi and Kulpa were the same
person. Now Kulpa does not seem in form like a Turkish name, nor do
I know of its occurrence elsewhere in history. Again, on none of
the coins which are assigned to Kulpa is the name written Kulpa,
but in all it is written Kulna or Kulnah.* This seems to show that
the name is in some way corrupted. Again the general view is
that Kulna was killed and succeeded by Nurus Khan, yet it is curious
that coins both of Kulna and Nurus occur both in the years 760 and 761,
struck, too, apparently in all parts of the Khanate,t so that it would
appear that their reigns were in fact concurrent and contemporary, and
not actually successive. Now, while we have coins with the name of
Kulna struck in 760 and 761, we find coins with the name of Kildibeg
struck in 762 and 763, that is the very next years. This evidence of the
coins, coupled with the facts mentioned from Khuandimir and the
Russian annahsts, make me disposed to think that Kulpa, Kulna, and
Kildibeg were in fact the same person. I may add that he is also called
Askulpa.t Kildibeg, according to Karamzin, passed himself off as the
son of Janibeg. Coins with the name of Kulna were struck at Guhstan,
New Serai, Azak, and Khuarezm in the years 760 and 761 {i.e., i359-6o).§
Those with the name Kildibek were struck at New Serai, Azak, and
Mokhshi in the years 762 and 763 {i.e., I36i-2).|| According to the
authority followed by Von Hammer, Kulpa only occupied the throne for
six months and five days, when, with his sons Ivan and Michael, he was
killed by Nurusbeg.^

• Frahn, Resc, 261, 262. t W., 261-264, and 651. I Golden Horde, 315.

§ Frxhn, Resc, 2G1, 262. \ Id., 273, 274. 1 Golden Horde, 316.

1 82 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

NURUSBEG KHAN.

Khuandimir tells us Nurus falsely pretended to be a son of Janibeg's,*
that is therefore a brother of Berdibeg's. Karamzin merely says he was
a descendant of Juchi Khan.t On his accession the various Russian
princes repaired to the horde for investiture. Thus went Vasili
Michaelovitch of Tuer, with his nephews the Princes of Riazan and
Rostof. Dimitri Ivanovitch of Moscow did not go himself, but sent his
sword-bearer to ask for the yarligh or diploma. Nurus, however, insisted
that he should go in person. The next year {t.e.,'m 1360) Andrew,
Constantinovitch of Suzdal, and his brother Dimitri went there, and
were well received by Nurus. That Khan offered the Grand Principality
of Vladimir to Andrew, who refused it. He then gave it to his brother
Constantine. This position passed therefore for a while from the Princes
of Moscow and the family of Kalita. Dimitri returned home with a
representative of the Khan, and was well received at Vladimir, where he
was duly consecrated by the metropolitan Alexis, who, however, refused
to remove his seat from Moscow. Dimitri's appointment was welcomed
by the people of Novgorod, who were jealous of the Princes of Moscow.
Meanwhile Dimitri, the prince of that appanage, remained for some time
at the horde, and distributed presents to the Khan, his wife, and the
grandees there. He was invested with the Principality of White Russia
and the towns of Vladimir and Pereislavl.J

The reign of Nurus was but a short one. We are told that Khidr, who
had for a long time wandered beyond the Yaik, having won over some
of the Tartar grandees, killed Nurus, his son Timur, and the old Khatun
Taidula.§ The chronicle of Nikon adds that he put to death all the
people of a certain Mualbuza. II This was probably the Mogolbeg who
appears prominently as a signatory to the treaties between Janibeg and
Berdibeg and the Venetians.^ On one of his coins Nurus is styled
Muhammed Nurus. His money was struck in 760-1 (?>., 1359-60), at
Gulistan, New Serai, and Azak.**

CHERKESBEG KHAN.

Khuandimir, in his list of the Khans of Kipchak, makes Nurus Khan
be succeeded by Cherkes Khan, who he says the emirs, for some
diplomatic reasons, made out to be a son of Janibeg Khan.tt His name
does not occur elsewhere as succeeding at this period, and it is not till

* Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 117. t Op. cit., iv. 370. J Golden Horde, 31G.

i id., 417. Karamzin, iv. 373. |J Karamzin, iv. 88. «[ Golden Horde, 517-519, and 521.

** Frjehn, Resc, 263, 264, tt Journ. Asiat, vii. 117.

CHERKESBEG KHAN. • 1 83

sixteen years later, namely, in the year 776 of the hejira (1374-5), when
we find Cherkesbeg Khan coining money at Astrakhan.* It may be
that he mounted the throne ephemerally, and then survived for many
years, but we know nothing more about him. With his shadowy figure
we may well close another chapter of our work, for we now find the
family of Batu Khan had reached the term of its rule in the Kipchak.
Whether his descendants were absolutely extinct or not it is impossible
to say, but none of them, so far as we know, occupied the throne, which
passed into the hands of the descendants of other sons of Juchi. Their
history I shall trace in the succeeding chapters.

Note I.— In the account of Uzbeg Khan I overlooked some notices of him
contained in the narrative of the Roman Catholic missionaries, published by
Colonel Yule in " Cathay and the Way Thither." Thus, in a work entitled
" The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan," set forth by the archbishop of
Soldaia (supposed to be the Dominician John de Cora), and written about 1330,
we are told how Uzbeg was one of the three great lieges of the Great Caan,
and that each year, like the rest, he sent as presents to his suzerain five
leopards, camels, and jerfalcons, and a great store of precious jewels. He
also says that in his war with Abusaid, Uzbeg put in the field an army of
707,000 horsemen ! ! !t Our next authority is John of MarignolH, who passed
through the Kipchak in 1339. He tells us he found Christians at Kaffa
of many sects, that on leaving that town he visited Uzbeg Khan, and presented
the letters which he had with him from the Pope for the Khan himself, for his
eldest son Tinibeg, and for Elias the ungarian (the Helym of the text),J who
was in favour with the latter. He also presented him with certain pieces of
cloth, a great war horse, with some strong liquor, and the Pope's presents ;
and after the winter was over, having been well fed, well clothed, and loaded
with handsome presents, and supplied by Uzbeg with horses and travelling
expenses, he proceeded to Almaligh.§

The Roman Catholics made extraordinary missionary efforts in the
fourteenth century. About 1307 Khanbaligh was created a metropolitan see,
with John of Montecorvino at its head, and directly after seven suffragan
bishops were nominated to various sees in China. || John is said to have
converted the Mongol Khakan. Wadding tells a very improbable story that
when the Khakan died he was buried in the convent church ; that when
the troubles broke out in later times and the friars had to leave China,
they removed the Imperial body with them to Serai^ and that when taken up
it was found as fresh as when buried.*[[ To prove how strongly established the
Latin church was in the Kipchak, I may quote a list of convents in that
province, which, although written in the year 1400, refers probably to an

* Fraehn, Resc, &c., 300. t Cathay amd the Way Thither, i. 238. \ Ante, 171.

§ Cathay and the Way Thither, ii. 337. \ld.,\.\jo. % Id., 171,

1 84 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

earlier period. There were ten within the custodia of Serai and four in that of
Gazaria or the Crimea. Those of Serai were Tana, Agitarchan (/>.,
Astrakhan), Serai, Comuch (Le., Kumuk, the land south of the Terek), Tarchis
(i.e., Terki, at the mouth of the river Terek, now represented by Kisliar,
higher up, and which was distinct from the modern Tarkhu), Mamui (? Serai-
chuk), Majar, Uguech (/.<»., Ukek), Ak Serai {i.e., white building perhaps, says
Colonel Yule, " Al Baidha," which means the same thing, and which Edrisi
couples with Samander, and possibly the Abserai of the Catalan map on the
coast below Terki), and Organae (/.<?., Urgenj).

In another list given by Wadding in 1314, we have named Beler, probably
Bulghari, and S. Joannes, a monastery three miles from Serai. According to
Wadding, a young man of this monastery named Stephen, resenting some severe
discipline, deserted and publicly professed Islam ; he afterwards as publicly
recanted, and thereupon the enraged Muhammedans hacked him in pieces
in front of the fire that was to have burnt him.*

Neie 2. — In a note to the previous chapter, I accepted Colonel Yule's conclu-
sions that the site of the ancient Serai of Batu Khan was probably near the salt
works called Selitrennoi Gorodok, and also that there was a " New Serai," con-
siderably further up the river, which was known as the Serai of Janibeg Khan.
Its ruins exist on a very large scale at Tzaref. They have been explored with
great diligence by M. Grigorief, who has published a considerable work upon
them, which is unfortunately written in Russian. A plan of the ruins may be
seen in the first volume of Colonel Yule's Marco Polo. This New Serai became,
from its importance, the chief capital of the Golden Horde, and was also
known as Great Serai. From Janibeg's name being so closely connected with
it in tradition, it probably owed a good deal of its importance to him. It first
occurs under the name of New Serai on a coin of Toktoghu of the year 710
{i.g., 1310-11), but the site is so important from the neighbouring pasturage being
so good, that it marks probably, as Pallas suggested, the usual summer quarters
of the Tartar Khans. Pallas described the ruins at Tzaref in some detail, and
I shall abstract his account. He says, " Near the Podpalatnoi Yerik (a ditch
which empties itself by one branch into the Tzarefka, and by another into
the Akhtuba), there are some curious remains of Tartarian antiquity. I
remarked there several traces of houses and sepulchral hills, similar to those
which I had before observed above the river Kugultu on the higher steppe.
Among them are three ruins enclosed by a square bank of rubbish, without a
a ditch, and with an outlet towards the south. The monument at Podpalatnoi
Yerik is a sepulchral mound of a flat form, raised on a square eminence, and
consisting of six contiguous and very low arches covered with earth ; its base
is about one hundred and fifty paces in circumference, and not above a fathom
high, but together with the square on which the vaults are erected it is three
fathoms in perpendicular height. This square monument is enclosed by the
foundation of a thick wall, which consists of an imperfect sandstone quarried
on the opposite bank of the Volga. There appears to have been an entrance
in the northern side of this wall, which forms an oblong square of twenty-nine

• Cathay and the Way Thither, t33, 234. Notes.

NOTES. 185

fathoms long and twenty-seven fathoms broad ; its base, measured from north
to south, is fifty-seven fathoms in extent, and fifty-six from east to v^est. The
space around the vaulted hillocks is considerably excavated within the
enclosure, and the vaults of the monument, which probably have long since
been plundered of a considerable booty, deserve a more accurate description
on account of the solidity of their construction. The walls that support them
are formed of pieces of rough unhewn sandstone, about an ell high. The vaults
themselves are almost flat, and consist of about six layers of square oblong
bricks placed alternately, so that one by its breadth supports and covers two
others. The spaces between them are nearly an inch broad, and filled up with
a cement which in some places appears to have been poured in while in a
liquid state. It has, however, acquired such a solid consistence that it is easier
to break the well-burnt bricks than to separate the mortar. This grey cement
appears to be a mixture of unslacked lime, pulverised charcoal, and pounded
sandstone, instead of the sand used for building. In that mass I observed
many particles of lime as white as snow, which readily crumbled into dust, as
well as large and small particles of charcoal, this substance being reduced to
a fine powder, probably imparted the grey colour to the cement. Perhaps the
admixture of charcoal dust may produce an effect similar to the earth of
Pozzuola, which, however, must be decided by experiment. The durability of
the cement may also be ascribed to a mixture of sour milk, which we may
suppose must have been in great abundance among a wealthy pastoral people.
In short, the mortar of their vaults is, notwithstanding the constant moisture
from above and the saline nature of the surrounding soil, the best, hardest, and
driest I have ever seen, and the ruins of the flat vaults almost resist the force
of the pick-axe, insomuch that they can only be reduced by small fragments.

" On the western side of this mausoleum, distant about forty-two fathoms,
there is a round heap of rubbish, apparently the ruin of a brick tower, from
which a wall of an ell thick extends five fathoms to the east-south-east, and
thirty-one fathoms to the south-south-east, forming an obtuse angle at a
circular pit, where it terminates. The brick and shards scattered here
probably belonged to an ancient aqueduct. I shall not attempt to decide
whether this has been an apparatus for raising water, but so much is certain
that the circumjacent soil having been made perfectly level, indicates a former
state of agriculture, besides, it is manifest that at the lowest side of the parapet
there has been a mound or bank formed in regular angles, from eight to ten
paces broad, and upwards of a thousand paces long. The earth for this bank
has been taken from pits discoverable in several places. This enclosure could
have served no other purpose than that of a reservoir of water for gardens."*"

"The popular tradition relative to the monument near the Podpalatnoi
Yerik is that the palace of the Khan formerly stood there. I imagine, however,
that this ruin, as well as the numerous vaulted piles of brickwork, are the
ancient sepulchres of the Mongol-Tartar princes and other persons of
distinction. The leaden tubes which are said to have been found near these
vaults have probably been used instead of the spiracles usually made in Muham-
medan tombs. It is certain that in the sepulchres of this country immense

* Pallas's Travels in the Southern Provinces of Russia, i. ij4-ig6.
lA

1 86 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

riches have formerly been discovered, consisting of jewels and vases and
ornamental horse furniture of massy gold and silver. The major part of this
treasure has been secretly disposed of to the goldsmiths and merchants, while
the remainder is still preserved in the cabinet of curiosities belonging to the
Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg.

•' About one hundred fathoms north-west from the great mausoleum there
is a large heap of rubbish or ruins thrown together, and nearly one hundred
fathoms in circumference. It appears to have been part of the materials of a
building. About sixteen fathoms farther towards the west-south-west is
another square mass of ruins of a moderate size. One hundred fathoms north-
west from the latter, and above one hundred fathoms from the large monument,
a third oblong and very considerable pile appears, which is probably the ruins
of a building ; and two hundred fathoms westward there is a circular sepulchral
hill, simply vaulted with bricks. This hill is opposite to and about one
hundred fathoms distant from a lake, which is a verst long and surrounded
with dwarf willows. The lake contains a sweetish water, and is much
frequented by a variety of the feathered tribe. According to tradition, it is
asserted to be the true sugar lake of Kharashish, the divorced consort of the
Khan Dshenovak (/.<?., of Janibeg Khan), who is so often the subject of con-
versation among the Kalmuks. This lady, it is reported, had fixed her
habitation near the above lake, and ordered a large quantity of sugar to be
thrown into it, to decoy aquatic birds from the circumjacent parts. By this
stratagem the Khan (her husband), who was a great lover of hawking, was
induced to resort to the vicinity of her residence, and thus she eventually
effected a reconciliation. All the heaps of ruins in the valley are distinctly
visible from this lake, and there is also a distance prospect of the pile situated
on the high steppe beyond the Tzaritza, which I have already mentioned in
my former travels, and the large sepulchral hillocks beyond the Kugultu." *

" In some parts of this low country there is said to be a regular road paved
with bricks leading over a swampy ditch, and in other places small regular
arches of brickwork are discoverable, which probably have served as a ground-
work for the felt tents of the chiefs in a country so rich in pasturage. In my
opinion the ruins are not the remains of the dwelling-houses, but partly of
mosques and partly of vaulted chapels which have been enclosed by walls
like the modern cemeteries of the Nogays. A wandering nation, such as
the Golden Horde of these countries, could no more be induced to reside
in houses than the Khans and princes of the Kalmuks along the banks of the
Volga; though the fortress of Yenataevka had been purposely established the
dwelling-houses built for their accommodation. The whole border of the high
steppe above the valley of Tzarevy Pody is covered with innumerable sepulchral
hills, and those called Kurgans, which are scattered down along the banks of
the Akhtouba, as far as the Solanka, and upwards beyond Saplavnaya. Some
of these hills are very large, and may be seen at a great distance, but nearly
the whole of their vaults have been opened. The largest sepulchral monu-
ments are erected on the most prominent parts of the country, gs in Siberia."

The ruins of the old Tartar capital and its dependent villages stretch over

* Id., 198, 199.

NOTES. 1S7

a wide area of the steppe on the upper Akhtuba, and cover a space of seventy
versts, including. the bends of the river, and stretch from the village of Nishni
Akhtubinsk, opposite Zaritzin, towards the east and south-east, as far as
Saplawinskoi and the village of Prishibinskoi.* Near Saplawinskoi there is a
large heap of bricks, which the Russians call Metshetnoi Bugar, or the hall of
the house of prayer, and the Kalmuks, Temahne Balgasun, or the camel's
tower. The Kalmuks report that Janibeg Khan kept his mares there,
whose milk was conveyed by tubes from this tower to his residence,
" but," says Pallas, " the numerous sepulchral hillocks scattered over the
steppe sufficiently indicate the purpose to which this building was formerly
consecrated."t

♦' From Prishibruskoi may be seen the beautiful valley of Tzarevy Pody, or
the Royal residence. It is upwards of fifteen versts long and seven broad. By
the Kalmuks it is called Jan Wokhani Balgassun (i.e., the town where Khan
Wokhan ruled). The Tartars, however, call it Janibeg Khan Serai. |
Many coins have been found over this area, while the worked stones and
debris have been used in building the tower of Zarefka," &c.§

I have no hesitation, as I said, in identifying the ruins just described with
New Serai, as distinguished from the old Serai of Batu Khan. Now it is
curious that when the name of New Serai appears on the coins that of Serai''
proper becomes very infrequent, and presently ceases altogether. We have
it replaced by a new name, " Gulistan " {i.e., the town of roses), a name
which occurs in other sites, as on the coast of Abkhazia on the Black Sea, and
is a very pretty synonym. I have no doubt that it represents the older Serai,
and was given to it doubtless when the name Serai became distinctively
attached to the larger town on the Akhtuba, and it naturally occurs for the
first time under Janibeg Khan in 1351, who gave New Serai its importance.
On a coin of Murid's,|| struck in 763, the mint place is " Gulistan lis Serai "
{i.e., Gulistan which is Serai), ^ which proves that Gulistan is only another
name for Serai. I may add that New Serai was apparently sometimes called
New Gulistan, which name occurs on some coins of Janibeg, Pulad, and Azis
Khan. There was still another synonym by which Serai was known, and this
was the Mongol name of Ordu, the meaning of which I have explained in the
Introduction. It first occurs under the Khan Abdullah in the year 1365-6,**
and was used by most of the succeeding Khans. The name was also applied
to New Serai, which was called Ordu el jedid, or New Ordu, on some of the
coins of Toktamish and his successors.

I may add, as confirming the view here taken, that the diploma granted by
Janibeg to the Venetians, already cited, is dated from Gulistan, while that of
his son Berdibeg is similarly dated from the ordu on the Akhtuba.tt

I shall reserve the description of Bolghari and Astrakhan for a later chapter,
and will now consider the sites of certain towns which occur as mint places of the
Golden Horde, and were probably situated on the Kuma and the Terek, namely,
Majar, JuUad, and Mokhshi. In regard to Majar we have abundant materials.

* Muller Ugrische Volkstamm, ii. 570. t Pallas, op. cit., i. 192.

I MuUer, op. cit., 571. § Id. || Vide next chapter. H Fraehn Resc, &c., 276.

** Vide infra. tt Golden Horde, 519 and 521.

1 88 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The ruins of the city are, or rather were, in recent times, situated on the river
Kama. The site was visited by Gmelin in 1772, and he tells us the ruins occur
in three places. The principal ones are called Middle or Great Majar, and
are situated on the left bank of the Kuma, between the lakes of Biwalla or
Bibala and Tamuslava. When Gmelin was there he found an elevated
quadrangular plain, five versts in diameter, the whole of which was occupied
with ruins.

" These ruins," he says, " are evident indications of the former existence of
a great and magnificent city, and some remains of buildings are yet in such
a state as to prove this to demonstration. Others are more completely
destroyed; and of the greater part, the ravages of time have left nothing but
rubbish and the foundations, vaults more or less perfect, and similar relics.
Such of the ruins as are in the best preservation are situated in general on the
extreme border of the quadrangle, and surround the rest of the town. They
are of superior dimensions, built of larger and more durable bricks, more
profusely embellished, and stand more detached ; they likewise exhibit traces
of ditches and walls, and seem from all appearances to have been castles of
the grandees, erected with a view to strength, splendour, and durability. The
bricks resemble those still made by the Tartars of Astrakhan, that is to say,
they are broader and thicker than ours. In the external walls, a mortar com-
posed of lime and sand is used only here and there, the cement generally
employed being clay alone ; but within almost all the rooms are plastered and
whitewashed. The foundations are mostly of brick, some few of stone, but all
extremely solid. The beams and wood-work are fir.

" The figure of the buildings yet preserved is square, octagonal, and circular.
All of them are from four to nine fathoms in height, and the square and
octagonal are surmounted by a kind of pyramid, or rather diminish upward in
the form of a pyramid. Narrow mnding staircases, seldom more than fifteen
inches wide, concealed in the walls, conduct to these pyramids or cupolas,
which receive light through apertures resembling windows in the sides. The
cupolas are arched at the top. In every house there is a lofty and spacious hall
with two windows, likewise built of stone, from which a door leads into the
principal apartment on the ground-floor. The entry to the hall is on the
outside, and low. Thus every building consists of no more than one principal
apartment on the ground-floor, the hall, and the cupola or pyramid. The first
receives light from a small narrow window at a considerable height on each
side, and on one or two sides there is a still smaller aperture very near the
floor, likewise for the purpose of light, or perhaps of air. On the outside of the
walls of the principal apartment and of the hall, there is a recess a brick in
depth, and this recess is always arched at the top, probably for ornament.
Within are several similar recesses or niches.

"The style of the circular buildings differ still more from the modern
European and Asiatic architecture. These are likewise from four to nine
fathoms in height, not large, arched and pointed at top ; and they so nearly
resemble the round Persian and other watch-towers, that they might be taken
for them, if they did not stand among the other buildings on level ground, and
had not windows instead of loopholes. These were probably magazines.
" In the middle of the principal apartment is a circular aperture three or

NOTES. 189

four feet in diameter, closed with a stone which exactly fits it. This aperture
leads to a horizontal subterraneous passage, frequently no longer than the
room itself, but which in many instances proceeds in a straight line, and runs
to the extremity of the court-yard, where is also a closed entrance. It is
provided with several air-holes.

" The decorations of the buildings consist of blue, green, red, or white
glazed bricks, which are neatly inlaid among the others in the form of
triangles/squares, parallelograms, crosses, hearts, and other figures, both in
the interior and exterior of the walls of the lower apartment, and of the
pyramid or cupola; just in the same manner as in the buildings of Selitrennoi
Gorodok.

*' The smaller wall incloses the court-yards of the above-described principal
buildings in the form of a square, be the buildings themselves of whatever
figure they may. Each of these court-yards has one or more graves, probably
of the owners and their relations. Where there are several, they are all placed
by the side of one another. Every grave has a stone, either standing upright
or flat. The latter are about two yards long, and on the upper side there is
generally the figure of a coffin common in Germany ; but some have also
geometrical and other figures, which to me appeared arbitrary ; but might be a
representation of the signature or arms of the deceased : thus you see upon
them triangles, crosses, squares, &c. The surface of one large gravestone was
divided by two diagonal lines into three compartments ; in the centre was the
figure of a coffin, and a figure in each of the two others,

" Besides these detached graves in the court-yards, there are also general
burial-places, and one in particular beyond the lake of Biwalla (the river
Bywalla) full of gravestones of different kinds.

" The buildings in the centre of the city, surrounded by these durable
edifices, are now almost all mere heaps of rubbish forming small hills. They
must have been run up with bad materials, and have been partly built of
unburnt brick alone. Nevertheless, every house has its court-yard encom-
passed with a wall and ditch, and its tenants repose in their own ground, as
traces of the walls and gravestones plainly evince— proofs of the once
flourishing state of this city.

" Not far from Majar, near the lake of Biwalla, I saw a sepulchre, the
occasion of which I was quite at a loss to divine. This burial-place cannot
have been discovered but by some accident, perhaps by some person sinking in
there; for it is totally destitute of any of the marks that would excite a
suspicion of the existence of such a receptacle. In a spot overgrown with
reeds is a hole two yards deep, four long, and about the same in breadth, with
shelving sides, which was covered with clay and turf, as it partly is still. It is
almost full of decayed human bones, to all appearance the remains of persons
slain in battle.

" The first Majar (or Lower Majar) is situated on the Kuma, eighteen versts
from Great Majar, and consists of the ruins of three edifices and court-yards
at some distance from one another. One of them exactly resembled the
octagonal buildings described above, both in form and architecture, but was of
larger dimensions than any of those structures, and the ornaments of glazed
brick had sustained less injury. The two] others stand each at the distance

I90 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of about two hundred fathoms from this edifice, and all three in the form of
a triangle.

" On the Kuma, three versts beyond Middle Majar, are the ruins of houses
the same kind, which are called by the Russians Upper Majar, Opposite to
Middle Majar, on the other (the right) side of the Kuma, are some few relicg
of former settlements and habitations.

" To this description of the remains of Majar, Gmelin adds that in 1735,
while the Tartars were still masters of this country, Tatischtschew, governor
of Astrakhan, sent some persons with a strong escort to explore these ruins,
and to collect antiquities. By this means, as we are told, he obtained a
writing upon very strong blue paper* and several coins, which he (as an
antiquary !) took to be Scythian. It is matter of regret that nobody knows
what has become of these collections, for in 1735 much greater curiosities
must have existed there than in Gmelin's time, or at present ; since the avarice
of the Russian peasants prompts them to such researches wherever there are
ruins and ancient graves, as leave nothing to be gleaned after them.

" Giildenstadt, who was at Majar on the 4th of July, 1773, found there, in
an area of four hundred square fathoms, about fifty different buildings of brick.
He considers them not as habitations but sepulchral edifices, all of which were
provided with subterraneous vaults, which are not cellars but graves where the
coffins were deposited. About five hundred fathoms to the west of this burial-
place were the ruins of a Muhammedan mosque with its tower or minaret, and
five hundred fathoms further to the west the remains of another edifice of the
same kind. He is of opinion that between the two might once have stood
houses, of which indeed no traces are now left, but which were probably,
according to the mode of building common in this country, of light boards and
wickerwork. From some inscriptions Giildenstadt ascertained that Majar was
inhabited in the eighth century of the hejira ; and from the style of the ruins
he concludes that the people were Muhammedans, and according to history
Nogays.

" Pallas says, that in 1780 thirty-two buildings were yet left, partly in good
preservation, partly lying in ruins, and that there had formerly been ten others
in the form of towers : but since numerous colonists have settled on the Kuma,
and erected villages, all these remains of Majar have disappeared ; as they
employed the bricks in building their houses, because timber is a great rarity
in the adjacent country. Thus seven years later Pallas found but four chapels,
as they are called, standing, the sites of the others being marked only by
heaps of rubbish."t

He tells that similar bricks to those found in the Tartar ruins, and glazed
on one side only, were used when he wrote for chamber ovens, and were made
at Cherkask, on the banks of the Don. After describing in detail the ruins as
he saw them, he says : — " We often met with similar enclosures near the

* " The Mongols still use the same kind of paper, which is either blue, brown, or black, for
copying the sacred books of Lama religion upon, in gold, silver, or white letters. Of this sort
were the Tibetian and Mongol writings found at Semipalatna and Ablai-kit, which excited so
much attention at the commencement of the last century. (See Bayer Museum Sinicum,
Petrop. 1730, vol. i., Pref., 108, and G. F. Miiller Comment, de Script. Tangut. in Siberia
repertis, in the Comment. Acad. Petrop., vol. x., 420, et seq."

t Klaproth's Travels in the Caucasus, 226-230.

NOTES. 191

principal tombs on the banks of the Volga, and I have not the least doubt that
all these remains of antiquity formerly belonged to the same horde.'* He gives
some excellent plates of two or three of the more imposing structures.

Let us now add Klaproth's account. He says: —

" These ruins, of which I could find nothing but the traces, are situated on
the elevated brow of the steppe on the left of the Kuma, and on both sides of
the Bibala, and extend northward as far as two small lakes of salt water.
They occupy an area of about four versts and a half in length from north to
south, and very little less in breadth. The destruction of these remains of
antiquity has been occasioned chiefly by the settlement of several colonies,
which have established themselves in this neighbourhood, and have pulled
them down for the sake of the serviceable bricks. Their total demolition,
however, is to be ascribed more particularly to Count Paul Ssergeitsch
Potemkin, who ordered the greatest part of the buildings remaining in his
time to be taken down, that the materials might be employed in the erection
of the governmental town and fortress of Yekaterinograd, projected by himself.
The peasants of Pokoinoi and Praskowyno have since carried away such
quantities of bricks, that out of all the edifices only two burial chapels are now
left, and these are going rapidly to decay.

" As the particulars already quoted from Gmelin and Giildenstadt are more
circumstantial than any that I am capable of giving," says Klaproth, " I shall
merely subjoin the description of a burial-vault underneath one of the chapels
still standing, which I caused to be opened. The sunken floor of this building,
which was quite open towards the east, was covered to the depth of more than
two feet with bricks, rubbish, and earth ; these were cleared away with shovels,
when I found a hole, two feet and a half in depth and two in width, covered with
a large limestone. This was the entrance to the vault, which was nine feet long
and five and a half feet broad, but scarcely high enough to allow a person to
stand upright. It was built of bricks laid edgewise; and in the middle, upon
an elevation of brickwork, was a coffin made of thick deal boards, with the
bones of the deceased, of the ordinary size, but which were much decayed,
and authorise the inference that they must be of considerable antiquity. The
skull had fallen to pieces, otherwise I should have taken it with me. Besides
these objects there was nothing whatever worthy of notice in the vault. The
air was pure, and our wax tapers burned extremely bright in it. The coffin
lay in the direction from north to south. I would have had the vault under
the other chapel opened also ; but the Armenians assured me that they had
examined it about a year before, and that it exactly resembled this in every
particular.

" From the remaining ruins and from the foundations, the site of the town
may easily be recognised, and it was evident that the burial-place was towards
the Kuma. Every impartial person must admit that most of these remains are
indications of a city, as are also the numerous ancient European and Tartar
silver and copper coins, the gold and silver rings and earrings, the bronze
mirrors, and other utensils which are still frequently found buried in the earth ;
further, the mosaic pavements of blue, white, and green glazed tiles, stone

* Pallas, op. cit., i. 331.

192 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

seats, and among the rest also a large reservoir for water of hewn stone, which
now serves a peasant at Praskowyno for a corn bin.

" The name Majar, given to these ruins, is old Tartar, and signifies a stone
building; it is synonymous with Thashtan. By the neighbouring Nogays and
Turkomans they are likewise called Kirk Majar, that is, the forty stone
buildings. Here, as in Turkish, Kirk does not merely signify forty, but it is
the number which denotes a great multitude, like six hundred in Latin. In
some Tartar dialects indeed, the word Majar also means a large four-wheeled
waggon, but here that signification seems to be totally inapplicable. Some
tribes of the Russian Tartars in the lofty mountains of the Caucasus, at the
source of the Chegem and Terek, assert that they are descended from the
inhabitants of this Kirk Majar.

" The following facts afford incontestable proofs that Majar was a town
built and inhabited by Kipchak Tartars.

" I. The form of the buildings and sepulchral chapels is characteristic of
Southern Asia ; and the latter in particular exactly resembles those which are
to be seen near Tiflis in the Tartar burial-place on the rivulet of Zakuissi.
The fashion of adorning the walls with tiles, which are glazed on one side with
different colours, is also Tartar and Mongol. Thus in Dauria are to be found
the ruins of an ancient city, and the same kind of green, blue, and red bricks as
here ; and in Tiflis the walls of the citadel of Naraklea, erected by the Turks,
are in like manner ornamented with glazed tiles of different colours.

*' 2. The inscriptions in the Arabic language yet extant on gravestones are
of Muhammedan Tartar origin. Several that I saw were inscribed in letters
resembling the Cufic, and others in Niss'chi characters ; the two most perfect
of which are the following : — ' Here is buried the deceased, who needs the
mercy of God in eternity, Sina, son of Muhammed, the son of Chalil ... in
the year of the aera seven-and-forty and seven hundred.'

•' The year of the hejira 747 commences April 23, 1346, and ends the nth
April in the year 1347 of the Christian era.

" The other inscription, which is of later date by about thirty years, is as
follows : — * The Judge of the Faithful, Kassi Muhammed, son of Taij-uddin
(Crown of the Faith), in the year seven-and-seventy and seven hundred.'

" The year 777 of the hejira falls between the ist of June, 1375, and the
19th of May, 1376. This stone, which is in excellent preservation, I took
away with me from Majar for the sake of the date.

" All the other sepulchral inscriptionsi, containing dates, which were partly
expressed in words and partly in figures, belonged to the eighth century of the
hejira ; and of these I found five more ; but excepting the lower part, compre-
hending the date, they were too much defaced to be entirely made out. When
Pallas asserts that he found no stones with inscriptions at Majar, he proves
that he took no great pains to look for them. They are now, indeed, no longer
to be met with among the ruins, but may be seen in the court-yards of the
neighbouring peasants, who use them for building. Many of them also are
said to have been employed in the walls of Yekaterinograd.

"3. Almost all the silver and copper pieces found at Majar were coined
at Serai, the residence of the Jingiskhanids in the Kipchak, or in other cities
of their empire."

NOTKS. 193

Klaproth describes in detail a considerable number of the coins found at
Majar, ranging from one of Mangu Timur, struck in the year 1274-5 to one
of Pulad Khan, who reigned from 1406 to 1408.* Great and Little Majar are
mentioned in the Derbend Nameh as early as the second century of the hejira,
and then had their respective governors.t According to Abulghazi, Mangu Timur
made over Kaffa, Krim, and Majar to Ureng Timur, the son of Tuka Timur.J
Abulfeda also mentions Kumajar in the country of the Tartars of Bereke,§
Kum Majar, as Klaproth says, is compounded of Kum and Majar {i.e., Majar
on the Kuma).|| Majar occurs as a mint place on a coin dated in 710 or 715 (i.,?.,
i3ioor 1315), and New Majar on a coin of Muhammud Bulak in 774 {i.e.,
1372-3). IF Klaproth says the town was probably destroyed in the turbulent
times which followed the reign of Toktamish.

The inhabitants of the district up to this time, as I have shown in the
introduction, were probably the ancestors of the Basians and Karachai of the
Caucasus, who were gradually pushed southwards, and eventually driven from
the two Kabardas into the mountains by the encroachments of the Circassians.

A second mint place in this district, in the days of the Golden Horde, was
Jullad, which occ«rs on a coin of 692 or 696 {i.e., 1293 or 1296). Fr^ehn says it
was situated on the right of the Terek, where its ruins still remain,** I
find in Koch's very detailed map of the Caucasian Isthmus there is a place on
the Upper Terek, but on the left bank, called Julatsk, which is perhaps the
site referred to. I may add that, like Majar, Jullad is also named in the
Derbend Nameh as having a special governor of its own.tt

In regard to Mokhshi there has been hitherto a singular difficulty in dis-
covering its whereabouts. It occurs on many coins of Uzbeg, on one of
Janibeg, and on one of Kildibeg. Frashn was apparently altogether ignorant
of its site, and its name is given with several orthographies, as if its
form was uncertain. I would propose to identify it with the ancient capital of
the Alans or Ossetes, which, according to Masudi, was called Magas.}]: This
was probably situated in the Little Kabarda. Klaproth, in describing this
district, says " in all probability the most ancient sepulchral monument in the
Little Kabarda is situated on the east side of the rivulet Yaman Kul, about
three versts from Botashewa Kabak, in the plain at the foot of the second
Greben. It is an edifice of hewn stone, and around it are about a hundred
hillocks of earth, called Bugri, which probably mark the graves of the princes
whose remains are deposited in the monument. The building is an octagon,
each of its sides measuring six feet. In that facing the south is an arched
door, on each side of which is a wall projecting to the distance of two yards.
In the sides fronting the east and west are two corresponding windows, about
nine inches from the ground. The height of the walls is about twelve feet.
At the bottom of the building is a deep vault, the stone supporters of which
have fallen in so that the regular sides of a central aperture leading to the
vault are no longer to be seen. This place is so incumbered with stones that
no remains of bodies are discoverable. Almost the whole west side of the

* Id., 236-238. t Id., »39. I Id., 239. § Jd., 240.

11 Id., 240. H Frffihn die Munzen der Chane von Ulus Dschutschi* ** Resc, 201.

t1 Klaproth, op. cit., 239. II D'Ohsson Voyage d'Abul Cassim, 23.

IB

194 Hi.^»v>.<i VM HI., :vlONG0LS.

building is in ruins, and tho wall there is two feet thick. On the stone inserted
over the door is engraved a Tartar inscription in three lines, of which only
these words, Kuban Khan, son of Berdi, in the year 860 {i.e., a.d. 1455), ^^^
legible. Berdibeg, the son and successor of Janibeg, reigned only from
1357 to 1359. If the Kuban Khan mentioned in the inscription were a son of
this Berdibeg, he must have lived upwards of one hundred years, a circum-
stance by no means rare among the roving Tartars." *

Note 3. — Since writing the above chapter I have met with a curious note in
a work by M. Butkowski, now publishing with the title " Dictionnaire
Numismatique." On page 251 he says, " A great curiosity is preserved in the
Archducal Museum at Jena, namely, a crown in massive gold which formerly
belonged to Janibeg Khan." The origin of which, he says, is perfectly
attested. Such an object is quite unique. I have no other information about
it. I may add that Janibeg is the last Khan of the Golden Horde mentioned
in the Yuen shi, where his name occurs in the form Ja ni bie.t

THE DESCENDANTS OF BATU KHAN.

Batu Khan.
I

I III

Sertak Khan. Tuktukan. Andewan. Ulaghji.

Kanju. Bartu. Mangu Timur Khan. Tuda Mangu Khan.

I I I I I I I

Tulabugha. Kunjukbugha. Alghui. Toghrul. Tudakan. Toktu Khan. Five other sons.

I Cholkan. Tu

Uzbeg Khan.

kul.

Timurbeg. Tinibeg Khan. Janibeg Khan. Khidrbeg,

Berdibeg Khan. Kildibeg Khan Nurusbeg Khan. Cherkesbeg Khan.

naibeg
or Ku

In the above table I have only inserted those names which occur in the text.
A more detailed genealogy, as given by Rashid, &c., is appended to Von
Hammer's Golden Horde.

* Kiaproth, Travels in the Caucasus, 359,360.
t Bretschneider Notices on Med. Geogr., &c., 106,

CHAPTER IV.

THE RIVAL FAMILIES.
KHIZR KHAN.

WITH the extinction of the family of Batu Khan we are landed
in a practical chaos, from which Ave only emerge into clear
daylight after some time. As I have before mentioned, a
great Mongol chief divided his clans among his sons, as a Russian
Grand Prince divided his appanages. These portions became the
hereditary heritage of his family. Thus, when Batu Khan succeeded to
the throne of the Golden Horde, his elder brother Orda succeeded to
that of the White Horde, which camped on the Jaxartes and in the east
of the Khanate. Tuka Timur's son Ureng was granted the towns of
Krim and Kaffa in the Crimea, with the surrounding district, by Mangu
Timur. Bereke and his family had the country on the Kuma and the
Terek. The Nogay Horde apparently nomadised on the Yaik or Ural
and the Yemba, while the descendants of Sheiban ruled over the
confederacy which was afterwards widely famous as that of the Uzbegs,
in the country now occupied by the Middle Horde of the Kirghiz
Kazaks.

When the leading family died out, and there were no longer any
descendants of Batu living, it was natural that strife should ensue among
the several collateral branches for the Imperial throne of the Khanate,
and this is what apparently happened. Unfortunately our authorities at
this point are so sparse and their information so slight, that we cannot
give the story a clear outline, and our conclusions are necessarily but
tentative. In tracing out the early stages of the revolution, I shall adopt
the account given by the Haji Abdul Ghassar, whose account has been
translated by Langles.*

He tells us that on the death of Berdibeg the Tartars assembled
together, and seeing there did not remain at Serai any prince of the
Royal blood, offered the throne to the Sultana Taid Ughlu Begum. She
had married Uzbeg Khan, and was the mother of Janibeg. (This was
the Taidula whom we have named more than once. She was not,
however, Janibeg's mother.) She thanked them, but said she could not
accept an honour to which she was not entitled, that religion forbade an

* Appendix to Forster, Op. cit., 372, &c.

196 lllSrURV OK [HE MONGOLS.

usurpation, and she recommended them to put on the throne some
prince of the house of Jingis. Pleased with her answer, the Tartars
thought they could not trust themselves in safer hands than her own, and
asked her to choose a sovereign. She chose Khizr Khan, who lived at
Akgul, I.e., the White Lake. He did not rule over either wing of the
Mongols, and his only claim was that he was descended from Jingis
Khan. He left for Serai, where he had an audience with the Sultana.
She was much pleased with his figure and graces, and offered to put the
crown on his head on condition of sharing his bed. This happened, we
are told, in the year 724 of the hejira {i.e., 1324-5).*

This account and what follows has been entirely passed over by Von
Hammer. It seems to me to be in the main true. The date, of
course, is an impossible one, but otherwise the story seems to be founded
on fact. We know from other sources what an important person Taidula
was. We are told by the Russian authors that Khizr Khan wandered
for some time beyond the Yaik, which agrees with the story that he lived
at Akgul. Who then was Khizr Khan ? We are told he did not belong
to either the right or left wings of the Mongols (J.g., did not belong either
to the family of Orda or Batu), that he lived beyond the Yaik, and also
at Akgul. This Akgul or White Lake can surely be no other than one
of the two lakes of Akgul in the eastern part of the Kirghiz Kazak
country, west of the Irtish and south of Omsk, that is, in the
country occupied by the subjects of Sheiban ; and it seems to me the
description of Khizr Khan suits this conclusion remarkably well. Khizr
may be a mere appellative meaning Christian, as it does elsewhere,
which would account for his being the chosen husband of the Christian
princess Taidula. This is, however, a mere conjecture. We will treat Khizr
Khan therefore as a descendant of Sheiban, and proceed with our story.

Karamzin tells us, as I have said, that Khizr Khan put Nurusbeg, his
son Timur, and the Khatun Taidulat to death. The last statement is
not consistent with the account given by the Turkish author, and is
probably a mistake. The revolution by which he secured the throne
took place in the year 1360. He invested Constantine with the prin-
cipality of Rostof, and gave Galitch to Dimitri Ivanovitch, the grandson
of the Great Gallician Prince Daniel-t In the same year some bands of
plunderers from Novgorod made a raid upon Yukotin, a town of Great
Bulgaria, in the district of Laichevski, and near the outfall of the Kama.
There they killed a number of Tartars and carried off some plunder.
The Tartars revenged themselves by an attack on the Christians in
Bulgaria. The princes of Yukotin made a complaint to Khizrbeg, who
sent three representatives named Urus, Kairmek or Kairbek, and
Altunshibeg, to punish the plunderers. § The Grand Prince, his brother

Op. cit., 373 and 375. t Op. cit., iv. 373. ; Jd.

$ Chronicle of Nikon, cited by Karamzin, iv. Note, 88.

KHIZR KHAN. 197

Andrew of Nigni Novgorod, and Constantine of Rostof, were summoned
to meet the Khan's envoys at Kostroma, to answer for the recent
brigandages. They sought out the guilty parties and handed them over
to the Tartars, to whom they also paid black mail.* Meanwhile Khizr
Khan was displaced from the throne.

According to the Turkish account already cited, the choice of the
Sultana excited a civil war among the Tartars, and Zekireh Nughai, born
of the Royal blood, who commanded the hordes of the left wing, hearing
that Khizr Khan had been preferred to him, determined to revenge
himself. He did not seek the crown for himself, we are told, but offered
it to Kara Nughai, his son. Tlie young prince took counsel during the
night with the Tartars of his faction, and it was determined in the
morning to enter by stealth the palace of Khizr Khan and to kill him.
Khizr Khan, we are told, succeeded in escaping, and Kara Nughai was
then proclaimed Khan.t

The Sultana had been forced to separate from a charming lover,
whom she long regretted. A new passion made her forget her old
love. Notwithstanding the frigidity of age, she had preserved alight the
fires of love, and now became enamoured of a young man of the house
of Jingis Khan named Bazarji. She offered to obtain the crown for him
if he responded to her passion, thus mistaking ambition for love, she
forgot her great age, and thought her charms were still powerful. J
Bazarji proved himself an infamous tyrant, and quite unworthy of a
throne, which the caprice of a woman had given him, and he signalised
his advent by a thousand excesses. He caused Alibeg, one of
the most distinguished Tartars, to be put to death. Hassan, son
of this beg, took refuge with Hussein, the ruler of Khuarezm, and
implored his help. Hussein accordingly marched against and defeated
Bazarji, who was killed with his wife.§ Bazarji is not named in the
Russian chronicles, nor have we any coins of his, but he is mentioned by
Khuandemir, and it would seem that he and the Turkish author just quoted
must have derived their information from a common source. I see no
reason for invalidating a story told with such circumstantial detail, and
am surprised it has been entirely ignored by Von Hammer. But to
continue, on the death of Bazarji, Khizr Khan returned, but he was born
to be unfortunate, and was killed by his own son Berut.|| This is no
doubt the Merdud of Khuandemir, B and M being interchangeable
letters in Turkish.

I may add, that while the other Russian chroniclers make Khizr Khan
be killed by Timur Khoja, that of Troitzki, which is generally to be
depended upon, makes him be murdered by his brother Murat.^ The
chronicle of Nikon calls Khizr good.** On his coins he styles

* Karamzin, iv. 373. Note, 88. t Op. cit., 375, 376. J Id., 376, 377.

5 Id., 377. II Id. 5[ Karamzin, iv, 446, Note, 8F. ** /d.

iy8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

himself the just Sultan Khizr Khan, and also Mahmud Khizr Khan.
They are apparently numerous, and were struck at Gulistan, New Serai,
Azak, and Khuarezm, in the years 760 to 762 of the hejira {i.e., 1359 to
1360-1).

MERDUD OR BERDUD KHAN.

This is but a shadowy figure, and we are merely told that having killed
his father, he was in turn killed two months later.* We have no coins
of his, but Von Hammer tells us that amidst the dearth of other infor-
mation there remains a coin struck during the year 1361 at Azof, with
the name Ordu Malik upon it,t and of this name he makes a separate
Khan ; but surely Malik means king and Ordu is simple the horde, and
Ordu Malik is a mere title applicable to any of the sovereigns of the Golden
Horde, and not the name of any particular one. This generalisation of
the Khan's name is a fair gauge of the state to which matters were at
this time reduced in the Khanate.

THE DESCENDANTS OF TUKA TIMUR.

We now get into the very recesses of our historical quagmire, in which
we can only thread a very crooked way. We have in the list of Khans
given by Khuandemir several names of chiefs, whose close relationship
he vouches, whom he makes Khans of the Kipchak, but who have left but
few traces elsewhere, either in the shape of coins or in the pages of the
Russian chronicles. More than one of them bears the title of Khoja.
Now this title or soubriquet was applied to those who belonged to the
family of the prophet, and, as is well known, the Khojas had at a later
day the chief pohtical influence at Kashgar and its neighbourhood. It
is probable that one of the Tartar chiefs married a wife who belonged to
a Khoja family, and thus engrafted his stock on the famous tree which
bore Muhammed himself. At all events, the use of the soubriquet Khoja
is a strong support to the fact attested by Khuandemir, that the princes
we are speaking about were closely related.

Now the first one who bore the name in the Kipchak, so far as I
know, was the Mamat Khoja' already referred to, who was exiled to
Urgenj in the reign of Berdibeg Khan. I believe him to be the same
person as the Mamai, who occupies such a prominent place in the
immediately succeeding narrative. Who then was he .'* This is a very
difficult question, and one, so far as I know, not hitherto discussed.
Von Hammer's authority tells us that when he went to Urgenj he

* Langles, op. cit., 371. t Golden Horde, 317,

THE DESCENDANTS OF TUKA TIMUR. . 199

went to his uncle there.* Now Khuarezm, of which Urgenj was the
capital, was during the reign of Uzbeg ruled by the latter's friend and
protege Kutlugh Timur, who was probably the uncle referred to by Von
Hammer. This does not advance us very far, but let us turn to another
thread of our argument.

Klaproth tells us that the Tartars who roam about the ruins of Majar
relate that this place was the residence of Khan Mamai. Hence also
he says the Russians in the vicinity give this place the appellation of
Mamaiski Qorod.t

Now we are told by Abulghazi that Majar, together with Krim and
Kaffa, were assigned by Mangu Timur to Ureng, the son of Tuka
Timur,t so that Majar was probably dominated over by the latter's
descendants, and if so, Mamai was probably one of them. Let us adopt
this as a provisional hypothesis. Mamai then stands out, not only as
" the kingmaker " but as the champion of the family of Tuka Timur
against the pretensions of those of Sheiban and Orda.

Let us then shortly turn to the family of Tuka Timur. Tuka Timur
was the youngest son or hearth-child of Juchi, the founder of the Golden
Horde. We first hear of him in 1229. In that year all the sons
of Juchi except Tuka Timur went to assist at the inauguration of Ogotai
Khan, and he was left behind in charge of the Golden Horde. On Batu's
return home on this occasion, Tuka Timur gave a grand feast which
lasted three days.§

On the inauguration of Mangu Khakan, in 1251, the Golden Horde was
represented by Tuka Timur and his brother Bereke. Ii He was apparently
the first of the princes of the Kipchak to openly adopt the religion
of Islam, and was followed in doing so by Bereke Khan. Tuka
Timur, with his two brothers Singkur and Siklum, belonged to the left
wing of the Golden Horde, which was presided over by Orda, Batu's
elder brother. We don't know when Tuka Timur died. On the
accession of Mangu Timur to the throne of the Golden Horde, we are
told, he gave Kaffa and Krim to Ureng Timur, son of Tuka Timur. 1" It
would seem he also made over Majar to him.** This took place in the
year 1265, and it is probable that it was Oreng Timur who first allowed
the Genoese to settle down at Kaffa in the Crimea.tt According to
Bohucz, Oreng Timur owed his good fortune to the assistance he afforded
Mangu Timur in a war against the Yazyges of Lithuania.JJ He was
probably also called Uz Timur. He had several sons, one of whom was
named Saricha.§§ Saricha is called Saricha Kunchak Oghlan by
Abulghazi, while Rashid makes Kunchak a son of Saricha. |||| The

* Golden Horde, 314. t Travels in the Caucasus, 239. I Ante, ig^.

§ Abulghazi, 179, 180. i| Golden Horde, 134 and 149. ^ Abulghazi, 182.

** Ante, 193. tt Golden Horde, 254. H History of the Taurida, 343.

$j Golden Horde, Genealogical Table. Abulghazi, 187.

I!!] Veliaminof Zcrnof, History of the Khans of Kasimof, Trans., i. 41.

200 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

former, whose account is generally based on Rashid, probably had a
better manuscript before him than we have now. It may be he is the
same person who was sent in 1333 by Uzbeg to summon the Russian
princes to his presence.* He is there called Seraichik, and it is
equally probable that he was the Serai Kutlugh who commanded an
army in the campaign waged by Uzbeg against the Ilkhan in 1318 and
1 3 19, and who is described as a brother of Kutlugh Timur.f

Our information is so slight at this time that we can only fill in a very
clouded and uncertain picture. In 1333 an army of Tartars invaded
Poland, in command of Kadlubeg (/.<?., Kutlughbeg), Demetrius, and
Kaizibeg.t This Kutlughbeg was doubtless the Kutlugh Timur just named,
who held such an important position at Uzbeg's court, and who is
mentioned as one of the grandees of the Krim in the treaty which the
Venetians the same year entered into with Uzbeg.§ This position makes
it very probable he was a descendant of Tuka Timur, and increases the
probability that he was a brother of Saricha. For the services he
rendered Usbeg he was nominated governor of Khuarezm.H Von
Hammer makes the governors of Krim and Khuarezm two distinct
persons in one place,^ while in another he apparently identifies
them as one.** I am now disposed to think the latter view is right.
Mirkhond tells us that Kutlugh Timur died in I335,tt but this seems to
be a mistake, for it is probable he was the same person as the Cotloboga
or Kutlughbeg who attested Janibeg's diploma to the Venetians and the
Kutlugh Timur, lord of Sorgat, who fills an important position in the
similar diploma granted by Berdibeg in 1358. If this be so, it is not
unlikely that he still retained his position as governor of Khuarezm. As
I have said I believe Mamai, "the Warwick" of Kipchak, was his
nephew.

TUGHAI.

Abdul Ghassar, the Turkish author, translated by Langles, speaks of
a chief whom he calls Zekireh Nughai as heading the party against
Khizr Khan. I would suggest that he was the brother of our Mamai.
This, I think, reconciles some of the difficulties which beset the story at
the point we have reached. We are told in that narrative that, not
wishing to have the throne for himself, he offered it to Kara Nughai, his
son, who accordingly secured it. This Kara Nughai was no doubt the
Nukai, son of Sibachi, who is made to succeed Bazarchi by Khuandemir.
He was again, as I believe and as was suggested by Von Hammer, the
same person as the Tughai of the Russian annalists. In fact the name
in Khuandemir's list is read Tukai by De la Croix, Grigorief, and

• Golden Horde, 297. t Ante, 156. I Ante, 163. § Golden Horde, 297, 298.

II /rf., 301. If Op. cit., 303. ** Id.i2<37> tt Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 123.

TUGHLUK TIMUR. 201

Von Hammer.* Khuandemir calls him the son of Sibachi, which is
therefore a synonym with the Zenkireh Nogai of Abdul Ghassar. The
same name is read Shahican by De la Croix.t They are perhaps
all corruptions of Saricha. The Russians call him Toghai of
Beshdeshe. ^This was a town desolated by the black death in
J 346. It has been identified with the village of Wesedef on the Volga,|:
but it is quite as probable that this name is a corruption of Beshtau in
Circassia, where Uzbeg had an ordu, and which was doubtless within the
camping ground of Tuka Timur's Horde. The Russians tell us Tughai,
about the year 1361, occupied the country of the Mordvins, where the
town of Naruchat is now situated.§ Having settled down in this district,
answering to the modern government of Penza, he proceeded to
burn the town of Riazan. Oleg joined himself to the Princes of Pronsk
and Koselsk, and defeated Tughai in a bloody struggle on the Woinova.
The latter returned home with only a few followers.il Von Hammer
attributes to him the foundation of the town of Taghai in the government
of Simbirsk.^ We have no coins struck by him, nor do I know anything
more of him. We may safely say that he was a mere local ruler, and
not truly a Khan of the Golden Horde.

TUGHLUK TIMUR.

Khuandemir makes Tughai be succeeded by Tughluk Timur Khan,
who, he says, was the son of the brother of Tughai.** If Tughai was
the son of Saricha, as I have suggested, then if we follow Abul-
ghazi, he was the brother of Tokul Khoja Oghlan.tt Abulghazi says
Tokul Khoja Oghlan had a younger brother called Tulek Timur.
Perhaps there is a mistake either in Khuandemir or Abulghazi, but this
very close agreement makes it probable that the Tughluk Timur Khan
of Khuandemir was the Tulek Timur of Abulghazi. His brother was
probably the Tawlubeg who was sent by Uzbeg as an envoy to Russia in
Jt339)++ who is mentioned under the name of Taughly Tuli Bai by Abdul
Ghassar as the first minister of Berdibeg and the instigator of his
parricidal crime,§§ and again in Berdibeg's diploma to the Venetians
under the name of Tolobei, as the lord of Tana.Hil He was killed, we
are told, with his master in 1 358.11^

As to Tughluk Timur himself I know nothing, unless he be the same
person as the Timur Khoja who some of the Russian chroniclers make
the son and murderer of Khizr Khan. I have shown that the son and

* Golden Horde, 322. Note, 4. De la Croix, History of Genghiz Khan, &c.,389.

t Loc. cit. I Golden Horde, 308. Note, 3. Ante, 175.

§ Karamzin, iv. 374. Golden Horde, 32J. || Karamzin, v. 11. Golden Horde, 320.

H Golden Horde, 320. ** Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 117. ft Abulghazi, 187,

11 Golden Horde, 302. §5 Op. cit., 372, Il|| Golden Horde, 531. %% Jd,^ 314,

IC

202 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

murderer referred to was not Timur Khoja but Merdud, and the title
of Khoja points to the former belonging to the family which we are now
dealing with, namely, the descendants of Tuka Timur. This is
supported by a statement in the Russian chronicles that Timur Khoja,
after a very short reign, was driven away by his temnik or general
Mamai. The latter was hardly likely to be the temnik of the rival family
of Khizr Khan. He had time, however, to coin money ; specimens are
extant struck at New Serai in 762 ( i.e., 1 360-1).*

MURAD KHOJA.

Khuandemir makes Tughluk Timur be succeeded by his brother
Murad, who has been confounded by previous historians with Merdud or
Berdud, the son of Khizr Khan, but who that author makes an entirely
different person. Murad was a more important ruler than the shadows
we have been considering. He held court at Serai, and was at deadly
issue with Mamai, who, as I have argued, was his near relative. The
times were dangerous also for the Russian Princes. Andrew Constan-
tinovitch of Nishni Novgorod, on his way home from the horde, was
attacked by the Tartar Retahos. The other Russian princes who were
there at his accession made the best of their way homewards.t The horde
was virtually split in two, one section obeying Murad and the other Mamai
(who was playing the part once played by Nogai) and his protege Abdullah.
A fierce struggle took place between the two sections. In 1 361 Mamai
made a raid and killed several dependants of Murad, while the following
year Murad or Amurath repaid this attack by crossing the Volga and
killing a great number of Mamai's people, t

In Russia we now find Dimitri Ivanovitch of Moscow, probably
supported by the metropolitan Alexis, setting up claims to the Grand
Principality, which, as I have said, had been granted to his namesake
Dimitri Constantinovitch by Nurus Khan. The question was referred to
the Khan Murad, who, amidst his domestic troubles (according to
Karamzin), found consolation in this proof of confidence and of power.
Having summoned the envoys to his presence, he adjudged the Grand
Principality to Dimitri Ivanovitch of Moscow. § His rival of Suzdal
refused to recognise Murad's patent of investiture and to evacuate
Vladimir and Pereislavl Zalesky ; but the Prince of Moscow, supported
by his boyards, marched against him, forced him to escape to Suzdal,
and was duly crowned and installed at Vladimir. The young prince was
but twelve years old,! but he worthily justified the confidence of his
advisers. Seated on the throne by the favour of the Khan Murad, Dimitri

* Frsehn Rcsc, 371. t Golden Horde, 318. I Karamzin, iy. 456. Note, 88.

^ Karamzin, iv. 375- II ^^■' 376-

PULAD TIMUR OR PULAD KHOJA KHAN. . 203

wished also to have the patronage of his rival Abdullah, whose envoy
appeared at Vladimir with a yarhgh or diploma for him. He accordingly
went again to Vladimir, and once more went through the ceremony of
inauguration there. This act offended Murad. Ivan of Bielosersk being
at this time (1363) at Serai, he sent him home, and with him an envoy
named Ilak with a yarligh authorising Dimitri of Suzdal to take
possession of the throne of Vladimir. The latter did so, but the
grandson of Kalita, who knew the weakness of the Tartars at this time,
marched against his rival and drove him away. He permitted him to
retain Suzdal as bis vassal only.* The Princes of Rostof, Starodub, and
Galiich were also obliged to submit to the young Grand Prince. Mean-
while the Lithuanians continued to increase in power, Olgerd had lately
occupied the towns of Mitislavl, Kief, and Belor in the principality of
Smolensk©, while he had kept up a perpetual struggle with the Poles
and the Livonian Knights. In 1363 he marched into Podolia and
attacked three Tartar hordes which nomadised on the Lower Dnieper.
He defeated them, drove them to the Krim, and plundered Kherson,
whose inhabitants he slew, while he pillaged the churches. From this
time Kherson apparently disappears from history, and the Tartars west
of the Dnieper became to some extent subject to the Lithuanians.t
Coins of Murad Khan occur only in the years 763 and 764 {i.e., 1361 and
1363). They were struck at Gulistan, which on one of his coins, as I
have mentioned, is called Gulistan lis Serai. We do not know how
he was displaced.

KUTLUGH KHOJA.

Khuandemir makes him be succeeded by Kutlugh Khoja, whom he
calls the brother of Tughai, and by implication the uncle of Murad. t
Fortunately we have a document signed by him still extant. It
is referred to by Von Hammer, who tells us Kutlugh Khoja was a
nephew of Mamai's,§ which exactly confirms the conclusion arrived at in
the previous pages. This document is a yarligh or patent granted to the
father confessor and seal bearer of the Russian Prince Dimitri, who had
been detained by the Tartars in the steppes of the Poloutzi, and is
expressed in very gracious terms. 1| We know nothing more of him.

PULAD TIMUR OR PULAD KHOJA KHAN.

About this time we read that Pulad Timur made a raid upon the
northern part of the Khanate of Kipchak, and captured the town of
Bolghari, where he set up authority. He is also styled Mir Pulad Khan

* Karamzin, v. 4. t Id., 16, I Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 117. De la Croix, op. cit., 389.
% Golden Horde, 325. U Id.

204 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and Pulad Khoja Khan on his coins. The use of the soubriquet Khoja
makes it probable that he belonged to the same family as the group of
chiefs last described, and was not a descendant of Sheiban, as some
have argued. On some of his coins he is called the son of Nugan, which
name is read doubtfully. It is probably a form of Nugai or Tughai, and
I would provisionally suggest that he was the son of the Tughai already
named. His coins first occur in the year 764 {i.e., 1362-3), at New Serai,
when he styles himself " The Just Sultan Mir Pulad Khan." Two
years later we have another of his coins, struck at the same place, in
which he is called " The Supreme Sultan Pulad Khoja Khan." Two
years later again, we have a coin of his with the name " Pulad Timur,
son of Nugan." On the reverse of this coin is the curious posthumous
ejaculation, " The sanctified Sultan Janibeg Khan, may his empire
endure."* His coins were struck at New Serai, which city is also named
New Gulistan on them. Master of the country on the middle Volga,
he harassed the Russian frontiers. We are told that Dimitri, Prince of
Nijni Novgorod, and his brother Boris attacked him and drove him
beyond the Plana. A great number of his people were slain or drowned.
This took place, according to Karamzin, in 1367. Pulad sought refuge
at Serai, where Azis was then ruUng, and by his orders he was put
to death.t

AZIS KHAN.

Azis Khan is not mentioned in Khuandemir's list of the chiefs of the
Kipchak. Abdul Ghassar tells us that after the death of Merdud,the son
of Khizr Khan, troubles ensued, and that Alaji Oghlu, a prince of the
blood, settled on the Volga, where many Tartars went over to him.| He
was doubtless the Azis Khan to whom we now turn. Aziz is styled the
Sultan Aziz Sheikh Khan on his coins, which were struck at Gulistan,
New Gulistan, and New Serai, in the years 766 to 768 {i.e., 1365-6 to
1 367-8). § He is called Osis in the Russian chronicles. I don't know
who he was, but it would seem from his putting Janibeg's name on his
coins that he claimed to represent in some way the legitimate Hne of the
chiefs of Kipchak. The name of Janibeg is mentioned with a formula
showing he was dead, a custom, says M. Soret, which prevails in the
modern Janid coins of Bokhara. I have mentioned how it occurs in
a similar manner on a coin of Pulad Timur. This use of the name of
the dead Khan has led to a curious invention of a second, and even a
third Janibeg by the Russian numismatists, for whose existence there is
no other warrant. Azis continued the same policy towards the Russians
which was patronised by Murad. Vasili, surnamed Kirdapa, the son of

* Frjehn, Description of Fuch's Collection, i8, 19. t Karamzin, v. 11.

Op. cit., i. 378. § Soret Lettre a M. le Capit^inc Kossikofski, 23.

A2IS KHAN. • 205

Dimitri of Suzdal, being at the horde, was sent home with a diploma
constituting his father Grand Prince in the place of the grandson of
Kalita, Dimitri Ivanovitch, but the latter shrank from the dangerous
patronage of the Khan. Andrew, Prince of Nijni Novgorod, dying
about this time, the Prince of Suzdal, who was his brother, endeavoured
to secure the succession for himself, but was forestalled by his younger
brother Boris. The former now appealed to the Grand Prince, and the
latter to the Tartars.* We are told that Beiram Khoja on the part of
the Khan Azis, and Hassan on the part of the Khan's wife,t who was
probably a person of some consequence, duly installed Boris as Prince
of Nijni Novgorod. The Grand Prince, assisted by the clergy, who
closed the churches of Nijni, speedily brought the recalcitrant prince to
submission, and he resigned his position at Nijni to his brother, while
he was allowed to retain Gorodetz. The same year Russia was again
ravaged by the plague. This terrible plague is described in graphic
terms by the annalists, " The victims were suddenly struck," says the
chronicler, " as with a knife, at the breast, at the shoulder-blade, or
between the shoulders ; a devouring fire consumed the entrails, blood
flowed at the mouth, a burning fever was succeeded by a shivering cold,
tumours appeared on the neck, the hips, under the arms, or behind the
shoulder-blade. The issue was always the same — inevitable death, swift
but terrible." Out of each hundred persons but ten remained well. The
dead were buried seven or eight together in the same grave, and whole
houses were stripped of their inhabitants. In 1364 it ravaged Nijni
Novgorod, Kolomna, and Pereislavl ; the next year Tuer, Torjek, and
Rostof ; in 1366, Moscow. It came and went intermittently, and we
are told that after three visits but five people were left alive in 1 387 at
Smolensko, which was filled with corpses, J We may be sure, although
we have no direct information on the subject, that the same pestilence
must have devastated the Kipchak, whence it probably first passed into
Russia. At Moscow the plague was followed by a fire which burnt its
four quarters, and led to the construction of a stone Kremlin in place of
the wooden one which previously existed there. §

Meanwhile we read how the merchants of Novgorod, who, Hke most
mediaeval merchants, were attached to buccaneering, formed bodies of
irregular troops styled volunteers, who pillaged the neighbouring
districts. In 1367, under a young man named Alexander, they
followed the course of the Obi as far as the sea, and plundered not only
the Ostiaks and Samoyedes but also the dwellers on the Dwina.
Another section descended the Volga on one hundred and fifty vessels of
various kinds, || massacred a great number of Tartars, Armenians,

* Karamzin, v. 7, 8. t Golden Horde, 320. I Karamzin, v. 9, 10. § Id., 10.

0 Seven kinds of boats are mentioneil, namely, Pauski, Uchani, Misfaani, Bafchiti, Strugi>
Kerbati, and Lodi.

2o6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Khivans, and Bukharias, at Nijni Novgorod, and carried off their
wives, children, and goods. They penetrated to the Kama, ravaged the
towns of Bulgaria, and returned home laden with booty. The Grand
Prince did not fail to reprimand the Novgorodians for thus acting as
brigands and attacking the foreign merchants who brought wealth to
Russia.* I don't know when and how Azis was displaced. We have
no coins of his, however, after 768 (?.<?., 1367-8).

ABDULLAH KHAN.

During the period of confusion which we have been describing,
Mamai apparently filled the same role which Nogai filled at an earlier
day. Although Fraehn publishes a coin of his struck at Azak in 763,!
it is doubtful if he actually occupied the throne. He preferred the part
of a maker and patron of kings.

When he displaced Timur Khoja in 1361, as 1 have mentioned, he
nominated a Khan of his own named Abdullah, with whom and with a
large section of the horde he crossed the Volga, and settled down in the
hilly country beyond.* The chronicle of Troitski calls him Audulia.§
He was probably a nephew of Mamai's, and doubtless belonged to the
family of Tuka Timur. While Mamai and his protege retired, as I have
said, beyond the Volga, Murad reigned at Serai. In 1361 he fought
against Murad, and put to death many princes of the horde. Another
battle was fought between them in 1362, in which Mamai's people were
surprised and similarly slaughtered. || Abdullah first appears on coins,
according to M. Soret, in the year 764, during which year and 765 he
coined money at Azak and New Serai ; after this it has been suggested
that he led a purely wandering life, as his mint place is almost always
" the Ordu." In 766 and 767 Abdullah was living in the East, as is shown
by his striking money then at Yanghicher and Cher el Jedid, both
meaning the same place ; but he again struck a coin at Azak in 769,
which has been published by M. Savilief, showing he had then returned.
His last coins are dated in 770 (/.<?., 1368-9).

HASSAN.

On the flight of Pulad Timur from Bulgaria, as I have mentioned, || it
would appear that this district of the Khanate did not fall into the hands
of Azis Khan. We are told that in the year 1366 Karach, Haidar, and
Tutekash made a raid on the Russian borders, which was repeated in
1 368. Two years later, we read that Dimitri, Prince of Suzdal, sent his
brother Boris and his son Vasili, accompanied by the Tartar Haji Khoja,

* Karamzin, v. 12. t Catalogue of Fuch's Collection, 20.

\ Karamzin, iv. 446. ^ote, 88. S Id. \ Ante, 202.

ILBAN. 207

against Bulgaria, and we are told they deprived Haidar of his authority-
there and gave it to the son of the bek.* Who then was this bek or
beg ? Abul Ghassar tells us that one of the crimes of Bazarji was that
he killed Alibeg, one of the most distinguished Tartars, and that Hassan,
son of AH, took refuge with Hussein, the ruler of Khuarezm.t I believe
the bek above referred to was Alibeg, and that his son, who was
appointed ruler of Bulgaria by the Russians, was Hassan. He was
probably the Hassan who was sent as an envoy by the wife of Azis Khan
to the Russian court in 1364.:}: Nikon tells us, according to M. Savihef,
that he captured Serai in 768.§ He is the same person who is called
Hassan Kasanji by the Russians, II A coin struck by him in 771 (2>,,
1372) was found at Tetiuchy,^ and he is again named as Khan of
Bulghari in 1376. We read that in that year the sons of Dimitri of
Suzdal, uniting with the Muscovite troops, advanced upon Kazan, where
Hassan and Muhammed Sultan then reigned. The people of Kazan
marched to meet them mounted on camels, intending in this way to
frighten the Russian horses; but this policy was unavailing, the Russians
burnt their villages, their winter quarters, and their boats, and compelled
Hassan and Muhammed Sultan to submit and to pay a tribute of 2,000
roubles, part of which was assigned to the princes of Suzdal. They also
paid down a sum of 3,000 roubles to be distributed among the troops,
and they even consented to allow a Muscovite customs officer or com-
missary of taxes to reside in their town.** We do not hear of Hassan
again.

TULUNBEK.

In 772 and 773 we find coins struck at New Serai by Tulunbek. The
curious thing about this personage is that on some of these coins Tulunbek
appears as the name of a king and on others as those of a queen.tt It is
probable that it was a queen who thus used ambiguous phrases, and it
may be that she was the widow of Azis, for the wife of the latter during
his hfe exercised the exceptional right of sending a special ambassador
(Hassan) to represent herself, while Azis was represented by an envoy
named Beiram Khoja.

ILBAN.

In 775 we find one Ilban striking coins at Seraichuk. M. Savilief reads
the name on a coin very like his Alp Khoja. Ilban was the son of
Maengu Timur, and belonged to the line of Sheiban. I know nothing
more of him. On another coin Kaganbek, son of Ilban and 'grandson of
Maengu Timur, is mentioned.

* Golden Horde, 321. t Langles, op. cit., 378. J Golden Horde, 320.

S Soret, op. cit., 24. || Golden Horde, 323. T Soret, op. cit., 24.

** Kurwnzin, op. cit., v. 51. tt Frshn, Catalogue of Fuch's Collection, 22.

208 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

KAGANBEK.

Kaganbek, the son of Ilban and grandson of Maengu Timur, struck a
coin published by M. Savihef. He is probably the same person of whom,
under the name of Ghayas ud din . . . aghabek,* we have a coin struck
at New Serai in the year 'JT] {i.e., 1377). I know nothing more of him,
nor yet of Cherkesbek, who struck a coin at Astrakhan in 776, unless he
was the Cherkes Khan already referred to, as I have suggested.t

MUHAMMED BULAK KHAN.

Let us revert from, these somewhat spectral figures to a more
substantial person. On the disappearance of Abdullah, we find him
replaced by another protege of Mamai's, namely, Muhammed Sultan.
His proper name, according to M. Frsehn, was Muhammed Bulak. He
is severally styled Muhammed Khan, Bulak Khan, Ghayasuddin Ved
dunya Muhammed Khan, and Ghayasuddin Muhammed Bulak Khan
on his coins. M. Soret has published a coin of his struck at New Serai
in 773. Otherwise he does not seem to have struck any money at Serai
or the other older mint places of the horde, but at Astrakhan (which now
occurs for the first time in history), at New Majar, and for the greater
part in the Ordu. His coins range from the year 771 to 777. |
I believe he was the Muhammed Sultan who is mentioned more than
once as the son of Hassan, the ruler of Bulgaria, already mentioned. He
was only nominally khan, however, and the chief authority no doubt
rested, as previously, with Mamai, who appears in the Russian annals as
the de facto ruler.

In Russia the terrible civil strife, occasioned by the rules of succession
and the various jealousies of the princes, continued in spite of the attack
of the Tartars from without and the plague from within. The strife
especially showed itself at Tuer, where the young Prince Michael and
his uncle were rivals for the throne ; the former leaned on the support of
his powerful brother-in-law Olgerd, the Prince of Lithuania, and
eventually prevailed. He was ambitious, and took the title of Grand
Prince of Tuer, which was a menace to the Princes of Moscow. This
was in I367.§ His intentions were not sobered by the treacherous
conduct of the Grand Prince Dimitri, who, having invited him to
Moscow, arrested him, but Karacha, a distinguished representative of the
Khan, arriving at Moscow, took his part and compelled Dimitri to give
him his liberty. The army of Muscovy having entered his dominions,
he appealed to the Lithuanians, whose chief Olgerd was not unwilling to
interfere. He marched with his brother Kestute, and his son Vitut

• Fmhn, Resc, SOI. ti4n<<-, 183. I Soret, op. cit, 24. i- Kwamzin, v. 14.

MUHAMMED BULAK KHAN. 209

compelled the Prince of Smolensk to join him. He kept his secrets
well, and his attack on Russia was as sudden as it was disastrous. For
forty years it had been free from war, but it now suffered at the hands of
one quite as terrible as the Tartar. Its towns were burnt, its people
slaughtered, and its army dispersed. Dimitri and his friends shut
themselves up in the Kremhn and burned its environs. There they
resisted for three days the Lithuanian attack, while Olgerd pillaged the
churches and monasteries. Fearing to besiege the fortress in winter, he
at length retired, leaving behind him many tokens of his ferocity.* This
attack was followed by another by the Livonian Knights on the small
principality of Pskof, to redress the grievances of the German traders
who resorted there.

In 1370 Michael, who had been allowed to settle in his appanage of
Tuer once more, quarrelled with Dimitri, who had ruthlessly plundered
the town of Zubtsef. He again appealed to the Lithuanians. He also
went to Mamai to solicit from him the patent of Grand Prince of
Vladimir. Mamai, who apparently wished to conciliate Olgerd and the
Lithuanians, sent an envoy with him to invest him duly at Vladimir, but
Dimitri had the roads guarded and compelled him to seek shelter at
Vilna. There his sister urged upon her husband Olgerd to make a fresh
attack upon the Grand Prince of Moscow. As soon as the roads were
hardened by the frost he set out, and battered in vain for three days at
the wooden fortifications of Volok Lamski. Failing to take it, he
marched on and appeared before Moscow in the first week of November,
1370. He was again foiled by the defences of the Kremlin, by the
assembling of forces at Peremysl, which jeopardised his retreat, by the
threatening conduct of the Teutonic Knights, and more especially by
the terrible weather, " for this," says Karamzin, " was the severest winter
mentioned in the Russian annals. Snow began to fall in the beginning
of September, and prevented the reaping. of the crops. December and
January proving very open the snow disappeared, and the harvest, which
had been covered with snow, was only got in in February."! Olgerd
accordingly agreed to terms, and gave his daughter Helena in marriage
to the Prince of Vladimir. The unfortunate Prince of Tuer once more
repaired to Mamai, who offered him an army, but he dreaded introducing
the Tartars among his own people, and contented himself with the company
of Sari Khoja, the Khan's envoy. The people of Vladimir would not
receive him, nor would Dimitri admit his claims. Sari Khoja therefore
merely gave him his diploma, and then went on to Moscow, where he
was sumptuously feasted and gained over. Dimitri determined to adopt
the same policy towards Mamai, and being assured of the good offices of
Sari Khoja, he set out for the horde, and was accompanied as far as the
Oka by the metropolitan Alexis. He was received by the Khakan and

* Karamzin, v. 16-20. t Karamzin, v. 25.

ID

2IO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Mamai with great honour. They confirmed him in the office of Grand
Prince, reduced the amount of the taxes which Moscow was wont to pay,
and went so far as to scornfully tell Michael of Tuer that, having refused
their offer of an army to seat him on the throne of Vladimir, he might
now seek protectors elsewhere. Michael's son Ivan was retained as a
hostage at the horde for the sum of 10,000 roubles, which his father
owed the Khan. Dimitri redeemed him, and kept him himself as a
hostage for Michael's good behaviour until he in turn redeemed him.
The latter was not appeased by this act, however, but continued his
attacks, nor was the Grand Prince a very conciliatory person. We now
find him attacking the turbulent Oleg, Prince of Riazan, and making a
terrible slaughter of his arrogant people. He would probably have been
crushed, but that Michael of Tuer prevailed once more on his friends the
Lithuanians to invade the Muscovite dominions. They approached
Pereislavl, whose suburbs they burnt, imposed a heavy fine on Dmitrof,
made the Prince of Kashin acknowledge Michael as his master, and
also captured Torjek. Meanwhile the crafty citizens of Novgorod, not
knowing exactly whether Michael or Dimitri was doomed to dominate
over Russia, threw in their influence with the former, whom they elected
as their prince in case he should be confirmed by the Khan. When
Dimitri received his diploma they transferred their allegiance to him,
and marched to recapture Torjek, but were badly defeated, and Michael,
in revenge, set fire to the town, which, like the other wooden towns of
Russia, burnt very easily. The monasteries, churches, &c., were
destroyed, and their treasures and those of the inhabitants plundered.
The visit of Michael recalled at Torjek the terrible apparition of Batu.*

Olgerd now prepared for a third invasion of Russia, and, as
usual, advanced with great rapidity. He was joined by Michael at
Kaluga. But the Muscovites were this time prepared, defeated his
advanced guard, and marched on till their army confronted that of the
Lithuanians- Only a narrow ravine separated them, and both sides were
afraid to begin, the risk supervening on defeat in either case being very
great, and overtures were made for a treaty of peace. By it Michael
surrendered all the conquests he had made in Muscovy and agreed not
to molest its frontiers ; Dimitri made a similar promise in regard to
Tuer, and Olgerd undertook not to intrigue at the horde against either
of them.t

During the year 1374 there was peace between the horde (where the
plague had made sad ravages) and Russia, but we read of a Lithuanian
army defeating the Tartar chief Tahmuras.J Meanwhile some envoys of
the Tartars, who arrived with a considerable following at Nijni
Novgorod, began to pillage the inhabitants of that town, who turned
upon and slaughtered them and their escort to the number of a

* Karam^in, v. 32-53. t Id,, 36-38, J Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 323.

I

MUHAMMED BULAK KHAN. 211

thousand. Their leader, the murza Seraiko, was at the same time
imprisoned, but having escaped, he tried with some of his remaining
followers to fire the archbishop's palace. He was thereupon attacked
and torn in pieces. Mamai revenged the slaughter by sending an army
into the province, which harried the country on the Kisha and the Piana
and as the Grand Prince Dimitri was deemed to be privy to the deed
Mamai prepared to revenge himself upon him also.

There still remained at Moscow an institution dating from the ante
feudal period. This was the office of Tissiachsky, the boyar of the
city or of the commune, a kind of civil and mihtary tribune elected
by the people.* Dimitri aboUshed this office, which was too
democratic for the feudal notions that were rapidly spreading. The
last Tissiachski, Vasili Veliaminof, left a son Ivan, who was ambitious to
succeed his father, and repaired with a rich Moscow merchant named
Nekomat to Michael of Tuer, and persuaded him that circumstances
were favourable for him to make a venture upon the Grand Principality.
He sent them on to Mamai, and repaired himself to Olgerd, who agreed
to assist him, while Mamai sent Haji Khoja with a diploma. He would
not wait for them, however, but invaded Muscovy and attacked Torjek
and UgHtch. The Grand Prince Dimitri was not less active ; he
collected a great army, summoned the dependent princes, and proceeded
to lay siege to the city of Tuer, while the province of the same name was
devastated, and as the Lithuanians prudently delayed coming to the
rescue, Michael was compelled to sue for peace. This was concluded,
and its terms were generous. Michael renounced all claims to the
principality of Vladimir, and to the allegiance of the people of Novgorod
and of Kashin, agreed to release all the Muscovites whom he had taken
prisoners, and to restore the treasures he had captured at Torjek. He
agreed further to enter into close alliance with Dimitri against the latter's
enemies, that the boyards should be free to pass from the service of one
prince to that of another on condition of their forfeiting their land in the
principality they deserted, that each citizen should own allegiance and
pay tribute to the prince of the district where he had his domicile,
notwithstanding his being in the service of another, &c. Michael also
entered into a separate treaty with Novgorod, in which mutual advan-
tages were secured. Content with having humbled his rival, Dimitri left
him his practical independence and his crown. His country had paid
dearly for his ambition, for, as Karamzin says, " the recognised mode of
warfare in those days was to lay everything waste with fire and sword.t
Ivan and Nekomat, the instigators of the war, were executed at
Moscow.

Next year there happened the campaign against Bulgaria, to which I
have already referred.| This was followed by the appearance of a fresh

* Kelly's Russia, i. 90. t Op. cit., v. 4?. I Ante, 207.

2l2 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Tartar leader, in the person of Arabshah, the chief of the horde of

Sheiban, of whom a coin struck at New Serai in 779 is extant, and who

arrived with a large force from the borders of the Blue Sea {i.e., of lake

Aral). The Grand Prince of Moscow was informed of this by Iiis

father-in-law, Dimitri of Suzdal, to whom he sent a considerable army.

This army he incorporated with his own and sent them against the

enemy. They allowed themselves to be surprised while refreshing

with hydromel and beer and sheltering unarmed in the hot sun.

The Tartars were guided by the willing Mordvins. We are told

Arabshah was small in stature, but had great energy. He attacked the

Russians on five sides, and so impetuously that they were panic-stricken.

They fled towards the Plana amidst a great slaughter. Prince

Simeon was killed in the flight, and Ivan, the son of Dimitri of Suzdal,

was drowned in the river, whose name Plana means the river of

drunkards, and this disaster gave rise to the Russian proverb, " one is

drunk on the banks of the Plana."* The victorious Tartars marched

quickly on, and appeared on the third day after at Nishni Novgorod,

which was burnt. Dimitri, the Prince of Suzdal, fled to Suzdal, and

most of the inhabitants took to their boats on the Volga. They next

captured Riazan, and we are told not a village remained unburnt on

the river Sura. Having wreaked their vengeance they retired, but their

advent was followed by that of marauding Mordvins, who destroyed

what the Tartars had spared. The latter were intercepted on their

retreat by Prince Boris Constantinovitch, Prince of Gorodetz, who

slaughtered a great number of them, and their bodies, says Karamzin,

joined the corpses of the Russians which crowded the Plana. Boris

then overran their land, fired their houses, slaughtered their people, and

put their wives and children in irons. Many of their chiefs were put to

death at Nijni, where the enraged people dragged them along the ice,

and had them worried with dogs. This terrible revenge excited the

anger of Mamai, for the country of the Mordvins was dependent on

him. He sent a fresh army, which again captured Nishni Novgorod,

and again fired it and devastated its neighbourhood. It then marched

to join a larger force which Mamai had sent against the Grand Prince.

This was in July, 1378. The Tartars were commanded by the murza

Beguitch. They were met by the Muscovites under Dimitri on the

banks of the Volga, in the province of Riazan, and were badly beaten

and driven across the river. They lost several thousand men, among

them being their commander Beguitch and the murzas Hajibeg,

Kowergui, Karabalik, and Kostrok. The Russians afterwards secured

the deserted camp and baggage of the enemy. This remarkable victory

was the first of any consequence which the Russians had gained over the

Tartars since the year 1224.! Mamai was naturally enraged at the

'*' Karamzin, v. 54. t Karamzin, v. 564 Golden Horde, 325.

MUHAMMED BULAK KHAN. 2l3

defeat, and marched with a fresh force against Riazan, whose Prince
Oleg was too weak to resist, and fled beyond the Oka. The Tartars
overran the province, burnt Pereislavl, and took possession of Dubak.*

Meanwhile the Muscovites gained an important success against their
mortal enemies the Lithuanians. The famous Olgerd died in 1337, after
he had been baptised under the name ot Alexander, and was succeeded
by his favourite son Yagellon, who put his uncle, the aged Kestut, to
death, and compelled Vitut, the latter's son, to seek shelter in Prussia.
Yagellon's brother Andrew of Pronsk also left the country and repaired to
Moscow, where these civil commotions in Lithuania were very welcome.
Dimitri determined to take advantage of them, and sent an army which
occupied Starodub and Trubchevski, old dependencies of Russia, which
had been appropriated by the Lithuanians.

We now find him interfering in a very arbitrary way with the
government of the Russian church. As is well known, the Russian
clergy consist of two entirely different classes, the white clergy or
seculars, who supply the parish priests, and the black clergy or regulars.
The bishops and dignitaries are chosen, I believe, entirely from the
latter class, who are better educated. The aged metropolitan Alexis was
on the verge of the grave, and the patriarch Philothaeus nominated
Cyprian, a learned Servian, as his successor without consulting the
Grand Prince. The latter was aggrieved, and determined to appoint
Mityai, the parish priest of Kolomna, who was his confessor and keeper
of the seals, and had a wide reputation, but who was a secular.
He secured the secret benediction of Alexis for him. On the death of
Alexis he was accordingly seated on the metropolitan throne, much to
the surprise of the clergy, and he set out for Constantinople to get the
patriarch to ordain him bishop. He set out with a lordly attendance,
including three archimandrites, six priests, &c,,' but as he travelled
beyond the frontiers of Riazan in the deserts of the Poloutsi, he was
arrested by the Tartars and taken before Mamai, whom he succeeded in
conciUating, and received a safe conduct from the Khan Talubeg, the
nephew of Mamai, says Karamzin, who was then reigning.t Perhaps
the Tughluk Timur previously mentioned still survived.^ Mityai,
however, did not reach his destination, but died en route. Dimitri
had given his protegi several signed warrants to be filled up as
Mityai wished. Pimen, the archimandrite of Pereislavl, who was
apparently one of his foUc^ers, had the audacity to fill one of these up
asking, on the part of Dimitri, that the patriarch should consecrate
himself, Pimen, as metropohtan, and although suspicions were aroused
at Constantinople, an antidote was found for them in a liberal distribution
of presents, and he was duly consecrated in St. Sophia.

The Grand Prince was naturally enraged when he discovered the trick.

* Golden Horde, 325. Karamzin, v. 58. t Op. cit., v. 66, 67. J Ante, 201.

214 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

He refused to recognise him, and had him seized and conducted to
Chuklom, where he was divested of his white mitre, and Cyprian was
duly inaugurated as metropohtan of Russia*

Controlling all the forces of the horde, Mamai apparently determined
to overwhelm the Russians. He summoned his people from all sides,
Tartars, Poloutsi, Circassians, Yasses or Ossetes, Burtanians or
Caucasian Jews (? the Kaitaks), Armenians, and Genoese,t and at a
council of his chiefs he told them he meant to follow the example of
Batu. " Let us punish the rebel slaves," he said, " reduce their towns,
villages, and churches to ashes, and appropriate their wealth." He made
a treaty of alliance with Yagellon, who promised to invade Russia on the
further side, while Oleg, Prince of Riazan, who felt sure that Muscovy
would be annihilated by such a combination, and that he would be the
first victim, entered into negotiations with both, and promised to be on
the Oka with his forces to assist them in September. Mamai on his part
promised to surrender all Muscovy to him and Yagellon on condition
of their paying tribute.

Dimitri, on hearing the terrible news, first fulfilled the calls of religion*
and then summoned all the troops of the Grand Principality to Moscow.
The Princes of Rostof, Bielosersk, and Yaroslavl, the boyards of
Vladimir, Suzdal, Pereislavl, Kostroma, Murom, Dimitrof, Moyaisk,
Zwenigorod, Uglitch, and Serpukof joyfully went to him with their
troops, and rendezvoused at the Kremlin. When all was ready Dimitri
repaired to the famous monastery of the Trinity, where the abbot Sergius
blessed him and bade him go and triumph, foretelling that he would
succeed after a terrible carnage, and after the laurels had been crimsoned
with the blood of many a Christian hero.+

Leaving the voivode Feodor in command at Moscow, he set out, and
was joined at Kolomna by the troops of Polotsk and Briansk. The
Russian host was larger than any which had hitherto been brought
together, and numbered more than 150,000 men. Mamai was encamped
on the Don, awaiting the arrival of Yagellon. He sent a summons to
Dimitri to pay the tribute which Russia had paid in the days of Janibeg,
Dimitri replied he was willing to pay a moderate tribute, but he could
not see his country ruined to satisfy outrageous demands, an answer
which was not deemed satisfactory.§

The Russians crossed the Oka on the 26th of August, and entered the
province of Riazan. Oleg in perplexity, f«r he did not expect the
Russians so soon, sent couriers to Mamai and Yagellon with the news.
On the 6th of September the army approached the Don. Counsels were
divided as to whether the river should be crossed or no, but it was
determined to pass over in order to prevent the junction of Mamai and
Yagellon. On the 8th of September the river was crossed, and the army

* Karamzin, v. 61-69. t Id., 69. J Id., 74. § Id., 76,

MUHAMMED BULAK KHAN. 21 5

was set out in battle array on the banks of the Nepriadwa. It was a glorious
sight that was surveyed by Dimitri from a piece of elevated ground,
the sun shining on the several ranks. " Great God, give the victory to our
sovereign," was the cry that rose from them, while Dimitri on his knees,
surveying the image of the Saviour on his black banner, prayed for the
Christians and for Russia, and then rode round the ranks on horseback.*
The battle took place on the plain of Kulikof, and raged with varying
success over a distance of ten versts. The issue was at length decided
by a sudden attack of Dimitri of Volhynia and Dimitri's brother Vladimir,
who had been planted in ambush, which caused the route of the enemy.
Mamai cried out when he saw the result, "The God of the Christians is
great," and then headed the crowd of fugitives. They were pursued as
far as the Mesha, where many of them perished. A vast booty became
(as usual in battles with nomades who carry much of their wealth with
them) the prize of the victors.

When the fight was over, Vladimir returned to the battle-field, planted
the black standard there, and sounded the big trumpet to summon the
various princes to him. Dimitri was not among them, a search was
made for him, and he was found fainting under a tree. He had been
stunned by a terrible blow, but on seeing his victorious people about him
speedily recovered, and rode over the field on horseback. There lay,
according to some of the annalists, 100,000 of the enemy, together with
many Russians. Among the latter was Alexander Peresvet, a monk of
Saint Sergius, who had engaged in single combat with a Pecheneg, one of
Mamai's champions. He dragged him from his horse, and each fighting
on foot gave the other a mortal stroke. Dimitri promised to reward his
faithful followers, and tarried by the more illustrious of the dead to cover
them with praises, and a special feast, known as the Saturday of Dimitri,
was appointed to commemorate the battle. There was naturally immense
enthusiasm when the news reached the various towns of Russia. The
people gave the hero of the victory the soubriquet of Donski, by which
he is known in history, and also of " The Brave," and although Russia
was more than a century before she finally emancipated herself, this was
in effect the death-knell of Tartar supremacy. Yagellon was only about
thirty or forty versts distant when the battle took place, and when he
heard of the result he returned quietly home, where he was joined by the
perfidious Oleg of Riazan. Dimitri's return was a continuous triumph.
Some months later he pardoned Oleg on condition that he gave up his
alliance with the Lithuanians.

The rivers Oka and Zna were fixed as the boundaries of Riazan
and Muscovy, the town of Tula, so named from the Tartar princess
Taidula, and formerly governed by her agents, was conceded to
Dimitri, as well as the district of Mechera in the country of the

* Karamzin, v. 80.

2l6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Mordvins, bought by him from its chief Alexander Ukovitch, who had
been converted to Christianity.

Mamai retired to the horde determined upon having his revenge, but
his career was cut short. We now reach a new turn in the history
of the Golden Horde. Toktamish, the protege of the great Timur,
marched against him. Retiring from the Don to the Kalka, a battle
ensued near Mariupol, at the place where the Russian princes had been
so terribly beaten in 1224. Mamai was completely defeated and fled
to Kaffa, where he was treacherously put to death by the Genoese.*

THE WHITE HORDE.
ORDA ICHEN.

I have already described how the patrimony of Juchi was divided, and
how Batu came to have a much larger share than his elder brother
Orda,t but although the most powerful and the dominant chief, Batu was
not treated as the head of the family at Karakorum. This honour was
allowed to Orda, the eldest son, and continued in his family, which held
an independent though smaller territory in the Eastern Kipchak. This
family and its subjects is known to Eastern writers as the Ak Orda or
White Horde {i.e.y the Dominant Horde), while the horde of Batu is
known as the Blue or Black Horde {i.e., the Dependent Horde). The
Russians have confused matters a good deal by sometimes applying the
name Blue Horde to the Eastern division, because it lived in the neigh-
bourhood of the Sea of Aral or the Blue Sea. For a long time the Blue
Horde was naturally supreme. The prestige of ancient victories, a
beautiful capital, and a commanding situation were advantages, supple-
mented by the possession of vast dependencies in Russia, Poland, and
Khuarezm. The black death, the rising power of the Russians, and
internal feuds, as we have seen, broke it to pieces. In the further east,
in the harsher cradle of the desert, the White Horde preserved a more
vigorous hfe.

Abulghazi and Ghassari are at issue about the ancestry of Urus Khan,
the real founder of the supremacy of the -White Horde. Von Hammerf
has discussed the relative authority of these two authors, and has
decided, as I think most reasonably, that Abulghazi is wrong, and that
we ought to follow the relation of Abulfeda, Ghassari, &c. In the first
place, Abulfeda and Ghassari are older writers than Abulghazi. In the
next place, their narrative is very trustworthy where we can test it, and
in describing the history of the White and the Blue Hordes agree with
that of Rashid. The account of Ghassari, after Rashid ceases to write,

* Karamzin, V. 91. Golden Horde, 326. \Ante,i^. J Golden Horde, 327, 328.

KUBINJI OR KOCHI. 217

is most consonant with the history of the two hordes as we otherwise
know them, while that of Abulghazi is the reverson Abulghazi makes a
clean jump over the fifteen years which separated Berdibeg from Urus
Khan, and makes the latter immediately succeed the former. He ignores
the famous Mamai altogether. He tells us the country of Krim being
very far off he did not know the ancestry of its Khans rightly. He
even hints that the sovereigns of Germany were descended from Sheiban.
The fact is, that Abulghazi is not of great value as an authority for the
history of any of the Mongol Royal houses except the one to which he
himself belonged.

I shall therefore follow the authority of Abulfeda, Ghassari, and of
Munejimbashi. As I have said, Orda dominated over the Eastern
Kipchak, His chief towns, according to Von Hammer, were Sighnak,
Taras, and Otrar.* Orda accompanied the Tartar army in its invasion
of Europe, but as a subordinate commander, the chief authority being
held, as I have shown, by Batu, the skilful general, and not by the head
of the horde. With his other brothers Orda went to attend the
inauguration of Ogotai.t Carpini, in describing the plains east of lake
Balkash, tells us Orda, who was older and superior to Batu, lived there.J
It is almost certain that, like the Tartars elsewhere, the tribes subject to
him moved their quarters in winter and summer, and that these were
the summer quarters of the White Horde, which retired to the Jaxartes
in the winter.

According to Rashid, Orda left seven sons, namely, Sertaktai, Kuli,
Kurmishi, Kunkrat, Jurmakai, Kutukui (Kirikui), and Khulagu.§ I
know nothing of any of these princes, and Sertaktai looks suspiciously
like a repetition of the name Sertak, the eldest son of Batu. The same
author gives Sertaktai a son Kubinji. He is called Kapchi or Kapge
by Abulfeda, and is no doubt the same person as the Kochi Oghul
mentioned about the year 1280. II Abulfeda makes him the son and not
the grandson of Orda, in which he is confirmed by the authority followed
by D'Ohsson,1[ who makes him a grandson of Juchi, and it is very
probable that the name Sertaktai has been interpolated by mistake into
Rashid's table.

KUBINJI OR KOCHI.

Kubinji or Kochi, as the head of the White Horde, was a much
more important person than is generally supposed. He is mentioned
among the chiefs of the Kipchak in the Yuen shi, and is there called
Kuan sa.** He is also mentioned by Marco Polo, who has a somewhat
romantic account of him, as follows : —

♦ Golden Horde, 329. t Abulghazi, 179. I D'Avezac, 751.

§ Golden Horde, Genealogical Table. 0 Ante, 133. f ii. 454-

** Brctschneider, Notes on Medieval Geography, &c., 106.

IE

2i8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

*' You must know that in the far north there is a king called Conchi.
He is a Tartar, and all his people are Tartars, and they keep up the
regular Tartar religion. A very brutish one it is, but they keep it up just
the same as Jingis Kaan and the proper Tartars did, so I will tell you
something of it. . . . The king is subject to no one, although he is of
the Imperial lineage of Jingis Kaan, and a near relative of the Great
Kaan. This king has neither city nor castle ; he and his people live
always either in the wide plains or among great mountains and valleys.
They subsist on the milk and flesh of their cattle, and have no com.
The king has a vast number of people, but he carries on no war with
anybody, and his people live in great tranquillity. They have enormous
numbers of cattle, camels, horses, oxen, sheep, and so forth.

" You find in their country immense bears entirely white, more than
twenty palms in length. There are also large black foxes, wild asses,
and abundance of sables ; those creatures I mean from the skins of
which they make those precious robes that cost i,ooo bezants each.
There are also vairs in abundance, and vast multitudes of the Pharaoh's
rat, on which the people live all the summer time. Indeed they have
plenty of all sorts of wild creatures, for the country they inhabit is very
wild and trackless.

" And you must know that this king possesses one tract of country
which is quite impassable for horses, for it abounds greatly in lakes and
springs, and hence there is so much ice, as well as mud and mire, that
horses cannot travel over it. This difficult country is thirteen days in
extent, and at the end of every day's journey there is a post for the
lodgement of the couriers who have to cross this tract. At each of these
post-houses they keep some forty dogs of great size, in fact not much
smaller than donkeys, and these dogs draw the couriers over the day's
journey from post-house to post-house, and I will tell you how. You see
the ice and mire are so prevalent, that over this tract which lies for those
thirteen days* journey in a great valley between two mountains, no
horses can travel, nor can any wheeled carriage either. Wherefore they
make sledges, which are carriages without wheels, and made so that they
can run over the ice and also over the mire and mud without sinking too
deep in it. Of these sledges indeed there are many in our country, for
they are just the same as are used in winter for carrying hay and straw
when there have been heavy rains and the country is deep in mire. On
such a sledge, then, they lay a bear skin, on which the courier sits, and
the sledge is drawn by six of those big dogs that I spoke of. The dogs
have no driver, but go straight for the next post-house, drawing the
sledge famously over ice and mire. The keeper of the post-house,
however, also gets on a sledge drawn by dogs, and guides the party by
the best and shortest way. And when they arrive at the next station
they find a new relay of dogs and sledges ready to take them on, whilst

J

KUBINJI OR KOCHI. 219

the old relay turns back ; thus they accomplish the whole journey across
that region always driven by sledges.

"The people who dwell in the valleys and mountains adjoining that
tract of thirteen days' journey are great huntsmen, and catch great
numbers of precious little beasts which are sources of great profit to
them. Such are the sable, the ermine, the vair, the erculin, the black
fox, and many other creatures, from the skins of which the most costly
furs are prepared. They use traps to take them, from which they cannot
escape. But in that region the cold is so great that all the dwellings of
the people are underground, and underground they always live-"*

This description clearly applies to Siberia, and it is very probable, as
Colonel Yule suggests, that it may have been derived from some member
of the embassy sent by Kochi to Gaikhatu, to which I shall refer
presently.

Let us now turn to other notices of Kochi. Abulfeda calls him lord
of Bamian and Ghazni and the other districts of that province, and has
some notices of his descendants in that neighbourhood. This is very
curious, for it implies either that he had been ousted from his northern
possessions or that he had acquired an additional dominion in the south,
which was separated from his ancient patrimony by the Khanate of
Jagatai. I believe this latter view to be correct, and that the explanation
is to be found in the facts I have before stated,t namely, that when the
contingent which was furnished by the princes of Kipchak to Khulagu
left the latter and seized upon Bamian and Ghazni, they placed them-
selves under the domination of Kochi, the ruler of the White Horde. It
will be remembered that the troops furnished by the White Horde for
this expedition were commanded by Orda's son Kuli, who it was
suspected was poisoned at the instance of his cousin Khulagu.+ I
believe Kochi Oghul to be the prince called Buchi Oghul on one
occasion by D'Ohsson,§ and confused by Von Hammer with Tekshin,
the son of Khulagu. || Ghazni and Bamian doubtless formed a part of
the original Khanate of Jagatai, and we are told that when Borak, the
grandson of Jagatai, crossed the Oxus to attack Khorassan, he sent word
to Buchi Oghul to evacuate the district between Badghis and the Indus
{i.e., the district ruled by Kochi), which had belonged to his ancestors,
which he refused to do.^ He said that he had been given it by his agha
and lord Abaka, and that he must first consult him. Abaka the Ilkhan,
on being consulted, insisted that the district belonged to the Khanate of
Khulagu and not to that of Jagatai.** This was in the year 1270.
Borak's campaign against Khorassan will occupy us in the next volume.
Here I may say that it does not seem to have affected the domination of
the White Horde over Ghazni and the neighbourhood. I may add that

* Yule's Marco Polo, ii. 410-412. t Ante, 114. J Id.

5 iii. 436. I Ilkhans, i, 264. 1 D'Ohsson, iii. 436. ** Ilkhans, i. 264.

220 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

it is not improbable that the Karaunas of Marco Polo, to whom Colonel
Yule has devoted a long note, characterised by his usual learning and
ingenuity,* were the subjects of Kochi Oghul. When, in 1284, Arghun
was hard pressed by the Ilkhan Ahmed, we are told he was recom-
mended by the emir Nurus to take shelter with Kubinji {i.e., Kochi)
beyond the Oxus.t This was clearly our Kochi, and not the insig-
nificant twelfth son of Sheiban, with whom Von Hammer identifies
him. In 1293 we are told how Kubinji sent an embassy to the Ilkhan
Gaikhatu with assurances of goodwill.? Abulfeda tells us that Kochi
died in the year 701 {i.e.^ i3oi-2).§

BAYAN.

A(;cording to Abulfeda, Kochi left six sons, namely, Bayan, Koblokum,
Tok Timur, Buka Timur, Mongatai, and Sasai, who after their
father's death struggled with one another for supremacy, but Bayan at
length prevailed, and obtained the kingdom of GhazniJ Other
authorities make Kochi have only four sons, namely, Bayan, Bajg-
sartai, Chaganbuka, and Magatai.^ The struggle he refers to was
apparently between Bayan and Kobluk or Kiulek, who is called his
cousin and rival by Rashid,** and not his brother, as by Abulfeda. It
would seem that Bayan succeeded to the country north of the Jaxartes,
properly subject to the White Horde, while Kobluk probably retained
Bamian and Ghazni. Bayan I take to be the Bohu named immediately
after Kuan sa in the list of the chiefs of Kipchak in the Yuen shi.tt

D'Ohsson tells us Bayan, whom he calls Nayan, was chief of the ulus
of Orda, and that he carried on a long struggle with the two allies Dua
and Kaidu, who supported Kobluk, during which fifteen battles were
fought. Weakened by this war, Bayan proposed to the Ilkhan of Persia
and the Khakan Timur to attack their common enemies on three sides
at once. This plan promised well, but was not carried out because
Timur, on his mother's persuasion, would not venture so far into the
desert, and Bayan's envoys were sent back with a civil answer. Abulfeda
tells us that in the year 709 {i.e., 1309-10) Bayan deprived Kobluk of his
kingdom of Ghazni. Presently, however, Kobluk collected some
adherents, and in turn ousted Bayan, but he soon after died. His son
Kash Timur continued the work he had begun but was not able to
complete. We are told further, that a section of Bayan's people obeyed
neither Kobluk nor his son, but were governed by Mangatai, who was
Bayan's brother. +];

Op. cit., i. 102-109. t Ilkhans, i. 354- I ^d., 403. % Op. cit., v. 179. | ld.» 180, 181.

^ Von Hammer's Table. •* D'Ohsson, ii. 515. It Bretschneider, Notes, &c., 106.

II Abulfeda, v. 225.

URUS KHAN.

SASIBUKA.

Bayan left four sons, Shadi, Sasibuka, Tekne, and Saljikutai, and
was succeeded, as Rashid tells us, by Sasibuka.* Munedjimbashi
makes him a son of Tuli (? Kuli), the son of Orda.t Abulfeda, in
tabulating the various rulers of Asia in the year 8ii (£<?., 131 1), tells us
that Ghazni and Bamian were governed by Mangatai, the son of Kochi,
while the country beyond the Oxus in Turkestan {i.e., the country of the
White Horde proper) was ruled by Saru Capgi,| which is probably a
corruption of Sasibuka.

EBISAN.

Sasibuka was succeeded, according to Ghassari, by his son Ebisan,
who is called Eideren by Haidar.§ He died in i32o,|j

MUBAREK KHOJA.

Ebisan was succeeded by his brother Mubarek Khoja. He died in
1344, and was buried at Sighnak.1I A very interesting coin of Mubarek,
being the earliest coin of the White Horde extant, was found in the
famous hoard at Ekaterinoslaf. It is inscribed, The Just Sultan
Mubarek (Kho) ja, whose reign may God prolong. • Struck at Sighnak in
the year 729 (or perhaps 739), i.e, 1329 or 1339.**

CHIMTAI.

Mubarek was succeeded by his nephew Chimtai, the son of Ebisan,
who reigned for seventeen years (/.<?., till 1360 or 1361). According to
Munedjimbashi, he was succeeded by his son Himtai, who after a reign of
two years was followed by his brother Urus.tt But Himtai does not,
I believe, occur elsewhere, and I am disposed to think his name an
interpolation, and that Chimtai was immediately followed by his son
Unas. This was in the year 762 {i.e., 1360).

URUS KHAN.

Urus was an ambitious person, and being opposed in his schemes by
Tuli Khoja, he attacked and killed him.JI Von Hammer makes Tuli

* Golden Horde, 329. t Ilkhans, i. 414.

I Op. cit., V. 351. § Ilkhans, i. 413. || Golden Horde, 329. U Ghassari, Golden Horde, 329.

** Soret Lettre et M. le Capitane, &c., Kossikofski, Brussels, i860, 25.

It Golden Horde, 329. Note, 7. II Golden Horde, 329, 330.

222 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Khoja the cousin of Urus. I believe him to have belonged to another
stock altogether, namely, to the rival family of Tuka Timur.* On the
death of Tuli Khoja, his son Toktamish fled for shelter to Timur, the
famous Timur, who is so widely celebrated as Timur i leng (or the lame).
It was while Timur was engaged in his fifth campaign against the
Jets or people of Mongolistan that Toktamish sought refuge at his
court. Timur ordered his temnik or general Timur Uzbeg to receive
him with all honour and ceremony. He himself made his way back
to Samarkand, where Timur Uzbeg conducted Toktamish. The great
conqueror received his guest in Imperial fashion, gave him a magnificent
feast and made him many rich presents ; gold and precious stones, arms
and rich dresses, furniture and horses, camels and tents, drums and
banners, horses and slaves, and ended by styling him his son.t He
also invested him with the government of Sabran, Otrar, Sighnak,
Sairam, Serai, and other towns of the Kipchak.f Von Hammer replaces
Serai by Seraichuk, and argues that Toktamish was invested with the
towns of the Eastern Kipchak between the Yaik and the Sihun only.§
When he had established himself, Urus Khan sent an army under his
son Kutlugh Buka against him. In the battle which followed Kutlugh
Buka was wounded, and died the next day of his wounds. Toktamish was
however defeated, and he was obliged to again take refuge with Timur, who
received him with even greater honours than before, and supplied him
with a fresh army. He was again met by the troops of Urus Khan,
commanded by the latter's eldest son Toktakia, who, with Ali Beg and
other princes of his house, was determined to revenge the death of his
brother Kutlugh Buka. Toktamish was again defeated, and having
retired to the Sihun, plunged in to save his life. He was pursued by
Kazanji Behadur, who fired an arrow at him and wounded him in the
hand. When he had traversed the Sihun he entered a wood bareback,
wounded, and alone, and threw himself on the ground among the brush-
wood to rest. He was there rescued by Idiku Berlas, who had been sent
to him by Timur to be his councillor in governing his kingdom, and who
passed by chance. Having supplied him with some refreshment, he
conducted him to Timur, who was then at Bukhara, and who again
supplied him with a fresh outfit in a lordly style. At this time Idiku, of
the tribe of the Manguts (and according to Abulghazi, a son of Timur
Kutlugh Khan), II who had been a supporter of Toktamish, arrived at
Bokhara with the news that Urus Khan was marching at the head of his
troops to punish that chief; and soon after Kepek Mangut and Tulujian
arrived at Timufs court as envoys with the message, " Toktamish has
killed my son, and has since sought refuge with you. I demand the
surrender of my enemy, and in case you refuse, I declare war. We must

* Vide infra. t De la Croix's Sherifuddin, i. 276, 277. I Id., 278.

§ Golden Horde, 331. || Op. cit, 171.

URUS KHAN. 223

choose a battle field." Timur replied, " Toktamish has put himself under
my protection. I will defend him against you. Return to Urus Khan,
and tell him that I not only accept his challenge, but also that I am
ready, and my soldiers are like lions, who do not live in forests but have
their abode in the battle field."*

Leaving the emir Yaku in charge of Samarkand, Timur set out towards
the end of the year of the crocodile (?>., 1376),! and encamped on the
plains of Otrar. Urus Khan had rendezvoused his men at Sighnak, which
was twenty-four leagues off.t A terrible storm of rain, followed by
intense cold, prevented any action for three months. At length Timur
ordered Katai Behadur and Muhammed Sultan Shah, with five hundred
men, to make a night attack upon the enemy. Timur Malik Aghlan, a
son of Urus Khan, met them at the head of three thousand men. The
battle was fought in the night. Katai Behadur and Yarek Timur were
both killed, while on the other side Prince Timur MaHk was wounded in
the foot and Elchi Buka in the hand, but Sherifuddin claims that the
victory remained with Timur's men, who were received with triumph at
their camp.§ Timur now sent Muhammed Sultan Shah to explore. The
emir Mubasher was sent out on the same errand. They each returned
with a captive, from whom they learnt that two brave warriors named
Satkin, the elder and the younger, had been sent out by Urus Khan,
with two hundred men, on a similar errand to their own. They were
encountered by accident by Uktimur and AUahdad, who had been to
Otrar to provision the troops there. Aktimur and his men feigned a
retreat, and when the enemy were broken in their pursuit, he turned on
them and utterly scattered them. His nephew Kebekji, the yurtji {i.e.,
the quartermaster),! killed the younger Satkin, and Indushah seized the
elder one and took him to Timur.

Meanwhile Urus Khan, apparently despairing of success, returned
homewards. He left Karakesel in command of the troops, the latter
shortly after deemed it prudent to retire too, and thereupon Timur
returned once more to Kesh.

When the season became favourable, Timur set out once more towards
the Kipchak, and gave the command of the advance guard to Tok-
tamish, who acted as guide to the troops, and marched so rapidly that
in fifteen days he had reached Geiran Kamish {i.e., the reeds of the
deer). The inhabitants were taken by surprise, the town was
pillaged, and a large number of horses, camels, and sheep were carried
off. But Urus Khan was already dead.^ As I have said, he only reigned
in the Eastern Kipchak, and, according to M. Soret, his only undoubted
coins were struck at Sighnak in 774 (/.<?., 1372-3) and ^^^ {i.e.,
1375-6). Fraehn mentions a coin of his struck at Schihun, which he

* Sherifuddin, i. »8i, 282. t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 332. Note, i.

I Sherifuddin, i. 282. S Id., 284* Golden Horde, 332. H Sherifuddin, i. 286, 287.

224 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

identifies with a ruined town on the Terek, but its reading is very
doubtful.*

TUKTAKIA.

Urns Khan was succeeded by his eldest son Tuktakia, who soon after
died.t

TIMUR MALIK.

Tuktakia was succeeded by his brother Timur Malik. Toktamish was
meanwhile warmly supported by his former patron Timur, who again
presented him with a Royal equipage, and also presented him with the
horse Kunk Oghlan, whose speed was famous, and which would equally
enable him to overtake a flying enemy or to escape pursuit.^ In the
struggle which ensued Toktamish was again defeated, and had to escape
once more to Timur. The latter again supported him, and sent him to
Sighnak, escorted by the temnik Timur Uzbeg, his son Balti Koja,
Ozuntimur (? Uzbeg Timur), Ghayassuddin, Terkhan, and Benki
Kuchin.§ Abdcrresak calls his companions Ghayassuddin, Terkhan,
Toman Timur, Yahia Khoja, Uzbeg Timur, and Nikbei.ll They
accordingly installed him at Sighnak, and, as was customary, strewed
gold and jewels over him.lf

When Toktamish escaped to Timur he was accompanied by Uzbeg
Timur.** Urus Khan had therefore confiscated the latter's goods, and he
was accordingly recompensed by Timur. Having accompanied his
master Toktamish against Timur Malik, he was made prisoner; being set
at liberty again, and reduced to great distress, he appealed to Timur Malik
to give him his former seignory, offering him his services. The haughty
Khan refused him, and said he should be more pleased to be without his
services. He accordingly fled, and escaped to Samarkand, where he had
the honour, says Sherifuddin, of kissing the carpet of Timur's throne.
He reported there how Timur Malik spent his days and nights in
debauchery. That he slept until ten o'clock in the morning, which
was dinner time, that no one dared to awaken him to attend to his
duties, that his people were weary of him, and wished for the return
of Toktamish. Timur accordingly sent to the latter, who was at
Sighnak, and told him to march against Timur Malik, who had spent the
winter at Karatal {i.e.y no doubt the Karatagh hills). He accordingly

• Resc, &c., 303. t Sherifuddin, i. 287.

I lA., 287. % Id., 288. II Golden Horde, 333. IT Sherifuddin, i. 288.

** Sherifuddin says Orkitmur, but Von Hammer says this is a corruption. (Golden Hordcj
333, Note, 3.)

TOKTAMISH KHAN. • 225

marched against him and defeated him, and sent Urus Khoja to Timur
with the news. Timur was greatly dehghted, spent several days in
feasting, and granted an amnesty to the prisoners, while he presented
Urus Khoja with a robe and girdle of gold brocade, and some jewels,
and provided him with money and horses for his return journey. All
this took place apparently in 1277, and Toktamish returned to winter at
Sighnak. Hitherto the princes of the White Horde had confined their
struggles to their own district, the Eastern Kipchak, but we now read
that in the spring following, Toktamish levied a considerable army and
marched against the kingdom of Serai and the country of Memak* {i.e.,
the Western Kipchak, and the country governed by Mamai). This
campaign was probably only a renewal of the struggle with Timur
Malik, who, we are told, had repaired to Prince Muhammed Oghlan,
perhaps the titular Khan of Serai, and asked for his alliance against
Toktamish. On his refusing and trying to dissuade him from the war
he killed him, and again marched against his former enemy Tok-
tamish. He found him near Karatagh. Timur Malik was himself
defeated and killed.t We are told that Balinjak, the faithful companion
of Timur Malik, was taken before the conqueror, who would have spared
him, but going down on his knees, he said : " I have spent the best
part of my life in the service of Timur Malik. I cannot bear to see
another on his throne. May his eyes be torn out who wishes to see you
on Timur Malik's seat. If you would be gracious to me, cut off my
head and put it under that of Timur Malik, and let his corpse recUne on
mine, so that his delicate body may not be begrimed with dust."
Toktamish, we are told, granted the request of the faithful Balinjak, and
sent him to join his master.:|: It would surely be hard to match the
chivalry of some of these Eastern heroes in our western cradles of
preux chevaliers.

TOKTAMISH KHAN.

As I have said, I am disposed to make Toktamish Khan descend from
Tuka Timur, and not from Orda, as Ghassari and Munedshimbashi do.
Toktamish Khan and his descendants were constantly at feud with the
descendants of Urus Khan, which seems to point to their being
champions of rival dynasties. Again AbuJghaxi is supported in making
Toktamish descend from Tuka Timur by the old Russian genealogical
tables of the Mongol Khans. § This conclusion is only tentative as s
many others unfortunately are in this inquiry, but I believe it accords
with the balance of evidence.

Sherifuddin, i. 294. t Golden Horde, 333, 334. j j^,^ 33^^

% Veliamingf Zernof, op. cit., i. 40, 41.

IF

226 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

All the authorities are at one in making Toktamish the son of Tuli
Khoja, who is styled Tui Khoja Oghlan by Abulghazi * and Togoza
Ulan in the Synodal Register. t According to Abulghazi TuH Khoja was
the son of Tokul Khoja Oghlan, the son of Saricha Kunchak Oghlan, the
son of Uz Timur, the son of Tuka Timur.J Let us now on with our
story.

Toktamish, by the defeat of Mamai, secured the Western as well as
the Eastern Kipchak, the latter of which alone had been subject to Urus
,Khan. The Russian princes hastened to send their sword-bearers with
their homage, and we are told that Kutlughbugha and Mokshi, the two
armour-bearers of the Grand Prince Dimitri, with other sword-bearers,
returned to the various principalities bearing gifts and diplomas, sealed
with golden seals. § But Toktamish was not to be satisfied with these
courtesies. He wanted tribute also, and to restore the ' dominant
authority of the Khans, upon which such great inroads had lately been
made. He accordingly sent the tzarevitch Ak Khoja with an escort of
seven hundred soldiers to summon the Russian princes to go in person
to the horde. The chief envoy himself stayed at Nijni Novgorod, and
sent some of his people on to Moscow with his message. The
Russians were too much elated with their recent great victory on the
Don to listen patiently to this summons, and an excuse was sent by the
Grand Prince Dimitri. || A year passed by without further intelligence
from the horde, during which interval Toktamish was mustering and
preparing his army, then news suddenly arrived that the Tartars had
seized the Russian boats in Bulgaria in order to transport their army
across the Volga, and that the treacherous Oleg of Riazan was prepared
to act as a guide to the invaders, and to show them the best way of
crossing the Oka. The courage of many began to quake. Dimitri of
Nijni Novgorod, godfather of the Grand Prince, sent his two sons to
the Tartars with presents, but Toktamish had already left, and they
overtook him at Sernach. The Grand Prince himself left his capital in
the hands of the boyards, and retired to Kostroma to collect a larger
force.

Toktamish, having captured Serpukof on the Oka, marched onwards
to Moscow. The citizens were summoned by the ringing of the
church bells to a general meeting, and the ancient Russian custom was
appealed to, by which the vote of the majority decided the course to be
taken. A large number of the people lost heart and retired from the
city, following the example of the metropolitan Cyprian, who went to
Tuer, and whose conduct is grimly excused by Karamzin on the
ground that he was not a Russian. General confusion spread over the
town. Meanwhile there arrived a brave young Lithuanian, a grand-

Op. cit., 187. Golden Horde, 330. t Vcliaminof Zernof, i. 41. J Id.

^ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 334. p Karamzin, v. 92. _

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 22^

son of Olgerd, called Ostei, who had been sent by Dimitri. His conduct
reassured confidence. The peasants from the surrounding villages came
with their families and treasures for shelter in the mother city. Even
the monks demanded arms, and numerous regiments of brave but
untrained militia garrisoned the ramparts. At length the smoke of
burning villages in the distance heralded the approach of the Tartars,
who reached the outskirts of the town on the 23rd of August, 1382.
Some of the invaders knew Russian, and asked where the Grand Prince
was, and on being told he was not at Moscow, they closely examined the
Kremlin. The siege now began. The showers of arrows which were
poured in killed whole ranks of the inhabitants, but the attacking
parties were met with showers of boiling water and crushed by heavy
stones. For three days the attack was pressed with great bravery by
the Tartars, who had no battering-rams or other artillery with them.
Finding himself baffled, Toktamish had recourse to stratagem. Some
of his principal chiefs were sent to tell the inhabitants that the Khan
loved them as his faithful subjects, and that he bore no ill-will to them,
but only to his personal enemy the Grand Prince, and that he would
withdraw without delay if they would send him presents and allow him
to enter the city to see its curiosities. These messengers were
accompanied by Vasili and Simeon, the two sons of Dimitri of Nijni
Novgorod, who were either acting under compulsion or beheved the
Khan to be sincere, and pledged their words as Russians and Christians
that the Tartars would keep their word. Ostei thereupon took counsel
with the priests, the boyards, and the people, who all agreed that the
word of the two princes would not be broken. The gates were accord-
ingly thrown open. Ostei was the first to go out, bearing rich presents,
and was followed by priests bearing a cross, the boyards, and the
people. He was taken to the Khan's tent, where he was killed, and
upon a given signal thousands of Tartars drew their swords and began
their work of slaughter. They entered the city, where the soldiers
without leaders were a mere rabble, and rushed about the streets crying
like women. Old men and children, women and priests, were equally
made victims of the indiscriminating sword of the Tartars. The church
doors were burst open, and the various treasures brought there for safety
from the country round were plundered. A vast booty in images and
precious vases, the gathered treasures from the Grand Prince's exchequer,
and of the boyards and rich merchants, fruits of long saving were pillaged;
and while the historian notes these losses, he lingers more regretfully over
the story of the manuscripts and ancient books which were also destroyed.
Having gorged themselves with booty, they set fire to the houses, and
driving before them a crowd of young Russians, they went to feast in the
neighbouring fields. The army of Toktamish then spread over the
Grand Principality. Vladimir, Zwenigorod, Yurief, Mojaisk, and

228 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Dimitrof met with the same fate as Moscow. Pereislavl was burnt,
but its inhabitants took to their boats and thus escaped. Kolomna
was also captured, and then Toktamish prepared to return home.
Crossing the Oka, he traversed the Principality of Riazan, which was
terribly ravaged and plundered, notwithstanding the treachery of Prince
Oleg, who was himself constrained to fly.* He also sent Sheikh Ahmed
as an envoy to the Prince of Suzdal or Nijni Novgorod, and at the
same time sent back Simeon, one of his sons, the other, Vasili, he took
with him to Serai.t The terrible destruction of so many flourishing
cities, which had taken so much care to nurse to their then condition,
and the general prostration of the country was a heavy blow to Russian
progress, and it would be easy, but hardly just, to draw the moral that it
would have been better to follow the pliable attitude of Ivan I. or of
Simeon, whose sycophancy to the Khans enabled their country to thrive
so much, instead of attempting to beard him when neither the discipline
of the people nor perhaps their resources were equal to a conflict.
The disaster was not so crushing as it would seem from the
wail raised by the beaten princes, who cried out, " Our fathers, who
never triumphed over the Tartars, were not so unfortunate as we are." t
The fact is, that the victory on the Don had broken the spell of Tartar
invincibility, and there was now a trysting-place in Moscow and its
Grand Princes which did not exist in the disintegrated Russia of an
earlier day, and we find the burning of Moscow followed directly by the
extension of the Grand Principality. Dimitri having returned to his
capital, ordered the dead to be buried. We are told a rouble was paid
for every eighty corpses disposed of, and three hundred roubles were so
spent ; thus making the number of victims, independent of those who
were burnt and drowned, 24,000. He then marched to punish Oleg of
Riazan, to whose treachery he attributed his misfortunes. Oleg fled, but
his city of Riazan was razed to the ground. The craven Cyprian was
reproved in strong language by Dimitri, who recalled Pimen from his
exile and made him metropolitan of Russia. He nominated Sawa as
bishop of Serai.§ Cyprian retired to Kief. It seems he had been
intriguing with Michael, Prince of Tuer, who was ambitious of displacing
Dimitri from his position as Grand Prince.

Michael, we are told, had sent his sword-bearer Gurlen to the Khan
with presents, and was rewarded with the diploma of Grand Prince.
The next year {t.g., in 1382) he went in person with his son Alexander.
There he had to leave his son as a hostage for the payment of 8,000
roubles, but he did not gain his end. Toktamish, like his immediate
predecessors, favoured the policy of strengthening Moscow, probably
deeming it easier in this way to recover his dues. He had sent one of

* Karamiin, v. 92-102. t Golden Horde, 335. J Karamzin, v. 102.

$ Golden Horde, 336.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 229

his murzas named Karachai with a conciliatory message to Dimitri.
The latter thereupon sent his son Vasili to the horde. He took no pre-
sents, for Moscow being destroyed he was too poor, but was well received.
He was detained as a hostage, and a fresh levy of taxes was levied upon
the Muscovites. Each hamlet of two or three houses was in future to
pay half a rouble of silver, and each town a quantity of gold.* We
read that at this time Boris Constantinovitch of Gorodetz, the
brother of the Prince of Suzdal, was entertained at the horde.t The
Grand Prince Dimitri now showed his statesmanship by making
advances to and concluding a peace with Oleg, the treacherous Prince
of Riazan, and by overlooking the recent intrigues of his rival the
Prince of Tuer. He then turned his attention to the affairs of Novgorod.
The democratic citizens of that old trading mart had lately, to appease
the Lithuanians, ceded to them the towns of Ladoga and Russa, and the
banks of the Narva, without his consent. Its inhabitants, like the
ancient Noresmen and the merchants of Elizabeth's day, had also been
engaged in buccaneering as well as trade. Under the name of " brave
people " they marauded along the banks of the Volga, the Kama, and the
Viatka. In 1371 they had captured Yaroslavl and Kostroma, and in 1375
they again captured the latter town, put its inhabitants in irons, burnt
its houses, and threw into the river what they could not carry away.
Thence they went on to Nijni Novgorod, where they made many
Russians prisoners, and actually sold them as slaves to the Eastern
merchants who frequented Bolghari ; but they made even a bolder
venture, and under the command of a leader called Procopius and of an
ataman from Smolensk, they ravaged the borders of the Volga as far as
Astrakhan, where, however, they were destroyed by the Tartar Prince
Salchei.t In 1378 another band of these plunderers was destroyed near
Kazan by the Viatkans. The people of Novgorod further went so far as
to sequestrate the revenues due from them to the Grand Prince, and to
refuse to recognise the supremacy of the metropoHtan of Moscow.

Dimitri determined to punish them. He marched a large army
northwards, which cowed the delinquents, and peace was concluded
on the terms of their acknowledging his suzerainty and paying the annual
tribute, as well as a fine of 8,000 roubles for their recent excesses,
retaining meanwhile their old rights of self-government. §

Lithuania was now growing into a very important kingdom, and was
becoming a menace to the Russians. It was governed by Ladislaus,
well known as Yagellon. He had married Hedwig, the heiress of the
PoUsh crown, a marriage which was accompanied by his baptism. It
reads almost like a farce to be told that he ordered his subjects to be bap-
tised at the same time, and that there being a large number of them they

* Karamzin, v. 106. t Golden Horde, 336. I Karamzin, v. 107-109,

§ Id., 112, 114.

230 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

were baptised in batches, the priest sprinkling them with water and
naming one batch Peter, another John, &c. The sacred groves and
idols at Vilna were destroyed, and the neophytes had white garments
distributed to them in lieu of their former skin dresses. Most people are
scarcely aware that in the end of the fourteenth century paganism was
still the State religion so near Central Europe as Vilna. The conversion
was the work of Polish priests, who were Roman Catholics, and Yagellon,
who had previously tolerated the Greek church, began to persecute its
followers, and forbade the marriage of Russians and Cathohcs. Many
of the Lithuanian nobles remained faithful, however, to the Eastern
church, and from these events we must date that religious feud which has
made the history of White Russia and Lithuania so famous in later days.
Soon after the Lithuanians laid siege to Polotsk, which they captured,
and sent its prince, Andrew, a prisoner to Poland. Sviatoslaf, Prince of
Smolensk, having invaded Mohilef, to niake a diversion in favour of
Andrew, committed the most terrible atrocities there. The Lithuanians
marched to the rescue, and having met him near Mitislaf, they defeated
and killed him, and made many distinguished prisoners. Retaining a
son of Sviatoslaf as a hostage, they placed Yuri, the other one, on the
throne of Smolensk. The latter acknowledged himself as their vassal.
These wars broke down the ramparts which defended Muscovy on the
west, but Dimitri, who had also the Tartars to reckon with, was powerless
to avenge them.

Dimitri, Prince of Nijni Novgorod and Suzdal, died in 1383, after
surrounding the former town with a stone wall. The Khan now divided
his appanage, and gave Nijni to his brother Boris, while Suzdal was
granted to his two sons Simeon and Vasih, on condition that the latter
stayed at the horde as a hostage. He was some time after allowed to
go home, when the two brothers drove their uncle out of Nijni. Boris
went to the Tartar court, while his nephews appealed to the Grand
Prince. Vasili, the latter's son, who had been a hostage at the horde for
three years, now escaped to Moldavia, and by the favour of the
Lithuanians was permitted to join his father at Moscow.* These events
were sufficient to create a tension between the courts of Serai and Moscow.
They were followed by a quarrel between the Grand Prince Dimitri
and his brother Vladimir, who, like Damon and Pythias, had hitherto
been most faithful to each other. The treaty by which they made friends
again is a famous one in Russian history, and effected one of the most
important revolutions in its administration. Hitherto the law of
succession in Russia had been that brother should succeed brother, a
very pernicious rule. Kelly has the following pertinent remarks on the
change then made : —

"This natural order of succession Dimitri Donski established, by

* Id,, 118, 119.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 23 1

a treaty in which his kinsman consented to renounce the mode
of succession from brother to brother. It was the most remarkable
among them, Vladimir the Brave, who was the first to sign this act. In
several other conventions he acknowledged himself the vassal and
lieutenant, not merely of Dimitri but also of Vasili his son, and even of
the son of Vasili when he was only about five years old. ... It is easy
to conceive," says the historian, "the infallible effect of this succession,
and with what promptitude it must necessarily have extended and
consolidated the power of the Grand Prince. In fact the ideas of the
father being transmitted to the son by education, their policy was more
consistently followed up, and their ambition had a more direct object, for
no one labours for a brother or a nephew as for his own children. The
nobles could not fail to attach themselves devotedly to a prince whose
son and heir, growing up amongst them, would know only them and
would recompense their services in the person of their children ; for the
consequence of the succession of power in the same branch was the
succession of favours and dignities in the same families." The boyards
had already seen this. " This was the reason of their restoring the
direct line in the person of the grandson of Ivan Kahta. It was they
who made him Grand Prince at the age of twelve years, and who
subjected the other princes to him. . . . The contemporary annalists
declare that these ancient boyards of the Grand Principality detested
the descent from brother to brother ; for in that system each prince of
the lateral branch arrived from his appanage with other boyards, whom
he always preferred, and whom he could not satisfy and establish but at
the expense of the old. On the other hand, the most important and
transmissible places, the most valuable favours, an hereditary and more
certain protection and greater hopes attracted a military nobility around
the Grand Princes. In a very short time their elevation to the level of
the humbled petty princes flattered their vanity, and completed their
junction with the powerful authority. This circumstance explains the
last words of Dimitri Donski to his boyards, when he recommended his
son to their protection, * Under my reign,' said he, * you were not
boyards, but really Russian princes.' In fact we see that the armies were
as often commanded by boyards as by princes, and that from this epoch
it was no longer a prince of the blood, but a boyard of the Grand Prince,
who was his lieutenant at Novgorod."*

The treaty with his brother was speedily followed by the death of the
Grand Prince. Dimitri's imposing presence (he was very tall and stout,
with black hair and beard and brilliant eyes), his engaging manners, and
his magnificent victory on the Don, made him the idol of his people.
The first vanquisher of the Tartars, his reign was not marked by
any great extension of the empire, but it was a famous epoch in other

* Kelly's Russia, i. 88, 89.

232 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

respects. It was then that Stephen, one of the missionary apostles of
the Eastern church, converted the Permians who lived between the
Dwina and the Ural mountains. The bonds, both religious and com-
mercial, which tied Russia and Constantinople were drawn closer.
Karamzin has translated a curious narrative of the journey of the
metropohtan Pimen to Constantinople. In it we are told how the
travellers went along the Don past Sarkel, the famous capital of the
Khazars (then in ruins). It was there, says the traveller, we first saw
on both banks of the Don the Tartars of the horde of Sarikhosa, as
well as an immense multitude of sheep, lambs, oxen, camels, and horses.
They were not ill-treated by the Tartars, who merely asked where they
were going to and gave them milk. They afterwards passed the camps of
Vulat and Akbuguin (/.<?., Pulad and Akbugha), arrived at Azof, and thence
went on their journey.* It is during the reign of Dimitri we first meet with
coined money among the Russians. " Before this time the chronicles make
frequent mention first of grivnas and afterwards of roubles, but by these
words are understood a certain weight of silver. Foreign commerce was
therefore carried on after the manner of the East, by barter or by
exchange against gold or silver taken by weight. For petty transactions
the current money was bits of marten skins called mortki, and still
smaller scraps of fur, consisting of squirrels' heads, or even the ears only
(marked with the official stamp), called polushki, worth some fraction of
a farthing. Moscow and Tuer were the first towns that employed a
Tartar coin called denga, named from the word tamgha, Mongol for a
seal or stamp. At first the legend was only in the Tartar language, then
Tartar on one side and Russian on the other^ and finally Russian only."t
These dengas were of silver ; besides them another Tartar coin in
copper, called a pula, was also in circulation. The silver coins bore a
horseman on one side. Accounts were kept in altins (derived from the
Turkish for six), consisting of six dengas, and in dengas.l The last year
of Dimitri was also marked by the introduction of firearms (which were
to effect such a mighty change in the conditions of Eastern warfare)
into Russia.

Dimitri was succeeded in 1389 by his son Vasili, who was duly
installed at Vladimir by Sheikh Ahmed, the Khan's deputy, and soon after
Boris Constanovitch, who had been dispossessed of his appanage by his
nephews, and had gone to Serai for redress, as I have mentioned,
returned home again with the Khan's diploma.§

We have now reached a period when the rulers of the Golden Horde
found a foeman more than his equal in power in the person of the Great
Timur ; but before we treat of their struggle we must take a short survey
of some transactions elsewhere.

In the year 1380 Ramasan, who represented Toktamish at Solgat in

* Karamzin, v. 140. t Kelly, i. 94i 95* I Karamzin, v. 142. ^ Id., 146.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 233

the Crimea, concluded a treaty with the Venetians. Andrea Venerio
represented the republic on this occasion. It was arranged that the
Venetian merchants should pay a duty of three per . cent, on their
goods, except on goods not for sale and those for the consumption of the
Venetians themselves ; that disputes should be decided by the com-
planiei ; that where an attempt was made to cheat the customs the
goods should be forfeited. Three years before this a treaty had
been made between Elias, the beg of Solgat, Gianone del Bosco, the
consul, and Barnabo Riccio and Teramo Pichenotti, the two syndics of
Kaffa, on behalf of the republic of Genoa and its colony, by which
protection was extended to all the subjects of the Khan resident at
Soldaya while eighteen neighbouring villages, with the district between
Cembalo and Soldaya, which had been colonised by the Genoese, and of
which they had been forcibly deprived, were restored to them.

Seven years later, namely, on the 12th of August, 1387, a fresh treaty
was entered into. Yunisbeg Kutlughbugha, beg of Solgat, repre-
senting the Khan, and Gentile di Grimaldi and Gianone del Bosco, the
syndics and procurators of the republic, Giovanni degli Innocenti,
who was styled consul of Kaffa, of the Genoese, and of all Ghazaria
{i.e., the Crimea), and Nicolo di Marin and Gianone di Vivaldis as
syndics on behalf of the citizens. The former treaties were confirmed,
and Kutlughbugha promised, on behalf of himself and the Khan, that
the money coined should be as good as in the days of his predecessor
Elias. This notice is very curious, and seems to point to the money
having been coined for the use of the Genoese traders. There are coins
extant of Toktamish, struck at New and Old Krim.*

After his great campaign in Russia, Toktamish busied himself
chiefly with the affairs of the eastern part of his Khanate. He seems
to have been of a ruthless disposition. We are told he caused his
wife Towlui or Tawlui to be executed. He also quarrelled with his
protector and patron Timur. The cause of this quarrel would seem
to have been the appropriation by Timur of Khuarezm, which formed
a portion of the Golden Horde. During the troubled times, when
Urus Khan was chief of the Eastern Kipchak and Mamai of the
Western, a chief named Hussein Sofi, son of Yanghadai of the
Kunkurat tribe, seized upon the districts of Kat and Khiva. Timur sent
an embassy to him at Khuarezm claiming that these districts belonged to
the Khanate of Jagatai, and demanded their surrender. Hussein said he
had conquered the district with the sword, and that it must be taken
from him in the same way. Timur would have marched against him,
but the mollah Jelal ud din of Kesh, who filled the post of mufti, per-
suaded him to let him go and try to bring Hussein to reason. Hussein
not only refused his counsel but cast liim into prison.! Timur accord-

* Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 337, 338. t De la Croix's Sherifuddin, i. 226-229.

IG

234 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

ingly marched against him. Leaving Bokhara he went by way of
Sepaye (?) on the Oxus, where some advanced pickets were captured and
beheaded. The army then went on to Kat, which made a determined
resistance, but was at length captured. The greater part of its garrison
was put to death, as well as a large number of its inhabitants, and the
women and children were carried off as captives. The enemy's army
was now defeated and the country devastated. Hussein Soft took refuge
in Khuarezm, and having been misled by a false rumour that a large
section of Timur's army would pass over to his side, he had the temerity
to march out and offer battle on the banks of the river Kaun, two leagues
from Khuarezm. The troops of Timur were victorious, and forced the
enemy to take shelter in the town, where Hussein Sofi shortly after died
of despair.* Peace was now made. Timur granted Khuarezm to Yusuf
Sofi, the son of Hussein Sofi, on condition that the latter's cousin, a
famous beauty called Sevin Bei, and surnamed Kanzade {i.e., daughter
of the king), was married to his son Jehanghir ;t but soon after some
fugitives from Timur's camp, who had a grudge against him, incited
Yusuf Sofi to break the treaty he had made, and we find him attacking
and ravaging the town of Kat and dispersing its inhabitants. In the
spring of 1372 Timur set out to take his revenge. Yusuf Sofi
submitted with the greatest deference and received a pardon. The
marriage which had been agreed upon now took place. It is described
in great detail by Sherifuddin, but forms no part of our present subject.

Two years later we again find Timur marching an army upon
Khuarezm, which he entered by way of Kat. He had reached Khas
when he was suddenly recalled by an outbreak of some of his officers,
who had marched uponr Samarkand. It was shortly after this that
Toktamish was nominated as Khan of Kipchak by Timur, as I have
mentioned, although for some time his authority was only nominal.
While Timur was wintering at Otrar watching Urns Khan, Yusuf Sofi
took advantage of his absence, and made a raid upon the district of
Bokhara. Timur sent an envoy to remonstrate with him, who was
cast into prison by the ruthless chief of Khuarezm. A courteous letter
was now sent to complain of this breach of the law of nations,
and we are told that, as an especial honour, it was written in fresh musk
upon silk. Yusuf Sofi replied by sending the messenger to join the
envoy in prison, while he made a raid upon the camels of some
Turkomans then near Bokhara. Timur was not the person to submit
quietly to such treatment. Accordingly, in the spring of the year 1378,
he marched by way of Eskizkuz, (?) and at length sat down before
the capital. Yusuf Sofi sent him a challenge, saying it was better
they two should fight it out than that so many Mussulmans should
perish. Timur gladly accepted it, donned his Imperial casque and the

* Id., 229-238. t Id., 239, 24c.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 235

armour he kept for duels, and, against the entreaties of his friends, went
out to meet his rival. He went near the city and called to him to come
out, and told him it was better to die than to live after breaking one's
word ; but the prudent Yusuf did not reply. Meanwhile we are told that
some of the first melons of the year were taken to Timur from Termed.
He gracefully sent some in a golden salver to his rival, who replied in a
characteristic fashion, by throwing them into the ditch and giving the
salver to the porter. The garrison made a brave sortie, and there was
terrible bloodshed on both sides. The siege now progressed, and the
walls were much battered with the primitive artillery then in use. The
attack lasted for three months and sixteen days, and the matter went so
badly with the Khuarezmians that Yusuf Sofi died of grief and chagrin.
Matters were now pressed, and after a stubborn resistance the breaches
were stormed, many of the people killed, and a large treasure of pearls
and precious stones captured. All -the sherifs, doctors, and men of
letters were sent to Kesh, with a vast crowd of women and children.*
The capture of Khuarezm took place in 1379. Thus was this ancient
province, which had long formed a part of the Khanate of Kipchak,
added to the dominions of Timur.

When Toktamish had defeated his various rivals and had firmly
seated himself on the throne, he doubtless also wished to recover
possession of Khuarezm from Timur, who, although his patron, he must
have felt was in fact a person who did not belong to the Imperial
Mongol stock descended from Jingis Khan. It is probable that Timur,
who was not given to surrendering what he had won, refused, and that
this was the cause of quarrel between the two chiefs.f The first open
strife between them commenced on the side of Persia, where Toktamish
probably also kept up the claims of his ancestors to the provinces of
Arran and Azerbaijan.

During the winter of 1385 Toktamish advanced upon Tebriz by way
of Derbend, at the head of 90,000 men. Under him were twelve Oghlans
(the princes of the Royal blood were so. named), the chief of whom was
Bek Pulad. Three others were called respectively Aisa Beg, Yagli Beg,
and Gazanshi. Having passed Shirvan, they entered Azerbaijan and
laid siege to Tebriz. Its governor was an incapable person, and the
inhabitants, by the advice of the emir Veli, and Mahmud Kalkali,
fortified the town and repulsed the enemy for eight days, but eventually
the superior numbers of Toktamish prevailed, and he captured it,
and Veli and Mahmud Kalkali fled to the country of Kalkal. The troops
of Kipchak ravaged the town most severely, and the vast riches and
works of art which had been accumulated there for many years were
plundered in the course of the ten days' sack. After which Toktamish
and his people retired once more before the winter was over by the same

* De la Croix, i. 295-306. t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 339.

236 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

route by which they had invaded the country. Timur was much grieved
at this disaster to a town so attached to Islam, but he had the conquest
of Iran on his hands at the time, and postponed his revenge for a while.*
Von Hammer reports how Toktamish on this occasion carried off the
famous poet Kemal of Khojend, who lived four years at Serai, and wrote
verses aboutlts beauties.t In the spring of 1 387, when he had finished
his enterprise in Persia, and had been spending the winter on the banks
of the river Urus, Timur heard' that Toktamish was meditating another
invasion by way of Derbend. This was contrary to the advice of Ali
Bey the Kunkurat, of Oronk Timur, and Akbuka the Barin, who
bade him remember what he owed to Timur. "Who knows," said
they, " if in some change of fortune yoH may not have to go again to him
for help ;" but their counsel was overborne by that of Gazanshi, a
parricide, and of Ali Bey, at whose instance he determined to break with
Timur and to invade Azerbaijan.^

Timur set out from Berdaa, and when he arrived on the Kur, finding
a body of unknown people on the other side, he sent the Sheikh Ali
Behadur, Ikutimur, Osman Abbas, and others to reconnoitre, and if these
were the troops of Toktamish he ordered them not to molest them on
account of the treaty he had with that prince. They went to inquire, and
having discovered that the strangers were the troops of Toktamish, they
were retiring when they were fiercely attacked, and "being overborne in a
bad position for defence, were defeated and lost forty chiefs. Meanwhile
Timur had sent the murza Miran Shah, Haji Seifuddin, and others to
support them. Having crossed the Kur, the latter were spectators of the
disaster, attacked the victorious army, and routed them. They were
pursued to Derbend and lost many prisoners, among whom was Khuridi,
brother of Mubasher. The prisoners were sent to Timur. He inquired
about Toktamish, whom he reproached with ingratitude and bade them
warn him to remain on good terms with him. The prisoners were then
given clothes and money and sent home. Sherifuddin, apropos of this
generosity, quotes a verse of Saadi's, " How can he stint his favours to
his friends when he is so generous to his enemies."§ Timur after this
fought against the Turkoman Kara Muhammed, and also marched
against Fars, which he annexed. Hardly had he done so, when a courier,
who had arrived in seven days from Mavera un nehr, brought word that
Toktamish had sent an army to invade that province. He had probably
found it impracticable to attack Timur by way of Derbend. This
army was commanded by the Bek Yarok Oghlan, Aisa Beg, Satgan
Behadur, &c., who having advanced from Sighnak, attacked Sabran and
laid siege to it. Timur Khoja Akbugha, who commanded there for Timur,
bravely defended it, and the enemy was obliged to raise the siege, and pro-

♦ Sherifuddin, i. 402-404, t Golden Horde.'sag. I Id., 4x2-425.

§ Op. cit., 427-429.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. . 237

ceeded to lay waste other districts. The murza Omar Sheikh, who was at
Andikan, collected some troops, and was joined by the emirs Suliman Shah
and Abbas, who took with them a portion of the troops of Samarkand.
They crossed the Sihun and attacked the enemy on the plain of Yukhk,
five leagues to the east of Otrar. Omar Sheikh, " the bravest man of the
century," penetrated into the thick of the forces of Kipchak. His people
thought he was killed, lost heart, and fled, and the emir Abbas was
wounded with an arrow. The Sheikh had, however, escaped, and
reached Andikan, where he collected the broken debris of his people.

News now arrived that Ankatura, a chief of Mongolistan, had also
broken faith with Timur, and was with an army in the neighbourhood of
Sairam and Tashkent. He was opposed by Omar Sheikh, and retired
after a fruitless campaign. The troops of Kipchak meanwhile proceeded
to plunder the rich valley of Soghd, and one section of them appeared
before Bokhara, and burnt the beautiful palace of Zendgir Serai, for
which Timur exacted ample vengeance at a later day.*" When he heard
of these doings he set out for Samarkand, and at the approach of his
troops the enemy scattered. One section retired towards Khuarezm, the
other went northwards towards the deserts of Kipchak.t Sherifuddin
says naively, that the troops being accustomed to victory, he deemed it
strange that they should have been beaten in the battle at Yuklik, and
he had the commanders tried. Those who had been unskilful were
punished, while others who had displayed courage were rewarded.
Among the former was Berat Khoja Kukiltash, who had his beard cut off,
his face was painted white and vermilHon, his head was dressed hke a
woman's, and he was then made to run barefoot through the town.J
Timur does not seem to have taken means to revenge this defeat
immediately, but undertook another campaign in Khuarezm.

After the death of Yusuf Sofi that district had fallen into the hands of
Suliman Sofi, probably Yusuf's brother, and of Ilikmish Oghlan, a Prince
of Kipchak, who had married Suliman's sister. They were doubtless
dependents of Toktamish. Timur now marched against them, and his
advance guard was commanded by Timur Kutlugh Oghlan and Kunji
Oghlan, two princes of the White Horde, who had taken refuge with
him. Having passed the rivers Bagdadek (?) and Shedris (?) they
learnt that Suliman Sofi and Ilikmish had fled to Toktamish, a division
under Timur's eldest son Miranshah was sent in pursuit. They went by
way of Kongkend (? Khanki) and Kiz (? Kazavat), overtook the fugitives,
and captured a large booty. Timur now went to the capital {i.e.^ Old
Urgenj), whose inhabitants he transported to Samarkand, while he razed
the city to the ground and sowed its site with barley, in punishment for
its rulers having declared war against him.§ Three years later, and
after his return from the campaign in Kipchak, which we shall presently

*/d„ 463-469. t /rf., 472. I -W., 473-475- S Sherifuddin, ii. 1-4.

238 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

describe, he sent Musiki, the son of Yunki Kutshin, to restore the ruined
city. He was very successful in this, rcpeopled and rebuiU it, and also
surrounded the towns of Kat and Khiva with walls.* We now read
of another aggression made by Toktamish, who, we are told, col-
lected the forces of Russia, Circassia, Bulgaria, Kipchak, the Crimea,
Kaffa, Alania, and Azak, as well as those of Bashkirland and
Muscovy, a force so numerous that the poets compared it to the drops
in a hurricane or the leaves in a thick grove. He set out towards the
end of the year ygo.f When Timur heard of his march he also
set out with the troops of Samarkand and Kesh, and encamped sa
Sagruj, a village six leagues from Samarkand. He also sent the
Tavachis into various parts of the empire to collect his people. The
winter was an exceedingly cold one and the ground covered with snow.
The news presently arrived that the advanced guard of the army of
Kipchak, commanded by Ilikmish Oghlan (the chief of Khuarezm, who
had taken refuge with Toktamish), had crossed the Sihun, and that it was
encamped near Azak Zernuk.J Timur determined to attack the enemy,
and when his chiefs, on their bended knees, begged him to wait till his
other men had come up he would not listen, but set out over the snow
(which reached the breasts of his horses),with only the troops of the district.
He marched day and night, and was joined en route by the murza Omar
Sheikh with the troops of Andikan. Detaching a division to cut off the
retreat of the troops of Kipchak, he on the following day crossed the
hill of Telanbar, and found himself before the enemy. The great war
cry of Suron was raised, and a bloody battle ensued. The enemy fled,
many of them were drowned in the Sihun, the remainder were for the
greater part surrounded and killed. Airdi Berdi, secretary of State to
Toktamish, was well received by Timur, who gave him presents and
otherwise honoured him. Timur now returned home again, and encamped
at Akar, near Samarkand. This was in February, 791.

When spring fairly arrived there also came to him the various con-
tingents he had summoned for the war. The murza Miranshah, at the
head of the troops of Khorassan, while others came from Balkh, Khunduz,
Bakalan, Badakhshan, Katlan, Hissar, Shaduman, and many other
towns. He ordered a bridge of boats to be built on the Sihun opposite
Khojend, and others in other places, and set out early in the year 791.
The advance guard of his army was commanded by Timur Kutlugh
Oghlan, Sevinjik Behadur, and Osman Behadur. They sent people ahead
to reconnoitre, who discovered the enemy's advanced posts off their
guard and surprised them. This was on the river Arch (? the Arys).
The army of Toktamish had attacked Sabran, but it had resisted so

* /</., ii. 5. t Id., ii. 23.

I This was one of the halting places of Jingis Khan on his march to Samarkand, and is
mentioned in the journey of Haithon. It was situated on the left bank of the Jaxartes, not far
from Otrar.

TOKTAMISH KHAN.

=39

bravely that he had been forced to raise the siege, and to retire towards
Yassi or Turkestan, in whose meadows he was encamped with the main
army, collected with so much pains, as I have mentioned. No sooner
did they hear of the approach of Timur's people than they decamped,
" like grasshoppers in a plain," and the pursuers saw only the dust raised
by their horses' feet. A few troopers were sent on ahead to follow their
traces, and came up with their rear guard in a place called Sarek Uzan
(? the Sari Su river). This they dispersed, and captured Kitba Terkhan,
a chief of a hundred men, with his people. They returned safely to Ak
Suma (/.^., the modern Ak Sumbe, north of the Alexandrofski mountains),
where Timur himself was encamped.

The latter now advanced with the main army by way of Uzenk
Shakel (?), and arrived at Bilen (?), thence by way of Sarek
Uzan (? the Sari Su), and Kurjun (?). He pitched his camp at
Alkushun (?). There, at a council held with his principal chiefs, it was
determined before proceeding against Kipchak, to secure the rear of the
attacking force by first destroying the power of the Khan of Mongolistan
(/..?., the Khan of the house of Jagatai), who held his court at Almaligh.*
This Timur succeeded in doing very effectually, and then once more
returned to Samarkand.

At length, in the year 792 (z>., in A.D. 1390), he set out on his famous
expedition, in which he completely overthrew the power of Toktamish,
and to which he was incited not only by repeated treachery but
also by the solicitations of one of the latter's principal chiefs, named
Idiku Uzbeg, who is called chief of the Nogais,t and about whom we
shall have more to say elsewhere.

A campaign in the deserts of Kipchak is a very serious matter, how
serious may be judged by the accounts of the recent expedition of the
Russians against Khiva, when they crossed the same country, and
Timur made adequate preparations. He sent out Tevachis or couriers^
to summon the troops, and also the contingents of those tribes who were
tributary, " both Turks and Tajiks," and to collect provisions for a year.
Each man was ordered to furnish himself with a bow, with thirty arrows,
a quiver, and a buckler. The army were mounted, and a spare horse
was supplied to every two men, while a tent was furnished for every
ten, and with this were two spades, a pickaxe, a sickle, a saw, an
axe, an awl, a hundred needles, half a men {i.e.^ 8|lbs.) of cord, an ox's
hide, and a strong pan. They were also furnished with horses from the
studs, coats of mail and cuirasses, and money was distributed among
them.§ Orders were issued that after leaving Tashkend each soldier should
Hmit himself to one men {i.e., lylbs. troy) of flour per month, forbidding the
cooking of bread, biscuits, and macaroni in the camp, and ordering that
they should limit themselves to hasty pudding or flour porridge. ||

* Id., ji. 31. t Charmoy Memoirs, St. Petersburgh Academy, ii. 502.
I Charmoy, op. cit., 131. Note, 2. ^ /d., 100, 422, 444. || M, 423.

240 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

He left Samarkand when the sun was in the sign of Capricorn, and
having built a bridge over the Sihun, he took up his winter quarters in
the district of Tashkend, between Barsin {i.e., Barchin) and Chihas (?).*
Before setting out he visited the tomb of the Sheikh Maslahet, at
Khojend, where he distributed 10,000 kupegi dinars in alms.t

Having returned to Tashkend he fell dangerously ill, and was so
for forty days. When he recovered, his son, the murza Miran Shah,
arrived with the contingent of Khorasan, and Timur proceeded to
distribute largess (okulga)t among the troops. He appointed three
Princes of Kipchak, who had sought refuge with him, namely Timur
Kutlugh Oghlan, son of Timur Malik Khan, Guneje Oghlan, and Idiku
Uzbeg, to act as guides to the army. Having made arrangements for
the government of the empire during his absence, he set out on the 19th
of January, 1391, accompanied by his favourite wife Chulpan Mahk Agha,
daughter of Haji Beg Irkanut, Prince of Mongolistan. The army was
detained for some days at Kara Saman.§ There, there arrived envoys
from Toktamish, who were honoured with a special audience by Timur,
and who presented him with a sonkar or royal falcon || and nine horses. H
They prostrated themselves, and touched the ground with their fore-
heads in the recognised manner, and delivered the message of their
master. The latter has addressed Timur in humble terms, and asked that
his revolt, which he attributed to evil counsels, &c., might be forgiven.

Timur, putting the falcon on his fist, replied that " The whole world
was witness of how he had protected Toktamish, what sacrifices he had
made to place him on his throne. How he had, notwithstanding, used
the opportunity when he (Timur) was absent in Irak and Fars to revolt.
How he had, nevertheless, been ready to forgive him if he had shown any
contrition ; but instead of this he had again invaded his borders with a
number of vile infidels, who pillaged and devastated far and wide, and
when he returned to the rescue of his people he had basely retreated,
and now wished once more to beguile him with his false promises, but
that be had been treacherous too often for him (Timur) to be again

t Charmoy has a note on this money, whose name recalls the Russian copecks. Kupegi
dinars mean dinars with the dog, and were, he thinks, the same as the gold Dutch coins called
in Egypt abu kelb (the father with the dog), and by corruption abokelle. They were so called
on account of the lion on them, the noble animal being styled dog either out of contempt for
the Christians or on account of the base metal of which they were made. These lion thalers
were of less value than those of Venice and Spain. (Id., 135. Note, 8.)
I De la Croix, ii. y^.

§ This name means black straw in Turkish, and is written Karaiman and Ferahman in other
manuscripts. De la Croix places Kara Saman, on what authority Charmoy cannot say, in
45.6 north latitude and 99 east longitude. It was probably situated to the north of Tashkend
and the south-east of Yassy or Turkestan, and not far from the Bodame, a tributary of the
Sihun. (Id., 136, Note, 13)

I These abound in the mountains of Ufa, and the falcons of that province are still very
famous. (Charmoy, op. cit., 137. Note, 14.)

H Probably from Kazan, whose breed is also famous.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. • 24I

misled, and he meant to carry out his purpose of punishing him. Never-
theless, if he was sincere and wished to give a proof of his real intentions,
let him send his first minister Alibeg to treat, and he (Timur) would act
in the way that wisdom and the interests of his empire required."*
Timur gave the envoys a grand feast and presented them with em-
broidered kaftans. They were assigned special quarters, but orders were
given to watch them closely.

A grand council of war or kuriltai was held on the 21st of February,
I39i.t A day under an auspicious star was chosen for the start, and
the envoys of Toktamish were sent home. The army marched by way
of Yassy (the modern Turkestan), Karachuk (a river which falls into the
Sihun about five versts from Turkestan), and Sabran, then turning more
to the north, it went for six weeks over barren steppes,+ where
it lost many horses for want of fodder, and at length reached Saruk
Uzen or Saruk Erin, as other manuscripts have it, that is the yellow
water which, as M. Charmoy has argued, is undoubtedly the well-known
river Sari Su.§ They reached this river on the 6th of April, 1391, and
the horses were unhaltered for a few days, and thanks were offered to
heaven for the happy progress of affairs. The river was flooded, and the
halt was necessary until it could be forded. The evening when the
crossing was effected two dependents of Idiku escaped to Toktamish,
and evaded all efforts for their capture. On the 26th of April the army
reached the mountain Kuchuk Tagh (/.(?., the Little Mountain), one of the
most famous of the steppe. Two days later they reached the Ulugh
Tag {i.e., the great mountain). It is called ulugh or great because the
inhabitants deem it the greatest mountain of their country. In this chain
rise the various affluents of the Sari Su, known as the Jeilanlu Kinghir,
Jislu Kinghir, Kara Kinghir, and Saru Kinghir. The Ulugh Tag and
Kunchuk Tag mountains were anciently known as the Ortagh (high
mountain), and Kar Tagh {i.e., dirty mountain), and were the summer
residence of the Khans of the Oghuz Turks. |i Timur climbed
the Ulugh Tagh, and from this magnificent vantage looked over
the beautiful prairies that stretch far away towards the horizon
and caused a stone obeHsk to be planted on the summit, with
the date and an account of his presence there ; a monument which
was supplemented in later days by a similar one in his own honour, set
up by the Uzbeg chief Abdullah Behadur Khan.^ Setting out again, and
hunting en route, the army arrived on the following day at the river
Ilanchuk {i.e., the snakelike).** Eight days after crossing it they

♦ Id., 102, 103. De la Croix, ii. 76-78. t Charmoy, id., 138. Note, 15.

I Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 346. $ Op. cit., 139, 140. Note, 17.

\ Id., 140-143. Note, 19. T Id. Vide infra.

** This river is mentioned by Levchine, who reports from the accounts of the Kirghiz

Kazaks that it springs in the Ulu^h Tagh and falls into the lake Yakan ak gul (i.e., the White

lake that burns), one hundred versts south-east of lake Ak Sakal Barbi. {Id., 143,)

IH

242 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

reached Atakaraghui or Ana karaghui.*' The army had been four
months on the march from Tashkend, and provisions began to run
short. As much as a hundred kupeghi dinars was paid for a
sheep, while the price of corn was similarly augmented, and the
troops had recourse to the eggs of wild birds, probably of wild
geese, which abound there, and all kinds of animals and herbs for food,t
while the only rations issued consisted in a kind of soup, made of flour
and flavoured with an herb called muthr (/.^,, the tuft of the millet), J
and the officers were constrained to live like their men. On the 6th of
May, 1 39 1, Timur ordered a grand hunt to be organised on the old
Mongol method of enclosing a large space with a ring of men. This
was very successful, and a vast number of steppe antelopes (the
cervus pyrargus of Pallas), deer, and elks were killed. The latter were
new to Timur's people, and are called kandaghai by the Mongols, while
the inhabitants of the steppes call them bulans.§ So numerous were the
game that only the fat ones were used (the lean ones being allowed to
escape), and they furnished the. army with meat for several days.||

After the hunt Timur held a grand review of his men. Charmoy
conjectures that this review was held in the great plain stretching
between the mountains Kezbel and Kotur and the Kara Adir range,
about five degrees east of Orskaia Krepost, where the Tobol springs.^
He inspected the troops drawn up in battle array, and variously armed
with lances, swords, daggers, maces, and lassoes, with bucklers covered
with crocodile hides, and with tiger skins on their horses. Such a
gathering must have been a grand and unique spectacle in the lonely
Siberian steppes. Timur himself, we are told, had a crown ornamented
with rubies on his head, and bore a mace terminating in the head of an ox.
As he passed by, the various commanders knelt and did homage, and one
of them presented him with a splendid charger. He examined the troops
carefully, and finding, we are told, that they were equipped as well as if
on parade on the flowery meadows of Akiar, dear Kesh, where he held
his reviews,** he distributed rewards. The army marched past to the
sound of timbals, shouting the war cry Surun (/.^., charge).

Timur now sent on an advance guard, of which, at his request, he gave
the command to his grandson the murza Muhammed Sultan Behadur,
and the latter set out on the I2th day of May, a day which had been
declared propitious by the Great Mollah Abdullah Lisan (? Kisan).tt
Two days after setting out the young prince found traces of the enemy.

* Probably, as M. Charmoy has argued, a corruption of Karaturghai, a river which springs
in the lead mountains, spurs of the Ulugh Tagh, and which, after running for a certain course,
changes its name to Ulugh Turghai (i.e., the Great Turghai). It traverses the marshes of
Bishe Kupa and the sands of Koshelok and falls into the lake Ak Sakal Barbi. The epithet
ulugh great explains the parallel epithets of ata (x.«., father), and ana (t.r, mother), used by
Sherifuddin, Mirkhond, &c. {/d., 144.)

i Id., 4^6. I Jd.,145 a.nd S71, Note, 23. § /rf., 106 and 146. Note, 27.

II /i., 106. IT/rf., 148. Note, 38, ♦*/</., 149. Note, 30. 1t/</., 108 and448.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 243

and came upon a recently abandoned camp, in which the fires were
scarcely out.* Following up the traces he hastened on, and at length
reached the well known river Tobol, upon which the city of Tobolsk is
built, and which derives its name from a small tree called Tobul by the
Kazaks and Tavolga by the Russians. This river was the old frontier
between the government of Orenburgh and the Kazaks. The route
followed by Timur and his people was doubtless, as M. Charmoy says,
the same which is still used between the Ulugh Tag mountains and the
Tobol.t Having crossed the river videttes were sent out, and reported
that they had found abandoned fires in seventy different places, but had
not seen the enemy.

Timur having heard of this, advanced by forced marches, and soon
reached the Tobol, and rejoined his advance guard. He then sent
on an experienced Turkoman named Sheikh David, who had been
brought up on the steppes, to reconnoitre. After a forced march of
two days and nights he came upon some huts, where he lay in
ambush, and waited until he saw a horseman come out. Having over-
taken and seized him, he returned to Timur, who rewarded him with a
gilt shoulder strap on which to sling his quiver, and a caftan.

The captive informed him that he had left the country of Toktamish
a month before, and had seen nothing of his men till a few days ago,
when he had noticed ten men in armour, who were then concealed in
an adjoining wood. Timur sent to surprise these warriors. They
resisted, and some were killed, while the others were captured. Having
heard definite news from them about his enemy, Timur once more
advanced by forced marches, and after traversing several rivers and
lakes, arrived on the 29th of May on the banks of the Yaik.f There the
army halted. One of the guides informed Timur that there were three
fords over the river, namely, Aighir Yaly, Bura-Guechit, and Chapma
Guechit or Khime Guechit.§ Timur preferred not to cross by these
fords, as the enemy might be ambushed behind. He therefore crossed
it higher up, where the water was deep, and six days later reached the
river Semur, where he halted.! There he heard that the army of
Toktamish, which had been posted in the neighbourhood, had recently
retired. He accordingly issued orders that the advance should be made
very circumspectly, and that no fires were to be lighted at night. On

*/^.,382. Ud.,151.

I This was probably near Kizilskaia. We still find on the route from the Tobol to this
station several lakes, such as the Aghatch Gul (lake of the wood), Balik Gul (the fish lake)^
Sari Gul (yellow lake), Ala Gul (blue lake), and several rivers, such as the Tagh Karaghai
(mountain pines), Kara Ali Aiat, Tuguzak, and Sarimsaklu (the garlic river), (Charmoy, op.
cit., 151. Note, 34.)

§ These Charmoy identifies with great probability with the positions of the modern forts of
Orskaia, Tanalitzkaia, and Kizilskaia.

II This was probably the Sakmara, which springs in the mountain Ak tuba (white hill), in
the district of Verkhni Uralsk, and running parallel for some distance with the Yaik, at
length falls into it, {Id., 152. Note, 35.)

244

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the 4th of June, 1391, he arrived at the river Ik.* Meanwhile Toktamish
had been encamped at a place variously called Kerk Gul {i.e., the forty
lakes) or Koruk Gul (the dry lake), where he awaited the contingents of
the dependent hordes of Bulghar and Azak {i.e., of the later Kazan and
Krim Tartars). He had planted ambuscades at the usual ferries over
the Yaik.t

Timur ordered his men to exercise renewed vigilance, to keep
close watch over the camps, and also to make a circuit of the immediate
neighbourhood every night, so as to prevent a surprise. Having passed
a night on the banks of the Ik, the troops again set out, marching with
difficulty over the marshy ground, and soon the advanced posts reported
having seen three of the enemy's regiments. Timur accordingly ordered
his men to range themselves in order of battle, and made a fresh
distribution of bucklers, cuirasses, and money.J From a prisoner, who
was afterwards put to death, he learnt that Toktamish was adopting
a Fabian pohcy, as he understood that provisions were wanting in
Timur's camp. Sending forward Mubesheshir Behadur to reconnoitre,
the latter came up with a detachment, of whom he made forty prisoners.
From them he learnt that they had set out to join Toktamish at the
rendezvous of Kerk Gul, but had not met with him. These prisoners
were also cruelly put to death. Soon after a more important capture
was made in the son of Mamai, who was wounded, and who, falling on
his knees, also reported that he had set out from Serai to join Toktamish,
but had not found him at the rendezvous. § Shortly after this the army
of Toktamish was discovered by an advance guard which Timur sent out
to explore, under Jelal ud din, the son of the emir Hamed, and other
chiefs. When Timur heard this news he ordered Aiku Timur, a chief of
the Berlas tribe, to advance with a body of troops and reconnoitre.
Having gone some distance and crossed two rivers, probably the
Dema, a tributary of the Belaia, and the Great Kinel, a feeder of the
Samara, or perhaps the Sok,|| he came up with Jelal ud din and the other
videttes. Seeing some of the enemy's troops encamped on a hill he went
up to them, and when they descended occupied their position, whence
he discovered a considerable force, in coats of mail, drawn up.
Deeming his people too weak to cope with them, he ordered them to
retreat, and himself took charge of the rear guard of seven or eight men.
The enemy, seeing his isolated position, marched upon him. His horse
was wounded by an arrow, and he was struck by a second one. He now
sped along, but his horse fell exhausted. Receiving a remount, another
arrow struck his second horse. He was now surrounded and killed, and
his head was cut off. Some of his companions suffered the same fate.

* There are four rivers of this name in the government of Orenburgh, but M. Charmoy con-
biders that the one meant is a tributary of the Sakmara. (/rf., 153. Note, 37.)

+ Id,, III. I U. § Id., i. 12. II ld„ 159. Note, 44.

TdKTAMISH KHAN.

245

The pursuit of the enemy was stopped by a body of troops which Timur
ordered to the rescue, and which poured in a well-directed flight of
arrows. He rewarded all those who had distinguished themselves in the
skirmish, conferring upon the sons of the emir Aiku the distinguished
title of Terkhan, and issued instructions to the Yesauls or orderhes to
permit them at all times to enter the Imperial palace or tent without
question, and not to inflict punishment upon them or their descendants
until they had offended nine times, privileges which, it will be remem-
bered, Jingis associated with the title of Terkhan. The great seal and
the seal for sealing despatches were intrusted to Shah Malik, son of
Kaljighai, who was invested with the office filled by Aiku Timur. The
latter's death caused great depression in the army.

Timur's army had advanced to the 54th degree of latitude, and to the
district where there was no tme night in summer. The Mussulmans
accordingly received dispensations from the Imams in regard to their
saying the midnight prayer. As Toktamish continued his Fabian
tactics, with the intention of wearing out his army, the great conqueror
called a council of his principal chiefs, where it was determined
that the murza Omar Sheikh should advance by forced marches with
20,000 men and force an engagement. He was accompanied by the
emir Sevinjik, Sultan Sanjar, Haji Self ud din, the emir Otsman, son of
Abbas, Hasane Jandar, and other distinguished officers. They soon
came up with the rear guard of the enemy, and in the grim phrase of the
chronicler, " The sun hid himself in thick clouds, so as not to light up
the horrors of the fight."* It was very cold, and snow fell for five or
six days. At length, on Monday the i8th of June, the weather cleared.t
Timur set his men in order at Kandurcha, in the country of the
Bulghars.l He divided them into seven divisions, from a reverence
he felt for the number seven, which is the number of verses in the first
Sura of the Koran, and gave them to his principal officers and
dependents. Although much harassed by their long march, while the
enemy was more or less fresh, there was great enthusiasm in the ranks,
and a general desire to test the issue. Timur, it seems, had seduced the
standard-bearer of Toktamish, and ordered him to pull down his
standard when the two armies were engaged. A more serious defection
from his duty was that of an emir of the tribe Aktaf or Aktagh (?>., of
the White Mountain),! who commanded the left wing of the army of
Toktamish. Having a deadly quarrel with another emir who had
murdered one of his relatives, he chose the moment when the two armies
were before each other to demand the surrender of his enemy. Tok-
tamish promised to surrender him after the struggle was over. Dis-

* Id., 116. Ud. Note, 56.

I This was probably the place still called Kandurchinskaia on the borders of the governments
of Orenburgh and Simbirsk, on the left bank and near the sources of the Kandurcha, which
falls into the Sok near Krasnoiarska. $ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 353.

246 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

contented with this answer he withdrew, and with him a number
of others, and the whole of the tribe of Aktagh. Von Hammer says
these Tartars of Aktagh had settled in the Dobrudja when Timur
overran Asia Minor.* They now retired beyond the Danube, and
planted themselves near Adrianople.t

When his men were set out in battle array, it was found that both on
the right and the left wing they overlapped those of Timur. His
principal generals are thus enumerated : — Tash-Timur, Beg Yaruk,
Ilkimish, Beg Pulad, AH Oghlan, and Jinta Oghlan. These were all
descendants of Juchi. Besides these there were Ali, Suliman Sofi, and
Nurus, of the tribe Kunkurat ; Aktaf, Akbuta (Akbuye of Von Hammer),
and Uruschuk, of the tribe Kiat; Ika beg (Isa beg of Von Hammer), the
elder brother of Ideku, Hasan beg, Serayi, Kuke bugha,| and Yaghli bi,
of the tribe Baharin ; Kunkur bi or Kunkurti, and others from the
steppes of Kipchak.

On the side of limur the first corps was commanded by Sultan
Mahmud Khan, assisted by Suliman Shah. The second corps, which
was the main body, was commanded in person by Timur, assisted by
Prince Muhammed Sultan, son of Jihangir. The murza Miran Shah
Gurkhan was placed at the head of the third corps, and was assisted by
Prince Muhammed Sultan Shah. The fourth corps was commanded by
the emir Haji Seif ud din, the fifth by the murza Omar Sheikh. The
names of the commanders of the other two corps are not mentioned,
but we are told that among the eminent chiefs on Timur's side there
were also Berdibeg, son of Sarbuka, Khudad i Huseny, and many others.§
Before the battle Timur prayed to God, and dismounting prostrated
himself twice, while the troops deployed to the famous cry of Allah
akbar (God is very great), and the shout of Surun [i.e., charge) mingled
on each side with the clang of drums and iron timbals.

Meanwhile the chief of the Sherifs Seid Bereke, a descendant of Ali,
who had prophesied that Timur would prove victorious, uncovered his
head and raised his hands aloft in prayer, while the Imam Khauja Zia
ud din Yusuf and Sheikh Ismael, both descended from the Sheikh ul
Islam Ahmed Jam, recited in concert a verse from the Koran, " Oh,
believers, remember the blessings of the Lord. It is he who stops the
arms of your enemies when they venture to turn their weapons towards
you. Fear God. It is in him whom beUevers ought to trust." Then
throwing a handful of gravel towards the enemy, the Imam cried out,
" May their faces be darkened," and then towards Timur, he said, " Go
where thou wilt, God protects thee."||

The emir Seif ud din was the first to attack the enemy, whose left
wing he broke. The people of Toktamish, who, as I have said, over-

/</., 353. t Charmoy, 118. I Von Hammer, 351. Note, 4. $ Charmoy, op. cit., 117.

II /^., 1 19.

TOKTAMISH KHAN.

247

lapped on either flank, tried to surround him, but were prevented by the
emir Jihan Shah Behadur, who forced them back again. Kilinjik
Behadur and the emir Mirian Shah Gurkhan also charged the left wing,
which was partly destroyed and partly forced to retire. Afterwards
the various commanders brought their men into conflict with the troops
opposite them, and a terrible slaughter ensued. Toktamish, finding that
he could not stop the centre and right of Timur's army, concentrated
himself on the left. Nothing, we are told, could withstand the im-
petuosity of his attack there, and Timur's left flank was broken, its
divisions were detached from the main army, and Toktamish actually
pierced through the opposing ranks and took up his ground behind them.
Notwithstanding the critical state of affairs, Timur, in order to inspire
his men with confidence, ordered his grandson Abubekr, with the
advance guard of 10,000 horsemen, to dismount and to proceed to pitch
their tents, light their fires, and prepare their victuals. This piece of
bravado disconcerted Toktamish, who was further distressed when he
found his standard-bearer lowering his standard, as he had agreed. He
thereupon retired in all haste, and fled, according to some, to the
mountains of Georgia, and according to others, to the court of Withold
or Vitut, Duke of Lithuania.* The battle had lasted three days, and was
a terrible disaster for the forces of Kipchak, a space of forty ferasenks was
strewn with corpses. The number of which, we are told, amounted to
100,000. The baggage and an immense booty became the prize of the
victors.t

The conqueror encamped on the field of battle, and returned thanks to
God for his victory. His various great officers then paid their respects
to him on their knees, and bestrewed him with gold and precious stones.
Timur returned their felicitations, set aside large sums for charity, and
then ordered seven men out of every ten to set off in pursuit of the
enemy. They followed them to the Volga, where those who were not
drowned were slaughtered. A few only escaped, but their wives, children,
slaves, and worldly goods, as well as the harem of Toktamish, became
the prey of the victors. The troops of Timur spread over the Kipchak
as far as Azak, and the towns of Serai, Seraichuk, and Haji Terkhan or
Astrakhan were ravaged and devastated. This battle and its con-
sequences were a fatal blow to the Golden Horde, from which it never
recovered. Its population was so terribly decimated and its towns so
ravaged and destroyed, that its glory may fairly be said to have passed
away. We who are accustomed to a temperate climate and a rich soil
cannot realise the terrible task of building up a stable and prosperous
civilisation where climate and soil are both harsh, where the desert
and its robber tribes are close at hand, where the inhabitants are
only half reclaimed nomades themselves, and where civilisation is not a

* Id., 121. lid., 122.

248

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

home-grown plant, but an exotic which grows only under constant care
and with prosperous surroundings. Such was the civilisation on the
Volga which the terrible vengeance of Timur trod under. We cannot
say that he was not provoked, but it makes us shudder to think how
under such conditions the ruin and misery of large nations may be
entirely at the mercy of intemperate and wayward rulers, whose one false
step may sweep away what centuries have accumulated.

The campaign of Timur was facilitated, as so many Eastern cam-
paigns previously have been, by the divisions and treachery of the
commanders of the other side. Three great chiefs of Kipchak served in
his army ; these were Timur Kutlugh Oghlan, who afterwards became
Khan, Guneje Oghlan, who also belonged to the Royal stork, and Idiku'
the Nogay chief. They were treated with great consideration by Timur,
who loaded them with gifts, jewelled girdles, precious robes, and splendid
chargers with gilded saddles. After the defeat of Toktamish they
requested permission on bended knees to join their respective hordes,
under pretence that they wished to conduct them to pay honour to Timur
himself. This permission was given, and Timur also gave them special
yarlighs or "letters patent" exempting them from taxation and sur-
veillance. They accordingly departed, and Timur followed his victorious
advance guard to the Volga, and pitched his camp in the beautiful
meadows of Urtupa, in which perhaps we have a corruption of Atiuba,
one of the lower branches of the Volga, not far from the Kandurcha, in
the district of Stavropol.* There the warriors encamped and rested from
their fatigues, and feasted generously. Of the three princes of Kipchak,
who had left with fair promises on their lips, only Guneje Oghlan
returned with his people according to promise, and was treated very
graciously. The other two had " fish of their own to fry," and we shall
hear of them again. Meanwhile the net was thrown over the devoted
land, and a vast booty in horses, camels, cattle, sheep, and young slaves
was drawn into it. The Krim and the district of Bulghar apparently
escaped most easily. So great was the number of captives that we are
told 5,000 maidens and pages distinguished by their figures and their
bright complexions were reserved for the personal service of Timur
himself, while the whole army was satiated with wealth.t

Timur spent twenty-six days at Urtupa, where he sat on his Royal
throne and presided at the splendid banquets. Wine, kumiz, hydromel,
date wine, and arak were handed round in golden cups, amidst music
and singing, while the lovely banks of the river, shaded by trees and the
pure serene air made a splendid background to the picture. The
conquest of Kipchak was also celebrated by special compositions called
Fath nameh i Kipchak (bulletins of the conquest of Kipchak).J

Timur now set off on his retnrn home. His march being that of a

Charmoy, op. cit., 167.

t Id., 124.

I Id., 169.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 249

conqueror loaded with spoils, and we are told that among these
were a great number of kibitkas or portable felt tents, which were
carried on waggons. On arriving at the river Yaik, Guneje Oghlan
and his people withdrew without notice, and went back to their own
country. Shortly after passing the river, Timur, having confided the
command of the troops to Haji Seif ud din and other emirs, returned
home by forced marches. He arrived at Sabran in October, 1391, and
thence went on by way of Otrar to Samarkand, where he was received
with great rejoicings.*

Thus by one fatal battle (which was curiously enough fought on the
18th of June, the day of Waterloo) Toktamish, like Napoleon, lost an
empire and made his country the camping ground of foreign hosts. We
must now examine how the debris of the Golden Horde were gathered
together, and how the story of its decline proceeded.

It would seem that in the confusion that immediately followed the
defeat of Toktamish, one of the chiefs set up an independent authority.
This was Beg Pulad, of whom we have coins struck during the years
793-796 {i.e.^ 1 390- 1 to 1393-4), struck at Krim, Azak, the New Ordu, and
Beled {i.e., the town or city). Beg Pulad is mentioned as one of his
opponents in the yarligh addressed to Yagellon, mentioned below. He
is also, probably, the ^^^ Pulad mentioned in the account of the
metropolitan Pimen's journey to Constantinople in 1283, when he had an
ulus on the Don.t M. Soret makes him a son of Toktamish. I don't
know on what authority, and it is hardly likely, if he was the same
as the person just mentioned, nor do I know who he was, but he
probably belonged to the rival family descended from Urus Khan. I may
add that there occur certain coins during the years 789 {i.e., 1387) with the
name of Toktamish on one side and on the other Berdibeg or Muhammed
Berdibeg Khan.f M. Fraehn identifies him with Kerimberdi, the son of
Toktamish, but if so he would hardly be striking coins during his reign.
It is more probable that he was the Berdi, also mentioned in the yarligh
already referred to. Berdibeg, son of Sarbuka, is named as one of
Timur's generals against Kipchak. If Sarbuka be the same as Sarikhoja,
it may be that the Berdibeg of the coins was the son of Sarikhoja, who
also had an ulus on the Don when Pimen passed that way.

Let us now turn for a while to Russia. Vasili, as I have mentioned,
was now Grand Prince. He had married Sophia, the daughter of the
Lithuanian Prince Vitut, who afterwards became so famous. He was
the son of Kestut, who had been killed by Yagellon, and had himseh
been an exile in Prussia,§ where Vasili met his bride on his circuitous
journey from Serai to Moscow. This marriage took place on the 9th of
January, 1391. It was probably in the spring of the same year that
Toktamish sent Bektut with an army along the Volga and the Kama

* U., 125, 1x6. Vii» ante, 132. I Frsehn, Rose, 355i 356. § Karamzin, v. 59.

I I

^50 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

into the province of Viatka, which was inhabited by emigrants from
Novgorod and by indigenous tribes of Ugrian race. This raid was
probably made in punishment of the buccaneering excursion of "The
Brave People," to which I have before referred. The country was much
ravaged. We are told that a section of the inhabitants determined
to revenge themselves. They united with the Novgorodians and the
people of Ustiug, and embarking in some large boats, descended the
Viatka, and passing along the Volga, ravaged Yukotin, Kazan, and the
Bulgarian towns dependent on the Tartars, pillaging without mercy the
merchants whom they encountered. On the 15th of July, we find the
Grand Prince repairing in person to the horde, where he was received by
Toktamish with great honour, as a friend and ally rather than a
tributary. It was clear that he wished to secure his friendship in his
terrible struggle with Timur. He not only gave him the principality of
Nijni Novgorod, with which he had endowed Boris Constantinovitch,
but also the districts of Gorodetz, Mechera, Torussa, and Murom ; the
two last had been appanages of the Princes of Chernigof, and had
not belonged to the descendants of Monomakhos. Vasih, no doubt, in
return furnished Toktamish with material assistance in men or money
for his great war. He arrived at Moscow, accompanied by the Khan's
deputy Alan (.'' Oghlan), who went to instal him. Nijni was surrendered
by the boyards, who, when Boris appealed to them, cried out, " We
no longer belong to you."* Here we have a palpable example of the
boyards helping on the centralising tendency of Moscow. " The motive,"
says Kelly, " is to be found only in their interest, as the Grand Prince of
Moscow intrusted them with the government of the appanages, and thus
substituted the nobles in the place of princes."! Vasih soon after went
there in person, and appointed Dimitri Vsevolof as its governor. Thus
terminated the independent history of the principality of Suzdal. On the
death of Boris, his nephews tried to reconquer their appanage, and
appealed to the Khan. Simeon, with the aid of the Tartar Eitiak^
captured Nijni by stratagem, but was too weak to retain it. His wife
escaped to the country of the Mordvins, who were dependents of the
horde, and lived in a village near a Christian church founded by a
converted Tartar named Khazibaba, while Simeon himself wandered
about for eight years with the Tartars, and having served under four of
their Khans, returned to Russia, and not long after died.

Soon after Vasili's return from the horde, we read that three of the
Khan's chamberlains, named Batu or Bashti Khoja, Khizr Khoja, and
Muhammed Khoja, were baptised at Moscow, and that the Tartars
ravaged Riazan, as they had done two years before. In the archives of
Moscow there is preserved a yarligh or missive of Toktamish to
Yagellon, written in the Uighur character and the Mongol language, and

Karamzio, v. 154. t Op. cit., i. 89.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 25 1

dated the 20th of May, 1393. In it Toktamish mentions seven of his
opponents, namely, Idiku (z>., the Nogay chief), Beg Pulad (who lived
on the Don), Khojamuddin,* Begish (?), Turduchak (?), Berdi, and
David, and in the Lithuanian copy we are told that Toktamish had
informed Yagellon by his envoys Hasan and Kutlughbugha of his
accession to the throne.f

We must now turn once more to the intercourse between Toktamish
and Timur.

It was three years after his previous campaign in the Kipchak that,
having traversed Persia and Georgia and found himself on the banks of
the Kur, Timur determined once more to march into the steppes of the
Volga to punish Toktamish, who had not only recovered his former
position there, but also threatened his frontiers. Having distributed
largess among his soldiers, and sent one portion of his harem for safety
to Sultania and another to Samarkand, he set out on the 28th of
February, 1395,^ the left wing of the army, as was customary among the
Tartars, leading the van. Before setting out he forwarded a letter to
Toktamish, in which he demanded of him, "whom the demon of pride
had turned from the right path, what was his motive in issuing from his
borders. He asked him if he had forgotten what had occurred in the
previous war, where his country and goods were crushed to powder ; he
reminded him how those who had treated him amicably had been
similarly treated in return, while he had pursued with his vengeance
those who had behaved in a contrary fashion. He reminded him also of
his own victorious career, which made him indifferent whether he was at
peace or war with Toktamish ; that he was ready to welcome either his
friendship or enmity with open arms, and he bade him, in conclusion,
send him speedy word of his intentions."

This letter was taken by Shemsuddin Almalighi, a person who is
described as a consummate diplomatist, and well versed in the maxims
of Turan and of the Tartars. Having had an interview with Toktamish,
he had almost persuaded him to submit, when a contrary policy was
urged by his courtiers and generals, to whom, according to Sherifuddin,
war was profitable. Following their advice, Toktamish returned a
haughty answer by Timur's envoy, to whom he presented a robe of State.
The latter rejoined his master on the river Samara, at the foot of the
Caucasus, five leagues from the Caspian.

Timur now passed his troops in review on the banks of the Samara.
The left wing of his army rested on the mountains, while the right wing
reached to the sea. The various emirs and chiefs did homage to their
master on their knees. The big drums and the war trumpet Kerenai
were sounded. The soldiers thereupon seized their swords and turned

* Von Hammer thinks him the same as the Guneje Oghlan already named,
t Golden Horde, 355. Note, 9, t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 358,

252 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

in the direction of Kipchak, and having cried out Surun {i.e., forwards),
they set out headed by their officers. After passing the defile of
Derbend, news arrived that the Kaitaks, who were subjects of Toktamish,
were prepared to oppose them. Timur, deeming that a good com-
mencement of a campaign is a gauge of a good ending, ordered them to
be exterminated. A terrible slaughter accordingly took place, and their
villages were destroyed.

An envoy from Toktamish now drew near, but when he saw the
number of Timur's forces he withdrew hurriedly to report to his master.
At Terki, Timur learnt that the enemy's outposts, commanded by
Gazanshi, were posted on the Kayussu {i.e., the Osen). Marching all
night, a body of troops was sent over the river, which overwhelmed the
advanced guard with great slaughter. Timur then continued his march
to the Sewinje,* where he halted for the rest of his people to come up.

Toktamish meanwhile was encamped on the Terek. His position was
strong, and was protected by a number of waggons ranged in the form
of a rampart or barricade, but on Timur's approach he abandoned it and
retired. Timur now crossed the Terek, while his rival encamped on the
Kura.t He marched along the Terek towards Jullad in the Little
Kabardahjt called Kulat by De la Croix, but hearing that Toktamish
was following him beyond the river, he turned to meet him. The armies
faced each other on the 14th of April. Timur's was intrenched, and he
gave orders that no fires should be lighted, and that silence should be
kept. During the night of the 21st, Ibashi Oghlan deserted him and
went over to the enemy. On the 22nd he ranged his forces in seven
divisions, which he inspected. The main body of his army was com-
manded by his son, the murza Muhammed Sultan, while he himself was at
the head of twenty-seven companies of picked men, who formed the
reserve. The conflict commenced amidst a shower of arrows and cries
of Dar u gar {i.e., give and kill, hold and take).§ A messenger came to
Timur to tell him that Guneje Oghlan, Barkiarok Oghlan, Aktau, Utarku,
and Daud Sufi, the son-in-law of Toktamish, were advancing upon his
right wing. He thereupon charged them at the head of his twenty-seven
companies, and drove them back, but his men pursued too far, and were
in turn pushed back and their ranks broken. The enemy seeing this,
pressed in pursuit, and Timur himself, whose quiver was exhausted and
his lance and his sword broken, would have been surrounded if Sheikh
Nuruddin, with fifty other heroes, had not dismounted and covered him,
and k^pt up a flight of arrows. Three others of his chiefs succeeded in
seizing three of the enemy's carts, and fixing them together formed a
kind of bulwark before their master. His troops now began to gather
round ; the trumpets sounded the rally, while the dismounted soldiers.

*».«., the Kcissu, also called the Sulak and the Shellinje (see Koch's map), t ? the Kuru Terek.
J Frsehn, quoted in Golden Horde, 359. Note, i. § Sherifuddin, ii. 346. Golden Horde, 539.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 253

kneeling on one knee, kept up a flight of arrows. Meanwhile the
enemy's ranks grew thicker, but they tried in vain to break the cordon
about Timur. Khodadad Hussein, with the advanced guard of the left
wing, broke in between Kuneje Oghlan, who commanded the right wing
of Toktamish's army, and the contingent under Aktau (doubtless the
same chief who had been treacherous in the former battle), and attacked
the latter, who was pressing Timur hard in rear, while the murza
Muhammed Sultan brought up strong reinforcements, planted them on
his father^s left, and speedily routed the enemy's right wing, compelling
Aktau to fly.

While this was taking place on Timur's left, his right wing was faring
badly. The enemy, commanded by Aisa Beg and Bashi Khoja,' broke
and surrounded it. Thereupon its commander ordered his men to
dismount and crouch down under their shields, forming a defence
analagous to our squares. They were hard pressed by the opposing
cavalry, who charged them scimitar and lance in hand. Seeing their
dangerous position, Jihansha Behadur went to the rescue with his
cavalry, and the assailants were charged on either flank by Timur's
lancers and mace men. This attack reversed the previous condition of
affairs. The two chiefs united their forces, and drove back the enemy's
left. The main body on either side then joined issue, that of Kiprhak
commanded by Yagblibi Behrin, a relative of Toktamish, while on the
other side the command was in the hands of the young murza Rustem,
son of Omar Sheikh. Yagblibi challenged Osman Behadur to single
combat, and they accordingly rushed at one another, their followers
imitating their example. The combat was very fierce and bloody, but at
length the troops of Kipchak gave way, a proceeding which was heralded
by the flight of Toktamish with his Oghlans and Noyans. The people
of Timur rushed in pursuit, and with terrible vengeance slaughtered
a vast number of the fugitives, and we are told they afterwards hanged
most of those they captured alive. Timur knelt down, uncovered
himself, and thanked heaven for his victory, while his principal chiefs
congratulated and scattered gold and jewels over him. He in turn
rewarded his faithful followers, especially the Sheikh Nuruddin, who
had rescued him. He promoted him and presented him with a noble
courser, a robe of gold brocade, a jewelled girdle, and a hundred
thousand kupeghi dinars. He then distributed treasure among his other
soldiers, and made a general promotion of his officers.*

The details of this battle show what a matter of uncertainty an Eastern
fight was, with its sudden rushes and its intermittent fortunes. While
the jeopardy of Timur, who was the keystone of a vast organisation,
shows also how the existence of the mediaeval empires of the East were
perpetually menaced. We cannot also doubt that defeat in such cases

Sherifuddin, 346-354.

254 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

was much more fatal and disastrous than it is with our better disciplined
and more orderly armies. Having left his baggage and the booty he had
captured near the battle field in charge of the murza Miran Shah, who '
had been wounded in the struggle, Timur went on in pursuit of
Toktamish. He halted for a while on the Volga, at the ford called
Turatu, and summoning Koirijak Oghlan, a son of Urus Khan and
brother of the Khans Tuktakia and Timur Malik, who was one of his
household. He invested him with a robe of golden tissue and a rich
girdle, gave him an escort of Uzbeg cavalry, and nominated him Khan
of Kipchak.

Timur's troops now pursued the enemy along the Volga as far as
Ukek, -capturing and killing many of them on the way. Toktamish
himself sought shelter in the woods of Bolghari. Having advanced to
the point where they had crossed the Volga in their former campaign,
the victors returned again with a vast booty, gold and silver and furs,
rubies and pearls, beautiful boys and girls. Murza Miran Shah, with
the baggage, &c., rejoined Timur at Yulukluk Asukluk. The latter sent
back some of his principal chiefs with part of the army to Persia, to
look after the administration there, while he himself determined to go on
to the Dnieper.

Osman commanded his advance guafd. On the Dnieper, at a place
called Mankirman, he came up with Barkiarok Oghlan, who lived there
with some other chiefs. He destroyed nearly all of them. Barkiarok
with difficulty escaped. Tashtimur Oghlan and Aktau fled, says
Sherifuddin, to the country of Hermedai (? between the Dnieper
and the Danube),* where the people were hostile to them, so they
went to Asia Minor, where they settled in the plain of Isra
Yaka, whence they were transported to the neighbourhood of
Adrianople by Muhammed I. The place where they settled is still
called Tatarbasari or the Tartar market.t Timur now returned to the
Don, whither Barkiarok had fled, and where he was overtaken. His
harem was captured, but he himself escaped to the Karasu (probably the
river of this name in the Krim). Timur treated his captured family
with generosity, gave them horses and other presents, and then sent
them back to him. Meanwhile the murza Miran Shah, with other troops,
were busy elsewhere. We are told they exterminated Beg Khoja and
other chieftains of Kipchak, and also the subjects of Onkul.l They
captured Eletz, where reigned Feodor, a descendant of the Princes of
Karachef and a tributary of Oleg of Riazan.

Vasili, the young Grand Prince of Moscow, leaving his uncle Vladimir
in charge of his capital, had escaped with his forces to Kolomna, behind
the Oka. Thence he wrote to the metropolitan bidding him take the
ancient image of the Virgin, which Andrew Bogolubski had removed from

♦ De la Croix, ii. 35i. t Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 361. J Pe la Croix, ii. 363.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 255

Vuichegorod, to Vladimir, and with which he had triumphed over the
Bulgarians, to Moscow. The image was conveyed in State between two
rows of worshippers, who cried out as it passed, " Mother of God, save
Russia ! " She was welcomed at Moscow, and was met outside by a
procession of ecclesiastics and grandees, and was conveyed to the church
of the Assumption.* It was to this image the Russians ascribed their
deliverance, for Timur, after marching for some distance along the Don,
suddenly halted and turned his steps elsewhere. Sherifuddin is
mistaken in reporting that Timur actually captured Moscow. His
retreat wus probably influenced by the approaching autumn and the
menacing attitude of the Russian army, which had so lately triumphed
over Mamai. The invaders retired with a vast booty, gold ingots and
silver bars, pieces of Antioch linen and of the embroidered cloth of
Russia, mule loads of furs, beavers, sables, and ermines, black and red
foxes, &c., as well as a vast number of colts which had not been shod.t

To the murza Muhammed fell the task of wasting the district ruled
over by Kabonji Karaul and the tribes of Kurbuka, Pirlan, Yurkun, and
Kelaji, who were nomades, and whose tents and famihes were plundered.
I cannot identify these tribes, but they were probably Nogais. We
are told that Timur now wended his way southwards, and went to
Balchinkin, which De la Croix identifies with the Maeotic marshes.! At
Azak he was joined by the troops of murza Miran Shah. When he
reached Azak he was met by a deputation from the town, which was then
the entrepot where the merchants of the East and West exchanged their
wares. Egyptians, Venetians, Genoese, Catalans, and Basques thronged
there. In vain they tried to soften the great conqueror's heart with
presents. He ordered the Muhammedans to be separated from the
other inhabitants, whom he then put to the sword, and afterwards gave
the town up to the flames. § He now marched through the Kuban, where
he lost many of his horses, the Circassians having burnt the herbage.
He punished them by ravaging their territory, and then crossed over into
the land of the Ossetes, who were Christians, and therefore an object of
religious hatred to him. They were then governed by Bura Khan.
Their country was overrun, as were also the fastnesses of the Central
Caucasus, and, according to Sherifuddin, he destroyed many Georgian
fortresses. After this he held a grand fete. His tent of audience was
hung with silk ; its poles were golden, or probably covered with golden
plates, the nails being silver; his throne was of gold, enriched with
precious stones ; the floor was sprinkled with rose water. The meats
were served on golden dishes, and after they were eaten, as is customary
in the East, where people do not drink at meals but after them, Georgian
wines were passed round amidst the playing of vioHns and the singing of
songs. A week was thus consumed in feasting, and the camp was at

* Karamzin, V. i;6, 177. t De la Croix, ii. 364. X /rf., ii. 365. § Sherifuddin, iL 365.

ZjjjS HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

length raised on a day declared by the astrologers to be auspicious.
Timur then captured the mountain fortresses of Kula (? Jullad) and Taus.*
They were situated on almost impregnable sites, the latter being described
as hke a nest on a rock, and the ablest archer could not shoot over
its ramparts. It had not hitherto been taken, and Timur summoned
the tuman or division of the Merkits, who were skilled in mountain
warfare and accustomed to hunt the gazelle and the mountain goat, but
they failed to find an approach. Beginning to despair, he had a
number of ladders fastened together, and a forlorn hope of reckless
characters were ordered to mount. Many of them were killed by the
stones hurled at them by the besieged, but fresh swarms, eager for
martyrdom in the service of Timur, followed them, the garrison was
at length intimidated, and the fortress captured and burnt, while the
people of the race of Irkaun,t who had sought refuge there, were put
to the sword. Timur then went on to Balakan (.''), famous for its honey,
where his soldiers had their fill ; thence to a town governed by Pulad,
where Utarku, one of the great chiefs of the Kipchak had sought
refuge. Timur summoned Pulad to surrender the fugitive, but, relying
on the strength of his fortress, he refused. He accordingly determined
to capture the place at whatever cost. There was a thick forest between
him and his goal, so thick that the wind could scarcely penetrate it.
Through this he ordered a route to be cut, which was three leagues in
length. The garrison defended themselves bravely, but the place was
taken, its inhabitants were converted into slaves, and its dwellings burnt.
Three companies of the enemy, having sought refuge in the mountains,
were captured and thrown into the fire. This campaign, which reminds
one of that of the Russians against Schamyl and his mountaineers, was
probably fought against the tribes of Daghestan.

Meanwhile the murza Miran Shah, who commanded the right of
Timur's army, reported that he had chased Utarku (who had escaped
by way of the Elburz mountains) across the Caucasus into the country
of Abkhasia. There he was followed and captured, and when taken
before Timur he was ordered to be put in chains.^ He now went
to the country of Sem sem (?), governed by Muhammed, the son of
Gaiur Khan, who was submissive, and was appointed an officer of
Timur's court. Some of his people having hidden in the mountains were
pursued. Timur ordered that they should have their hands tied and be
thrown down from the mountains. The war in the mountains was
treated by Timur as a holy war, like his campain in India, and we are
told he purged the land of the infidels who inhabited it, burnt their

* There is a mountain called Taus Tau on the Koissu, on the borders of Lesghistan and
Daghestan,

t A place called Irgauni is marked on Koch's map as situated on the Koissu, a little south
of Taus Tau.

I Sherifuddin, ii. 374, 375.

TOKTAMISH KHAN. 257

dwellings, and destroyed their churches and statues ; and to show the
difficulties he overcame, we are told his men had in some places to slide
down from one position to another, there being no paths. He now went to
mount Auher(?), which he gave up to pillage, and thence to Beshkent (? the
town at Beshtau), whose inhabitants had been very submissive, and were
duly rewarded with privileges and exempted from the menace of his
soldiers. He then passed on to the country of the Kazaks of Yutur (.?). He
put them all to death and harried their country, whence his soldiers also
obtained a large quantity of honey ; thence he went to the land of Bogaz
Kum (.?), where he wished to pass the winter, and where the people of
Kazikumuk sent him their submission,* and were well received by him.
There only remained in these districts the islands (? in the Caspian),
whose inhabitants were called Balekchian {i.e., the fishermen), who had
not submitted. Troops were sent to reduce them, who marched over
the ice.t

On another side Omar Taban, who commanded at Astrakhan for
Timur, having noticed some symptoms of treachery in Mahmudi, who
was kelanter or governor of that town, sent information to his master,
who determined to destroy it. He marched his army during the winter,
which was very severe, leaving the murzas Muhammed Sultan, Miran
shah, and the emir Haji Seifuddin with the baggage.

The Volga washed the walls of Astrakhan, and, according to Sherif-
uddin, the inhabitants were accustomed to pile up masses of ice round
it in the winter, over which they poured water, and thus formed an ice
rampart round the town, through which they cut a gate. On the
approach of Timur, Mahmudi was cowed and went out submissively
to meet him, but he was put under arrest and sent towards Serai.
Timur then entered, and having ordered the inhabitants, cattle, and pro-
perty there to be taken out, he destroyed the place. Mahmudi, according
to orders, was forced underneath the ice of the Volga by his conductors.
From Astrakhan Timur passed to Serai, the residence of the Kipchak
Khans. There also the inhabitants were driven out hke sheep, and the
town destroyed, in revenge for the destruction of the capital of Ghazan,
the Jagatai Khan, namely, Zendjar Serai, which the people of Kipchak had
destroyed in the absence of Timur on an expedition in Persia. The army
had been much reduced by the severity of the winter and the hardness
of the campaign. Most of the horses had perished. A pound of millet
sold for seventy kupeghi dinars, a cow's head for one hundred, and a
sheep's head for two hundred and fifty. Timur accordingly ordered that
the spoils captured at Astrakhan and Serai should be divided among the
troops, a task which was performed by the Tawachis, and thus each man
was remounted.

Having crushed the empire of the Kipchak, Timur set out on his

* Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 362. Note, 4. t De la Croix, Sherifuddin, ii. 375-378.

IK a

2S8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

return home. Leaving his winter quarters of Bugaz Kum, he marched
by way of Derbend and Azerbaijan, reducing the Kazikumuks, Kaitaks,
and Kubechi on his route.

Timur had laid the Khanate of the Golden Horde prostrate, and it
never recovered again properly. Many of the inhabitants were driven
away, and Von Hammer enumerates six colonies formed of emigrants
who left at this time. The most important of them perhaps were
the Kara Kalpaks or Black caps, who previously lived on the Volga,
near Bolghari, and who now migrated to the borders of the Aral Sea,
where their descendants still remain ; the Aktau Tartars, who settled in
the Dobruja, others in the district of Memnen, near Smyrna, others at
Tatarbazari, near Adrianople, others in Moldavia, which was thence
known as Karaboghdan ; and lastly the Likani in Lithuania. These last
were apparently descended from a body of several thousand Tartars who,
with their wives and children, were captured and carried off in 1 397 by
Vitut, the famous Lithuanian chief. There they abandoned Islam, and
having mixed with the people and lost their characteristics, retained only
the name of Tartars.* They were settled between Vilna and Troki.

On the retreat of Timur, Toktamish seems to have emerged from his
retreat in Bolghari, collected some forces, and re-entered Serai, apprising
his neighbours of his arrival there. This was about 1398, but he was
soon after attacked by Timur Kutlugh, by whom he was defeated and
driven away from Serai. He then, with his wife and two sons, his
treasures, and a numerous following, repaired to Kief. For four and
twenty years he had reigned in the Kipchak, and was certainly one of
the most potent of its chiefs, and one too in whose reign, and by whose
policy most important events of far wider interest than that which attaches
to the steppe lands of Southern Russia were brought about. He was the
last really great figure in the history of the Golden Horde.

The coins of Toktamish are the most numerous in the series of the
Khans of the Golden Horde. On these coins he styles himself Toktamish
Khan, Nasir ud din Toktamish Khan, Jelal ud din Mahmud Toktamish
Khan, and Ghayas ud din Ved dunya Toktamish Khan.t Fraehn
mentions a coin of his struck in the Ordu in the year tjt^ but this is a
soUtary specimen, and it is not till .783 when the series of his money may
really be said to begin, and when by the defeat of Mamai he secured the
whole Khanate. In that year he struck coins at Khuarezm, Krim,
New Krim, Azak, Serai, New Serai, Seraichuk, and Astrakhan. In
later years we also find as mint places Ordu, the New Ordu, Derbend,
Shamakhi, Shaberan, Baku, Mahmudabad, and Kas^ Kath or Keth in
Khuarezm.J His coins occur as late as the year 799 (?>., i396-7).§

* Golden Horde, 384. Karamzin, v. 196. t FrBehn, Res., 304-354«

\ X Mahmudabad was situated in the province of Karabagh on the Caspian, between the Kur
and the Chepehchal. (Fraehn, Fuch's Coll., 39.)

% Frahn Res., 326.

TIMUR KUTLUGH KHAN. • 259

I ought to have mentioned that in 797 there occurs a coin bearing on
one side the name of Toktamish, and on the other that of Tash Timur.
It was struck at Krim. Fr^hn suggests he was a son of Ulugh
Muhammed, but the date makes this impossible.* I beUeve he was a
brother of Ulugh Muhammed, and shall refer to him later.

TIMUR KUTLUGH KHAN.

We have said little of Koirijak, the nominee of Timur as Khan of
Kipchak, because little is to be said. In the West he was a mere
puppet, and his throne depended on the support of Timur's troops.
When they withdrew he seems to have disappeared also, for we hear no
more of him, and the Western half of the Khanate became the object
of struggle between Toktamish and Timur Kutlugh, the son of Timur
Malik and grandson of Urus Khan, and the protege of Idiku, the Nogay
chief, both of them, as I have mentioned, had lived for some time at
Timur's court. Koirijak, however, doubtless retained his hold on the
Eastern Khanate, and continued to rule over the White Horde.

When Toktamish retired to Bolghari Timur Kutlugh seems to have
occupied the southern parts of the Khanate, and we find him the year
after Timur's retreat on the Dnieper, granting a diploma with the
privileges of a terkhan to a person at Sudak in the Krim.t

Kief was then governed by the Lithuanian Prince Vitut, who, by a
treaty with Yagellon the Polish King, had been ceded the provinces of
Volhynia and Brest, and who, as I have said, was the Grand Prince's
father-in-law. He had been converted by the Germans of Prussia, and
was a violent and ambitious person. He ordered the deaths of three of
his relatives, the sons of Olgerd. These were Vigunt, Prince of Kief,
who was poisoned ; Narimant, whom he ordered to be transfixed with
arrows after he was suspended from a tree ; while the third, Kongailo,
was decapitated. Their brother Koribut, who reigned at Novgorod
Severski, was imprisoned. He drove away Vladimir, another brother,
from Kief, which he for a short time gave to Skirigailo, the brother of
the King of Poland, but he was poisoned by the archimandrite of the
convent of Petchersky, who was probably a creature of Vitut, and who put
Prince John Olkhanski there as his deputy. He soon after seized upon
Podolia, a dependence of the crown of Poland. He also subdued the
Princes of Drutsk, and seized upon Orsha and Vitebsk. He was thus
master not only of Lithuania bnt also of Little Russia. He next assailed
the principality of Smolensk, then governed by his brother-in-law Yuri
Sviatoslavitch. He appeared suddenly before its capital, cajoled the
garrison by fair promises to come out to him, pretending all the while he

* Soret, op. cit., 31. t Golden Horde, 364.

26o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

was on the inarch against Timur. The credulous people came out to see
the hero, but they were soon undeceived. The chiefs were seized, the
suburbs burnt, and the city captured and plundered. Having stayed
some months to consolidate his power, he left Yamont, a Lithuanian
there as governor, and then made some raids upon Riazan.

Thus was a dangerous power thrusting its arms nearer and nearer to
Muscovy. Vasili knew his danger, but he dissembled his suspicions,*
and went in person to Smolensk to meet his father-in-law, and after-
wards received a visit from him at Kalomna.t The two then adopted a
common poUcy against Novgorod. Vitut wished to detach the
merchant republic from its alliance with the Germans of Livonia, the old
enemies of the Lithuanians, and the Grand Prince to insist upon their
acknowledging the supremacy of the patriarch Cyprian. The people of
Novgorod had only recently concluded a peace with the Germans after a
long strife, and the trade with them was too valuable to be lightly
sacrificed. They accordingly repHed, '•' Grand Prince, we are and wish
to be at peace with you, Vitut, and the Germans." They treated the
envoys civilly, but would not give way. Vasili thereupon declared war
against Novgorod, and while on the march his troops received the
submission of the people of the Dwina, the great entrepot for Siberian
furs and the silver of the Northern Urals ; the country also whence
the falcons used by the Russian princes came. This was perhaps the
most valuable dependency of Novgorod. Vasili appointed Feodor of
Rostof as its governor. This was in 1397. But the victory was short-
lived, the Novgorodians took up arms and prosecuted their campaign
vigorously, and Vasili was forced to see his acquisitions pass away again,
for he learnt that the treacherous Vitut was having secret communi-
cations with Novgorod and offering to become its protector, and he
deemed it prudent to treat the stiff-necked repubhc with tenderness.

Vitut no doubt had ambitious views in the direction of Novgorod, but
these were postponed for a while by the arrival, as I have mentioned, of
Toktamish at Kief. He was only too happy to become the patron of
so important a person, and hoped through him to further his ambitious
schemes. He accordingly sent Yamont, the governor of Smolensk, on
an embassy to the Russian Grand Prince, to ask him to join, him in his
enterprise, but the Russians were quite equal to the occasion. To them
a war between the Lithuanians and the Tartars, their two greatest
enemies, would be a welcome spectacle, and, as Karamzin says, their
sympathies were by no means with the former in such a struggle, for
while the Tartars beyond exacting a heavy tribute left them to govern
themselves, the Lithuanians were ambitious of annexing the Grand
Principality. The Grand Prince was not, however, strong enough to
defy his father-in-law, so he sent his wife, with a number of boyards, to

* Karamzin, v. 186. t /d., 189.

TIMUR KUTLUGH KHAN. ' 261

Smolensk with a courteous message. She was cordially received and
her father presented her with a number of pictures of the Saviour,
recently arrived from Greece.* While he kept himself free from any
entangling alliances with the Lithuanians, Vasili determined upon a
campaign on his own account against the Tartars, to revenge their recent
attack on Nijni Novgorod. He sent an army commanded by his brother
into Bulgaria, which captured its capital Bolghari, Yukotin, Kazan, and
Kremenchug, and returned home laden with booty. After this war
Vasili styled himself " Conqueror of the Bulgarians."

Meanwhile Vitut was prosecuting his plans, one of which was no doubt
the subjection of the Grand Principality, of which he hoped to get a
grant from his protege Toktamish.t He assembled his forces at Xief,
which consisted not only of Lithuanians but of large contingents from
Poland and from his dependent Russian provinces. The Tartars of
Toktamish formed a detached corps, as did also five hundred Germans
richly equipped, sent by the grand master of the Prussian knights. The
whole were commanded by fifty Russian and Lithuanian princes, under
the guidance of Vitut. He heeded not the warnings of Hedwig, the
Polish queen, who claimed the gifts of prophecy, when she foretold that
misfortune would overtake him.|

Timur Kutlugh sent an envoy to Vitut with the message, " Surrender
Toktamish, my enemy : Toktamish, once a great prince, but now only a
vile deserter. Such is the fickleness of fortune." " I will go and find
Timur," was the reckless answer, and he accordingly set out, taking the
same road which Monomakhos had formerly taken in his campaign
against the Poloutsi. Timur Kutlugh was posted on the banks of the
Vorskla, beyond the Khorol and the Sula. " Why do you march against
me ! I never made a hostile attack on your land," was the message he now
sent him. Vitut replied, " God has appointed me master of the world.
You may choose, either be my son and tributary, or be my slave.''
According to the Russian annalists, Timur was willing to acknowledge
Vitut as his elder brother and to pay an annual tribute, but the exacting
Prince of Lithuania also insisted that his arms should appear on the
Tartar coins. Timur asked for a respite of three days, during which he
sent presents, and it seems what he wanted was some delay. This was
marked by the arrival at the Tartar camp of Idiku, the Nogay chief,
which, as Von Hammer says, was like the arrival of Camillus at the
Roman camp, putting an end to further parley with Brennus. He recom-
mended death rather than submission to such terms, and then sent to
ask for an interview with Vitut. The two chiefs met on the banks of the
Vorskla. " Brave Prince," said Idiku, " our King has rightly recognised
you as his father, since you are his elder ; but as you are younger than I,
pray recognise me, and put my portrait on the coins of Lithuania." The

* Karamzin, v. 197. t Id., 198. i99' 1 1^-, 199-

262 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

irony enraged Vitut, who ordered the fight to begin. Spitko of Cracow,
the wisest of his voivodes, on seeing the numbers of the Tartars,
counselled his master to make peace with them on honourable terms.
This counsel was rejected by^the Lithuanian chiefs. The illustrious
Stchoukofski being their spokesman, said : " If love for your young and
beautiful wife, if the irresistible charms of ease and luxury can make you
shrink from death, do not interfere when heroes wish to sacrifice their
lives for glory." " Madman,'' he replied, " I shall die in the fight while
you will seek safety in retreat."* Vitut expected great things from his fire-
arms, which were then a new invention in Europe, but the Tartars, who
fought in loose order, outflanked his solid battalions, and artillery was
then too rude to be well or quickly served. The Lithuanian lines were
broken by an attack from the rear, made by Timur Kutlugh. Toktamish
was among the first to fly, and he was followed by Vitut and the vain-
glorious Stchoukofski, while Spitko, the palatine of Cracow, died, as he
had said, in the fight, and with him seventy-four noble Lithuanians.
The carnage was terrible. Two-thirds of the Lithuanian army perished,
among the slain being Gleb of Smolensk, and Michael and Dimitri of
Gallicia, descended from the famous Gallician Prince Daniel. The
fugitives were pursued as far as the Dnieper. Kief had to pay a heavy
fine, and the monastery of Petcherski was similarly mulcted, while the
Tartars ravaged the territory of Vitut as far as Lutsk.t

This decisive battle was fought on the 5th of August, 1399, nor was its
issue probably at all unwelcome at Moscow, where the Lithuanian power
was becoming a dangerous menace. Toktamish lived on for seven
years longer, and was then according to the Russian chroniclers, put to
death by order of Shadibeg, in the district of Tumen in Siberia, where
he had fled. Palitzin would read Simbirsk for Siberia.J According to
Arabshah and others he fell by the hands of Idiku.

Sherifuddin tells us how, while Timur was engaged in his war
against the Siah Posh Kaffirs of Kaferistan, envoys went to him from
Timur Kutlugh and Idiku, who were well received by him. It is curious
that he should in one place call them envoys of the Uzbegs.§

Timur Kutlugh does not seem to have survived his victory many
months, and died in the autumn of 1399. 11 The news of his death, we
are told, was pleasing to Timurleuk, as was the news of the confusion
which reigned in Kipchak, since Timur Kutlugh had treated the great
conqueror ungratefully.^ Coins of Timur Kutlugh, struck at New Ordu
and Krim, are known from the year 799 to 802 (1396-7 to 1399- 1400).

♦Karamzin, V. 20s. 1^,204. i Golden Horde, 370. Note, 3. § De la Croix, iii. 30 and 34.
11 Golden Horde, 366. Note, 4. •[ De la Croix, iii. 212.

SHADIBEG KHAN. • 263

SHADIBEG KHAN.

On the death of Timur Kutlugh, he was succeeded by his brother
Shadibeg as de jure Khan, while Idiku was probably the real controller
of his policy. He only ruled over the Western Khanate however. The
Eastern was subject to Koirijak. Abdul Ghassar says expressly that he
ruled concurrently with his uncle Koirijak.* The history of the Golden
Horde at this time is closely connected with Russia. Michael, Prince of
Tuer, who was in some respects a rival to the Grand Prince of Moscow,
died in 1399, and divided his dominions among his sons and grandsons.
Michael had been a close friend of the Lithuanian chief Vitut, with whom
he was united by the marriage of his son with Vitut's sister. On the
defeat of the latter by the Tartars, Michael's son prudently sent envoys to
the Khan Timur Kutlugh, bearing rich presents for himself, his wives, and
begs, to ask for a confirmation of his authority. This embassy arrived
about the time when Timur Kutlugh died. Michael's sword-bearer
(Kilichi), called Elcha, returned with the Tartars Bechin and Satkin,
bearing the yarligh or diploma for him ; but he being dead, fresh envoys,
in the persons of Constantino and Theodore Gushen, and the Tartar
Safrak, were again sent, and returned with a similar diploma for his son.t

Ivan having received the Khan's diploma, began to persecute his
brothers and nephew. He also formed a close alliance with his brother-
in-law Vitut of Lithuania, whose fortunes had received such a shock in
his fight with the Tartars that Yuri, the Prince of Smolensk, collected an
army and captured his ancient capital. He was received joyfully by the
inhabitants, but proceeded to take cruel revenge on the Lithuanians and
their adherents, which led the citizens to remark, " The stranger Vitut
reigned peaceably within our walls, while a Russian prince only enters
them to bathe in our blood. "{ Yuri successfully resisted the attacks of
Vitut's armies, but the town was afterwards surrendered by treachery
when he was absent at the court of Moscow.§ An attempt on the part
of the Prince of Riazan to recover possession of Briansk, which formerly
was dependent on Chernigof, and had been appropriated by the
Lithuanians, was also defeated by Vitut, who made Rostislaf, the son of
Oleg of Riazan, prisoner. The latter prince soon after died, and was
succeeded by his son Feodor, who received a diploma from Shadibeg and
married a daughter of the Grand Prince. Meanwhile the Tartars were
becoming more and more indifferent to the doings of the Russians. In
the year 1400, we are told the Princes of Riazan, Pronsk, Murom, and
Koselsk defeated an army of them on the borders of Chernayar, near
Khobr on the Don, and captured a chief named Muhammed Sultan.
The following year the Grand Prince Vasili sent an army into the
country of the Mordvins to find the widow of Prince Simon Dimitrovitch,

* Langles, op. cit., 385. t Von Hammer, 368. I Karamzin, v. zit. § U,, m-zij.

264 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

who, as I have said, had taken refuge at Chebirchia.* The following
year (/.<?., in 1402) the Tartars ravaged the borders of Riazan.t In 1403
Aintak, their envoy, went to Moscow, and the same year there died Sawa,
bishop of Serai, while, as we read in the narrative of the Spanish
traveller Clavigo, there also went envoys to Timur to announce to him
the accession of a nephew (nieto) of Toktamish to the throne.t In 1404
the Tartars made another invasion of Riazan, but were defeated and lost
many prisoners.§ Their country was the asylum where many desperate
characters sought refuge. Thus we read that in 1402 Vasili, who had
many grievances against the people of Novgorod, sent an army under
two brothers, named Aifal and Gerassim, formerly priests and renegades,
also from Novgorod, to ravage the country of the Dwina.|| This they
accomplished, but having been defeated near Kholmogory, the mother of
the later Archangel, they were obliged to fly. We are told that Aifal
turned buccaneer. He had two hundred and eight boats on the Volga,
and one hundred on the Kama. With these he made an excursion
towards Serai. The flotilla on the Kama was captured by the Tartars,
that on the Volga escaped. He himself was made prisoner, and was
eventually killed at Viatka by Rassokhin, who, like himself, was a
deserter from Novgorod.lF

A more distinguished fugitive escaped to Novgorod in 1406. This was
Yuri of Smolensk, who, after he had lost his city and in vain appealed to
the Grand Prince for aid, turned to the people of Novgorod, who
willingly listened to him, hoping no doubt to utilise him against their
exacting suzerain. They granted him an appanage consisting of the
towns of Roussa, Ladoga, &c. Growing weary he returned to Moscow,
and was appointed governor of Torjek by Vasili, but his violent
temper undid him. Conceiving a passion for Julienne, the wife of
Simeon, Prince of Viazma, he tried to seduce her, and failing, stabbed
her husband at a feast, and was proceeding to take liberties with her
when she wounded him in the hand with a knife. Enraged at this,
he drew his sword, cut her to pieces, and threw her remains into the
river. Flying from the consequences of his crime, he escaped to the
horde, and after wandering for a while in the steppes, ended his days in
a monastery at Riazan. He was the last Prince of Smolensk descended
from Rostislaf Mitislavitch, grandson of Monomakhos.**

We now find the long gathering storm which had been collecting
between Moscow and Lithuania coming to a crisis. Pskof, the sister
republic to Novgorod, had formerly been tributary to it, but had been
enfranchised, and now elected its own magistrates and princes, and had
its own laws. The Grand Prince, however, had a deputy there, and it
acknowledged his suzerainty as Novgorod did. Its position was a

* Vide ante, 250. Golden Horde, 369. t Golden Horde, 369. I Id. Note, 7.

5 Id. 11 Aifal is called Nikitish by Von Hammer. (Golden Horde, 373.)

•f Karamzin, v. 217, 218. Golden Horde, 373, '* Karamzin, v. 219-221.

y

PULAD KHAN. 265

critical one, however, for it had the Livonian knights on the one side and
the Lithuanians on another, while the people of Novgorod were very-
jealous of its wealth and commerce, and far from having cordial feelings
towards it, were in the habit of attacking its borders. It had also
recently been devastated by the plague. Vitut determined to take
advantage of its position. He accordingly attacked one of its depend-
encies, namely, the town of Koloje, where he made 11,000 prisoners,
while the grand master of Livonia ravaged the environs of Izborsk,
Ostrof, and Kotelno. The brave citizens of Pskof succeeded in defeating
both antagonists, but feeling that the contest was unequal, they appealed
to the Grand Prince. He determined to support his j(>rofe^e, and sent his
brother Constantine, who demanded explanation from the Lithuanians,
while he collected an army together. He also made a close alliance with
the Prince of Tuer.

For some years Vasili had refrained from sending tribute to the horde,
and had evaded the messages of Shadibeg's envoys to go in person to his
court. Such an envoy went in 1405, in the person of Shadibeg's treasurer ;
instead of tribute, however, he only received some small presents.*
Before entering upon his hazardous venture against Lithuania, Vasili
deemed it prudent to send to the Khan to ask him for assistance,
inasmuch as Lithuania was their common enemy. He, however,
refrained from mentioning either tribute or dependence. Shadibeg sent
some troops, but no decisive action took place. Both sides seemed
afraid of the risk, and after several border raids a peace was ratified.
The river Ugra was fixed as the boundary of the Muscovites and
Lithuanians, the towns of Kozelsk, Peremysl, and Lubutsk were ceded to
the Grand Prince, and Vitut promised not to molest Pskof.t

We now reach the end of Shadibeg's reign. We are told that Ivan,
JPrince of Tuer, having repaired to the horde in the year 1407, to
complain about the usurpation of Yuri, brother of the last Prince of
Kholm, Shadibeg was no longer Khan, having been driven away by
Pulad. He seems to have fled to Daghestan and Shirvan.J According
to Schiltberger he fled when he heard of the approach of Idiku, by whom
he was slain.§ Shadibeg seems to have been generally acknowledged as
Khan of the Western part of the Kipchak, and his coins are found
minted at Bulghari, Serai, New Serai, Azak, Astrakhan, and New
Astrakhan, between the years 802 (1399-1400) and 809 (i4o6-7).||

PULAD KHAN.

Shadibeg was succeeded by Pulad, who is made the nephew of
Shadibeg and son of Timur Kutlugh by Ibn Arabshah, a conclusion in
which he is followed by Von Hammer, IT Munejimbashi, Khuan-

* Karamzin, v. 229. t Id., 223-227. J Frsehn's Criticism, Golden Horde, 585.

§ Op. cit., ed. Neumann, 90. I! Fraehn Res., 362-366. % Golden Horde, 370.

IL

266 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

demir,* whose account is adopted by De Guignes, and M. Soret, make
him the son of Shadibeg. I am not sure that either conclusion is
right, and am disposed to beheve he was Shadibeg's brother. He was
perhaps the Beg Pulad already named.t I may add that that chieftain
was probably the same Pulad against whom Timur marched in 1395.+
He was certainly z. protege of Idiku's.§

In the summer of 1409 Ivan, Prince of Pronsk, returned laden with
honours and gifts from the horde. With the help of the Tartars, he
drove Theodore from the throne of Riazan, and annexed that princi-
pality to his own. In the autumn of the same year Pulad made an
invasion of Lithuania. Next year he sent an embassy to Moscow. As
Von Hammer suggests, this was probably to order the Grand Prince to
join him against the Lithuanians. It would seem that VasiU refused to
obey. He had persistently for many years ignored his dependence on the
Tartars, and had abstained from sending tribute to their Khan or one of
his relatives as an ambassador. He now dared to offer an asylum to the
sons of Toktamish. Pulad, whose policy was really dictated by his great
subject Idiku, accordingly assembled an army and sent it towards
Moscow. This, it was pretended, was meant to fight the Lithuanians,
and to punish them for the evils they had brought upon Russia, and
Vasili was ordered to go in person to meet it, or to send his brother, his
son, or one of his grandees as his representative.il The Grand Prince was
misled by the Tartar professions, and at Moscow people were living
in fancied security when the news came that the Tartars were marching
rapidly on the town. Vasili followed the example of his father, and retired
with his wife and family to Kostroma, leaving the defence of his capital
to his uncle Vladimir the Brave, his brothers, and a number of boyards.
The Grand Prince had great faith in the fortifications of Moscow, in his
artillery, and in the winter, which promised to be one of great severity,
while he determined himself to raise an army in Northern Russia to raise
the siege ; but his retreat disspirited the inhabitants, who murmured at
being thus deserted. Vladimir ordered the outskirts to be burnt, while
their wretched inhabitants were refused an asylum within the walls, for
fear that provisions should run short. The Tartar army appeared before
the city on the ist of December, 1410. Among the chiefs who accom-
panied it were the princes Buchak and Tanriberdi ; the begs Erekliberdi
and Altamir ; Pulad Muhammed, Yusuf, the son of Suliman ; Tegin,
the son of the Sheikh Urus, and his son Serai ; Ibrahim, the son of
Tahmuras ; Yashibeg and Seid Ahbeg, the sons of Idiku ; while Idiku
himself was commander in chief. IF Having detached a body of 30,000
men to besiege the Grand Prince at Kostroma, and ordered Ivan, Prince
of Tuer, to join them with his army, his arquebusiers, and his artillery,

* Id. Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 118. t^»<«, 249. I Ante, 256.

$ Schiltbcrgor, 90. || Karamzin, v. 231. f, Golden Horde, 371.

PULAD KHAN. 267

the Tartars spread over the Grand Principahty. They burnt Pereislavl
Zalesky, Rostof, Dimitrof, Serpukof, Nijni Novgorod, and Gorodetz.
The horrors of the invasions of Batu and Toktamish were revived. " The
miserable Russians," says Karamzin, " instead of resisting, were like a
flock of sheep pursued by wolves. Some were decapitated, others made
into butts for the Tartar archers. The young people were reserved as
slaves, the old were stripped of their clothes and left to perish in the
cold. The prisoners were chained together, and one Tartar sufficed to
keep guard over forty of them,"

Meanwhile Idiku waited for the artillery which the Prince of Tuer was
to bring, but the latter returned home again on the plea of illness after
he had gone half way. The contingent which was sent after the Grand
Prince also failed in its object. Nevertheless Idiku determined to winter
at Kostroma and to blockade Moscow, but he was suddenly recalled by
news which came from the horde. The Tartars no longer could muster
their former numbers. The plague, the attack of Timur, and internal
dissensions had made terrible ravages. We accordingly find that Pulad,
who had remained at Serai while his army marched to Moscow, was at
the mercy of another aspirant to the throne, and wrote to recall Idiku
to go to his defence. Meanwhile the Grand Prince was assembling an
army at Kostroma to attack him.

He determined therefore to raise the siege. He promised to retire on
the payment of 3,000 roubles. This was gladly acceded to by Vladimir,
who commanded in the town, where the people were in a state of panic
and given up to religious exercises. Retiring by way of Kolomna, he
captured Riazan en route. The traces of his invasion were not effaced
for a long time. From the Don to Bielo ozero and Gallicia the land was
terribly devastated.

On leaving Muscovy he wrote a letter to the Grand Prince in these
terms : — " Idiku, after holding counsel with the tzarevitches and princes,
sends Vasili greeting. Having learnt that you have given shelter to the sons
of Toktamish, the Great Khan ordered me to march against you. You not
only ill-treat our merchants, but you also insult our envoys. Ask your
old men if it was so formerly. Russia was then famous for its fidelity to
us. It preserved a sacred respect for the Khans, paid its tribute
regularly, and respected our merchants and envoys. Instead of this,
what have you done 1 When Timur {i.e., Timur Kutlugh) mounted the
throne, did you go in person to him, or send one of your princes, or even
a boyard ? After the death of Timur and during the eight years' reign of
Shadibeg, did you make a single act of submission ? And lastly, during
the three years Pulad has been on the throne, have you, as the senior
Russian prince, gone to the horde, as it was your duty ? All your actions
have been criminal. When Theodore Koshka* lived the Russians

* Doubtless a Tartar commissaryat Moscow.

268 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

heeded his counsel and behaved well, but you no longer heed John,
his son, your treasurer and friend. You reject the wise counsel of the
elders. See the consequences in the wasting of your country. If you
would avoid this, listen to your wisest boyards, to Ilia and Peter, and
John Nikitich, &c., and send me one of your grandees with the tribute
Russia used to send to Janibeg. All the excuses you have made to the
Khans about the poverty of the Russian people were false. We have
overrun your country, and we know that every two ploughs pay you a
rouble. What becomes of this money? We do not wish to ill-treat
you. Why should you behave like a miserable fugitive? Reflect and
listen to the counsels of prudence,"*

This magniloquent letter had little effect on the Grand Prince, who
knew of the dissensions that reigned at the horde. He returned again
to Moscow, where he greeted his uncle, the brave Vladimir. " The first
of all the Russian princes," says Karamzin, " to serve under one of his
nephews."t

Meanwhile Pulad had been driven from the throne by Timur. Of
Pulad as Khan we have coins struck at Bulghari, New Bulghari, Azak,
Astrakhan, Khuarezm, and Radjan or Rasan, which some have read
Majar, but it may be a corruption of Riazan. They range from 8io
(1407-8) to 815 (1412-13). Frcehn suggests, I know not why, that the
coins struck at Khuarezm belong to another Pulad. t

TIMUR KHAN.

According to Abdul Ghassar, Timur and Pulad were the proteges of
Idiku and his son Nur ud din respectively, Idiku supporting the former ;
but from the facts already mentioned, it is much more probable that it
was his son who supported the new Khan, while Idiku was the patron of
Pulad. The author just cited tells us that Idiku and Nur ud din
quarrelled about their candidates for the throne, and that the former,
rather than fight his son, retired to Khuarezm, where Nur ud din,
unmoved by his father's generosity, pursued him.§

We are told that at this time Daniel, the son of Boris, Prince of Nijni
Novgorod, endeavoured to recover his father's patrimony, which had
been appropriated by the Grand Prince, and at the head of five hundred
men, the guards of the Bulgarian princes, he defeated the latter's brother
at Liskof, while his voivode or general Talich, supported by the
Tzarevitch of Kazan, with a combined army of less than five hundred
Russians and Tartars, surprised and pillaged the city of Vladimir, which
was now but the shadow of its former self, and was unfortified. His
allies, the Tartars of Kazan, returned home with their booty. ||

* Karamzin, v. 239-241. t Id., 242. \ Res., 372. § Langles, op. cit., 385, &c.

\ Karanwa, v. 244i 245-

JELAL UD DIN KHAN. * 269

Timur had only a very short reign, and was succeeded by Jelal ud din
Sultan, a son of Toktamish, who was apparently living at Kief, and who
was a close friend of the Lithuanian Prince Vitut. This took place about
the year 141 1. Although his undisputed reign was short, Timur seems
to have struck coins during several years. The first one of him known,
according to Soret, is dated in 809. That was before the accession of
Pulad. It was struck at Krim, and is now in the Ouwarof collection.
On the other hand, there is a coin of his of the year 818 (z>., 141 5-16),
some years after the accession of Jelal ud din, which may, however, have
a blundered legend. Two or three dateless coins of Timur were struck
at Astrakhan, the rest at Bulghari.

JELAL UD DIN KHAN.

The rapidity of these revolutions and the ease with which they were
effected proves how weak and disintegrated the central authority at
Serai was becoming. Jelal ud din Sultan was the eldest son of
Toktamish. He is called Seleni Sultan and Seledin by the Russian and
Polish chroniclers, and Jelalberdei by the Turkish writers. Schiltberger
calls him Segelalladin.* Abdul Ghassar tells us that, having profited by
Idiku's absence, he marched against Timur, who fled. Jelal ud din seized
the throne, and having strengthened his position, he attacked and sought
to kill Nur ud din, and did succeed in killing Pulad, who it seems still
survived, in the struggle.t Schiltberger also tells us it was he who drove
away Pulad. | Nur ud din escaped, but repented not "having followed
his father's advice. It was doubtless at the instance of Idiku that the
Mankuts or Kara Kalpaks, his special subjects, now made an attack on
the borders of Kipchak from beyond the Yaik.§

I have described how Daniel, son of Boris, Prince of Nijni Novgorod,
made an effort to regain his ancient patrimony and attacked Vladimir.
We now find the sons of Boris repairing to the Tartar court, which at
their instance sent orders to Vasili to cede the principality to them. This
intrigue and the fact that Vitut of Lithuania was in close alliance with
Ivan, the Prince of Tuer, and also with Jelal ud din, induced the Grand
Prince to go himself to the horde, with some of his principal boyards.
Fourteen days later the Prince of Tuer followed his example, and also
went to the horde, but another revolution had taken place there. We
are told that, inflated by his success, Jelal ud din became quite insup-
portable on account of his pride and avarice, and neglected his nearest
relatives, to whom he had been indebted for his advancement. |j In a
battle with Idiku he was treacherously shot with an arrow by his brother

* Op. cit., 90. t Langles, 385, &c. : Op. cit., go.

$ Golden Horde, 374, 375. 1| Langles, loc. cit.

270 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Kibak. Von Hammer says by Kerimberdei.* Jelal ud din struck coins
at Astrakhan and Bulghari, and one of them bears the uncertain date
814 {i.e., I4ii-I2).t He was killed, according to Langles, in 1412.

KERIMBERDEI KHAN.

Jelal ud din was succeeded by his brother Kerimberdei. The new
Khan, who had no doubt with his other brothers found a useful asylum
in Russia, was well disposed towards Vasili, and received him very
graciously. He promised not to support the Princes of Suzdal {i.e., of
Nijni Novgorod), and that he would not second the machinations of
Vitut against Russia. At the horde Vasili met a quasi rival in the person
of Ivan of Tuer, who was also well received by the Khan. Ivan behaved
in a friendly way, and promised not to molest the Grand Principality.^
Vasili, however, seems to have renewed the obUgation to pay annual
tribute to the Tartars, which was duly carried out during the rest of his
reign, notwithstanding the commotions that went on at Serai.

In April, 141 3, we read of an embassy which went to Ofen in Hungary,
bearing rich presents, offering Ladislaus the alliance of the Khan. Two
years later the Tartars west of the Don invaded the district of Riazan,
and captured and pillaged the town of Eletz, whose prince was killed.
While Kerimberdei was on friendly terms with the Russians he was the
reverse with the Lithuanians. His brother Jelal ud din, we are told, had
fought with Vitut and Ladislaus against the Prussian knights. Kerim-
berdei, on the other hand, was hostile to them, and we actually find Vitut
nominating a new Khan of his own. He was called Betsa Pulad, and
was solemnly invested at Vilna, decked in a splendid cap of golden
tissue and a superb pelisse covered with scarlet cloth. He was, however,
captured and beheaded by Kerimberdei, who was soon after himself
killed by his brother Jebbarberdei, also called Jarimferdei, who was a
creature of Vitut.§ The coins of Kerimberdei do not bear dates. They
were struck at Serai and Astrakhan. 11

KIBAK KHAN.

The name of Kibak appears in several corrupt forms. He was called
Thebacht by Schiltberger, who tells us he reigned both before and after
his brother Kerimberdei, whom he eventually supplanted. He lived
amidst constant difficulties. These difficulties are shared by the
historian, who has now few dated coins to rely upon, and has a

* Golden Horde, 375. Schiltberger, 90. Langles, loc. cit. t Soret, op. cit., 32.

I Karamzin, v. 246. § Golden Horde, 376. Karamzin, v. 246. || Soret, op. cit., 32.

CHEKRE KHAN. 27 1

number of names of various Khans whom he finds it difficult to place,
and who were doubtless rivals for the throne. Amidst this dearth of
materials one can only make a tentative arrangement. Kibak struck
coins at Astrakhan and Bulghari.* From their 'scarcity it is probable
that he did not occupy the throne ver>' long. It would seem that, like
his brothers, he was at issue with Idiku, who set up Chekre in his place.

JEBBARBERDEI KHAN.

Khuandemir names Jebbarberdei as the successor of Kibak, Abdul
Ghassar, on the other hand, tells us both he and Kerimberdei died from
the wounds they received in a single combat.t We have no coins of his,
and merely the sohtary statement by Karamzin, who calls him Jerem-
ferdei, that he was in close alliance with the Lithuanians.!

CHEKRE KHAN.

Chekre is said by Abdul Ghassar to have been a relative of Idiku's, but
he probably belonged to the family of Urus Khan. The Bavarian
traveller Schiltberger, who was in his service, tells us he had lived for
some years at the courts of Miran Shah, and Abubekhr, the son and
grandson of Timur. While there an embassy came to him from Idiku,
asking him to return to the Kipchak. He accordingly did so, and was
supplied by Abubekhr with a force of six hundred horsemen, to whom
Schiltberger was attached. They travelled by way of Georgia to
Shirvan, and thence to Derbend, Astrakhan, and a place called Setzulet
(probably a corruption of Serai), where there were many Christians, who
had a bishop. Their priests, he says, knew Latin, but read and chaunted
their prayers in 'x'artar. They then went on to find Idiku. The latter
set out on an excursion to Siberia, and Chekre and Schiltberger went
with him. Our traveller calls Siberia, Ibissibur, and this is one of the
earliest notices we have of the name. He tells us that in Siberia was a
mountain two and thirty days long {i.e., the Urals), beyond which,
according to the inhabitants, was an uninhabited waste reaching to the
end of the world. In this mountain the people were wild, and lived
apart from other nations, and only their hands and faces were free
from hair. They hunted wild animals in the mountains, and also
ate leaves and grass, and whatever they met with. The ruler of the
country sent Idiku a wild man and woman who had been captured there,
also a wild horse not larger than an ass, and other animals. In that
land (/.^., Siberia), he says, there were also dogs who drew carts and

* Soret, op. cit', 33. t Langles, 388. J Karamzin, v. 247.

272 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

sledges, containing furs and cloths. These dogs were as big as asses,
and were also used as food. The people who lived there were called
Ugine (z>., Ugri). When a young unmarried person among them died,
they dressed him in his best clothes, held a feast, put the corpse on a
bier, and raised a beautiful canopy over it. This they carried in pro-
cession. In front went the young people in their best clothes, and
behind the father and mother and other relatives, raising lamentations.
They carried the eatables and drinkables to the edge of the grave, where
they held a funeral feast, the young folk sitting round eating and
drinking and the relatives wailing. The latter were afterwards accom-
panied home. In that land men ate no bread, nor had they any corn but
only beans. These facts Schiltberger reports came within his own
observation.* We must now on again with our story.

Kerimberdei having been driven away,t Idiku, we are told, put his
protege Chekre on the throne, as he had promised. His reign
lasted for nine months. He and Idiku were then attacked by Ulugh
Muhammed, Chekre fled to Desht Kipchak, and Idiku was made
prisoner.t Chekre's coins are dated in 817 and 818 (;>., 1415-16),
and were struck at Bulghari, Astrakhan, and the Ordu. If, as Von
Hammer suggests, Kibak be the same person whom the Russian
chroniclers call Kuidat or Kuidadat, as is very probable, then it would
seem that Ulugh Muhammud's war against Chekre was in support of the
dispossessed Kibak, and was in fact in favour of the family of Toktamish
as against that of Urus Khan. This is favoured by the fact that Chekre
is found in alliance with Idiku, the enemy of Toktamish and his
descendants, while we find Kuidat the object of resentment to Borrak,
the representative of the house of Urus Khan in the Eastern Kipchak.

SEYID AHMED KHAN.

Abdul Ghassar and Khuandemir make Chekre be succeeded by Seyid
Ahmed, to whom we shall revert in the next chapter. He seems to have
been a boy, for the former writer says he had no experience in ruling,
and was deposed after only forty-five days' rule.§

DERWISH KHAN.

At this time we meet with another Khan named Derwish, who is made
the successor of Seyid by Khuandemir and Abdul Ghassar. His coins are
not unfrequent. They are also found minted in several places, as Astrakhan,

* Op, cit., ed. Neumann, 88-90.
t Schiltberger tells us Kibak regained the throne, but he only kept it for a short time.
I Id., 91. Golden Horde, 377. ( Langles, 389.

BORRAK KHAN.

273

Serai, Bulghari, Ordu, and an uncertain locality, Bing Bazar.* His dates
are very corrupt and uncertain. They seem to range from 805 to 822, but
the matter is very doubtful. He is called the son of Alchi Khan by
De la Croix.t It is strange that, with the wide authority which
his various mint places show he had, that we should know so little of his
history. It is not improbable that, like Chekre, he was a member of the
family of Urus Khan.

KIBAK (RESTORED).

As I read the authorities, Kibak or Kuidat, the protege of Ulugh
Muhammed, still lived, aud he seems now to have again occupied the
throne of the Western Kipchak. In the Eastern Kipchak or the
country of the White Horde, Koirijak was dead, and his place was
occupied by his son Borrak. In 1422 he marched against Kibak or
Kuidat, as he is called, defeated him, and laid siege to the town o^
Odoyef, but did not take it. The next year Kibak returned with a fresh
army and attacked the same town. He captured many prisoners, but
these were retaken by the Russian Prince Yuri Romano vitch of Odoyef
and the voivode of Mzensk. He made another attack some time after,
but was severely beaten and apparently killed by Yuri and a contingent
sent by the Lithuanian Vitut, and both his wives were taken prisoners
and carried off, one to Lithuania and the other to Moscow.l

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN.

We now find the Khanate dominated by Ulugh Muhammed Khan, who
was a patron of the family of Toktamish and himself belonged to the
family of Tuka Timur, as I shall show in a future chapter.§ M. Soret
says that a coin of the collection Pflug, struck at Astrakhan in 822
(z.tf., in 1419), shows that Muhammed was then reigning. || In 1424 we find
him attacked and defeated by Borrak. The account of what followed
is contained in an interesting passage from the work of Abderresak,
quoted by Von Hammer.

BORRAK KHAN.

That historian of Timur and his son Shahrokh, in an extract given by
Von Hammer, says that, having in 1424 defeated Muhammed Khan and
possessed himself of the command of the Uzbegs, Borrak the following

* Soret, op. cit., 32. t Journ. Asiat., 4th ser., xvii. 119. \ Golden Horde, 382.

§ Sub. voc, Kazan^ || Op. cit., 32, ^ Golden Horde, 378. ♦* 378.

I M

274 HISTORY OP THE MONGOLS.

year demanded from Ulughbeg, the governor of Turkestan, the surrender
of Sighnak, the old capital of the White Horde, which had been incor-
porated by Timur with his dominions. Arslan Khoja, the Terkhan who
governed at Sighnak, reported that the messengers of Borrak had com-
mitted some depredations in the neighbourhood. Their demands were
submitted by Ulughbeg to his father Shahrokh, then Khan of Jagatai, as
heir to the dominions of Timur. The demand was met by preparations
for war. Shahrokh sent an army to his son's assistance, commanded by
another of his sons named Muhammed Choki. They set out for
Samarkand on the 15th of February, 1427. Meanwhile Ulughbeg set
out with his own troops towards Sighnak, and was soon joined by his
brother with the army of Khorassan. The battle field was very hillocky
and ill-adapted for a cavalry struggle. When the armies drew near to
one another it was seen that the troops of Borrak were superior. He
would not, however, risk an open fight, says the chronicler, but had
recourse to a ruse. Collecting his men, he made a sudden rush with
them altogether. The right and left wings of Ulughbeg's army were
overthrown, the centre was shaken, and eventually the whole army took
to flight. They were pursued to the very walls of Samarkand, and the
rich and beautiful country of Transoxiana and Turkestan was terribly
ravaged, the victors retiring with a rich booty.

It would seem that during the absence of Borrak in the East,
Muhammed regained a temporary authority in the Western Kipchaki
He was soon driven away again by Devlet Berdi.*

DEVLET BERDI.

Devlet Berdi is made a son of Tash Timur by Khandemir,t but it
seems more probable that he was a son of Toktamish and the brother of
the other princes whose names were compounded with Berdi. According
to Schiltberger, he only reigned for three days.f He issued coins, however,
at New Serai and Astrakhan. § The only one known to me with a date
was struck in 831 (?>., 1427-28). || He was displaced by Borrak Khan,
who was afterwards defeated and killed by Muhammed. This defeat took
place in the year 831 of the hejira.^ According to M. Soret, no coins of
Borrak are known, proving what little hold he can have had on the
towns of the Khanate.

KADIRBERDI.
We now meet with another son of Toktamish with the name of
Kadirberdi. He struck a coin at Bulghari, published by Fraehn.** He

• Schiltberger, 91. t Joum. Asiat., 4th ser, xvii. 119. I Op. cit., 91.

§ Soret, 32. B Frshn Res., 395. il Golden Horde, 383. ** Res., 385.

i

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN. 275

is not named by Khuandemir, but we are elsewhere told that, having
refused to acknowledge Idiku, the latter marched against him and killed
him. According to one account Idiku was also killed in the struggle,
while another makes him be drowned in the Sihun.*

ULUGH MUHAMMED (restored).

Muhammed again found an opportunity and mounted the throne.
Chekre, the patron of Schiltberger, who it seems was still living, marched
against him, but was also slain,t and Muhammed was for a while the
master of the Kipchaks.

We must now make a long digression to bring up the narrative of
events in Russia to this point. The latter years of the reign of Vasili
were spent for the greater part in peace with his neighbours. We find
him sending some troops to assist the Lithuanians against the Livonian
knights,^ and having a passing brush with the Swedes, § but otherwise
Great Russia was tolerably tranquil. It was, however, again ravaged by
the plague, which was apparently a form of cholera, and which was more
or less chronic from 1352 to 1427, and destroyed a great number of
people. To avert this terrible attack various methods were employed,
churches were built, wealth was devoted to charity, and at Pskof the
distressed people burnt twelve witches. || 1419 was marked by a thick
snow which prevented the seed from being sown, and which was
succeeded by a famine lasting three years, and this by the terrible winter
of 1422. Hearing that there were stores of grain at Pskof, the people of
Novgorod, Tuer, Moscow, the Chudes, and Carelians hastened there,
and soon caused a dearth, and the fugitives were driven back again.
Novgorod and Moscow were devastated by fires. In 1421 a large part
of Novgorod and nineteen monasteries were overwhelmed in an inun-
dation ; terrible hurricanes, falls of aerolites, and the great comet of 1420,^
which the Italians believed foretold the death of John Galeas, Duke of
Milan, seemed to be a warning that the end of all things was at hand. It
was amidst these evil days that Vasili died, on the 27th of February,
1425, after a reign of thirty-six years.

During his reign Nijni Novgorod,Suzdal, andMurom, some districts in the
country of the Viatiches, formerly belonging to Chernigof, such as Torussa,
Novossil, Kozelsk, Peremysl ; and others, such as Beyetski-Verkh, and
Vologda, belonging to Novgorod, were added to the Grand Principality,
while the repubUc of Viatka was practically subjected to his authority ;
but he made no marked inroad upon the Tartars, whose government was
breaking to pieces, nor could he recover for Russia those fair Western

* Golden Horde, 384. t Schiltberger, 91. I Karamzia, v. 248. § Id., 230*

II W., 256. f?i492. See

276 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and Southern provinces which were ruled by his father-in-law Vitut, the
master of the neighbouring and much larger empire of Lithuania. By
his will he left his infant son Vasili the title of Grand Prince, and
the various domains he had received from his father, together with
his own acquisitions. It is strange to read the list of this private
property, including the principalities of Nijni Novgorod and Murom, the
mill at Khodinka, a house at the gate of Barovitsk, and another beyond
the gate near Saint Vladimir, a cap of gold, a superb collar, the cross of
the patriarch Philotheus, a stone vase sent by Vitut, a crystal cup
presented by Yagellon, &c. To his wife he left Tiis other property
for life, and inter alia he left each of his five daughters five
slaves or serfs.* By a treaty which he made with the Prince of
Riazan, and which was dated in 1403, the Oka was fixed as their
common boundary. He ceded the town of Tula to him, and that prince
in return promised to live at peace with the princes of Torussa and
Novossil, vassals of the Grand Prince, who were probably Tartars.

Vasili, when the Emperor Manuel of Constantinople was terribly
harassed by the Ottomans, sent him a welcome supply of money, and the
grateful Kaiser married his son John Palseologos to Anne, the daughter
of Vasili, who however died three years later from the plague.t During
a large part of Vasili's reign Cyprian was metropolitan, and he ruled the
Church with firmness and prudence, and was also famous for his
learning. Inter alia we are told he had the satisfaction of converting
three Mongol nobles, named Bakhti, Khidir, and Mamat, who were
baptised with great pomp on the banks of the Moskwa, in the presence
of the Grand Prince and his court. The three neophytes received the
names of Ananias, Azarias, and Misael. Cyprian died in 1406,^ and was
succeeded by Photius, a Greek from the Morea, who was skilled in
the Slave tongue, but who was avaricious, and thought more of the
worldly than the spiritual wants of the Church, and engaged in quarrels
and litigation with the grandees. He was in consequence unpopular.
Although living at Moscow, the metropolitans were styled metropolitans
of Kief, the old mother city of the Russian empire, whence they drew a
considerable income. This position kept up a close bond of union with
the Southern provinces now under the Lithuanians, not at all to the taste
of Vitut, who was a Roman Catholic. Cyprian had conciliated him by
living a long time at Kief, and otherwise ; but Photius, who was a
bigoted Greek, refused to make any visitation of the Southern provinces,
although he insisted on them sending him his proper dues. Vitut
persuaded the Southern bishops to address a remonstrance to Photius,
and on the refusal of the patriarch at Constantinople, who was the
latter's friend, to consecrate a fresh metropolitan, these Southern bishops
repaired to Novgorod in Lithuania, and having issued a famous pro-

t Karanizin, v. 264. t Id., 267. J td,, 267-271.

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN. 277

clamation to the people, proceeded themselves to consecrate Gregory
Tsamblak as their hierarch. In this proclamation, signed by the
archbishop of Polotsk and Lithuania and the bishops of Chernigof, Lutsk,
Vladimir, Smolensk, Kholm, and Turof, and in which they call Vitut the
hospodar of Lithuania, they recite how Photius refused to visit them or
govern them, and was only engaged in amassing wealth and robbing
Kief of the ornaments of its churches. They recite also that from early
times the bishps had had the right of electing a metropolitan, and had in
fact in the reign of Isiaslaf consecrated Clement ; that Bulgaria and
Servia, less important countries than " Little Russia," had their own
metropolitans; that it was not the patriarch of Constantinople who
nominated the metropolitan but the Emperor, whence had arisen many
abuses, &c. The whole document is interesting to those \yho study
ecclesiastical changes. The election took place on the 15th of
November, 141 5.

Photius protested in vain. His rival, zealous for religion and for
learning, made an effort to join the churches of the East and West, and
journeyed to Rome and Constantinople, but the attempt was fruitless. He
died in 14 19, and was succeeded as Southern metropolitan by Gerassim,
bishop of Smolensk.*

For the first time since the days of Yaroslaf the Great, we find the
Russian sovereign issuing a set of laws ; at least no intervening ones are
extant. These were issued for the people of the Dwina in 1397. The
usual feudal method of paying fines for various offences is carried out.
Some of the clauses are curious. No one was to interfere with a quarrel
at a feast which terminated on the spot, but if it was prolonged the
Grand Prince's representative was to receive a marten's fur ; labourers
removing landmarks were to be fined a sheep or its equivalent ; promises
made under durance were void ; thieves, when caught, were to be marked
{i.e., branded) ; those taking the law into their own hands or assisting
criminals to escape were to be fined; no lord of a serf was to be
responsible for killing him by inadvertence, whipping him until he
died, &c. The merchants of the Dwina were to have free trade with
the Grand Principality, paying only to the Grand Prince's deputies at
Ostiugh and Vologda a tax of two measures of salt for each boat and two
furs (?) for each cart.

During the reign of Vasili, Novgorod and Pskof began to imi-
tate Moscow and introduced a metal coinage in place of the old
system of paying by skins. In his reign the Russians also began
to date their years from the Creation, and to make September
instead of March the beginning of the year as formerly. This
was doubtless an innovation of Cyprian's, in imitation of the Greeks.
Meanwhile the arts made some progress although the Germans

* Karamzin.'v. 273-278.

^78 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of Dorpat prevented their artisans from entering Russia and other-
wise hindered its progress. Simeon the Black, the monk Prokhor,
and Daniel of Gorodetz are named as famous painters at this period, and
we are told that in 1420 the method of preparing lead for roofing
churches was introduced at Pskof.* In 1404 the first clock that struck
was erected at Moscow. It was made by a Servian monk of Mount
Athos and was put up in a pubhc place. It was deemed a prodigy. In
a letter addressed by the metropolitan Photius in 1410 to the Archbishop
of Novgorod, we have some curious details of the times, those who were
united in marriage without the usual benediction were excommunicated.
Marriages were to be celebrated after mass and not at night. Only
young people who had no children were to marry a third time. Girls of
less than twelve years were forbidden to marry. Oaths and obscenities
were condemned. Nuns and monks were forbidden to live in the same
monasteries. The clergy were forbidden to trade or to practise usury,
&c.t But on surveying the period we cannot avoid the conclusion that
progress was well nigh impossible so long as Muscovy was tightly held
all round her borders in the grip of strong and barbarous powers, who
closed every inlet into the country and created an isolation scarcely
paralleled in history. We must remember that she had at this time no
seaboard at all, that no traveller could enter her borders or leave them
without crossing more or less hostile territory, and that she was
absolutely cut off from all knowledge of the renaissance in the West and
limited for teachers to the crystallised and mumified ecclesiastical caste
which dominated the church of Byzantium.

Vasili was succeeded by his son Vasili, a boy ten years old. He is
well known in history as Vasili the Blind. From the first his uncle Yuri
or George, who wished to revive the old form of succession, refused to
submit to him. He had retired to Galitch, and when he heard of his
nephew's enthronement he collected an army, but dared not face that of the
latter and fled beyond the Sura. He then proposed an armistice for a
year. Vasili sent Photius, the metropolitan, to treat with him, and when
he ventured to intimidate him by the presence of a crowd of the people
of his own appanage, the proud prelate reminded him that peasants were
not soldiers and shirts were not cuirasses. The result of the mission was
that Yuri agreed to forego his claims until the matter had been decided by
the Khan of the Tartars. J Meanwhile the plague again ravaged Russia,
several princes perished both at Tuer and Moscow. This was in 1426
and again in 1431. In 1430 there was a great drought followed by
famine. Thus was the new reign inaugurated with sad omens. In 1426
the redoubtable Vitut, who deemed no doubt that Russia was now in
weak hands, besieged Apochka, in the district of Pskof, with an army of
Bohemians, Wallachians, and of Tartars, furnished by the Khan

* Karanuin, y. 284. t M, 286. I Id., 290-294'

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN, 279

Muhammed. The citizens having dug a large hole and planted stakes in
it, covered it with a bridge hung on cords, and posted themselves behind
their wall. Into this ambush the Lithuanians fell, many of them were
killed, while those who were taken prisoners were burnt alive. Having
withdrawn his army it was overtaken with a terrible hurricane which was
deemed a visitation of heaven, and Vitut the more readily agreed to make
peace on condition of the Pskofians paying a sum of 1,450 silver roubles.
Two years later he marched through the marshy district called the
Black Forest to punish the Novgorodians, who given up to luxury and
confident that they were safe among their marshes, treated his threats
with contumely, and sent him word they were preparing hydromel for
him. An advance guard of 10,000 men with axes cut their way through
the forest, a corduroy road was then made by laying the trunks of
trees side by side, and marching over it Vitut proceeded to besiege
Porkof. His largest cannon had been made for him by a German work-
man and was drawn by forty horses. One shot from this cannon
knocked down a tower as well as the wall of the church of Saint
Nicholas, but it eventually burst and killed many Lithuanians including
the man who had made it. The town at length offered 5,000 roubles for
peace. The people of Novgorod made similar advances, and the prudent
Vitut contented himself with exacting a sum of 10,000 roubles, and 1,000
more as a ransom for his prisoners, a price which taxed the powers of
the Novgorodians.*

Vitut, who was now eighty years old, made his grandson Vasili
promise not to meddle with the affairs of Novgorod and Pskof, and he
in 1429 invited him to go and see him. He was, no doubt, the most
powerful monarch in Europe, and at this time there were assembled at
his court such a series of notables as were seldom collected. There were
the Princes of Tuer, Riazan, Odoef, and Mazof, the khan of the Taurida
or of Krim, who had now become independent ; Ilia, the exiled hospodar
of Wallachia, the ambassador of the Greek Emperor, the grand master
of the Prussian Knights, the grand commander of those of Livonia, and
Yagellon, the king of Poland. They vied with each other in their
display, and were magnificently entertained. Each day there were con-
sumed seven hundred casks of hydromel, besides beer and the wine of
Roumania; while among the eatables furnished by his kitchens were
700 cows and heifers, 1,400 sheep, 100 buffaloes (probably bisons), and as
many elks and wild boars. The feast lasted for seven weeks. Vitut,
following the counsel of the Emperor Sigismund, with whom he had an
interview in 1429, wished to have himself crowned King of Lithuania by
the Pope's legate ; but this was opposed by the Polish grandees, whose
kingdom would be overshadowed, and as they were supported by the
legate, they had their way. Sigismund probably intended to separate the

KaV^mzio, v. 298,

28o HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

interests of Poland and Lithuania, and to make the two countries attack
each other.* Vitut was irritated at the turn of affairs. He fell ill and
died. This was in 1429. He was a crafty and powerful statesman,
abstemious and open-handed, unscrupulous and ambitious. His reign
was the apogee of Lithuarian greatness, which fell to pieces rapidly in
the hands of his successors. He was succeeded by Suidrigailo, the
brother of Yagellon. Let us now return to the Tartars.

For some years they had not had much intercourse with Russia. In
1426 they made a raid on Riazan, and three years later a body of them
from Kazan, commanded by a tzarevitch and a prince, ravaged the
towns of Galitch, Kostroma, Plesso, and Lug. They were attacked by
the people of Riazan, and made to disgorge their booty. The
tzarevitch was pursued by the uncles of the Grand Prince as far as Nijni,
while his rear guard was cut to pieces by the Prince of Starodub. In
the autumn of 1430, a Tartar prince, named Haidar, entered Lithuania,
and laid siege to Mtsensk. The town resisted for three weeks. Its
governor, Gregory Protassief, trusting to the promises of Haidar, went to
his camp, where he was made prisoner, and sent on to the Khan
Muhammed, who honourably released him, and reprimanded Haidar.J
About this time the Russian prince, Feodor Pestri, made a raid upon
Eastern Bulgaria and the country of the Kama.§ It was now six years
since the treaty between Vasili and Yuri, by which it was agreed that
their claims to the Grand Principahty should be remitted for decision to
the khan of the Tartars. In 1428, by a fresh treaty, each of them agreed
to retain his own territory; but in 1431, Yuri, having attacked his
nephew, the latter proposed to appeal to Muhammed, who was then khan.
This was agreed to, and both princes set out. Both arrived together at
the camp of Minkulad, the Daruga, who was stationed at Moscow.]]
He was a friend and strong partisan of Vasili ; but Yuri found a champion
in Tegin Murza (the Teguinia of Karamzin), who took him with him to
pass the winter in the Krim, and promised to secure him the Grand
Principality. Ivan Dimitrovitch, an active boyard of Vasili, aroused the
jealousy of the other grandees against Tegin, who, he said, would end by
dominating over Russia and Lithuania, and displacing the authority of the
khan. The jealousy of Haidar, Minkulad, and the other grandees was
aroused, and they so worked upon the Khan Muhammed that he pro-
mised to put Tegin-to death if he should declare for Yuri.

On the arrival of the latter with his patron at the Horde, Muhammed
assembled a court to decide the question, over which he presided him-
self. Vasili urged the recent rule of succession which had been adopted
by the Muscovite princes. Yuri appealed to the ancient rule and to the

* Karamzin, V. 300. t /^., 301. ; /^., 303. Golden Horde, 383.

§ Karamzin, v. 304.

Golden Horde, 384. Karamzin calls bim Bulak, and styles him a baskak.

ULUGH MUHAMxMED KHAN. 28 1

will of Dimitii Donski, in which he was named the successor of Vasili
the elder. The astute boyard whom I have mentioned then approached
the throne, and asked the Khan not to consider these precedents, but to
decide, as he had the power to do, according to his own wish ; and he
further urged him to confirm the will of the late sovereign, who had
nominated his son as his successor. Muhammed decided in favour of
Vasili, and, according to Asiatic custom, he ordered Yuri to hold the
horse's bridle for his nephew, which the latter, however, magnanimously
refused to allow him to do.* Meanwhile, Kuchuk Muhammed, of whom
we shall have much to say presently, began his rebellion against the
Khan, and Tegin seized the opportunity, and secured for his protege the
towns of Swenigorod, Rusi, Wishogorod, and Dmitrof.t On their
return to Russia, Ulan, the Khan's deputy, enthroned Vasili as Grand
Prince at Moscow^ at the golden gate of the Church of the Virgin.
Hitherto this ceremony had been performed at Vladimir. The latter
town continued, however, to be named before Moscow in the titles of the
grand princes. |

The decision of the Khan did not settle matters in Russia. The
boyard Ivan, who had served Vasili so well, wished to insist upon
his marrying his daughter ; and, on his refusing to do so, and
marrying Maria, the daughter of Yaroslaf and grand-daughter of
Vladimir the Brave, he left the court, determined upon vengeance, and
joined Yuri at Galitch. Yuri's two sons, Vasili the Squinter and
Shemiaka, had gone to Moscow to attend the Grand Prince's wedding.
The former wore a famous golden girdle, enriched with diamonds, which
had belonged to Dimitri Donski, but had been surreptitiously changed for
one of inferior value by one of the grandees, and, after passing from hand
to hand, had reached those of its present wearer. Sophia, the mother
of the Grand Prince, having been told of this, had it publicly seized,
and the two young princes, naturally much vexed, left the court and
went to join their father. By the persuasion of these fugitives Yuri
having collected an army, suddenly attacked Vasili, .made him
prisoner, and overran Muscovy. By the advice of one of his boyards
named Simeon Morozof, he granted Kolomna to his nephew as an
appanage and seated himself at Moscow. But the boyards there were
not willing to see the new rule of succession thus rudely set aside^
" Public opinion," says Mr. Kelly, " disarmed as it was, yet stronger than
a victor, neutralised his victory ; priests, people, nobles, all disavowed
him. The entire population of the great Moscow followed the lineal
heir into his banishment ; the conqueror, struck with dismay, remained
alone ; and, vanquished by this terrific insulation, he descended from his
solitary throne, and restored it to the legitimate heir."§ ^ Yuri's two sons

• Karamzin, v. 304-307- t Golden Horde, 386. \ Karamzin, v. 308.

S Op. cit., i. 97,
I N

282 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

avenged themselves on their father's adviser Morozof by assassinating
him. Vasili returned to his capital in triumph, the vast crowd of people,
in the quaint words of the old annalists, " surging about him like bees
about their queen,"* but his triumph was short-lived. Pusillanimity
seemed to control his council, and Yuri, having continued the struggle
notwithstanding his promises, successfully contended against his armies,
again occupied Moscow, and captured Vasili's mother and wife, while
the latter fled successively to Mologa, Kostroma, and Nijni Novgorod.
Yuri, having taken the title of Grand Prince, almost immediately after
died, at the age of sixty. In his will, which had apparently been made
in his days of comparative obscurity, he had not provided for the new
state of things. He merely divided his own appanage, and ordered his
sons to contribute 1,026 roubles towards the tribute of 7,000 roubles
which the Grand Prince had to pay to the horde.

Vasili the Squinter, notwithstanding, had himself proclaimed his
father's successor, but his brothers refused to acknowledge him, and
drove him away from Moscow. They were duly rewarded by Vasili
Vasilovitch, who was once more seated on the throne, Shemiaka
receiving as his portion Uglitch and Kief.t The Squinter took up arms
and ravaged the borders of Muscovy and the principality of Novgorod,
and the Grand Prince, who suspected his brother Shemiaka's fidelity,
had him seized and imprisoned at Moscow. In a struggle which ensued
between the two Vasilis ; the son of Vasili captured his rival the Squinter
and had his eyes put out, and he passed the remainder of his life in
obscurity. Shemiaka was released and restored to his appanage, on con-
dition of his returning the treasures which his father had carried off from
Moscow.t Soon after the Grand Prince punished the temerity of the
Novgorodians, who had imposed a tribute of 50,000 squirrel and 240
sable skins on Ustiughe, a dependency of Muscovy, by himself com-
pelling a payment of 8,000 roubles.

Meanwhile the Russians continued to pay their tribute regularly to the
Tartar Khan Muhammed. The latter's reign at Serai was, however,
drawing to a close. I have mentioned how he was troubled with
a rival named Kuchuk Muhammed, or Little Muhammed. The latter
now {i.e.y in the year 1437) finally drove him away from his capital.
Ulugh Muhammed sought refuge in Russia, where he expected to be well
received by Vasili. He was, on the contrary, ordered to leave the
country immediately. The Russians prepared an army to enforce this
order, but with a most craven disposition it broke to pieces and fled
at the sight of the very inferior forces possessed by Muhammed ; so
inferior that he could not follow them up, but deemed it wiser to retire.
He crossed the land of the Mordvins into Bulgaria, which had been
terribly ravaged by the Russians in 1399. There he rebuilt the city of

* Karamzin, v, 314. t Id., 317. I td., 321*

NOTES. - 283

Kazan and became the founder of a separate empire, known as the
Khanate of Kazan, on which a separate chapter will follow.

We are told that Ulugh Muhammed had wearied out his people by his
continual migrations. He had so dragged his court from place to
place that they had no leisure in which to sow or reap their harvest, and
there had been great scarcity of grain among them.* Driven away
from Serai, the family of Tuka Timur continued to rule both at Kazan
and in the Krim, under which heads their future fortunes are traced out.

Note I. — The land occupied by the White Horde is one of the least
known parts of Asia. Once dotted with flourishing towns, these have long
since, for the niost part, disappeared, and are now marked merely by ruins
or mounds. As the country has been little explored, we can only in a few
cases fix the sites of the old settlements.

It would seem that the land of the White Horde was conterminous largely
with that occupied by the Oghuz Turks of the Arab writers. Thus it included
the lower Jaxartes and the valley through which it flows, the western part of
the Alexandrofski range, the valley of the Sarisu, the Ulugh Tagh and Kuchuk
Tagh mountains, and the present camping ground of the Middle Horde of the
Kirghiz Kazaks. Its boundary on the east, where it was conterminous with
the Khanate of Jagatai, is very uncertain. Von Hammer enumerates Sighnak,
Otrar, and Taras as its chief towns,! and we find that in Ssanang Setzen the
Golden Horde is spoken of as the Khanate of Togmak, which name it doubt-
less derived from the town of Togmak on the Chu. This seems to show what
is otherwise probable, that it included all the valley of the Chu, a famous river
which loses itself, after a considerable flow, in the sands of Karakum. On the
north it was apparently limited by the Khanate of Sheiban, which we shall
describe in a later chapter, on the west by the Horde of Batu, on the south-east
by the Alexandrofski mountains, and on the south-west by the deserts of
Kizil kum, which separated it from Khuarezm.

As I have said, this country is at present singularly unexplored. Once it
was no doubt a very thriving region. We have reason to believe that the Chu
once rose in lake Issikul and flowed into the Caspian, and that the Talas and the
Sari Su were its tributaries. Its banks were thickly peopled, and its borders
irrigated with artificial canals. The district was traversed, too, by the great
highway which in Mongol times connected the East and West, and was then
much frequented. We can only throw a partial light on the topographical
riddles that meet us at every turn. First let us consider this trade route.

The problem of tracing out some of the vaguely described journeys of
ancient travellers is much facilitated by certain physical features which limit
our hypotheses very considerably. Oceans cannot be crossed without ships,

* Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 346. t Golden Horde, 329,

284 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

nor high mountain ranges by large armies except at certain passes. This is
familiar enough, but it is hardly as familiar that deserts are almost as
impassable as oceans, and that we cannot therefore hypothecate a direct march
from one point to another unless we know the nature of the intervening
country. It is the necessity of avoiding physical barriers that makes ancient
trade routes in the East so persistent ; perhaps more persistent than any
human institutions. The great trade route from China to Persia, which was
travelled by Chinese as well as Western travellers, led by all accounts along
the northern slopes of the Alexandrofski range and by the road which still
remains the only route from Togmak to Avlie Ata. It is well delineated in
Colonel Walker's capital map of Central Asia. In traversing this district it
crosses the very numerous head streams of the Chu, which spread out like a
fan, and form the well known Ming Bulak or thousand springs, to which I
shall presently refer. Between Togmak and Avlie Ata its course is pretty
nearly east and west, and is bounded on the south by the impenetrable
Alexandrofski mountains.

At Avlie Ata the mountain range is broken by a gorge through which flows
the river Talas or Taras. This gorge forms one of the most important passes
in the world; the pass which connects Iran and Turun, and by which it is
probable that many of the earlier nomadic invaders of Persia entered the
valley of the Jaxartes. This important site, now marked by the town of Avlie
Ata, was formerly the meeting place of two distinct trade routes. One of
them has been almost discontinued, and formerly led westwards along the
northern slopes of the mountains towards the sea of Aral. The Uzbegs and
other nomades have swept away its towns and made it otherwise imprac-
ticable. The other route is still frequented, and goes through the gorge to the
south-west to Chimkend. From the fact of two great roads meeting there, and
from the fact also of its being the only feasible trade route across the
mountains, the gorge I have referred to must always have been a very
important station, and it is, I believe, universally held now that in former times
it was commanded by the town of Taras, and that Taras occupied a site not far
from the modern Avlie Ata.

"Avlie Ata owes its name," says Mr. Schuyler, " to the tomb of the patron saint
of the Khirghiz, Avlie Ata (holy father), said to have been a certain Kara Khan,
and a descendant of the Sheikh Ahmed Yasavi, who is buried at Turkestan.
The tomb itself, which is an ordinary brick building, is in a woful state of
dilapidation, and is by no means as interesting as the similar monument
erected over the grave of Assa bibi, some female relation of Kara Khan, which
can be seen on the road side, ten miles west of the town. Ten miles below
Avlie Ata on the Talas, amidst the sands of the Muyun Kum, are the ruins of
what was apparently a city called by the natives Tiume Kent," which the
author adds, " may perhaps prove to be those of the city of Talas." Tradition
says that a maiden once lived there who was beloved by the prince of the
Divs, giant spirits who dwelt in the neighbouring mountains. In order to
prepare a fit residence for her, this Div began to build a city, and for that
purpose threw down immense stones from the mountain of Makbal. The city
was never finished, but its remains are still visible, called by the natives

NOTES. 285

Akhyr tash (Akhyr tepe) or Tash kurgan. The legend may be absurd, but the
ruins, which are about thirty miles east of Avlie Ata,* are very curious. They
consist of an immense unfinished building, 600 feet by 450 feet, of reddish sand-
stone, the lower layer of the front being built of large stones, 7 feet long by
4 feet broad. M. Lerch, who investigated the river, thinks it was intended for a
Buddhist monastery. The scattered stones are supposed by the natives to
have been mangers or feeding troughs for an encampment, and hence the
name Akhyr tash (stone manger). The Chinese traveller Chang Chun, who
passed here in 122 1, says, "We travelled westwards along the hills, and after
seven or eight days journey the mountains suddenly turned to the south. We
saw a city built of red stone, and there are the traces of an ancient encamp-
ment. To the west we saw great grave moulds, placed like the stars in the
Great Bear." These mounds also still exist, and from a short distance they
indeed appear to be seven, disposed like the seven stars of the Great Bear.
In reality, however, there are sixteen mounds of different sizes, the largest
being two hundred to two hundred and fifty paces in circumference. They are
called by the Kirghiz Jitte tepo or the seven mounds. On one of these M.
Lerch found a stone bearing a Manchu inscription, relative to a victory of the
Chinese over the Sungars in lysS.t

Having shown that there are abundant ruins to satisfy those who wish to
have proofs of the' former existence in this neighbourhood of a large city, we
will now pass on to collect such notices of it as we can find. I propose to
begin my short survey of this difficult area with Taras or Talas, as it is
oftener called. This is probably one of the oldest sites in the world. Edrisi
writes the name Taran, and I would suggest as possible that the name Taran,
the complement of Iran, is connected with it, for Taras commands the main
pass which leads from Iran into Central Asia. It first occurs in the pages of
Menander Protector, who wrote towards the end of the sixth century, and
who, in describing the embassy of Zemarchus to the Turkish Khan Dizabulus
in the year 569, tells us that while the Khan was engaged in an expedition
against the Persians, and while his camp was pitched at a place called Talas,
an ambassador from the Persians went to meet Dizabulus, who invited him
and the Romans to dinner.:}:

About the year 729 Hiuen Thsang, the famous Chinese pilgrim, passed
through Taras. He tells us that about 400 li west of the Su ye {i.e., the Chu),
he arrived at Thsien thsiuen {i.e., the thousand springs answering to the
Mingbulak of the Mongols). The country of Thsien thsiuen was about 200 li
square. On the south it was bounded by snowy mountains, and on three other
sides by continuous plains. The land was well watered and the vegetation
abundant. . . . The Turkish Khan went there every year to pass the
summer heats. After travelling about 140 li or 150 li to the west of Thsien
thsiuen, he arrived at the town of Ta-lo-si.§

The thousand sources, called Thsien thsiuen or Ping yu by the Chinese,
Mingbulak by the Mongols, and Bin gul by the Turks, is a name occurring in

* He says above they were ten miles below Avlie Ata, and perhaps a different set of ruins is
here meant.

t Schuyler's Turkestan, ii. 121, 122. I Cathay and the Way Thither, clxv.

§ Vivien St. Martin, Memoir on Hiuen Thsang's Travels, 18.

286 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

several places, and meaning in effect a well watered country. This Mingbulak
which was bounded on the south by snowy mountains, was doubtless the
district watered by the cluster of small rivers and torrents which form the
head waters of the Chu, and the Talosi of the Buddhist traveller is no doubt
Taras. In the Tang shu or history of the Tang dynasty, under the article Shi
(i.e., Shash or Tashkend). We read of Ta-Io-sze as a city situated west of the
river Sui ye (i.e., the Chu).*

In the travels of Chang chun, who visited Western Asia in 1221, and whose
narrative is very confused, he mentions that four days after leaving Almaligh
he arrived at the river Talasu molien (i.e., the Talas muren), a river which is
described as deep and broad, coming from the east and cutting across the Yin
shan mountains, and running in a north-western direction. To the south of
the river were snow-covered mountains.f In the Si shi ki, describing Shang
tis journey westwards in 1259, he tells us that he passed Ta la S2,e, without
mentioning whether it was a river or a town.J In the Si yu lu we are told
that several hundred li to the west of Hu sze wo lu do, the capital of Kara
Khitai, which last town was 400 li from K'u jan (i.e., Khojend), was the city
Ta la sze.§ All these references point to one conclusion only, namely, to the
Ta la sze of the Chinese being the Taras or Talas identified with Avlie Ata.

Ishtakhri tells us Teraz was on the extreme border between the land of the
Turks and Mussulmans, and that all about there were strong castles, called in
general after Terez. The region of Islam extended as far as this spot.||

Let us now turn to the Western authorities. Edrisi calls the town Taran.
He says it was a place of passage for the Mussulmans, who had established forti-
fications there against the Khizilji Turks with whom the Mussulmans were for
the most part at war. When there was peace between them then there was
an exchange of commodities in merchandise, cattle, furs, &c.^ This answers
exactly to the frontier town of Avlie Ata, but the fact is made certain
when we examine the route which he gives from Samarkand to Taran, which
we can trace step by step to Isfidjab, now called Chimkent, whence it was
three days' journey to Taran, with one intervening station at Badakh kath,
between which and Taran was a wild country without inhabitants or
cultivation.**

In a work quoted by Quatremere as the Mesalek alabsar fi memalek alamsar,
whose author was born in the year 700 and died in 749 hej., we are told it was
tv/enty days' journey from Samarkand to Yanghi, and that Yanghi consisted
of four towns, separated from each other by a distance of a fersenkh each.
They all had distinct names, and were known as Yanghi, Yanghi baligh,
Kanchuk, and Talas.tt In the Tarakhi Rashidi we read that Taras was called
Yanghi by the Mongols, and that there were many people of Yanghi in Mavera
un nehr who were called Yangelik. In the steppe of Yanghi, says its author,
are found the remains of several cities, and of domes, minarets, and schools,
but he adds, it is not known which of these ancient cities was Yanghi or what

• Bretschneider, Notices of Mediaeval Geography, &c., 59.

t Bretschneider, Notes on Mediseval Travellers, &c., 34. ; /^.,

§ Jd., 114, 115. II Ishtakhri, published by Ousely as Ibn Hauka), 269.

1 Edrisi ed., Jaubert, ii. 208, 209. ** Id, 214.

tt Quatremere Notices et Extracts, xiii. 224-226.

NOTES. 287

were the names of the others.* In the Geography of Heft Iklim we are told
that Taras was formerly a celebrated town, then destroyed by the Uzbegs. Its
environs, to which the name of Taras was given, were desert.t Baber and the
Akbar Nameh seem to confuse Yanghi and Otrar, and Klaproth and others
among modern writers have confused it with Yassy or Turkestan.

Having fixed the site of Taras, let us now proceed further. There is a
passage in the history of the Kara Khitai which has not hitherto been rightly
explained. We are told that after the Gurkhan had conquered the country
which he ruled over, he appointed governors from Kum kidjik (Le., the desert
of Kipchak) to Barsedjan, and from Taras to Tamdj (i.e., to Tamghadj or
Taugas) answering to Uighuristan.

Barsedjan has been a puzzle to most inquirers. Dr. Bretschneider says
that Du Halde, in the map of China appended to his history of China in 1734,
places Bersagian la haute or Sairam on the river Talas.j This name of
Sairam reminds us that Mirkhond associates a Kara Sairam with Taras, and
tells us it was a vast town, a day's journey from end to end, having forty gates,
and inhabited by Mussulmans, and that it belonged to Kaidu.g On turning
to Edrisi we find him mentioning two Barsedjans ; Upper Barsedjan, remote
from the neighbourhood we are describing, and Lower Barsedjan, a town
surrounded with inhabitants and cultivated fields, and thirty-three miles from
Taran or Taras. || Again, reporting the famous voyage made by the Arab Salam
among the Turks in the ninth century, he tells us that in returning homewards
from the East he came by way of Gharian, Barsedjan, and Taran to
Samarkand.^ These extracts seem to show that Barsedjan was situated on the
grand route to the East some thirty-three miles from Taran, which agrees very
well with the site of the ruin of red stones mentioned by Mr. Schuyler, which
he tells us was thirty miles east of Avlie Ata, and which he seems to have con-
fused with other ruins some ten miles further down the Talas than Avlie Ata,
as I have mentioned. On journeying eastwards from Taras the first important
place met with is the fort of Togmak on the Chu. Mr. Schuyler says, " The
old town of Togmak, of which only undistinguishable ruins remain, was about
fifteen miles above the present one, which is a small place with a Russian
population of 800, and is on the site of a Khokandian fort captured in iSeo."**
Togmak must have been of great importance in mediaeval times, for it gave a
name to the Khanate of Kipchak.

The name Togmak, as Dr. Schmidt says, was used by the Mongols to
designate the Khanate of Kipchak. Ssanang Setzen, whose geography is not
very clear, applies the name also to the empire of Khuarezm.ft He calls Juchi
" Khan of Togmak,"|J and speaks of the ruler of Togmak in 1452 as a
descendant of Juchi. §§ Abd el Razzak, in describing Timur's campaign in
1391, calls the people of Kipchak Togmaks, and after their victory the soldiers
of Timur sang a song in which they boasted of being the vanquishers of the
Togmaks.

Rubruquis, as I have mentioned, |||| having on his journey towards Kara-

* Veliaminof Zernof, op. cit., ii. 156. " t Quatremere, loc. cit.

I Notices, &c., 37, § Quatremere, Notices et Extracts. |1 Op. cit., ii. 217. 1 Id., ii. 420.
**fd.,n.i26. tt Op. cit., 87 and 383. Note, 41. llld.,iii> §§ /<i.. 165. M Ante, 87,

288 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

korum travelled southwards for eight days from certain alps or mountains,
which were doubtless the Urtagh chain and its shoulders, arrived at a well
watered and cultivated plain, bounded on the south by high mountains, and
entered a town which the Saracens (i.e., the Muhammedans) called Kenchat,
and which was watered by a large river which sprang in the mountains, and
was lost eventually in the sands, and was six days' journey from Talas.
Mr. Schuyler has identified Kenchat with Merke, and I followed him in so
doing,* but I am now convinced that Togmak must have been the town other-
wise called Kenchuk. The distance from Taras, as given by Rubruquis, suits
it better than Merke, where Mr. Schuyler puts it, and it is further the con-
verging point of the trade route along the north of the mountains and that
east of the river Chu, which latter seems to have been followed by Rubruquis.
Taras and Kenchuk are associated together several times by the Persian
writers. Thus Rashid ud din speaks of the meadows of Talas and Kenchuk,
and Haidar Razi talks of •' the meadows of Talas and Kenchuk, which are
commonly called Meske and Taraz." The two places were at each end of the
well watered tract of Ming bulak, and the whole district was thus well described
by its limiting towns.

Kenchuk was apparently a new name given to the town after the Mongol
conquest, for I do not meet with it before. It is in form similar to Seraichuk,
and may be a corruption of Kent or Kcnd, a town, and Kuchuk, small.

Having examined the topography of the country east of Taras, let us now
turn to that west of that city. Here, unfortunately, we have but scant
information. The road followed by nearly all travellers was through the gorge
at Avlie Ata, and down upon the Jaxartes by Chimkent, a route which is well
known. For information as to the road westwards along the northern flanks
of the Alexandrofski range, we are in fact limited to one writer, namely, the
Armenian royal traveller Haithon. He went to visit Mangu, as I have men-
tioned, and travelled from Cilicia by way of the Kipchak. It would seem that
it was his intention to return by the same route. When he therefore reached
Taras on his way home, and there had an interview with Khulagu, he tells us
he there turned to the north-west, and came successively to Kutukchin, Berkent,
and Sukulkhan, none of which places are apparently named elsewhere, but
they were doubtless on the main route from Avlie Ata to Suzak, He then
reached Urusokan. Ur is a particle occurring in many Turkish names, as
Urtepe, Urtagh, &c., and simply means high. Usokan is assuredly but a form
Uzkend. Uzkend was one of the cities captured by Juchi, as I have men-
tioned, and I have also shown that this Uzkend was not the Uzkend on the
eastern limits of Ferghanah, but was situated much further west. It is not at
all improbable that it was the same place which Haithon calls Urusokan.

Let us follow his further steps. After leaving the latter place he passed
Kayi kent (?), and then arrived at Khuzak. This is identified by Mr. Schuyler
with great probability with Suzak, a well known town marked on Colonel
Walker's map, and mentioned in the account of M. Mazarof's journey to
Tashkend in 1813. He reached it after crossing the Chu and crossing some

* Ante, By.

NOTES. 289

sands beyond.* After leaving Suzak our traveller passed successively Kamotz,
Khendakhoir, and Sighnak.

Slghnak w^as a famous town, the capital of the White Horde, and it is curious
that its site should be quite unknown. Haithon, in speaking of it, says, " There
is the mount Kharchuk whence the Seljuks came and where mount Thoros
begins." The mountains of Kharchuk were no doubt the range of Kara Tau, in
which the river Kara Ichuk, a tributary of the Jaxartes, springs. Klaproth says
Sighnak was situated on the Muskan, a tributary on the right of the Jaxartes,
which had its origin in the Karachuk mountains.! He does not cite his
authority, but the position is in itself probable. Sherifuddin speaks of Sabran
and Sighnak as the two frontier towns of Turkestan, and tells us Sighnak was
situated four-and-twenty miles from Otrar, while the biographical work entitled
Tabakatol hanefiyet of Kesevi speaks of it as being near the town of Yassy.J
Vambery, I know not on what authority, says it was united to Jend by a
canal. § These various hints point to the neighbourhood of Babai kurgan
(which is named on Colonel Walker's map) as the most likely site for the
capital of the White Horde. It would therefore seem that Haithon on leaving
Suzak crossed the mountains by the Bivpik pass, and went to Sighnak.
Thence he retraced his steps again to pay a visit to Sertak, who was on his
way to Mangu Khan. After which he returned to Sighnak, and thence went
on to Sabran, which he tells us was extremely large. Sabran is a well known
site on the main route from Yanghi-kent to Turkestan, and is marked on
Colonel Walker's map. Edrisi says that Sabran was a town where the Ghuz
met to make peace or a truce, and to trade in times of peace. He tells us it
depended on Nukath, the capital of Ilak.[| In another place he tells us that
after passing Sabran one enters the desert of the Ghuzzes.^ Its site was
passed by Schuyler a little above the Russian fort of Julek. He says its ruins
lay some distance from the post station, so that he could not visit them.
" They were noted a few years ago for containing two tall brick towers or
minarets of very graceful construction, having spiral staircases within. One
of them fell a few years ago, and as the other was greatly injured by the
Kirghiz, it is now also probably in ruins."** From Sabran, Haithon went to
Kharchuk, situated doubtless on the river of the same name, flowing between
Sabran and Turkestan, and then went on to Yasun (i.e., Yassy), the old name
for the town of Turkestan, recently visited by Mr. Schuyler, and whose
description will occupy us in a later chapter. From Yassy our traveller went
on to Savri, which is probably to be identified with the ruins north of the river
Aris, marked in Colonel Walker's map. The next station he reached was the
famous Otrar, whose ruins are still to be seen a little to the south of the river
Aris. It was a famous city in early times, and we have described how the
truculence of its governor led to the invasion of the Khuarezmian empire by
Jingis Khan, and how his people wreaked their vengeance upon it. It was
also at Otrar that the. Great Timur died. It first appears under the name of
Otrar in the thirteenth century, and was previously known as Farab. It is
mentioned by Ishtakhri.tt and seems to have been the capital of a small

* Levchine, Kirghiz Kazaks, 104. | Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 285. Note.

I Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 11. Note, 8. $ History of Bokhara, 124.

II Op, cit., ii. 208. % Id., 209. ** Op. cit., i. 68. tt Ouseley's ed., passim,

10

290 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

territory, a position which it retained after its change of name, for in the
Chinese account of the travels of Yelu Chutsai,* it is said ten other cities
were dependent on it. In Pegolotti's land routes to Cathay, compiled in the
first half of the fourteenth century, we are told Oltrarre was forty-five days'
journey with pack asses from Almaligh, while it was a journey of thirty-five or
forty days with camel waggons from Urgenj.t As Colonel Yule says, Otrar
was the great frontier city between the Khanates of Kipchak and Jagatai,
and we find it, with the other towns of the White Horde, assigned as
the appanage of Toktamish by his patron Timur.

On leaving Otrar Haithon crossed the Jaxartes and went on by way of
Zernuk, whose ruins are marked on several maps, on the left bank of the
Jaxartes and Jizak, which still retains its name, and so on to Samarkand.

We have not completed our survey of the towns of the White Horde, and
still have to consider those which were to the west of Sighnak. In speaking
of the ntountains of Kharchuk, Haithon says they began with Taurus and
reached to Parchin. This will be recognised as the name of a mint place of
the Golden Horde. Among the towns captured by Juchi in his first campaign
was Barchin, otherwise called Barkhaligkent. It is called Barjen in the Yuan
shi, and Barchilikan in the Chinese map published by Dr. Bretschneider.| It
is mentioned by Carpini under the name Barchin. § These are all the notices
of the town known to me, and it seems to have been situated at the western
termination of the long chain of mountains known now as the Alexandrofski
range, where all accounts agree that the country is strewn with ruins as yet
unexplored. Between this point and Suzak is the station of Ak Sumba,
marking no doubt one of Timur's halting places on his journey towards the
Urtagh, and which he calls Ak Saman.

Let us now examine the towns on the Lower Jaxartes. Of these the most
important in every way was Yanghi kent. Yanghi kent simply means new
town, a name which is in some measure misleading, since it is mentioned in
early days. Mr. Erskine tells us it is the Alkariah al jadideh of the Arabs.||
It is mentioned by Masudi under the name of Haditse (tr., " the new "). He
tells us it was situated a fersenkh from the Sihun or Jaxartes, and two days'
journey from its outfall into the lake of Khuarezm. He tells us further, it was
the chief winter residence of the ruler of the Oghuz Turks.«[ Edrisi, in
describing the course of the Sihun or Jaxartes, tells us that after passing
Sabran it entered the desert of the Ghuz, and passed at a distance of three
miles from the town of Ghozzia the New, and then fell into the lake of
Khuarezm at two days' journey from that town. He tells us this town was the
capital of the Ghuz and the winter residence of their ruler, and that Mussul-
mans were found there. It was twelve days' journey from Khuarezm and
twenty from Farab or Otrar.** Carpini mentions the town under the name of
Jane kin. Abulfeda tells us Yanghi kent was situated on a river which fell into
the lake of Khuarezm. It was ten days' journey, he says, from Urgenj, twenty
from Otrar, and twenty-five leagues from Bokhara.tt

• Bretschneider, Notes on Mediaeval Travellers. &c., 115.

t Cathay and the Way Thither, 288. J Notices of Mediaeval Geography, 193, et passim.

5 Ed. Dav.. 750. IBaber, II. Note, 6. f D'Ohsson, Abul Cassim. 147.

•• Op. cit., ed. Jaubert, ii. aog, 210. 1 1 D'Avezac, op. cit., 513. Note, 2.

NOTES. 291

Levchine tells us its ruins are situated at a distance of an hour's ride on
horseback from the Syr or Jaxartes, and a day's journey from its mouth. In
the last century it belonged to the Karakalpaks. Gladychef, who was sent on
a mission to these people in 1742, found the town then in ruins, but its
ramparts and towers still remained, and the Khan of the Karakalpaks lived
inside the enclosure. It was afterwards occupied by the Kirghiz Kazaks, who
reported that its primitive inhabitants had been driven away by serpents.*

M. Lerch explored the ruins of Yanghi kent in 1867. He opened several of
the mounds, and found various articles of pottery and household ware, but
nothing which could enable the age of the ruins to be ascertained. f

Another town of the Lower Jaxartes, which was captured by the army of
Juchi Khan, and which occurs frequently in Eastern history, is Jend or Jund.
I have no doubt it is the Kojend of Edrisi (not to be confounded, of course,
with his Khojend much further east). He mentions it as one of the three
cities of the Ghuz on the Lower Jaxartes.]: Masudi expressly calls it Jend, in
a passage which was probably copied by Edrisi.§ It is very probable that
the name Lemfinc, a town mentioned in this neighbourhood by Carpini, is a
blundered legend for Jend.

M. Lerch, who has studied the archasology of Turkestan so diligently, fixes
the site of Jend at some ruins on the right bank of the Jaxartes, between the
fort of Kazalinsk and that known as No. 2. Of this famous city, where the
founder of the family of the Seljuki adopted Islam and also died, there only
remain some mounds of rubbish and some tombstones with Arabic inscriptions.
Its bricks have been largely used by the modem Kazaks to build their
mausoleums with.|| I may add that the third town of the Ghuz on the
Jaxartes is called Khuara by Masudi. The name is written Hawara in the
translation of Edrisi.

Note 2. — In the following tables I have endeavoured to reconstruct the
family tree of the Royal houses descended from Orda Ichen, as contained in
the previous chapter.

Orda Ichen.

Kubinji or Kochi.
I

1

Bayan.

1 1 II
Koblokum. Tok Timur. Buka Timur. Mongatai.

Sasai.

Sasibuka.
1

1

Ebisan.

1

Mubarek Khoja.

Chimtai.

Urus Khan.
1

Tuktakia.

Timur Malik Khan.

1
Koirijak.

Borrak Khan.

Timur Kutlugh Khan.

Shadibeg Khan. Pulad Khan.

Timur Khan.

Hist, des Kirghiz Kazaks, 114. t Schuyler, op. cit., 68 and 401. % Op. cit., ii. 209.

% D'Ohsson, op. cit., 147. II Russische Revue., i. 31.

CHAPTER V.

THE LATER KHANS OF THE GOLDEN HORDE
AND THE KHANS OF ASTRAKHAN.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN.

WE have now reached a notable crisis in the history of the
Golden Horde, whose eastern half had become independent
of the ruler of Serai, and was, as I shall show in a
future chapter, the subject of contention between the Kirghiz Kazaks and
the Uzbegs. Its western half was also undergoing disintegration. The
northern districts of Bulghar were subject to Ulugh Muhammad, and I
shall follow their fortunes in a later chapter on Kazan. In the south-
west a new and vigorous branch of the Tartars, founded a separate
and substantive Khanate in the Krim, and dominated probably also
over the Circassians. On this also I shall have much to say in future
chapters. Meanwhile we find in the west and in the country included
between the Don and the Dnieper, and probably for a while also in the
Krim, a third more or less independent sovereignty set up by a chief
named Seyid Ahmed.

This person has been identified by Von Hammer* and others with
Abusaid Janibeg, the son of Borrak Khan, an identification in which I
cannot concur, and which seems to me quite misleading, nor is it based,
so far as I can see, on any evidence save mere conjecture. I believe
that this Seyid Ahmed was the same person already mentioned,! who
was set up as Khan for a short time on the deposition of Chekre, and
then almost immediately deposed because of his youth and inexperience.
As at that time Borrak Khan was still living, it is exceedingly improbable
and contrary to Tartar notions to suppose that his grandson should have
been then nominated as Khan. The only statement I can find in any
Eastern author as to his origin is in the Turkish authority followed by
Langles, who has by far the fullest details about this crooked period, and
who tells us he was a descendant of Toktamish, but the same writer tells
us just before, that at this time the family of Toktamish was extinct. When
Seyid Ahmed occupied the country between the Don and the Dnieper it
would seem that he was followed by a considerable body of Nogais, and
according to an authority I have mislaid, he is looked upon by the Nogais

* Golden Horde, 38S. 1 Anit, 273.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. . 293

as having introduced them into Europe. It may be, therefore, that he was
related to the great Nogai leader Idiku, who had a son named Seyid Ali.
The Russians named his people "the Swift," which answers to their
description in the Turkish annals and to the style they gave themselves,
z.<?., Tatari badreftar, or *' Tartars who fly like the wind."* Seyid Ahmed
is mentioned as holding joint authority with Kuchuk Muhammed as
early as 1434, when we are told Vasili Vasilovitch sent his tribute to the
Khans of the horde, Kuchuk Ahmed and Seyid Ahmed.t

Seyid Ahmed's joint rule is a token of the growing disintegration of
the Golden Horde. Luckily for Russia, a similar decay occurred at this
time in the empire which had so long threatened it in the west, namely,
Lithuania. On the death of Vitut he was succeeded by Suidrigailo,
brother of Yagellon, who, as I have mentioned, reigned in Poland, and
from whom he tried to conquer the districts of Podolia and Volhynia.J
He was on friendly terms with the Russians and devoted to the Greek
church, but he was a drunkard and otherwise weak, was driven
away by his people, and eventually became a shepherd in IVloldavia.
The Lithuanians called in Sigismund, the brother of Vitut, a cruel
and avaricious tyrant, who, we are told, kept savage beasts as
guardians of his gates. He was assassinated by Ivan and Alexander,
princes of Chertorisk and grandsons of Olgerd, and was succeeded by
Casimir, son of Yagellon, whose brother Vladislas was now King of
Poland. This was in 1440. On the latter's death Casimir once more
united the crowns of Poland and Lithuania. §

We now arrive at a famous crisis in the history of the Greek Church.
The metropolitan Photius had died in 1431, and during the next six
years there was a vacancy in the office, which Gerassim, the metropoHtan
of Lithuania, tried to usurp, but the Russian bishops would not tolerate
l>im. A council was at length summoned to elect a new chief of the
church, and the choice fell upon Jonas, bishop of Riazan ; but mean-
while the patriarch of Constantinople had consecrated Isidore of
Thessalonica, a learned theologian, equally versed in the Greek and the
Latin theology, and furthermore a friend of the pope, the famous
Eugenius IV. At this time the Imperial throne at Byzantium was
occupied by John Palasologus, who had married the Russian princess
Anne. He was but a shadow of an emperor, and the Turks pressed
upon his borders more and more. Under these circumstances the pope
promised to support him, and to preach a European crusade against
the invaders on condition that the Greek Church would, after an
impartial examination of the points in dispute between themselves and
the Latins, conform to the decision of a general GEcumenical council to
be called in Italy. These terms were agreed to, and the Emperor with

• Golden Horde, 394. t Id., 388.

Latham Nationalities, i. 50. ^ Karamzin, v. 301, 302. Lelewel, Hist, de Pologne, i. 93, 94.

294 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

his brother (the despot Demetrius), together with Joseph, the patriarch
of Constantinople, and seven hundred of the Greek clergy, set sail from
Byzantium'on the 24th of November, 1437.*

Isidore, the new metropolitan, who had now no rival, Gerassim having
been burnt alive by Suidrigailo at Vitebsk for having had secret com-
munications with his rival Sigismund, set off on the same errand from
Moscow on the 8th of September, 1437, with a large cortege, and soon
proved himself an ardent champion of the Latin cause. It is curious to
trace his route ; he went by way of Novgorod, Riga, Lubeck, Luneburgh,
Brunswick, Leipzic, Erfuhrt, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Augsbourg, and the
Tyroljt and was very cordially welcomed. The various objects of
art, the rich cities and gardens, the stone aqueducts and palaces were
objects of astonishment to the hitherto secluded Russians ; nor were
they who knew only the wide plains and steppe land of Central and
Southern Russia less amazed with the sight of the Tyrolean Alps.j

The council thus summoned was the famous Council of Florence, and
the four chief points in dispute were the procession of the Holy Ghost,
the use of unleavened bread only in the sacrament, purgatory, and the
supremacy of the pope. It is no part of my subject to recount its history
and how its apparent success was brought about. Isidore, the metro-
politan of Russia, was rewarded for his complacency with a cardinal's
hat, and appointed apostolical legate of the North. He returned home
by way of Venice and Hungary, and arrived at Moscow in the spring
of 1440, bearing a letter from the pope for the Grand Prince. But
Vasili refused to give up the old faith of his ancestors, declared that the
Greeks had been taken in, and declared further that Isidore was a
heretic ; and having called a council of bishops and learned boyards,
who agreed with him, he had him imprisoned, but he escaped and fled to
Rome, where he was always known as the bishop of Russia.

Jonas, the former choice of Yasili, was again nominated metropolitan.
As the Emperor of Byzantium had declared for Rome, Jonas did not go
to Byzantium for consecration, nor was he acknowledged outside
Muscovy. The bishops of Southern or Lithuanian Russia obeyed as
their metropolitan a Bulgarian named Gregory, a disciple of Isidore's and
a partisan of union, who had his seat at Kief and ruled the dioceses of
Briansk, Smolensk, Percimysl, Turof. T.nislc. \n;u]iniir, Polotsk, Kholm,
and Galitch.

Thus ended the attempt to piece togctlicr tlic broken unity of
Christendom. The effort may be said to have failed because of the
obduracy of Vasili, and although his obsequious bishops flattered him by
saying he had kept awake while they slept, an impartial observer, who
considers the terrible expenditure of blood and hatred which the
separation of the two churches afterwards caused in the long continued

♦ Karamzin, V. 334. t/rt', 337 I ///., i. 338.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. . 295

and still lively strife, between the Poles and the Lithuanians on the one
hand and the Russians on the other, cannot help thinking that a mistake
was made. Whatever the means employed, it is pretty certain that the
most learned prelates of the Eastern church acquiesced in the decision,
and if it be deemed a misfortune for Europe that the Turks should have
supplanted the Greeks at Byzantium, we cannot help feeling that a
patent cause was the disunion of Christendom. The chief effect of the
council of Florence in Russia was to create a bitter feeling of hatred
there against the church of the Latins.

In 1441 the strife between Vasili and his cousin Shemiaka again broke
out, and the latter even made a momentary attempt upon Moscow, but
his time had not yet arrived, and afraid of the power of the Grand
Prince, he seems to have again withdrawn to his appanage.*

On another side Vasili had a contest with Casimir, the King of
Lithuania, whose enemy Yuri, the son of Lugveni, had found shelter at
Moscow. This led to a declaration of war in 1444, during the winter of
which year Vasili sent two Tartar princes in his service against Briansk
and Viazma. This force ravaged the country as far as Smolensk. The
raid was revenged by the Lithuanians, who with 7,000 men plundered
the environs of Kozelsk, Kaluga, Moyaisk, and Vereia, and defeated the
Russian force sent against them. They afterwards withdrew.!'

Let us now revert again to the Golden Horde. The Khan at Serai at
this time was Kuchuk Muhammed, or the Little Muhammed, who is
proved by the best of all authorities, namely, his coins, by Khuandemir, by
the authority followed by Langles, and the Rodos. Kniga,J to have been the
son of Timur Khan, the former ruler of the Kipchak. The details of the
overthrow of Ulugh Muhammed are given by a very interesting con-
temporary author, the merchant traveller, Josafa Barbaro, who lived so
long in Southern Russia, and whose work has recently been edited for
Ahe Hackluyt Society by Lord Stanley of Alderlcy. He tells us that in
the year 1438, when Ulugh Muhammed ruled in the champaigns of
Tartary, Nurus, the son of Idiku, who was one of his chief captains,
having quarrelled with him, went with a number of his people to the I til
(/.«?., the Volga), to his rival Kuchuk Muhammed. Having united their
forces they marched by way of Astrakhan, which he calls Citerchan, and
then by the steppes of the Tumen and the Don towards the sea of Azof,
which, like the Don, was frozen over. The army had in its march to
occupy a considerable distance, so that those who went before should not
consume the forage of those who were to follow. So great was the line
that when the advance guard was at Palastra (?) its rear guard was at
Bosagaz,§ on the Don, the two places being 120 miles apart. The news

* Karamzin, v. 356. t /</., 366, 367. J Golden Horde, 389. Note, i.

$ This Jehosaphat Barbaro explains as the grey wood, but Von Hammer as the ice wood.
(Barbaro's Travels, Hackluyt Society, 1873, p. 9. Golden Horde, 389.)

296 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of their march had reached Tana or Azof four months before, during
which time scouts, in parties of three and four, and leading spare horses,
had appeared there. Some of them were taken before the consul, who
interrogated them, but could only learn that they were travelling for
pastime. They stayed only an hour or two, but their numbers kept
increasing, and when the army was five or six days' journey off they
came in twenty-fives and fifties. At length Kuchuk Muhammed arrived
himself, and was lodged in a mosque an arrow-shot from Tana. The
consul sent him and his mother and Nurus each a present of novena
(/>., a present of nine things, as bread, wine, honey, &c.),* and Barbaro
himself headed the deputation, and commended the ' town and its
inhabitants to his favour. He found him reclining in the mosque with
his head towards Nurus, and he tells us he was twenty-two years old and
Nurus twenty-five. He received them well, jocularly remarking " what a
town is this, where three men have but three eyes among them." This
he said because Buran Taia-Pietra, their Turkoman attendant, Zuan
Greco, the consul's servant, and he that carried the hydromel had each
lost an eye.t

Barbaro tells us that the scouts who preceded the army each carried a
bottle made of goat's skin, and containing a paste made of millet and
honey and a wooden bowl, so that when they failed to kill any game
they mixed some of the paste with water and drank it. They also ate
different herbs and roots. A necessity of their diet was salt, without
which he says their mouths swelled and festered.

On the march the Khan went first, then herds of horses, sixty, one
hundred, or two hundred together, then camels and oxen, and lastly,
small beasts — a procession six days' journey long — and this was only the
advanced division. " We stood on the walls," says Barbaro " (for we
kept the gates shut), and in the evening we were weary of looking, for the
multitude of these people and beasts was such that the diameter of the
plain which they occupied seemed a Paganea of 120 miles."J At Bosagaj,
on the Don, where Barbaro had a fishing place, the fishermen ' told him
that after fishing all winter they had salted a great quantity of moroni
and caviare, but the invading Tartars had carried off all their fish, both
fresh and salt, and also their salt, nor did they even leave the barrels,
but broke them up, perchance, he says, to use the staves to trim their
carts with, and broke three small mills which were there to grind salt,
merely to get the little iron in them.§ They even found a cache of thirty
barrels of caviare which had been buried by one Zuan de Valle, who
burnt wood over the spot to hide it. The people, he says, were accom-
panied by innumerable carts with two wheels, " higher than ours," partly
covered with cloth and partly with felt, and closed with mats (/.<?•, arabas).
Some of these carts carried their yurts.

* Barbaro, lo. Golden Horde, 389, t Barbaro, 10, 11. t Id., 12. $ Op. cit., 13,

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. 297

After Kuchuk Muhammed had passed on two days he was followed
by his brother-in-law Edelmugh (/.^., Aadil Mulk), who was entertained
by Barbaro in his own house at Tana for two days, and who entreated
him to accompany him. This he agreed to do, and he went accompanied
by two Tartars from the town. His host, he says, was so drunk that the
blood ran from his nose, and when he would have persuaded him not to
drink any more, he made mouths like an ape, saying, " Let me drink ;
when shall I find any more of this ?"*

The whole party traversed several rivers which were frozen over, the
prince's course on the ice being naturally very aberrant- When they
neared the camp of Kuchuk Muhammed the party were received with the
Mongol hospitality usual when Royal princes were guests ; flesh, milk, and
bread were given without stint. They found the Khan in his tent, and we
are told those who desired audience were kneeling, detached from one
another, and had left their weapons a stone's cast away. ''' Unto some
of them," says Barbaro, " the lord spake, and demanding what they
would, he always made a sign to them with his hand that they should
rise. Whereupon they would rise, but not approach eight paces more
till they kneeled again, and so nearer and nearer till they had audience."
According to Barbaro, litigation was settled in a very simple fashion.
When a quarrel arose, a stranger at haphazard was chosen to decide,
and he did it according to his judgment, the bystanders being witnesses
Barbaro calculates that in the whole ordu, including the encampment of
Ulugh Muhammed, there were 300,000 people. Barbaro tells us the
more valiant among the Tartars were called Tulubagator, which signifies
a valiant fool.t Barbaro says the class was held in great repute among
the Tartars, and from his description they would seem to have been a
kind of Berserkers. The man of peace has a quaint remark about
th^ir name. "This surname," he says, "to my seeming is very con-
venient for them, because I see none that deserveth the name of a
valiant man but he is a fool indeed. For, I pray you, is it not folly in
one man to fight against four ? Is it not madness for one with a knife
to dispose himself to fight against divers that have swords."J He then
tells a story which reminds one of the feats recited in the last volume,
performed by some of the soldiers of Jingis in Persia, and in our own
day by the Uhlans in the French towns. Being one day, he says, in
the street at Tana, some Tartars reported that in a wood, about three
miles from the town, there were some hundred Circassians intent on
making a raid upon the place, as was their custom. Barbaro was in a
butcher's shop, he says, with a Tartar merchant, who, on hearing the
news, asked how many there were of the enemy. On being told one

* Id., 14.
t Lord Stanley adds in a note that this is Tula behadur, and that Bahadury means swag-
gering or boasting.

I Op. cit.,16, 17.

I P

29^ HtSTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

hundred, he said well, we are five, and addressing Barbaro, how many
horses will you make ? The latter said forty. That was forty-five in all.
The Circassians, said the Tartar, are not men but women ; let us go and
take them. They accordingly went, and attacked them unawares and
killed about forty of them. The Tartar wished to pursue the remainder,
and as the others did not do so he went on himself, but he did not
capture any. As soon as their lord was lodged, the remaining Tartars
unloaded their yurts and pitched their camp, which had broad ways
between the yurts, and was very miry in winter and dusty in summer
from the treading of the cattle. They then put up their ovens and
roasted and boiled their flesh, and dressed it with milk, butter, and
cheese, and generally they had some venison or wild flesh, especially red
deer. They had many artificers with them, as clothiers, smiths,
armourers, &c. They had no walls or towers about their camp, a
peculiarity which received an epigrammatic explanation from one of
them, who said, "He that is afraid buildeth towers," an aphorism
which is not easy to gainsay, and which proves the martial habits of the
people. There were also many merchants with them. The Tartars were
much addicted to falconry, using large falcons which they flew at deer,
&c. "Sometimes there passeth over the army a flock of geese, at which
some of them shoot crooked unfeathered arrows, which in ascending
hurle about breaking everything in their way, necks, legs, and wings."*

Their herds of horses were enormous, and they were very skilled in
catching them and putting a collar, which they carried on a pole, over
their necks. These horses were not very good, being little with grekt
bellies and eating no provender. They were in fact similar to the
Cossack horses of our own day. The chief market for them apparently
was Persia. Their oxen were very big, and were exported, Barbaro tells
us, by way of Poland, and also through Wallachia and Transylvania into
Germany, whence they passed into Italy. This breed was apparently
the origin of the famous cattle of the Campagna. They also had a great
number of two-humped camels, which they sold in Persia at twenty-five
ducats each, while those with one hump were smaller, and only brought
ten ducats. Their sheep were also big and long legged, with long wool
and fat heavy tails. These sheep are no doubt represented by the
modern sheep of the Kirghiz steppes. Barbaro describes what may still
be seen there, namely, how small carriages with wheels were attached to
the sheep so as to support their tails. The Tartars, he says, practised
some agriculture, sowing their seed in March, at two or three days'
journey from the encampment. The rest of the story must be told in his
own quaint words : — " The Emperor with the ordu doth meanwhile as
a mother is wont to do with her children. For when she letteth them
go to play she ever keepeth her eye on them, and so doth he never

* Id., 19.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. 299

depart from these ploughmen more than four days' journey, but com-
passeth about them, now here now there, till the corn be ripe, and when
ripe he sendeth those who sowed it or who wished to buy it, with carts,
oxen, and camels." Lord Stanley tells us in a note that in Wallachia the
villagers still go in their carts to a distance from their village and from
any water, plough and sow the ground, and return again in the same
way to gather in the harvest.*

The ground was very fertile, and returned fifty bushels of wheat and
a hundred bushels of millet for one of seed. While speaking of the
agriculture among the Tartars, he tells us an interesting fact in regard to
Ulugh Muhammed's family, proving that he must at this time have been
a very old man. He tells us that a grandson of Ulugh Muhammed, who
had reigned for some years, fearing that his cousin Cormayn (?), who lived
beyond the Itil {i.e., the Volga), might overwhelm them, would not let a
portion of his people go out for their tillage, and thus they did not sow
or reap for eleven years, and had to live on flesh meat, except a scanty
portion of meal and paste. He was, nevertheless, eventually driven
away by his cousin. Barbaro tells us that in crossing rivers the Tartars
made rafts or platforms of dry wood, under which they fastened bundles
of reeds. The latter they also put under their carts and about their
horses, to serve as floats ; and he tells us how, when he was once on the
river, he met the floating debris of such a crossing in great numbers of
these reed bundles on the bank, &c. In speaking of the good side of the
Tartar character, he mentions how he received a second visit from
Edelmulk, Kuchuk Muhammed's brother-in-law, at Tana, who intro-
duced his son to him and presented him with eight slaves, which
he described as part of the prey he had captured in Russia. He made
some presents in return, and then adds with naive quaintness : " Some
^here be that departing from others, thinking never to meet again, do
easily forget their amity, and so use not those courtesies they ought to
use, wherein by my small experience it seemeth to me they do not well.
For as the saying is, mountains shall never meet, but men may."t

Barbaro makes another digression from his story which throws some
light on the curiously adventurous times in which he lived. He says that
being in a vintner's cellar in the Rialto in 1455, he saw at the end of the
cellar " two men tied in chains, which by their countenance he thought
to be Tartars." He was told they had been slaves of the Catalans, from
whom they had fled in a small boat, and had then been captured by this
vintner. Having reported the matter to the Signori di Notte, he had the
two prisoners brought into court and released. On taking them to his
house he asked them whence they were. One of them replied he was a
native of Tana, and had been the servant of one Kazadahuch, whom
Barbaro says he had known well, since he was the Emperor's {i.e., the

* Id., 21. t Op. cit., 23.

30O HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Khan's) customs-officer over everything that went into Tana. " I asked
him," he says, " what was his name. He answered Chebechzi, which
signifies a bulter of meal. And when I had well beheld him, I said unto
him dost thou know me ? He answered no. But, as soon as I
mentioned Tana and Yusuph (for so they called me there), he fell to the
earth, and would have kissed my feet, saying unto me, ' Thou hast saved
my life twice ; now when being a slave I reckoned myself dead, and
another time when Tana was on fire, thou madest a hole in the wall
through which many so creatures escaped, amongst whom was I and my
master both.' " Barbaro says he kept the two Tartars in his house about
two months, and when the ships departed towards Tana he sent them
home. "Wherefore I say," adds the good-hearted old man, "that
departing one from another with opinion never to return into those parts
again, no man ought to forget his amity as though they should never
meet, for there may happen a thousand things that, if they chance to
meet again, he that is most able shall have need of his succour that can
do the least."*

Let us now revert to the Golden Horde. Barbaro, as I have said,
dates the revolution by which Ulugh Muhammed was driven out in 1438.
Kuchuk Muhammed was apparently acknowledged as Overkhan of the
Golden Horde, with his capital at Serai. His accession did not secure
immediate peace, however, for we are told how he proceeded to put to
death Manshuk, the first of his princes, and others.

In 1438 we read of an attack made on PodoUa by the horde of Seyid
Ahmed, in which the brave Michael Busa perished.t Our notices of the
Great Horde or Horde of Serai become very jejune. In the years
1437 and 1438 these Tartars made raids upon Riazan. In 1442 they
again plundered the borders of that exposed principality. In 1445 they
are found in Poland, and advanced as far as Lemberg. The last of
these were doubtless the subjects of Seyid Ahmed. In 1445 the invasion
of Riazan was repeated, under a commander named Mustapha. The
history of this expedition is told by Karamzin.| He calls Mustapha the
Tzarevitch of the Golden Horde {i.e., probably the son of the Khan).
The winter was very cold. The Tartars captured Riazan, where they
made some prisoners and exacted ransoms, and then marched upon
Pereislavl, where they appeared as suppliants rather than enemies. The
severe weather had destroyed all their horses, and they had no means of
returning home. The people of the town allowed them to enter, but the
Grand Prince sent Prince Obolenski against them with a body of the
Cossacks of Riazan and of Mordvins mounted on wooded pattens, called
in Russian liyi (snow-shoes or snow-skates), and armed with maces,
swords, and javelins. The cold prevented the Tartars using their bows,
but Mustapha, who had planted his men on the banks of the Listana,

t /<!., 24, 25, t Golden Horde, 391. J v. 367.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. 301

refused to give way, threw himself with his men on the Russian spears
and was killed. No prisoners save the wounded were taken.* We
are told that Mut Mursa and Usberdi, son of Nushirwan, were captured.t
The vigour of the blood of Jingis was clearly not yet extinct. Some
time after a fresh army marched towards Riazan and the country of the
Mordvins to revenge the death of Mustapha, but was driven out. We
now reach the famous crisis in Russian history when Vasili was made
prisoner by the Khan of Kazan, which I have described in a later
chapter.

The capture of the Grand Prince was a great stroke of fortune for his
cousin and rival Shemiaka, who had retired to Uglitch, where he plotted
with Boris, Prince of Tuer, Ivan of Moyaisk (whom he had persuaded
that Vasili intended to resign Muscovy to the Tartars and appropriate
Tuer to himself), with the boyards of the deceased Constantine Dimitro-
vitch, who were jealous of those of the Grand Principality, together
with many boyards and others at Moscow. This proved how disliked the
weak VasiH was. On the latter's return from Kazan it was determined
to seize him, and this was accompHshed while he and his sons were on a
visit to the famous monastery of the Trinity. During the night of
February the 12th, the conspirators seized the Kremhn unawares, with
the wife, mother, and treasures of Vasili, as well as the houses of many
boyards, which were plundered. Troops were then despatched to the
monastery, the Grand Prince was captured in the church of St. Sergius, and
his friends about him were arrested and pillaged. But worse was to come.
On his arrival at Moscow the conspirators ordered him to be blinded.
This was done in the names of Dimitri Yurivitch (/.<?., Shemiaka), Ivan
of Moyaisk, and Boris of Tuer. " You favour the Tartars so far even
as to appoint whole towns for their entertainment. You continually gorge
them with the gold and money of the Christians. You weigh down your
people with taxes. You caused our brother Vasili the Squinter to be
blinded." The unfortunate prince and his wife were conducted to
Uglitch, while their two sons were taken to Murom by a faithful prince
named Ivan Riapoloviski.J Shemiaka signaHsed his victory by excesses
of various kinds, but the nobles of Moscow were overawed and did him
homage. He began once more to disintegrate the Muscovite dominions
which had been so carefully consohdated during the previous reigns, and
his conduct became so arbitrary that it gave rise to a proverb still in use,
expressive of some ill-judged act, which is said to be " a judgment of
Shemiaka."§ By fair promises he induced the ingenuous Jonas, bishop of
Riazan to repair to Murom, and to bring the young sons of Vasili to
Moscow, when he treacherously broke his word and sent them to join
their father at Uglitch. But he soon began to find his position intolerable,

* Karamzin, v. 367-369. t Golden Horde, 392. J Karamzin, v. 384.

f Id., V. 386.

302 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and that a very general conspiracy was rising against him. He therefore
determined to adopt another policy. Having gone in State to Uglitch, he
summoned Vasili to his presence and behaved in a seemingly courteous
way to him ; he gave him his hberty and the town of Vologda as an
appanage, while Vasili, with unusual and doubtless feigned humiUty
wished his rival a happy reign over Moscow. After a few days' residence
at Vologda he repaired to the monastery of St. Cyril at Bielo Ozero?
where the abbot absolved him from the promise he had made to
Shemiaka, and bade him return and regain his appanage. His partisans
began to gather at Vologda, while he secured a useful friend in Boris of
Tuer, who made peace with him on condition that Vasili's son, who
was seven years old, was affianced to his daughter Mary. With this
help he determined to march upon Moscow. On the way his people
were joined by an army of Tartars from Kazan, who went to his
assistance. The Kremhn was seized by stealth by his partisans, and
this news reaching Shemiaka, together with that of the march of an
army against him, he fled to GaUtch, and thence to Kargopol, taking
with him Vasili's mother, whom he, however, restored before long, and
soon after he and the other conspirator, Ivan of Moyaisk, submitted.
They agreed to restore all the provinces they had usurped, together with
the treasures, crosses, the precious images, and the deeds and letters-
patent of the Khan's, on condition that they were allowed to retain their
appanages peaceably.

Misfortune had taught Vasili some lessons, and his second reign
was marked by considerable prudence. He retained his ecclesiastical
prejudices however. For eight years there had been no metropolitan
in Russia. He now, in 1448, had Jonas consecrated to the office by an
assembly of Muscovite bishops, including the bishops of Rostof, Suzdal,
Kolomna, and Perm, those of Novgorod and Tuer assenting. Jonas did
not repair, as was customary, to Constantinople for benediction, but, on
the contrary, an edict was issued to the bishops of Lithuanian Russia
denouncing the conduct of the Greeks at the council of Florence, and
Vasili was in turn denounced by Pope Pius II. in 1458, as an impious
son of the church, an apostate, &c.* This appointment formed a notable
epoch in the history of the Russian church. It thenceforward became
entirely independent of its mother at Byzantium, which had hitherto had
the appointment of its metropoUtan.t To secure the succession for his
son Ivan, Vasili now had him associated with himself in the government,
while the various princes who ruled in the appanages renewed their
allegiance, and undertook not to ally themselves with the Tartars or
Lithuanians against the Grand Prince. He rewarded Vasili of Borosk
and Michael, brother of Ivan of Moyaisk, with the grant of certain towns,
and also made over to them a portion of the revenues of Moscow, and

* Karamzin, v. 398-400. t Id.

KUCHUK MUHAMMED KHAN. 303

took upon himself the payment of the tribute which they owed to the
horde. These various treaties were signed by the metropohtan Jonas,
who also brought about a good feehng between Muscovy and Poland,
and styled himself the father both of Casimir and the Grand Prince.

Shemiaka continued to behave treacherously. He refused to return
the sacred images and treasures which he had carried off, refused to pay
his quota of the tribute owing to the horde, on the plea that he did not
recognise the Khan Seyid Ahmed, and continued to intrigue with
Novgorod, Ivan of Moyaisk, and the people of Viatka and Kazan. The
bishops of the Grand Principahty thereupon addressed him a famous
letter, recounting his various ill-deeds, recalling the fate of his father and
brother, reproaching him for not having assisted the Grand Prince when
attacked by the Tartars, and with having on the contrary taken advantage
of his misfortunes. They summoned him to make restitution and
repent, and in default threatened him with the terrors of the church.'*
This letter had no effect, and two years after he took up arms and
made an attack on Kostroma, where, however, he was defeated. The
Grand Prince now determined to punish him effectually. He collected a
large force and gave its command to Prince Obolenski. With his own
people there also marched a contingent of Tartars, which advanced to
Galitch in the government of Kostroma, where Shemiaka had encamped
in a very favourable position. The fight was a terrible one, and was
memorable as the last of the struggles between the Russian princes.
Shemiaka was completely defeated, his boyards captured, and his
infantry almost destroyed, while he found shelter at Novgorod. There,
the citizens took up his quarrel, and allowed him to collect some forces,
with which he captured Ustiugue, where those who remained faithful to the
Grand Prince had stones tied round their necks and were thrown into
the river Sukhoma. He afterwards made a diversion towards Vologda,
but failed to capture a single town.

In 1449 the Grand Principality was again invaded by the Tartars of
the Golden Horde, who attacked the neighbourhood of the Pokhra and
of Bitiugue, carried off the wife of Prince Vasih Obolenski, and com-
mitted other ravages. They were defeated by Kassim, the son of Ulugh
Muhammed, who was z. protege of the Grand Prince, and the founder of
the principahty of Kazimof. Others of them pillaged the district of
Eletz, and even advanced as far as the province of Moscow.t

Von Hammer tells us that in 1450, under the leadership of Malberdei
Ulan, the Tartars once more advanced against the Grand Prince, who
was then at Kolomna. He sent his faithful vassal Kassim against them,
and they were defeated on the river Batiutza, and one of their chiefs
named Romodan was killed. They then entered Podolia, and wasted the
borders of Gorodek and Belz, and nearly captured Vladislas of Madof,

* Karamzin, v. 403-406. t Id., 410, 411.

304 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Prince of Belz, who was out hiintin;^. They returned home with a great
booty.*

In 1451 wc hear ol .m inv.i-iit^ii on a larger scale, liu^^ vv.i:> com-
manded by Masofsha, the son of Seyid Ahmed, and its declared object
was to insist on the Grand Prince paying a tribute. The Prince of
Zuenigorod was ordered to guard the passage of the Oka, but he
deserted his post. The Grand Prince himself, who was not a heroic
person, withdrew to the Volga to collect the contingents of the various
towns, while Moscow was confided to the care of his mother Sophia,
his son Yuri, the boyards, and the metropolitan Jonas.

The Tartars reached Moscow on the 2nd of July, set fire to the
suburbs, and were defeated by the Russians in a sortie. They were
afterwards seized with unaccountable panic and withdrew in the night,
leaving behind them carts filled with iron and copper vessels, and arms
and merchandise strewn about.

The Grand Prince, freed from this danger, now determined to suppress
his old enemy Shemiaka, the Prince of Ustiugue, who on the approach of
the Muscovites fled to the Dwina, and eventually sought refuge at
Novgorod, where he was poisoned. This was in 1453. The turbulent
prince, whose end was probably dictated by Vasili himself, was buried in
the monastery of Yuricf.t

In 1452 the Tartars of Seyid Ahmed made another raid upon Podolia.
They captured the fortress of Rosof and carried off the noble Stogney
Rey of the house of Oksha, with his wife anrl children, to.^cthcr with the
landgraf Mrozko and others4

Casimir of Poland collected an aim^ ..y ,,..,.,„,, ii.,., i,,v,i.^iw.,, uui vvmn.
his nobles were assembling at Siradien the Tartars made another attack
upon the district of Lemberg, which they apparently repeated five times.
They were incited to these attacks by the nobles of Lithuania, who
doubtless resented being in a subordinate position to the Poles, and who
had sent Radzivil Hostikovitch as their envoy with presents to Seyid
Ahmed. The Poles found a friend in Haji Girai, the Khan of Krim, who
marched against and defeated the Nogai subjects of Seyid Ahmed ; but
this was only a temporary relief, for in the year 1453 we find the Tartars
making two new raids into " the land of plains." One of their armies
marched by way of Lichtmess, Lusy, and Olyeshko, and carried off 9,000
young men and maidens as prisoners. The other army was divided into
two sections. One of them was defeated on the ist of April, 1453,
between Ostrog and Zinkowiccz, on the river Skucz, by Yorio Lascz,
Johannes Niemiecz, and Maczieiek, and forced to surrender their booty.
A similar fate overtook another body of them who were nearly over-
whelmed by the citizens of Breczlaf.§

In 1455 Seyid Ahmed was again attacked by Haji Girai, and so

♦ Golden Horde, 305. t Kartmrin, v. 414, 415, I Golden Horde, 393. S Id., 396.

AHMED KTIAN. . 305

badly beaten that he lied with his nint; sons anil other princes to Kief.
Andrew Odrowasz, the palatine and captain of Lcniber^% marched
against him at the bidding of Casimir, and made him prisoner. There-
upon the people of Kief fell on such of the Tartars as they could lay
hands upon and killed them. Scyid Ahmed was shortly after sent to
Kovno, where he died miserably.* The same year that he was made
prisoner the Tartars of his horde crossed the Oka and defeated IMince
Simon Jiabitch. They were driven back, however, by a Russian nrmy
under Theodore Basenok Vasilivitch, the voivode of Moscow,

Two years later, namely, in September, 1457, they once more entered
Podolia. Bartholoma^iis lUiczacski, whose prowess had .dready been
tested in struggles with the Tartars, was at Potilicz with Johannes Lascz,
the sub-chamberlain of I'odolia, when news arrived of the Tartar attack,
Having surprised the outposts of the enemy, they ventured to attack the
main body, which w.'is strongly posted. They were defeated and both
killed, and the Tartars returned home in triumph.!

In 1459 the Tartars of Scyid Ahmed again crossed the Oka, and
advanced as far as Kolomna, whence they were driven back by Ivan, the
son of the Grand Prince. A church was built by the metropolitan Iv.in
in commemoration of this victory.J

The year of Kuchuk Muhammcd's death is nowhere recorded, so far
as I know. All we can say is, that it happened before the year 1460,
when the Great Horde was ruled by his son Ahmed.

On his coins, which were struck at Serai, Astr.ikhan, Ordiibazar, and
liulghari, Kuchuk Muhammcd styles himself the fust Siiltan Mnliammcd
Khan, the Supreme Sultan Muh.immed Khan, and Muiuimmed, the son
of Timur Sultan, the Supreme Khan.§

MAHMUD KUAN.

Kuchuk Muhammed left four sons, Mahmud Khan, Ahmed Khan,
Yakub Sultan, and Bakhtiar Sultan. || Of Mahmud Khan we have no
mention in the Russian annals, and he proba]>ly reigned only a short
time. Coins struck by him at Astrakhan and Ordub.azar, but without
dates, are extant. On some of these he styles himself Mahmud Khan,
the son of Muhammcd Khan, the son of Timur Khan.^

AHMED KHAN.

Mahmud Khan was succeeded by his brother Ahmed Khan, who was
a more important figure in history. M. Sorct mentions a coin struck by
him on which he styles himself the Supreme Sultan Ahmed Khan.**

Id,i9;. Ud., 3gS. lid, ♦ Fr«hn, Rei., 3W-30«, i VtU Zwn., I. iS, 39,

H Frsbn, Re*., 393, 394. ** Lettrc a M. Ic Cap. Roan,, &c,, 33,

IP*

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

He first occurs, as far as I can discover, about the year 1460, when,
according to Karamzin, Ahmed, son of Kuchuk Muhammed and Khan
of the Great Horde, besieged Pereislavl of Riazan, but was obhged to
retire with loss. He accused his principal commander Kazat Ulan of
being a secret partisan of the Russians.* We must now again take up
the thread of Russian history.

The death of Shemiaka removed the great rival who had so persistently
opposed Vasili, and he now began to consolidate his power. Ivan of
Moyaisk, who had refused to march with him against the Tartars, was
driven into Lithuania and his appanage annexed.t The proud and
independent merchants of Novgorod were his next victims. They had
given shelter to his enemies, refused to acknowledge the decrees of his
council, and appropriated his revenues. He marched against them in
the winter, and captured Russa, one of their richest entrepots, with a
large booty. A body of 5,000 Novgorodian cavalry, who went to the
rescue under the Prince of Suzdal, was dispersed, and Tucha, the first
possadnik of Novgorod, was captured. Terror now reigned at the city
of merchants, where a majority declared themselves for diplomacy rather
than war, and the archbishop Euphemius and other notables were sent
with an open commission to settle terms. These were granted. A fine of
8,500 roubles was to be paid. All decrees of the national council tending
to limit the authority of the Grand Prince were annulled, and the citizens
undertook not to give asylum to his enemies. The treaty was signed by
the Novgorodians and Pskofians, who had assisted them. Thus did
VasiH pave the way for his sons and grandsons. f Ivan, Prince of Riazan,
dying at this time, left his children under the care of Vasili, who removed
them to Moscow and sent his deputies to rule the principahty. He then
turned upon Vasili of Borosk, who had been so loyal and faithful to him
in his misfortunes, and under the pretext that he was ambitious of
displacing him, he had him conveyed to UgHtch under arrest. Ivan, the
son of the Prince of Borosk, fled to Lithuania, where he shortly after-
wards died. This appropriation was shortly afterwards followed by that
of the throne of Suzdal, whence the grandsons of Kirdiapa were con-
strained to fly; and in 1458-9 the republic of Viatka, a vigorous daughter
of Novgorod, which had persistently defied the Muscovite princes, was
compelled to pay tribute and to place its forces at the disposal of Vasili.
Successful on all sides, he did not venture, however, to interfere with
Tuer, whose princes had been so powerful in the last generation, and we
are told that when its prince, Boris Alexandrovitch, died in 1461, he was
succeeded by his son Michael.§ This death was followed by that of
Vasili himself. He apparently sufi"ered from phthisis, and had recourse
to an extraordinary remedy then in vogue, namely, to put German tinder

* Kuramzin, v. 427. Golden Horde, 399. t Karamzin, v. 415.

» Id., 435.

I Id., 419.

AHMED KHAN. 307

on different parts of his naked body and to set fire to it. This terrible
remedy only produced ulcers which gangrened, and he at length died on
the 17th of March, 1462. By his will he created a number of appanages
for his younger sons, thus undoing much of what he had previously done.
Ivan succeeded to the throne of the Grand Principality and one-third of
the revenues of Moscow ; his second son Yuri was given the towns of
Dimitrof, Moyaisk, Serpukof, and the domains belonging to his mother
Sophia, who had died in 1453 ; his third son Andrew received Uglitch,
Verkh-Beyetsky, and Zuenigorod ; Boris, his fourth son, Volok-Lamski,
Kief, and Russa ; a second Andrew, his youngest son, Vologda, Kubena,
and Zavzeria. To their mother he left the little town of Romanof, his
treasures, all the domains which had belonged to the Grand Princesses,
as well as those he had bought or confiscated for treason.^

Vasili was a weak and vain tyrant. His reign was disgraced by many
cruel acts, and, according to Karamzin, by the introduction of the knout
as a punishment even for grandees. It was borrowed, he says, from the
Mongols.t The period was marked, as usual in times of misfortune in the
Russian annals, with apparitions and natural phenomena — bloody rain,
showers of wheat, weeping images, &c., are among the marvels named.
The ancient ingots or roubles were abolished by him. The same period
was remarkable for the foundation of the famous monastery of Solofsky
on the White Sea, and for the first intercourse the Russians had with the
Voguls, a tribe of Ugrian origin living in the Middle Urals. It was
remarkable, too, for another event which deeply touched Russian
sympathies, and this was the capture of Constantinople by the Turks,
which took place, as is well known, in 1453. As Karamzin says, Con-
stantinople was a second homeland to the Russians. Thence they had
received their religion and their culture, and people at Moscow spoke of it
as Europeans in the time of Louis XIV. did of Paris. The contemporary
Russian annalists write in gloomy terms of the catastrophe, but they
speak with some impartiality also. Listen to their phrases as quoted by
Karamzin. "Without the fear of the law an empire is like a steed
without reins. Constantine and his ancestors have allowed their
grandees to oppress the people. ... the judges have amassed treasures
from the tears and blood of the innocent. Greek soldiers were proud
only of the magnificence of their dress, the citizens did not blush at
being traitors. The soldiers were not ashamed to fly. The Lord has
consequently raised and supported Muhammed, whose warriors delight in
combat, and whose judges do not betray their trust. There remains not
an orthodox empire save that of the Russians. See how the prophecies
of Saint Methodius and Saint Leo the Sage have been fulfilled, that
sometime the children of Ishmael should conquer Byzantium. It may be
that we shall also see accomplished another prophecy, by which the

* Id., 427> 428. t Id., 430.

308 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Russians shall triumph over the children of Ishmael and reign over the
seven hills of Constantinople."* Little did the Russians know of the
fierce future that this conquest was to bring for them, and less of the
terrible gadfly which the Tartars of Krim, who now began to fonn a
separate kingdom of their own, would also prove. The succession of
Ivan III. to the throne of Muscovy forms a notable epoch in its history,
and we may imitate Karamzin in giving a short resume of the then
condition of Russia.

Its long subjection to the Tartars had had a natural result in breaking
down the spirit of independence of its people, and in introducing those
habits of chicanery and diplomacy which are generally the inheritance of
slaves. It was well for the Russians, however, that their oppressors did
not parcel out the land and settle there, as they did in China, and as the
Turks did in Europe, but contented themselves with ruling it from a
distance, and merely exacted taxes and black mail by means of their
agents, or it may well have been that Russia would still be groaning
under their rule. I have already mentioned how effective the Mongol
suzerainty was in inducing the growth of extremely autocratic institutions
within the Grand Principality, where the bell summoning the vetche or
popular assembly was now no longer heard, as it once had been in the
more ancient Russian cities. Moscow, Tuer, &c., the more modern ones,
had not known the privilege, and only one such summons is mentioned
in the former town, when it was at once threatened by the Tartars
and abandoned by its prince. The towns had also lost the privilege
of electing their military chiefs. The boyards or old grandees, who
filled the various administrative posts in the Russian pohty, whose
office was a personal rather than an hereditary one, but who had the
singular privilege of changing their allegiance with their retainers from
one prince to another, formed the only aristocracy of Russia, and
were really the heads of its principal families. They had now sunk
greatly from their former importance, the subjugation of the southern
provinces by the Lithuanians and of the appanages by the Grand Princes
left them practically at the mercy of the great autocrat who filled the
throne of Moscow, and whose hand the Russian annalists are fond
of arguing it was necessary to strengthen by the ehmination of
democratic institutions, in order that when a blow was struck for freedom
it should be a strike-down blow, and not be distracted by internal
dissensions. We can sympathise better with the welding together of the
various broken fragments of the land under one hand, and the conse-
quent sweeping away of local laws, coins, institutions, and armies, which
led to the Grand Prince becoming something more than receiver-general
of Tartar taxes and the commander-in-chief of the general levy. This
consolidation we may well believe could never have been effected but for

AHMED KHAN. 309

the external pressure of the Tartars and the relative importance which
the deputed authority of their Khans gave to the great autocrat.

Ivan III. was only twenty-two when he succeeded to the throne. One
of his first acts was to send back Vasili, the young Prince of Riazan,
who had married his sister Anne, to his principaHty. He then entered
into an offensive and defensive alliance with his brother-in-law Michael,
Prince of Tuer, the brother of his wife Mary.* Three years after his
accession we find him at war with Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden
Horde. It would seem that he had not only neglected to get an
investiture of his kingdom from the Tartars, but had also failed to pay
them the accustomed tribute. Ahmed had collected his people for an
attack upon Muscovy, but meanwhile he quarrelled with Haji Girai, the
Khan of Krim, and a struggle ensued between them on the banks of the
Don.t This was the beginning of a long feud, which was itself the after-
flow of the struggle between Urus Khan and Toktamish, and which was
very opportune for Muscovite interests. In Muscovy the early years of
Ivan were marked by various calamities, by famine and a pestilence known
as " Glandes," which destroyed a vast number of people, 48,400 dying at
Novgorod alone. It was now nearing the seven thousandth anniversary
of the Creation, and a popular delusion was spread abroad that the end
of the world was at hand. Many people became monks, and the
metropolitan Theodosius resigned his office and went to live in a hut
with a leper. Philip, bishop of Suzdal, was elected in his place.t To
restore confidence to his people, Ivan determined upon a war with his
neighbours the Tartars of Kazan, which will be described in a future
chapter, and which ended favourably for the Muscovites. It took place
in 1469. The same year we read that a great army of Tartars, led by a
prince named Maniak, made an irruption into Poland. It divided into
three streams. One marched by way of Vladimir Kremenetz, Kuzmin,
Czudov, and Zathomir, and carried off 10,000 prisoners. Another went
by way of Trabovlya, and retired again with its prey on learning of the
approach of the Polish army. The third division, which invaded
Moldavia, was twice defeated, and the son of Maniak was captured.
Maniak sent one hundred of his people to demand the return of his son.
Ninety-nine of them were slaughtered, and the remaining one was sent
back with his nose cut off.§

Casimir, the Pohsh king, was in close alliance with the Tartars of
Krim, and it is probable that these invaders were Nogais, and Maniak a
son of Seyid Ahmed. We now find him intriguing against Muscovy.
The people of Novgorod, it would seem, were impatient to recover the
liberties they had surrendered to Vasili, and began to act very inde-
pendently. Ivan sent to warn them, in generous but firm language, of
the consequences of their acts, and his words seemed to have produced

Karamzin, vi. 5. 1 Id,., 8. I Id.^ 9-12. § Golden Horde, 403.

310 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

their proper effect when there broke out at Novgorod a very strange
sedition. Marfa, the widow of the possadnik Isaac Boretski, an
ambitious woman with great wealth and influence, conceived the project
of freeing Novgorod from the domination of the Grand Prince, and of
placing it under the patronage of Casimir of Poland, who she probably
expected would make her son his deputy. She was opposed by the
higher clergy and notables, who did not wish to become proteges of
an heretical Latin prince, nor to change the allegiance which Novgorod
had faithfully owned since the days of Ruric ; but their influence was
overborne by the crowd, and eventually an embassy was sent to Casimir
to offer him the title of chief of Novgorod. This he accepted, and a
strange treaty was drawn up between the Polish king and the authorities
of the town, by which he was to have a deputy of the Greek religion, who
was to live at Goroditche, and was not to have a retinue of more than
fifty men. He was to sit conjointly with the possadnik of the town, but
was to have no voice in the affairs of the tissiatski, the archbishopric, or
the monasteries ; besides this lieutenant, he was to be represented by an
intendent and a judge. Casimir undertook to aid them against the
Muscovites. The towns of Kief, Veliki-Luki, and Kholm were to remain
subject to Novgorod, but to pay tribute to Casimir. The Lithuanians and
Novgorodians residing in each others land were to be judged by the lex
loci. The dues from ten salt pits at Russa were assigned to Casimir for
a revenue. While he undertook not to buy their slaves and their villages,
they promised that his dues should be regularly paid ; his deputies
were not to make any exactions upon them, and their domains were to
be managed by their own magistrates. He was to have a joint judge
with theirs at Veliki-Luki, Torjek, and Volok. The Lithuanians were not
to trade directly with the Germans, but through themselves. The German
quarter at Novgorod was to be outside Casimir's jurisdiction. They were
to be permitted to have their metropolitan consecrated at Moscow or at
Kief, as they wished, he was not to build any church of the Latin rite
within their borders, and in case he should succeed in appeasing the
Muscovites, they promised to make a general levy to repay him.*

But the Muscovites were not likely to be appeased. Once more the
Grand Prince sent his envoys to recall the recalcitrant citizens, and as
they were obdurate, war was determined upon. The people of Tuer and
Pskof undertook to assist the Grand Prince. The citizens of Ustiuge
and Viatka were ordered to repair to the Dwina with their contingents.
Prince Daniel Kholmski marched upon Russa, and Prince Vasili
Obolenski Striga, with the Tartar cavalry, to the Amsta. This was,
only the advanced guard, the main body followed. A terrible
vengeance was exacted from the wretched people. Vuichegorod was
captured, and Russa was burnt. Marfa meanwhile, with the usual

* Karamzin, vi. 35-38.

AHMED KHAN, 3II

pertinacity of martial women, inspired vigour into the councils of her
people. Even the poorest labourers were drawn into the ranks of the
regiments or made to man the war boats. A momentary success of the
Novgorod infantry was followed by a disastrous defeat, in which 500 men
perished, and the captives had their noses and lips cut off— a barbarous
custom, probably learnt from the Mongols — while their captured cuirasses
and helmets were flung into the stream contemptuously by the troops of
the Grand Prince, who declared they needed not the arms of traitors.
Presently a more important battle was fought on the river Chelone, in
which the Muscovites were greatly outnumbered, but were superior in dis-
cipline and skill to the armed mob opposed to them. The Novgorodians
were completely defeated, and their chronicler assigns an ambuscade laid
by the Tartar cavalry as the cause ; 12,000 men perished, and 1,700 were
made prisoners, among them some of the principal rebels. The draft
treaty of peace already mentioned was also captured. The victorious
Muscovites proceeded to ravage the country as far as the Narova and the
frontiers of Livonia. The Grand Prince repaired to Russa, where some
of the ringleaders were beheaded or imprisoned, while others were freely
sent home. Meanwhile the division of the Muscovite army which had
marched to the Dwina gained a victor)- there over the combined troops
of the Dwina and the Petchora, colonists and faithful subjects of Great
Novgorod. Nor did the Polish king send any succour. The envoy in
fact who had been sent to apprise him had not been allowed to cross the
Livonian territory, and had had to return. Want began to be felt within
the city, and the more martial spirits, who were determined to prosecute
the war, were met by the dangerous cries of bread and peace.* The
archbishop Theophilus and the principal notables of the town were sent
to the Muscovite camp at the mouth of the Chelone to entreat for the
citizens. They prostrated themselves humbly, and when Ivan ordered
his secretary to read out a list of the various grievances which the Grand
Princes had suffered at their hands, they rephed that they had not gone
to justify anything but to ask for pardon. Pardon was granted them, but
they undertook to pay a fine of 15,500 roubles or 80 pounds of silver, to
restore the domains they had appropriated, to duly pay the annual taxes
to himself, and the ecclesiastical dues to the metropolitan, to have their
archbishops consecrated at Moscow, and promised to renounce all
connection with Casimir and the other enemies of Moscow, that they
would abolish the acts of the vetche or national assembly, recognise him
as supreme judge, and issue no judicial acts not previously confirmed
by himself. He on his part gave up to them again Torjek and his recent
conquests on the Dwina, and swore not to violate their rights. Marfa
was, as if in disdain, not even mentioned in the treaty, and the Grand
Prince returned home in triumph, while the rash merchants of Novgorod

* Id., 50-54-

312 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

had to deplore at leisure the terrible ravage of their country, which
became for a time the prey of roving bands of robbers.*

Although Casimir did not render any direct aid to his proteges the
people of Novgorod, it was not through any good will he felt for the
Muscovite power, and we now find him intriguing and causing it trouble
in another direction. Vasili Dimitrovitch, ancestor of the Grand Prince
Ivan, had bought in Lithuania a Tartar named Misur, who had been
captured by Vitut. A grandson of this Misur, named Kiree (? Girai),
deserted the Muscovite service and sought refuge in Poland, where he
gained the ear of Casimir, and was sent by him to the Golden Horde to
incite Ahmed against the Russians, urging that the ambition of the
Grand Prince was to break off his allegiance and to cease paying tribute.
His persuasion was supported by that of Timur, the first grandee at
Ahmed's court, but the Khan had to exercise considerable caution, for
the power of the horde was fast decaying, and this very year we find that
the people of Viatka took boat on the Volga, and hearing that Ahmed
was encamped some fifty versts away from Serai, they made a descent
upon it and carried off a large booty, running the gauntlet of a number of
Tartar boats, which would have cut off their retreat.t

Ahmed at length sent Girai back with a promise that he would at once
attack the Muscovites ; and a few months later, leaving, says the
chronicler, the old, the rich, and the children in charge of his wife, he
approached Alexin on the Oka4 He also put under arrest a messenger
whom the Grand Prince had sent to him. The latter, on hearing of this
invasion, ordered the boyard Feodor, with the troops of Kolomna, to
the Oka, and presently sent a larger contingent under Daniel Kholmski,
Obolenski Striga, and his brother, with a contingent under the friendly
Tartar chief Daniar, altogether a force of 140,000 men. Nevertheless, so
great was still the fame of the Tartars, that considerable fear reigned at
Moscow, and the Grand Prince's mother retired to Rostof. The Tartars
succeeded in burning Alexin, which was an unfortified town, and its
inhabitants were either burnt or made prisoners. They then fell upon a
detachment of Muscovites on the other side of the Oka, but on the
appearance of reinforcements retired. We are told how the Russians
marshalled their men on one side of the river, and how the Tartars,
having seen from the other bank their strength and equipment, retired,
and when darkness came on fled precipitately, carrying away with them
the Russian envoy Kilitshei Volnin. Their retreat was so rapid, that
they regained their camp in six days, while their advance had occupied
six weeks.§ This attack took place in the year 1471, and one account
assigns the breaking out of a contagious disease as the cause of the
retreat. This same year Prokhor was installed as bishop of Serai. ||

* Id., 58. t Karamzin, vi. 63. J Vel. Zern., i. Note, 36.

Karanuin, vi. 65. Vel. Zern., i. Note, 36. |j Golden Horde, 404.

r

AHMED KHAN, 313

About the time of this invasion we find the borders of Muscovy
enlarged towards the north-east by the conquest of Permia, whose towns
were the seat of a great trade in furs, and were peopled largely by
colonists from Novgorod. They were successively occupied, and their
prince, Michael, was made prisoner. His son was allowed to return an4
to reign for a while as z. protege of the Grand Prince.*

In 1472 Ivan III. married Sophia, the niece of Constantine Palaeologos,
the last Emperor of Constantinople, This wedding was arranged at the
instance of the pope, who wished to complete the work of the Council of
Florence. It was also very grateful to Ivan, who spoke of his bride as
a branch of an Imperial tree whose shadow had once covered all
orthodox and brother Christians.t He probably also deemed that by
this graft his own descendants would some day have claims upon the
mistress of the Bosphorus.

It is very curious to read of the graceful compliments that passed
between the pope and the ambassadors of Ivan, and to read further that
the solemn betrothal of Sophia took place in the Basilica of Saint Peter
at Rome. The pope gave her a dowry, and sent a legate and other
ecclesiastics with her, and she made a stately progress across Europe,
and was met at Dorpat by a Russian escort.l She was received with
great honour at Pskof and Novgorod, and was eventually married at
Moscow. The legate and his companions tried in vain to induce the
Russian authorities to submit to the decision of the council of Florence
and then returned home. Karamzin remarks that this famous marriage
broke the seclusion which had hitherto surrounded Muscovy. Till then an
unknown land in the west, it now began to form a unit of the European
body-politic. While the destruction of Constantinople drove many
Greeks and other useful emigrants to Italy, another stream went to
Russia, and initiated a kind of renaissance there. The services of the
church acquired the pompous surroundings they wore at Constantinople,
" while many books, &c., found their way to the Russian libraries. Ivan
also adopted the arms of the Greek Emperors, the double-headed eagle,
and his seal bore on one side an eagle and on the other a horseman
trampling on a dragon, with the inscription, " The Grand Prince, by the
grace of God, Sovereign of all Russia."§

We now find the Venetians asking Ivan to incite the Khan of the
Golden Horde to attack and harass the Turks. On the other hand Ivan,
who was desirous of embellishing his capital, sent to Venice for an able
architect. Fioravanti Aristotle, who had built a fine palace at Venice,
accordingly went to Russia, and there designed and built the famous
Church of the Assumption within the Kremlin, which was consecrated
on the 1 2th of August, 1479, and which still survives; other Italians were
employed upon other large buildings. Inter alia there was built the

* Karamzin, vi. 59-61. 1 M, 7?. I Jd., 77. $ M., 86,

314

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Granovitaia Palata or Granite Palace, which also survives, and which
was meant for State ceremonials. The residences of the Grand Princes
had hitherto been of wood only, the constant victims of merciless
Russian fires. Ivan had a brick palace built by the Greek Alevizo, which
is still known as the Palace of the Belvedere, and his example was
followed by the greater grandees. He also built the massive walls and
bastions of the Kremlin as they now repiain. Cannon founders were intro-
duced, while Italians improved the character and style of his coinage,
on some specimens of which the name of the architect Aristotle occurs.
When we read of the rising empire of Muscovy stretching itself in
various directions, making such dignified alliances, and otherwise
showing signs of great vigour and rejuvenescence, we are apt to forget
that the Grand Princes were still the vassals of the Tartars, and Muscovy
only a dependence of the Khanate of the Golden Horde ; but this period
of subserviance was drawing to a close. We are told that Sophia
continually taunted her husband with his position, and asked how long
she was to remain a slave of the Tartars. There was a house within the
Kremlin where the ambassadors and other functionaries of the horde
resided, and where the Tartar merchants congregated. As they acted as
spies upon the Russians, Sophia determined to rid herself of them, and
craftily wrote a letter to the wife of the Khan Ahmed, accompanied by
presents, in which she said that in consequence of a dream, she had
determined to build a church on the site of this house (the place where
the church of Saint Nicholas Gostunsky now stands). She asked
that it might be made over to her, and offered to replace it with
another. The Tartars consented, the house was demolished, but thence-
forward no resting place was found for the strangers within the Kremlin.
It is said she also persuaded Ivan that in future he must not march out
to meet the Tartar ambassadors. Formerly when these functionaries
arrived bearing with them the Basma or portrait of the Khan, it was the
custom of the Grand Princes to go out and meet them, and then to
prostrate themselves, offering a cupfull of kumis and spreading a sable
skin under the feet of the person who read the Khan's letter, which was
listened to kneehng. During the reign of Ivan a church was built on the
spot where this ceremony generally took place. It was dedicated to the
Saviour, and still survives.* Herberstein says that latterly Ivan, on the
approach of the ambassadors, used to feign sickness.t He, however,
continued to pay tribute, which in the official acts of the time is called
the tax of the horde. We find Nicephorus Bassenkof mentioned as an
envoy from Ivan to the Khan, are further told that Karachuk went in the
same capacity from Serai, accompanied by 600 servants and 3,200
merchants, escorting 40,000 Asiatic horses for sale in Russia. J I have
mentioned that the Venetians tried to persuade Ahmed to declare war

* Karamzin, vi. iii.

Ud.,6. Note, 8.

I Id., 112.

AHMED KHAN. 315

against the Turks. Their envoy for this purpose was Trevisani, who
visited Serai. About this time that Khan had a struggle with Mengli
Girai, the Khan of Krim, whom he drove out. Proud of this performance,
he sent Bochuk to demand that Ivan should repair to the horde to do
homage. The Grand Prince received the envoy courteously and sent
back presents with him, but he refused to go *

Many severe things have been said about the peculiar policy adopted
by Ivan. It was certainly not heroic, and when he gained his ends it
was more by craft and chicane than by open fighting. People forget
that such characters are absolutely necessary in certain stages of national
progress. What would France have been but for Louis XL, or England but
for Henry VI I. ? and the position of Russia was far more difficult. With
many more external enemies and a long inheritance of disintegration
within ; Charles XII. of Sweden and such as he, would simply have buried
the empire under glorious ruins, while Ivan's persistent Macchiavelianism
welded together a splendid inheritance.

At this time Contarini, the Venetian envoy, passed through Russia on
his journey to and from Persia. He tells us how on his return home, in
April, 1476, he sailed with one Marco, a Russian envoy, from Derbend
on the Caspian to the mouth of the Volga, and thence to Citracan '(/.^.,
Astrakhan), which he says was seventy-five miles from the river's mouth.
Some of the merchants who accompanied him were taking rice, silk, and
fustians for the Russian market, and there were some Tartars going to
get furs for sale at Derbend. Between Citracan and the coast, he says,
there was a large salt lake, yielding salt of excellent quality, from which
Russia was principally supplied, and which would suffice fof a great part
of the world. Marco, he says, was allowed to land as he had friends in
the town, but he himself was prohibited doing so. He, however, went
ashore and lodged in the same house with his friend. ^' In the morning,"
he says, " came three ill-favoured Tartars, who told Marco that he was
welcome as he was a friend of their lord, but that for me I had become
his slave as the Franks were their enemies." Marco at length arranged
that he should pay their lord a sum of 2,000 alermi (?) by way of ransom.
" This sum did not include," he says, " what was extorted by others. As
I had not a soldo, the money was advanced on very usurious terms by
Russian and Tartar merchants who were going to Muscovy, on security
given by Marco. Although our difficulty with the lord might be said to
have been overcome by this arrangement, the dog of a Comerchier used
to come to our house when Marco was not at home, and, after knocking
down my door, would threaten in his cursed voice to have me impaled,
saying that I had jewels in quantities. I was therefore obliged to
appease him as best I could. Many and many a time, also, Tartars
drunk with a beverage they make with apples, used to come and shout

* M, 112.

3l6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

that they would have the Franks, who had not the hearts of men. We
were terrified into purchasing their silence also." The travellers
remained at Astrakhan from the ist of May to the i6th of August, 1476.
He goes on to say that the town belonged to three sons of a brother of
the present Emperor of these Tartars, who inhabited the plains of
Circassia and the country lying in the direction of Tana. In the heat of
summer they {i.e., the Great Horde) went towards the confines of Russia
in search of fresh pasturage. These three brothers remained in
Astrakhan a few months in the winter, but in the summer did like
the rest. The latter were, he says, the nephews of the Khan of
the Great Horde. He tells us one of them, and apparently the chief
one, was named Kasim, and he was then at strife with his uncle {i.e.,
with Ahmed). This is confirmed by Karamzin, who says that Ahmed
was for a long time at strife with his nephew named Kassyda.* Kassyda
is obviously the same person as the Kasim of Contarini. The other
two princes I shall revert to further on. Contarini says their father
had been Khan of the horde, which makes it clear that they were
the sons of Mahmud Khan. He thus describes his journey to
Moscow. "On the loth of August, 1476, the feast of St. Lawrence, as we
have said, we left Citracan, as I shall hereafter relate. The lord of
Citracan, named Kasim Khan, sends an ambassador to Russia every
year to the Duke of Muscovy (more for the sake of obtaining presents
than anything else), who is accompanied by a great many Tartar mer-
chants, who form a caravan, and take with them silk manufactured in
Gesdi, and fustian] stuffs to exchange for furs, saddles, swords, bridles,
and other things which they require. And as the country between
Citracan and Muscovy is a continual desert, everyone is obliged to carry
provisions. The Tartars, however, care little to do so, as they always
drive a great number of horses with them, some of which they kill every
day for food. They live, indeed, continually on meat and milk without
other food, no one being even acquainted with bread unless it be some
merchant who has visited Russia. We, however, were obliged to
provide ourselves as well as we could. We took a little rice, with which
a mixture is made with milk dried in the sun, and called thur, which
becomes very hard, tastes rather sour, and is said to be very nourishing.
We had also onions and garlick, besides which I obtained with much
trouble a quart of biscuits made of very good wheaten flour, and a salted
sheep's tail."t

The route of the travellers lay between two tributaries of the Volga^
but as Kasim Khan was at war with his uncle, pretending that
he was the true Emperor, his father having been the Emperor of the
Orda and in possession of the territory, they determined to cross the
river, and to go as far as the narrow pass between the Tanais and the

* Karamxin, vi. 177. t Contarini's Trarels, ed. Hack. Soc, iii, 152.

AHMED KHAN. 317

Volga (/>., to near Tzaritzin). The Tartar who was his guide not finding
a boat to take Contarini and his party over in, collected some branches,
which he bound together as well as he could ; and after placing the
saddles upon them, tied them with a rope to the tail of a horse, which he
drove to an island in the river, a distance of two bow shots. He then
returned and took a Russian woman, and eventually Contarini himself,
and also his horses. " This was the third day," he says, " I had not eaten,
and when he (z>., the Tartar) gave me a little sour milk I received it with
the greatest thanks, and thought it very good.^ A number of Tartar neat-
herds, who were on the island, collected round to look at him, no
Christian having ever been there before. On the 14th of August a lamb
was killed in his honour, which was partly roasted and partly boiled, but
no trouble whatever was taken to wash the flesh, as they said that
washing took all the flavour away, nor did they scum it with anything
but a twig. Some of this meat and some sour milk was then served
up, and, although it was the eve of our Lady (of whom I craved forgive-
ness as I could hold out no longer), we all began eating together.
Mares' milk was also brought, of which they wished me to drink, as it
gives great strength to man, but as it stunk most horridly I refused to
take it, which gave them some offence."* Two days later he crossed to
the further bank of the river, and met Marco, who had crossed further
south, and his caravan.

Speaking of the Great Horde, he says : — " This horde is governed by
an Emperor, whose name I do not remember, who rules over all the
Tartars in those parts. These Tartars, as I have said, are constantly
wandering in search of fresh pasturage and water, and live entirely on
milk and meat. They have, I believe, the most beautiful oxen, cows,
and sheep in the world, the meat being of good flavour on account of the
excellence of the pastures. Mares' milk, however, is held in great
estimation. Their country consists of beautiful and extensive plains,
where not a mountain is to be seen. I did not visit this horde myself,
but was desirous of obtaining what information I could respecting it and
its numerical strength. It is the general opinion that, although it
contains altogether a great many people, a thousand men armed with
sword and bow could scarcely be mustered in it, all the rest being women
and children in great numbers, or men shoeless and without arms of any
kind. They are accounted valiant, as they plunder both Circassians and
Russians. Their horses are no better than wild ; they are timid, and it
is not the custom to shoe them. These Tartars themselves are generally
looked upon as brutes. As has been said, they dwell between the rivers
Tanais and Volga. But there is said to be another tribe of Tartars living
beyond the Volga, in an east-north-easterly direction, who are supposed
to be very numerous. They wear long hair reaching to their waists, and

* Id., 154.

31 8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

are called wild Tartars. They wander in search of pasturage and water
like the others, and in winter, when there is much cold and ice, they are
said to come as far as Citracan, nor do they commit any damage in the
town, unless it be some paltry theft of meat."*

Our traveller now proceeded to Riazan, a wooden town with a wooden
castle, thence to Kolomna, and reached Moscow on the 26th of
September. He was not very cordially received, it would seem, by Ivan,
who resented the intercourse of the Venetians with the Gr^at Horde,
and especially the recent journey of Trevisani to the Tartars. He met
Aristotle, the architect, already mentioned, and also a Maestro Trifoso, a
goldsmith from Cattaro, who had made some beautiful vases for the
Grand Duke. He describes Moscow as built entirely of wood, as
traversed by a river, having a castle with a portion of the town on one
side, and the rest on the other. The river was crossed by several
bridges. The town was surrounded by forests, with which indeed, he
says, the greater part of the country was covered. The land abounded
in grain, which was then, as it is now, very cheap. Meat was also very
cheap, three pounds of beef or pork being only a soldo. A ducat would
buy one hundred fowls or forty ducks, and geese were little more than three
soldi each. Hares were common, but other game scarce. Many small
birds were sold in the market. Water melons, as now, abounded. Most
of the heavy traffic was carried on in the winter, when the roads were
covered with snow, and it was easy for sledges to be moved. In October
the river was frozen over, and a bazaar was held where provisions were
sold. The cattle and pigs, when killed, were frozen, the former skinned
and then made stand up on their legs. " The meat you eat," he says, " has
sometimes been killed three months or more." Fish, fowl, &c., were
treated in the same way. " They have a pope of their own," he says, "and
hold ours in httle esteem, saying that we are doomed to perdition. They
have no wine of any kind, but drink a beverage made of honey and the
leaves of the hop. They boast of being great drunkards, and despise
those who are not. Their custom is to remain from morning till mid-
day in the bazaars, and to spend the rest of the day in the taverns in
eating and drinking. After mid-day you cannot obtain any service of
them whatever." Many merchants from Germany and Poland, he says,
frequented the city to buy peltries, such as the furs of young goats, foxes,
ermines, squirrels, wolves, &c., for which Moscow was the great
emporium.t

Before Contarini left the Grand Duke, who is described as thirtyfive
years of age, tall, thin, and handsome, was more courteous, undertook to
pay the money he owed the Russians and Tartars, entertained him at his
table, gave him a gown of ermine skins, and also a present of a thousand
squirrel skins, and showed him some of his own dresses of cloth of gold

* Ztf., X55. t /rf., 161, i6a.

AHMED KHAN. 3^9

lined with ermine. At the farewell banquet he was given a large silver
cup filled with hydromel, this he Was told to empty and then keep the
vessel, which was done when great honour was to be done to envoys or
others. He then returned home by way of Poland.*

Barbaro's account of Russia adds but little to the graphic details of
Contarini. He tells us the drink used by the Russians was called bossa
{i.e., kwass, from the Turkish and Persian buzah, a kind of beer). The
abundance of flesh in Russia, he says, may be gathered from the fact,
that they did not sell it by weight but by the eye, and gave as much as
four pounds for a marchetto {i.e., a coin not worth an English halfpenny).
Seventy hens could be got for a ducat, and a goose for three marchetti.t

Let us now continue our account of the aggrandisement of Ivan HI.
We have reached the time when the proud burghers of Novgorod had to
stoop their heads very low. That mercantile republic, like others
similarly based — like Venice and Genoa — had become in effect an
oligarchy, in which wealth and its surroundings ruled the roost, while the
people were tyrannised over. Ivan cleverly took advantage of this state
of things. He fomented the dissensions between the boyards and the
people, and where injustice seemed inevitable he laid the blame on the
ancient laws of Novgorod. At the invitation of the lower orders, he
repaired in person to the banks of the Volkhof, and was received with royal
hospitality, presents of casks of red and white wine, cloth of Ypres,
ducats, and the much valued teeth of the narwhal, &c. He in his turn
entertained the higher clergy, the possadniks, and boyards at his own
table. He then proceeded to business, and courts were opened for the
trial of the many complaints which had arisen. *' Then it was," says
Kelly, "that he sent to Moscow, loaded with chains, the nobles of
Novgorod who had formerly been his enemies. He had procured their
denunciation by the people, whose blind jealousy exulted to see violated,
in the person of these eminent men, the ancient law of the republic,
* that none of its citizens should be tried or punished out of the hmits of
its own territory.' "J What Ivan did, he did under the semblance at least
of equity and fairness. Those taller poppies, upon whom the crowd lean
for support in tempestuous times, were charged with treacherous dealings
with the Lithuanians or with oppression, charges often well founded, and
they were accordingly weeded out. He then returned to Moscow, after
distributing a generous largess and receiving rich presents in return.§

The punishment of these boyards was followed by a crop of fresh
complaints from those who easily found grievances now that they had
Ivan to repair to ; and, for the first time in its history, Novgorod was a
constant suppliant at the feet of the Grand Prince, " who, when by this
slow, gradual, and almost imperceptible progression, thought he had led
them far enough astray from their ancient usages, and had made them

* Id., 165. t Id., 29, 30. I Kelly, i. 115. § Karamzin, vi. 127.

320 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

forget their ancient liberties, then on every thoughtless movement to
which he had given rise, and on every imprudence he had excited, he
grounded a claim of right."*

The Grand Princes were styled Gospodars of Novgorod, Gospodar
meaning master. Either through inadvertence or design, an envoy of
the republic addressed Ivan under the style of gosudar {i.e., liege lord),
upon which he wrote a letter to the citizens, claiming the rights of an
absolute master, demanding that they should take an oath of allegiance
to him as their monarch, only legislator, and judge ; that they should
accept only such judges as he sent them, and should surrender to him
the ancient palace of Yaroslaf, where their public meetings were held.t
These demands caused an outbreak of patriotic fervour, the traitors who
had connived at the encroachments of Ivan were seized and terribly
punished, and the envoy who had committed himself was torn in pieces.
The Muscovite representative, however, was treated with courtesy, but
Ivan was plainly told they would never submit to him as their sovereign,
they would not surrender their ancient meeting hall, nor allow the
Muscovite court, which sat at Goroditche according to ancient custom,
to transfer its sittings to Novgorod.^ Ivan professed to be much
aggrieved at this answer, and insisted that, having been styled their
sovereign by their envoys, the Novgorodians now intended to insult him
before all the people. He ordered a general muster of his troops, and
constrained the unwilling citizens of Pskof and Tuer, who doubtless saw
their own fate looming in the distance, to send their contingents. He
quickly surrounded Novgorod and occupied its environs. The citizens
built a wooden rampart about it, but they saw they were overpowered,
and that the real choice left them was death by famine or the sword.
They accordingly began to negotiate. Several times their notables
approached Ivan, seeking to restrain his demands, but from these he
would not move. He would reign at Novgorod as he did at Moscow.
They must give up their possadnik and the great bell which summoned
the national council, and also make over to him some Royal domains
within their territory, such as he had at Moscow.§ These terms the
citizens were obliged at last to submit to, and we are told that the
domains he seized, which consisted of a large portion of the land
belonging to the archbishop Theophilus and the monasteries, amounted
to 2,700 arpens, without counting the territory of Torjek.

It proves that Ivan was a statesman as well as a crafty manipulator,
that his victory was not stained with any excesses. " Marfa and seven
of the principal Novgorodians were the only persons sent prisoners to
Moscow, and had their property confiscated ; but on the 15th of January,
1478, the national assemblies ceased, and the citizens took the oath of

* Kelly, op. cit., i. 115, 116. t Karamzin, vi. 129, 130. K«lly, i. 116.

I Kar&nuiOi vi. 132. S Id., X49> &c.

AHMED KHAN. 321

allegiance (Kelly says slavery, but this is mere prejudice). On the i8th
the boyards entered voluntarily into the service of the victor, and the
possessions of the clergy, united to the domain of the prince, served to
endow the three hundred thousand boyard-followers, the immediate
vassals of his own creation, by whom the supremacy of Moscow over all
the empire was to be permanently secured. He exacted the surrender of a
great part of the territories belonging to the city, and is said to have
conveyed to Moscow three hundred cart-loads of gold, silver, and
precious stones, besides a vast quantity of furs, cloths, and other
valuables.* Among the presents given to him by the archbishop are
mentioned a gold bejewelled image, a cup in the shape of an ostrich egg
ornamented with silver, a carnelion cup, a crystal bowl, a silver spoon
weighing six pounds, golden vessels, and several hundred ducats.t But
the trophy which was probably held in greatest esteem was the cele-
brated bell which had summoned the citizens of Novgorod to their
assemblies, which was carried off and hung in the tower of the church of
the Assumption, in the market-place of Moscow.^

It was not likely that the Novgorodians would instantly submit with a
good grace. Smouldering discontent lingered among them, and they
still fed on the hope of some returning good fortune. Ivan was well
informed of this, and we find him in 1481 seizing some of the principal
and richest boyards, and incarcerating them in various parts of Russia.
Then began a series of transportations of the sturdy republicans. Fifty
of the chief families of Novgorod were transferred to Vladimir, and this
was followed by the moving of eight thousand boyards and merchants,
who obtained possessions at Vladimir, Murom, Nijni Novgorod, Perei-
slavl, Yurief, Rostof, and Kostroma, while their old possessions were made
over to Muscovite merchants. Thus was the spirit of the old republic
broken ; its most chivalrous sons carried away. " It was now," says
Karamzin, " like a body without a soul ;" and presently and inadvertently
a' greater misfortune overtook it. " Having been insulted by a Hanseatic
city, Ivan ordered to be put in chains at Novgorod all the merchants of
all the cities of that union, and confiscated the whole of their property.
From that moment confidence was no more, the commerce of the North
took another route, and the great Novgorod, which for many centuries
was able to muster a force of 40,000 men, and which is said to have been
peopled by 400,000 souls, has dwindled until now it is nothing more than
an insignificant borough."§ How insignificant and decayed may be seen
in the picture lately drawn of it by Mr. Mackenzie Wallace.

The fall of Novgorod immensely increased the power and resources of
Muscovy. Its borders now stretched to the White Sea and the Urals,
and it came into immediate contact with the Swedes and the Germans of
Livonia. Its politics were now entering upon a fresh phase, and Ivan

* Kelly, op. cit., i. 118. t Kwanuin, vi. 157. 15S. Id., i59» i Kellyj op. cit., i. 119.

I R

322

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

was becoming one of the most important integers in the European
assembly of crowned heads. This bound forward was succeeded by
another of even greater importance, namely, the breaking of the yoke
which had hitherto made the Russians the subjects of the Tartars.
Ahmed having sent fresh envoys to bring the Russian tribute, they were
presented to Ivan, *' who," we are told by one annalist, " thereupon took
the Basma or image of the Khan, threw it down, and trode it under,
and having put to death all the envoys except one, he bade him return
to his master and report what he had seen, and to tell him further,
that if he continued to trouble him, he should be served in the same
fashion as his image had been." Ahmed was naturally enraged, and
began to collect his forces. This story, however, is hardly consonant
with the crafty and diplomatic temper of Ivan, and other accounts
attribute the arming of Ahmed more probably to the instigation of
Casimir of Poland, who began to fear the growing power of Muscovy,
and sent Ak Girai as his envoy to the Golden Horde accordingly.
Ahmed had for a long time been struggling with his nephew Kassyda or
Kasim, but they were now friends again, Kasim having no doubt
submitted, and it was arranged that while the Tartars advanced to the
Oka the Lithuanians should march to the Ugra, and thus attack Russia
on both sides. Accordingly, in the year 1480, Ahmed marched with his
nephew Kassyda, with six of his sons and a number of Tartar princes.*
Meanwhile the Krim Tartars, who were the close allies of the Russians
and at feud with Lithuania, made a descent upon the latter country, and
prevented Casimir from performing his part of the contract. The
Grand Prince having learnt that Ahmed had advanced with his warriors
and left his homeland unprotected, thereupon ordered his protegi
Nurdaulat, the tzar of Gorodetz, and Prince Vasili Nostrowali, the
voivode of Zuenigorod, to make a descent upon " the city of Batu."
Gregorief argues that this was not Serai, but such a view seems incon-
sistent with the context, where we read that, taking ship on the Volga
these leaders proceeded to the fated town, which they captured. They
would have destroyed it, but a Tartar named Oblasi or Obuyas, in the
suite of Nurdaulat, addressed him, saying, " What are you going to do ?
Have you forgotten that this ancient horde is our common mother, that
to it we owe our existence ? You have fulfilled the calls of honour and
the promise you made to the Muscovites. You have given Ahmed a
terrible blow. It is enough. Spare the poor ruins of his power."
Nurdaulat thereupon retired.t

Meanwhile, having collected an army at Moscow, Ivan marched
to the Oka. His wife seems to have sought safety at Bielozirsk. His
mother alone consented to stay to animate the courage of the people.
He was not made of heroic materials; his cold and phlegmatic

* Karanuin. vi. 176, i77. t Vel. Zern., 23. Note, 55. Karamzin, vi. 180 and 196.

AHMED KHAN. 323

temperament, like that of Louis XI., dreaded an ill turn in fortune, nor
could he forget the terrible fate which had overtaken Moscow after the
great victory of Dimitri on the Don, and he would gladly have avoided
a conflict. Ahmed, on hearing that the borders of the Oka were
occupied by the Muscovites, abandoned the Don and advanced upon
Mtsensk, Odoef, and Lubutsk on the Ugra, in the hope probably of
forming a junction with his ally Casimir. Ivan thereupon ordered his
son and brother to march upon Kaluga, and to occupy the left bank of
the Ugra. He himself retired to Moscow, and arrived there as the
inhabitants were leaving the suburbs and sheltering in the Kremlin. His
arrival, which implied the desertion of his soldiers, was by no means
welcome. The people cried out, "The prince has handed us over
to the Tartars ; he has weighed the land down with taxes without paying
the tribute to the horde, and now that he has irritated the Khan he
refuses to fight for the country."* Touched by these reproaches, he did
not enter the Kremlin, but stopped at the village of Krasnoi, and said he
had merely returned to his capital to take counsel with his mother, the
clergy, and the boyards. " March then," said the bishops and boyards,
"bravely to meet the enemy," while the aged archbishop cried out,
" Does it become mortals to fear death ? We try in vain to avoid our
destiny. I am feeble and bent with the weight of years, but I am ready
to brave the Tartar sword, and I will not turn away my face from his
sparkling lance." Even his own son refused to go to him, saying he
preferred to die rather than to leave his army for an instant at such a
pass. Ivan, seeing how matters were turning, promised to go and oppose
the Tartars. He also made peace with his brothers, with whom he had
had a long strife, and having made certain dispositions of the local forces,
he once more set out. The metropolitan Gerontius blessed him as he
departed. " May God protect your empire and grant you victory, as he
formerly did to David and Constantine. Have the courage and firmness
of a soldier of Christ, my son ; a good shepherd will sacrifice himself for
his sheep ; you are not a hireling ; save then the flock the Lord has
intrusted to you from the tooth of the sanguinary wolf who approaches
our frontiers. God shall be our ally." Amen, said the other bishops,
as they urged Ivan not to listen to the perfidious voices of those who
counselled peace.

These brave words, however, did not produce any very marked spirit
in the Grand Prince. He advanced, it is true, to the Luya, and gave out
he should direct the movements of his forces from behind that vantage.
Meanwhile the two armies faced each other on opposite banks of the
Ugra, across which they for some days carried on an interchange of
musketry and artillery fire. At length, seeing that the Russians did not
mean to retire, Ahmed withdrew for a distance of two versts, and sent

* Karamzin, vi. 183.

324 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

out sections of his people to forage. Some of his men addressed the
Russians across the river, saying, " Let our tzar pass freely, or it will go
badly with your Grand Prince and bring misfortune on yourselves." A
few days later Ivan held a counsel of his grandees, who showed a bold
front, except two of his favourites, the boyards Ostshera and Gregory
Mamon, whose mother had been burned as a witch by Ivan of Moyaisk.
These fat and powerful lords, as they are called by the chronicler, loved
their families and wealth more than their country, and urged that every-
thing must be sacrificed for the sake of peace. They recalled the fate of
his father VasiU the Blind, and even urged that Ivan was bound by his
oath not to take up arms against the horde. He was naturally moved
by these counsels, so consonant with his own sympathies, and accord-
ingly sent envoys to treat for peace with Ahmed and with Timur, a
prince of the horde, but Ahmed rejected these offers, as also the presents
which Ivan sent. " I have come here," he said,. " to revenge myself on
the perfidy of Ivan, to punish him for not having during the last nine
years come to my presence to do homage and to bring his tribute. If he
will come in person before us, and if my princes will intercede for him, I
will extend my clemency to him."* Such was the recklessly brave
language of the Khan, who must have known how few resources he had
to back up such language. Timur also refused the presents, and replied
that the only means Ivan had of pacifying the anger of Ahmed was to
kiss the stirrup ; and as even Ivan refused to humiliate himself so far,
it was suggested that his son, or his brother, or even the boyard
Bassenok might act as his deputy. These terms were refused, and
thus the negotiations broke down. One can hardly credit such
pusillanimity in a sovereign amidst an army of 200,000 men eager to
fight. Far different was the conduct of the patriotic Russian clergy at
this time. When news reached the metropolitan, the archbishop Vassian,
and Paisius, abbot of the Trinity, they wrote strong remonstrances.
Vassian sent an especially energetic letter. '' It is our duty to speak
the truth to kings," he said, "and what I have already said to you,
greatest of sovereigns, I now write in the hope of strengthening your
purpose. When you set out, moved by the entreaties of the metropolitan
and the highest of your subjects, to combat the enemy of the Christians,
we interceded with God that he would grant you victory. Meanwhile we
hear that on the approach of this ferocious Ahmed, who has killed so
many Christians, you have humbled yourself before him and asked for a
peace, which he has contemptuously rejected. Oh, prince, to whose
counsel do you listen ? They are not worthy of the name of Christian.
Is not this to throw away your buckler and to fly ? From what a height
of grandeur are you not descending ? Would you give up Russia to fire
and sword, its churches to plunder, and your subjects to the enemy's

• Karamzin, yi. 188.

AHMED KHAN. 325

sword. What heart would not break at such a disaster. The blood of the
flock cries for vengeance in accusing its shepherd, but whither will you
fly, where can you expect to reign after sacrificing the sheep God has
confided to you ? Can you mount like the eagle and make your nest
among the stars ? The Lord will cast you down from that asylum.
No, we will trust in the Almighty. You will not desert us and brand
yourself with the name of coward and traitor. Have courage, . . . there
is no God like our God. Life and death are in his hands, and he gives
strength to his warriors. Democritus, the pagan philosopher, enumerates
prudence, firmness, and courage as the virtues of kings. Recall the
glories of your ancestors, of Igor, Sviatoslaf, and Vladimir, to whom the
Greeks were tributary ; Vladimir Monomachos, the terror of the Poloutzi ;
Dimitri, who beat the same Tartars on the Don. See how he fought.
He did not say, / have a wife, children, riches, and when I atn deprived
of my country 1 will go and live elsewhere. He bravely faced Mamai,
and the Lord protected him. Did not he raise his arm against the
Khans notwithstanding his oath of allegiance ? We, the metropolitan
and other ecclesiastics, will release you from an oath extorted by
violence. We bless you and implore you to march against Ahmed, who
is no tzar but a brigand and an enemy of God ; a breach of faith which
will save the empire is preferable to the fidelity which will ruin it. By
what sacred law are you bound to obey this impious tzar, who never
belonged to the race of tzars ? Was it not merely over the weakness of
your ancestors that he triumphed ? . . . Did not God overthrow Pharaoh
in the Red Sea to save the children of Israel ? He will pardon you also
if you are penitent. The repentance of a king is the sacred obligation to
observe the laws of justice, to cherish his people, to renounce violence
and to be merciful to the wrong doer, God has raised you above us, as
he raised Moses and Joshua, that you may save Kussia, the new Israel,
from the impious Ahmed, this second Pharaoh. . . . God will grant you
a glorious reign, you and your sons, and your sons' sons, from generation
to generation. . . . You have already defeated the infidels, but what says
the evangelist ? * He who endures to the end shall be saved.' Lastly,
do not blame my feeble words, my requiem, for it is written, * Show the
wise man knowledge, and he'will be wiser.'* Thus may it be. Receive
our blessing. You, your sons, and all the boyards and voivodes, and
all your brave warriors, children of Jesus Christ. Amen."t

Well might even Ivan's courage be roused, as we are told it was, at
these words, which were copied by many hands and distributed. For
fifteen days nothing, however, was done, and the two armies were
separated by the Ugra, called by the Russians "the girdle of the Holy
Virgin," the rampart of Muscovy. An attempt made by the Tartar
cavalry to force the passage of the Oka was frustrated. At the end of

* Proverbs ix. t Karamzin, vi. 189-194. Kelly's Russia, i. no.

326 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

October there came a severe frost, which froze over the Ugra, and made
it therefore passable. The Grand Prince thereupon ordered the army to
retire to Kremenetz, on the plea that the plains of Borosk afforded a
better battle-field. This show of weakness communicated itself to the
army, whose retreat was in fact a disorderly scramble. The Tartars, on
seeing the retreat of the Russians, thought it was a ruse to draw them
into an ambuscade, and the Khan was similarly seized with panic, and
the strange sight was seen of two great armies flying away from one
another without being pursued by anyone. Ahmed's retreat was perhaps
hastened by the capture of his capital, as I have mentioned, by
Nurdaulat.* Having revenged himself upon Casimir for not having kept
his appointment, by destroying twelve Lithuanian villages, Ahmed retired
homewards. On the way his son Murtaza made a raid upon a district
of the Ukraine, but was driven away by Ivan's brothers. t Karamzin has
the somewhat cynical remark, that although Ivan's policy did not lead to
his being crowned with laurels like the conqueror of Mamai, that it
planted the crown more firmly on his head and consolidated the inde^
pendence of the empire.J The metropolitan fixed the 23rd of June as
a fete day in honour of the transcendent event by which the yoke of
Russia was finally broken, "for here," says Karamzin, "ended our
slavery,"§

On his return home with a rich booty, which he had collected in
Lithuania, Ahmed was attacked by Ivak, Prince of Tumen, a descendant
of Sheiban's, in alliance with Yamgurchi and Mussa, two murzas of the
Nogais, and 16,000 Kazaks. Ahmed and his people nomadised between
the Volga and the Don ; he had his winter quarters near Azof, and had
retired to the Little Donetz and dismissed his kulans, when Ivak
approached during the night the white yurt of the Khan, and killed him
with his own hand when asleep. || The chronicle of Kazan assigns the
deed itself to Yamgurchi, who was Ahmed's brother-in-law.^ Ahmed's
camp, his wives and daughters, and all his wealth, together with a large
number of Lithuanian captives and of cattle, fell into Ivak's hands, who
on his return to Tumen wrote to the Grand Prince to announce to him
that his enemy was no more.** Von Hammer, who has most strangely
confused the history of this period by confounding Ahmed with his father
Kuchuk Muhammed, closes his survey of the history of the Golden
Horde with the death of Ahmed. This is apparently to complete the
symmetrical number of fifty Khans, which he assigns to the horde, but,
as we shall see further, his view is entirely mistaken. The blow was a
crushing one, but it did not mean the utter collapse of the Tartars.
It undoubtedly meant, however, the emancipation of Russia, which
thenceforth was practically free from foreign domination.

• Ante, 322. 1 Karamzin, vi. 196. I Id., 198. $ Id.

U Id., 198. % Golden Horde, 408. ** Karamzin, vi. 198, 199.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 327

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS.

The assassination of the Khan Ahmed was no doubt a terrible blow to
the Golden Horde, and it very largely broke the chains which had so long
bound Russia, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the Tartar empire
then came to an end. It subsisted for some years longer. The heritage
of Ahmed was, however, practically divided into two portions ; one of
them subject to his sons, and retained control over the nomadic portion
of the Tartars ranged between the Don and the Yaik, and also com-
manded the allegiance of the Nogais. This was known to the Turks as
the Takht il {i.e., the Great Horde).* According to Miechof, in his
tract " de Sarmatiis," the name was Tak xi (/.<?., First Horde). They were
also known to the Poles and Russians as Zavolgenses or Zavolhenses ij-.e.,
"those beyond the Volga"). The other section was subject to Ahmed
Khan's nephews, and had its seat at Astrakhan. They were probably
dependent on the Takht il. We shall revert to them presently, and will
now limit ourselves to the history of the Takht il or Great Horde.

Ahmed Khan left several sons. Their number is uncertain. An
authority, quoted by Vel. Zernof, thus enumerates them by Bikai
bikem, a relation of the Sultan Hassan murza, he had Murtaza Khan,
Idige Sultan, Hussein Khan, and Devlet Sultan; by another, Bikai,
Sheikh Ahmed Khan, Kuchuk Sultan, and Janai Sultan ; by Uishun
Bikem, Seyid Mahmud Khan, Seyid Ahmed Khan, and Behadur Sultan ;
but two of these, Kuchuk Sultan and Janai Sultan, were apparently the
brothers and not the sons of Seyid Ahmed.t Three of these sons are
alone of interest in our inquiry, namely, Seyid Ahmed, who is not to be
confused with the Seyid Ahmed previously named,t who was a leader of
the Nogais, Murtaza, and Sheikh Ahmed, called Schig Achmet by the
Russians ; and of these Seyid Ahmed was apparently acknowledged as
their senior by the other two.

These brothers lived at constant feud with one another, and hastened
the disintegration of the Golden Horde. All three styled themselves
tzar at the same time, and they only united together when they had to
prosecute the war with the Krim Khans, which they had inherited from
their father. § Like him, they were in alliance with Casimir of Poland.

When the Lithuanians conquered Western Russia, they could not
compel the inhabitants to forsake their old faith and adopt that of the
Latin church. When, therefore, the Grand Prince began his policy of
reconquest, he found a ready magnet at hand with which to attract the
former subjects of the Russian crown ; and we are told that about 1482, the
great-grandsons of Olgerd, who were princes of Seversk, who belonged to
the Greek faith and were subject to Casimir, determined to submit them-

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat, xii. 356. Note. t Op. cit., i. 43-46. Note, 82.

I Antti 272. § Vel. Zern. Note, 49.

328 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

selves to Ivan. Their project, however, was discovered, and two of them
were imprisoned, while the third, the Prince of Belsky, escaped to
Moscow; and we are told Casimir sent a precautionary force of 10,000
men to Smolensk, and tried to incite Seyid Ahmed and Murtaza, the
chiefs of the Great Horde, to attack Russia, and succeeded in persuading
the Krim Khan to do so.*

We now find the Grand Prince Ivan having intercourse with the
nations of Central Europe, whose history had formerly been closely
entwined with Russia, but had since the Tartar invasion lived apart, thus
in 1482 he sent envoys to Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, who
was, like himself, the enemy of Casimir of Poland. The two friends
undertook to make war against the common enemy. Ivan's solicitude
for the improvement of his people is shown by his urgent request that
Corvinus would send him engineers, architects, goldsmiths, miners, and
cannon founders. His envoy was detained on his return at Bielogorod
by the Turks, but was released at the instance of the Hungarian king
and Mengli Girai. In 1488 we find Ivan sending his new friend a
cloak of black sable, with gold clasps ornamented with pearls, from
Novgorod.t

At this period Moldavia was governed by the celebrated voivode and
hospodar Stephen IV., whose victories over the Turks have made him
famous. He was menaced by Casimir of Poland and the Krim Khan,
and as he and his people belonged to the Greek faith, he naturally turned
for an ally to the Russian Grand Prince, and the alliance was cemented
by the marriage of his daughter Helena with the eldest son of Ivan.
The latter was indefatigable in widening his domains. We now find him
annexing the principahty of Tuer, which had long been the rival of
Moscow, and which still retained its independence, an island surrounded
on all sides by Muscovite territory4 Michael, Prince of Tuer, was Ivan's
brother-in-law. Knowing him well and fearing him much, he, like his
ancestors, leaned upon an alliance with Lithuania, and made a secret
treaty with Casimir. Ivan, having heard of this, declared war against
him in 1485. Michael hastened to reconcile himself with his dangerous
neighbour, and to make concessions. He gave up his style of " equal," and
accepted that of younger brother, promised to furnish a contingent of
troops, and to renounce his alliance with the Lithuanians and the dis-
possessed princes. Ivan granted a formal peace, but he planted his heel
rudely on the land, and so ground down the people, that they in despair,
and finding no protection in their own prince, turned elsewhere. Several
of the principal people deserted him and submitted to Ivan, and shortly
after, a letter having been waylaid in which he asked for the aid of Casimir,
an army was sent against his capital, which was surrendered after a short
siege. Michael fled to Lithuania, where he shortly after died without

* KaramziDi vi. aio-aiz. t Id,, 215. I Id., 219.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 329

children. Ivan showed his usual clemency on these occasions, and
invested Michael's son with his father's dominions. Thus was annexed a
famous Russian principality which, since the days of Michael Yaros-
lavitch, had borne the title of Great, and which could formerly muster a
force of 40,000 cavalry. Ivan wrote to announce his victory to Matthew
Corvinus, who about the same time made his brilliant conquest of Vienna
and a large part of Austria from the empire.*

The absorption of Tuer was speedily followed by that of other
principalities. Michael, Prince of Vereia, had a son named Vasili, whose
wife was a Greek princess, the niece of Ivan's wife Sophia. Sophia
having presented her niece with some jewels belonging to Ivan's former
wife, he seized the opportunity, had a violent quarrel with Vasili (who
fled to Lithuania), insisted upon his father disinheriting him and
making himself (Ivan) the heir of Vereia, Bielo Ozero, and Yaroslavetz,
which he accordingly did. Ivan succeeded to these districts in 1485.
This was followed by the surrender by the Princes of Yaroslavl and
Rostof of certain independent rights which they possessed which were
incompatible with the supremacy of Ivan.t

By these annexations the Grand Prince, without any bloodshed and
by the exercise of consummate statecraft, had not only restored Russia
to the limits which it had in the days of Andrew Bogolubski and Vsevolod
III., but had added to them the wide domain of Novgorod and the
appanages of Murom and Chernigof. Riazan, whose prince was his
brother-in-law, alone retained a shadowy independence.

Notwithstanding that the Sultan of the Osmanli had ordered the
Khan of Krim and the chiefs of the Golden Horde to live at peace with
one another, their mutual strife did not cease. We are told that at the
approach of the terrible winter of 1485 Murtaza, who nomadised with his
people in the country of the Don, went to seek shelter against the famine
in the Krim. Mengli Girai marched against him, captured him, and sent
him prisoner to Kaffa, and also defeated the bands of the Nogay, Timur.f
This is the Russian narrative. The same year when Murtaza was taken
prisoner his brother Seyid Ahmed marched to the rescue with the Timur
already mentioned, captured and plundered Solgat and Kafifa, drove
Mengli Girai away, and set Murtaza once more free. Mengli Girai
appealed to the Porte for assistance, which sent some troops, and also
ordered the Nogais to march against the Great Horde.§ It would seem
the Russians also came to the assistance of their ally Mengli Girai, for
we are told they pursued the victors, and recovered a number of
prisoners whom they had carried off from Krim, and returned to Mengli
Girai. ||

In another account we are told that Mengli Girai had determined to

* Karamzin, vi. 218-224. ^ Id., 226. I Id., 213. § Vel. Zern., i. Note, 49

II Karamzin, vi. 214.

IS

330 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

occupy the country on the borders of the Volga belonging to Seyid
Ahmed. On his way thither Murtaza Sultan, one of the Khan's brothers,
went and joined him, pretending to have abandoned his brother's cause.
He was received with distinction and invited to a feast, during which
Murtaza apparently incautiously disclosed his real object. Mengli Girai,
seeing he had merely gone to act as a spy, had him arrested. Seyid
Ahmed hearing of this, left his wife, family, and property in a safe place
on the Volga, and marched at the head of his troops, accompanied by
Mamai Bey, a descendant of Idiku, with a body of Nogais. A battle
having ensued between him and Mengli, the latter was wounded, fled,
and sought refuge in the fortress of Karakar, in the middle of the Krim.
Seyid Ahmed advanced into the country and secured a rich booty. He
laid siege to Solgat, which resisted bravely. He offered the people a free
pardon, and assured them their lives and property if they would submit.
They accordingly opened their gates, when the too legitimate heir of
Jingis Khan proceeded to kill them and to pillage the place. He then
marched against Kaffa. Kasim Pasha, its governor, without telling any-
one, sent one of his people out in a ship, and prepared several other vessels,
which also put to sea. He received Seyid Ahmed's envoy cordially, and
showed him the presents destined for his master. In the midst of this
reception there arrived an officer (Chaush), who gravely announced he
had left Constantinople three days before, and that the Sultan had
already sent a fleet to the rescue of his proteges. The other ships
now returned and began to fire cannons, &c., and to act the part of a
Turkish fleet. The ambassador reported what he saw to his master
Seyid Ahmed, who was deceived, and abandoned the attack on Kaffa.
He ravaged all the country as he went. While engaged in festivities at
the town of Fekeljik, he was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by
Mengli Girai, with the tribes Chirin and Barin, and completely defeated.
He had to disgorge his plunder and to return home. According to
Karamzin, it was the Russians who thus defeated him. Mengli Girai
sent an army in pursuit of him, of which his son Muhammed Girai was
commander. They surprised Seyid Khan's brothers, and utterly defeated
his troops, many of which were transported to the Crimea.*

Jehoshaphat Barbaro has a different story. He tells us how Mengli
Girai determined to go towards Citarcan, a place sixteen days' journey
from Kaffa, under the dominion of Murtaza Khan, who at that time was
with his ordu on the river Itil {i.e., the Volga). He fought with him,
took his people from him, and sent a large part of them to the isle of
Kaffa {i.e., the Krim), and spent the winter on the river. At that time,
he says, by chance there was another Tartar lord lodged a few journeys
off" {i.e., Seyid Ahmed), who, hearing that he wintered there, when the
river was frozen came on him suddenly, assaulted and defeated him, and

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat.* xii. 353-355.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 331

SO recovered Murtaza, while Mengli Girai returned to Kaffa. The next
year, in the spring, Murtaza returned to the isle of Kaffa, but as he could
not capture the town, he went home again.*

The bitter strife between the two hordes was by no means appeased?
and the sons of Ahmed continued to intrigue with Casimir, the king of
Poland. They once more marched towards the Taurida, whereupon the
Grand Prince Ivan sent a body of Cossacks, commanded by his protege
Nurdaulat, the brother of Mengli Girai, against them, and also told
Muhammed Amin of Kazan to harass them. The intercourse between
Krim and Muscovy had, we are told, become very difficult because of the
perpetual raids of the Tartars of the Great Horde, who attacked all whom
they encountered on the banks of the Oskol and the Merl, and Ivan pro-
posed to constitute a new trade route thither by way of Azof.t In order
to win Nurdaulat over, so that he might use him against his brother,
Murtaza in 1487 sent an envoy named Shah Bahlul to Moscow with
letters for him and the Grand Prince.

To Nurdaulat he wrote : — " To my l^rother tzar Nurdaulat. May the
Lord grant that thy power may abide, and that thy days may be pro-
longed, our nearest brother, whose justice, kindness, and sincerity are
everywhere known to the good. ... In this world mayest thou be the
support of our religion, our help against the unbehevers and unbelief.
Through the grace of God, mayest thou be the just and faithful lord.
Thy kingdom would be great and fortunate until the return of Muhammed
if our prayers and those of our young folk were heard. Thou knowest
that we are both children of the same stock. Thou knowest that our
ancestors, blind with ambition, were at strife with one another ; but after
much evil and carnage they grew more reconciled, and instead of rivers
of blood there flowed streams of milk, and they quenched the fires of
discord with the waters of peace, and the holy Ahmed tzar, who has
gone to his repose, united thine ulus to ours. On his death thy brother
Mengli lit again the fires of discord, broke his word, but failed to injure
our strength. Thou knowest with what terrible disasters God, the creator
of the world, has punished him. Things have gone well with us, and we
are again thy brother. We have learnt that thou art living among the
unbehevers. It pleases us not, to see thee there. We take the opportunity,
therefore, of sending thee a heavy greeting with a light heart, through
our servant Shah Bahlul. When he shall reach thy mightiness, and shall
behold thy face, tell him in all confidence what thou meanest and how
thou art, and he will report it to me. If thou hast the wish to quit this
unclean land, I have written to Ivan to this effect. For the rest,
whatever thy intentions, mayest thou prosper, and may we remain
brothers." This letter, which was phrased exceedingly courteously, was
written in December, i486. Concurrently with it Murtaza sent a

* Barbaro, Hack. Soc, 30. t Karamzin, vi, 230, 231.

332 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Yarligh {i.e., an order or command) to Ivan, which was worded in much
more peremptory terms.

It is thus expressed :— " Murtaza's order to Ivan. Be it known to
you that tzar Nurdaulat has hitherto lived on friendly terms with my
father and myself, and that while we were at peace Mengli Girai has
broken the pact. He is still our enemy, and we would consequently
cultivate friendship with Nurdaulat. And we have in consequence sent
our servant Shah Bahlul as our envoy to you to ask you not to detain him.
Let him, therefore, leave with Shah Bahlul. Retain, however, his wife
and children. If God wills, I shall give him a yurt, and he will then
take them back. 'Full of friendship to you, I dictated and sent this
Yarligh."*

Ivan was piqued at the domineering tone of this letter, arrested the
envoy, and informed Mengli Girai of what was going on.t

In 1491, we read that the Grand Prince sent an army against Seyid
Ahmed and Sheikh Ahmed {i.e., the brothers of Murtaza), who had marched
towards Krim to attack Mengli Girai. The commanders of the Russian
forces were Prince Peter Michaelovitch Obolenski and Ivan Michaelovitch
Repniya Obolenski, together with several boyard's sons, with Satilgan
(Nurdaulat's brother), and with many ulans and princes and all their
Cossacks. They were also joined by a contingent sent by his brother
Boris, and another sent by the tzar of Kazan. When the Tartars heard
what a strong force was marching against them they left Perekop
and hastened homewards, and the Russians returned without having
encountered them.f The policy of Ivan was to utilise the feud between
the Krim Tartars and the Great Horde as much as possible. We read
how he sent several embassies with presents to the Krim Khan, and
Prince Romoda Nofski, who was sent in 1490, assured him that the
Russian forces were always available to harass the Great Horde. In
1490 Ivan lost his eldest son Ivan. The unfortunate doctor who attended
him was executed, a fate deemed reasonable by the people, since he had
offered to forfeit his hfe if not successful.

We now find Ivan showing his moderation and wonderful political
insight in another manner. There arose in Muscovy a strange wild
heresy, a renaissance of Judaism, originating with a Jew of great
eloquence and power, named Skharia. It seems that it was one phase of
that movement in favour of the Kabala, which found favour in Western
Europe about the same time, and which attracted inter alios the allegiance
of Pica di Mirandola. These mystics claimed to have in the Kabala a
work given to Adam himself by God, and which explained all mysteries.
They denied that the Messiah had as yet appeared. They were accused
of cursing the Saviour and the Holy Virgin, of spitting on the crucifix, of

* VcK Zern., op. cit. Note, 57. t Karamzin, vi. 233.

I Vel. Zero., i. Note, 58. Karamzin, vi. 257.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 333

calling the images of the saints (which they tore with their teeth and
otherwise treated with contumely) idols, of denying paradise and the
resurrection of the dead. These charges were probably many of them
untrue, and we must view the movement as an erratic phase of that
same convulsion of opinion which gave birth in the West to the
Reformation. The heresy spread fast among the ecclesiastics, and the
metropolitan himself was infected with it. " There was then seen," says
St. Joseph of Volok, " a son of Satan on the throne of the holy saints
Peter and Alexis, a devouring wolf in the garb of a peaceful shepherd."*

The mysteries of Christianity were rudely criticised, and astrology and
the Kabala, those queer ancestors of modern science, attracted a multi-
tude of students, who, if wanting in scientific insight, at least learnt
habits of criticism and of doubt. A council was called, the heretics were
anathematised, and a cry arose among the orthodox that they must be
uprooted by fire and sword. Not so with Ivan, whose clemency is surely
an extraordinary feature in one who was a contemporary of Ferdinand
the Catholic and his peers in Western Europe. He nominated another
primate, and would use no stronger weapons against the offenders than
exile and ridicule. A large number of them were sent to Novgorod,
where the archbishop Gernadius caused them to be mounted on horse-
back with their heads to the horses' tails, their vestments the wrong side
out, wearing pointed hats, ornamented with tassels of tow, on their
heads (in the way they were wont to represent devils), and crowns of straw
with this inscription, " See the army of Satan." They were driven about
the streets amidst the jeers of the populace, who spat at them, saying,
" See the enemies of Jesus Christ." The burlesque proceeding terminated
by their hats being burnt on their heads.t

We now find Ivan at issue with his brothers. His impatient ambition
could not brook any independent authority near him. Under pretence
that Andrew was intriguing with the Lithuanians he had him
arrested, and he soon after died, doubtless from poison, in prison. This
was in 1493. Five years later, Ivan received absolution from the
metropolitan and the bishops for " having caused the premature death of
his unfortunate brother."| His other brother Boris was very submissive ;
he died soon after Andrew, and his son Ivan followed him in 1503, after
demising his appanage and other wealth to his uncle. Kelly uses much
spirited rhetoric in regard to this constant acquisition of new territory.
" Now at length," he says, " the feudal hydra has vanished ; all the
princes of the same blood as Ivan, whom on his accession to the throne
he had found almost as much sovereigns as himself, were either
expatriated or dead, or so completely subdued that they aspired to no
other honour than that of being the most officious of his servants. They
were beaten down by so strong a hand that, thenceforth confounded with

* Karamzin, vi. 245. t Icl; 246, 247. I Id., 259.

334 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the higher class of nobility, not one of them dared so much as to call to
mind their common origin with their haughty ruler."* The increasing
renown of Ivan is shown by the fact that, for the first time for more than
two centuries, there came an envoy from the German Emperor. This
person was named Nicholas Poppel, and arrived about 1529 with a letter
from the Emperor Frederick and his son Maximilian, asking for a treaty
of alliance. Ivan reciprocated these advances, and consented to marry
his daughter Helena or Theodosia to Albert, the Margrave of Baden. A
curious proof of the then seclusion of Russian women is afforded by the
fact that Ivan would not let the envoy see her. The latter in a third
audience made an extraordinary communication, he said that, " having
heard that Ivan desired to receive the Royal dignity from the pope, he
reminded him that it was the Emperor alone who had the right of
creating kings, princes, and knights, and that the Emperor was willing to
grant him the title of king, and then to make him equal to his rival the
King of Poland." Ivan replied by his boyards that he owed his throne
to Heaven, and did not desire to receive titles from any earthly
sovereign.

He seems to have been somewhat inflated by his position, for we find
him sending word by his envoy that the Margrave of Baden was not a
sufficient match for a desqendant of the ancient Greek Emperors, who in
moving to Constantinople had ceded the town of Rome to the popes
(surely a dry piece of humour to send to the father of the " King of Rome");
and suggesting that MaximiHan was a more fit person, if the Emperor
desired an alliance. It reads curiously to find Ivan giving his own
envoy eighty sable and three thousand squirrel skins to pay for the
expenses of his journey.t

The Russian envoy was received with marked honours at the Imperial
court, having a seat provided for him next the Emperor's chair. He was
doubtless welcomed much as the Chinese and Japanese ambassadors of
our own day are received by our people ; but his mission had no definite
result. If it be curious to trace the rivers of history to their sources,
we must be interested in the next movement which brought the empire
and Muscovy together. Matthew Corvinus of Hungary was now dead,
and the magnates of that country wished to put Ladislaus, king of
Bohemia, the son of Casimir of Poland, on the throne. The Emperor's
son Maximilian, who deemed himself the heir of Matthew, was much
displeased at this, and sent an envoy to propose a joint alliance against
the Poles. Thus began that common policy against Poland which
ended in our own century in the final partition of the land between the
Teuton and the Russian. A treaty was signed between them, in which
Ivan undertook to assist the Emperor in his war to gain Hungary, and
the latter undertook a similar obligation if Ivan went to war to recover

* Op. cit., i. 122. t Karamzin, vi. 265.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 335

Kief and the other old possessions of the Russian crown. Ivan styles
himself in the text of the treaty, Monarch of all the Russias, Prince of
Vladimir, Moscow, Novgorod, Pskof, Yugra, Viatka, Perm, and Bulgaria
{i.e., Kazan).* In all these negotiations Ivan was exceedingly punctilious
about his own dignity.

It is strange to read of the presents interchanged between the two
potentates, which look as if Maximilian treated the Russian Grand
Prince as our court treats a barbaric sovereign. The former sent some
pieces of grey cloth and a paroqueet, the latter eighty sable skins, some
damask, and a gerfalcon. In these negotiations the Grand Prince is
called Tzar, apparently, its first application to the Russian sovereign. In
the German translations of the same diplomatic documents the title is
translated Kaizer.t The negotiations, however, did not come to any
satisfactory conclusion. On Maximilian's turning his arms against the
King of France he made peace with Ladislas, who undertook to pay
him 100,000 ducats for the Hungarian crown. Meanwhile the King of
Poland, his father, was firmly seated on his throne, and the ancient
enemies of his country, the Teutonic Knights of Prussia and Livonia,
were completely subdued.

Ivan, therefore, for a while turned his ambition elsewhere, and we find
him in 1490 ravaging Finland terribly, and burning and torturing its
inhabitants.t In 1491 some German explorers discovered the mines of
the river Tsilma, in the district of Petchora, and thenceforward we find
coins in use, struck from Russian gold and silver. On the first of these
we have on one side Saint Nicholas in pontifical robes, giving his
blessing with his right hand and holding a book in his left ; on one side
of him is a figure of the Saviour and on the other that of the Virgin.
The inscription announces that the Grand Prince caused this thaler to
be made out of his own gold and gave it to his daughter Theodora. The
silver money of the same reign has on it a figure of a man on horseback.
This exercise of the right of coining money is of importance as showing
how completely the Russians were emancipated. Among Muhammedan
races there is hardly a better proof of practical independence than the
right of coining money, and so long as the Golden Horde lasted no
money was coined in Russia.

In 1493 we find an envoy from John, the king of Norway and
Denmark, and formerly an ally of the Polish King, at Moscow. This
was another example of the opening of negotiations with a country whose
history for many years had run apart from that of Muscovy, and which
had once had close relations with Novgorod. Four years earlier an envoy
came to Moscow from Hussein Mirza, the Khan of the far distant
Khorassan, while on another side we find the long-lived Christian state
of Iberia or Georgia, the victim of so many Mussulman conquerors,

* /rf., 268, 269. t /d., 274, 275 . + l^; 274.

336 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

sending an envoy to ask for the protection of Russia. Its prince in his
letter styles himself the servant of Ivan, while he calls the latter the
" Great Tzar, the light of the azure sky, the star of the faithful, the hope
of the Christians, the refuge of the poor, the legislator and true
arbitrator of all the monarchs of the world, pacificator of the universe,
and zealous servant of Saint Nicholas."*

This long digression is meant to exhibit the extraordinary outburst of
life and energy which Russia exhibited directly after its emancipation,
and those who deny the title of Great to Ivan because his method was
not Quixotic, fail to read the true lesson of history, which does not favour
the virtues of Don Quixote or of Richard Coeur de Lion. It was surely
a gigantic task for one man to accomplish, not merely to unite into a
homogeneous whole the broken fragments of the Russian realm with
scarce any bloodshed, and to break off the yoke of the Tartars, but having
done this, to be treated as an equal by the Great Kaizer himself, and to
have his favour sought by the weak States of far off latitudes. Not only
did he do this, but he used every opportunity to import culture and the
arts among the people. Compare his conduct in the treatment of the
great heresy with that of Ferdinand the Catholic, who pieced the shreds
of Spain together, and then proceeded, with a fierce bigotry whose fruit
is not yet all harvested, to eject the Moors and the Jews, who
were the guardians and patrons of learning, culture, and the arts of
peace. And remember, further, what his people were, what his
antecedents and surroundings were, and we shall readily admit that he
stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, and merited the title
of Great far more justly than most of those who bear the name. That
he had a foresight and an instinct which are only given to the few who
have moulded mankind into a new shape, and that to dissect his moral
qualities with the critical scalpel produced by our aesthetic standard is as
unfair as to test the ignorant by the standard of the wise, and to
complain of Friar Bacon because he did not know so much as Newton.

Meanwhile let us return to the Great Horde. Its wretched fragments
wandered, we are told, from steppe to steppe, sometimes on the borders
of the Dnieper, and sometimes on those of Circassia, near the Kuma.
The sons of Ahmed allied themselves with Abdul Kerim, the tzar of
Astrakan, made another attempt to invade the Crimea, but their effort
was frustrated by the Russians, the Khan of Kazan, and the Nogais on
the one hand, and by a contingent of 2,000 troops, sent to the assistance
of Mengli Girai by the Sultan, on the other. They lost many of their
herds, and in a bloody fight Idiku, the son of Ahmed, was killed.t The
Lithuanians continued in close alliance with the Great Horde, however.

On the side of Poland matters were also ripening for Russia. Casimir
was growing old ; like Ivan, he was a cautious person and averse to open

* Karamzin, vi. 288, t Id., 292.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. . 337

war, and the two rivals played a prudent game, in which the chief
factors were intrigues "with the dependents and neighbours of the other.
At this game Ivan was very fortunate. Since the reign of Vitut in
Lithuania, the ancient appanages constituting the Principahty of
Chernigof, in the governments of Tula, Kaluga, and Orel, had been
subject to the Lithuanians, but they were Russian by race, and remained
faithful to the Greek church, while their masters belonged to the Latin
communion. We now find Ivan doing what the Russians have lately done
in Servia, &c., and encouraging their princes to change their allegiance.
We read that several of them, such as the Princes of Odoyef, Vortoynsk,
Bielef, and Peremysl, placed themselves under the protection of Muscovy.
Meanwhile there was apparent cordiality in the diplomatic intercourse of
the two sovereign patrons. On Ivan asking for several favours, however,
his envoys were told, " Your monarch loves to ask but not to grant. I
will follow his example."* Soon after, namely, on the 25th of June, 1492,
Casimir died, and his dominions were divided between his two sons ;
Albert became King of Poland, and Alexander Grand Duke of Lithuania.t
This seemed a happy turn for Russia, and we find Ivan urging Mengli
Girai of Krim to make an immediate descent on the latter country.
Another messenger was despatched to Stephen of Moldavia to incite him
to a similar pohcy. Meanwhile Feodor Obolenski made a raid into
Lithuania, and was assisted by some of the newly enfranchised princes.
The Russians overran the province of Smolensk, and gained some minor
victories, and Ivan's hatred for his neighbour was further inflamed by the
discovery of a plot to poison him, which was said to have been started by
Casimir himself. The Prince Ivan Lukomski, of the race of St. Vladimir,
and a Pole named Matthias were intrusted with the horrible commission,
and on their plot being discovered, they were burnt aUve in a cage on the
Moskva.

The Krim Khan continued faithful to his alliance against Lithuania.
From a letter which he wrote to the Grand Prince, we learn that Sheikh
Ahmed, having married a daughter of Musa, a famous murza of the
Nogais, had been for a while dethroned, but that he was afterwards
reinstated, and continued to reign conjointly with Seyid Ahmed.J This
was apparently written about 1492 or 1493.

Ivan, whose worldly wisdom perhaps saw that if he pressed matters
too much he might combine against him the three brothers Ladislas,
Albert, and Alexander, who together controlled Hungary, Bohemia,
Poland, and Lithuania, and knowing that Stephen of Moldavia, his own
ally, was being daily weakened by his conflict with the Turks, determined
at length to make peace with Alexander. This was signed in January,
1494. By it the Lithuanians ceded all suzerain rights over the Princes
of Viazma, Novossil, Odoyef, Vorotynsk, Peremysl, Bielef, and the Grand

* Karamzin, vi. 296. 1 Id., 297. I Id., 303, 304.

I T

338 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Princes of Riazan, and agreed to release the two Princes of Mezetsk, who
had been exiled to Yaroslavl ; they also undertook that the various dis-
contented princes who had sought refuge in Lithuania should be detained
there. The Russians agreed on their part to abandon their recent
conquests ; the merchants and envoys of each country were to pass
freely through the other. The treaty was cemented by the marriage of
Alexander with Helena, the daughter of Ivan. It was strictly provided
that she was to retain her religion, and that Alexander was not to consent
to her changing it, even at her own desire, while a Greek church was to
be built within her palace. Ivan, on bidding good bye, strictly enjoined
her to respect his wishes in this matter,* and sent a special envoy to see
she was married in a Greek church and in Russian costume. Karamzin's
naive narrative says, " The two fiances met outside Vilna, on a piece
of golden damask spread over red cloth, addressed a few words to each
other, and then entered the town, he on horseback, she on a splendid
sledge." The marriage, like many other similar marriages, did not prove
such a gauge of peace as some expected. Ivan was irritated that his
son-in-law styled him Grand Prince and not " Sovereign of all the
Russias," which doubtless involved some claims upon Kief and other
Lithuanian possessions. He also interfered in the domestic arrange"
ments of the young pair, and was absurdly particular in regard to his
daughter not being contaminated with Roman Catholic dogmas. She
was a sensible person, and very loyal to her husband.

In 1492 Ivan built the fortress of Ivanogorod, opposite Narva, as a
menace to the knights of Livonia. He then proceeded to quarrel with
the merchants of the Hanseatic league, as I have mentioned. In 1496
he sent his armies to ravage Finland, which was then a possession of the
Swedish crown, and the country on the banks of the Limenga was
annexed.!

We now read of a strange and cruel domestic incident in the
Muscovite Imperial family. Ivan's eldest son Ivan had left a son named
Dimitri, who, if the succession had been absolutely settled, would have
been undoubtedly the heir to the throne. By his second wife Sophia,
the descendant of the Greek Emperors, he had a second son Vasili. It
would seem that the partisans of the old order of things, in which
brother succeeded brother, seconded the efforts of Sophia to claim
the crown for Vasili. Ivan was unsettled, but after some time decided
in favour of his grandson Dimitri, who was crowned with great
ceremony, while the partisans of Vasili, who had entered into a con-
spiracy to kill the young prince, were severely punished. Presentlyj as
is the case often with autocratic tempers, Ivan changed his mind, was
reconciled to Sophia, and with extreme cruelty punished some of the
principal boyards who had taken the other side, and some weeks after he

* Id., 314, 315. t Id., 335, 336.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 339

nominated Vasili as Grand Prince of Novgorod and Pskof, Dimitri
retaining the style of Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow. When the
people of Pskof complained he repHed, " May I not act as I please with
my sons and grandsons ? I will give Russia to whom I please, and I
order you to obey Vasili." Surely the words of a most unrestrained
autocrat. We now find him receiving envoys from the Shirvan Shah,
from the Venetians, and Sultan Bajazet. The representative of the latter
was admitted to his table.* Fortune continued to smile upon him, and
in 1499 we read of him subjugating the Samoyedes and Voguls of the
Northern Urals and the valley of the Obi. Thenceforward the Russian
tzars added to their other titles that of Princes of Yugoria.

Meanwhile Ivan continued his MachiavelHan policy towards Lithuania.
Alexander, his son-in-law, lived in perpetual dread of his ambition.
Stephen, the voivode of Moldavia, having devastated Braslavl, Alexander
determined to declare war against him, but the Grand Prince warned
him not to molest an ally of Moscow. Alexander replied, " I hoped that
a relation was dearer to you than an ally, but I was mistaken." In 1499
a Lithuanian envoy took Ivan the following stinging letter : — " My
brother : in order to please you I have entered into a treaty of peace and
friendship with Stephen of Moldavia. Having heard that the Sultan
Bajazet has taken up arms to attack him, my brothers, the kings of
Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia, have sworn to ally themselves with me
to defend him. Unite your arms to ours against the common enemy,
who has already seized several Christian kingdoms. Stephen's kingdom
is a strong barrier for us, and its conquest by the Sultan would be no less
a menace for you than for us. . . . You wish me in my letters to call you
Monarch of all Russia. I will do so if you will undertake by a new grant
to confirm me in the possession of Kief. Notwithstanding your solemn
daily assurances of amity, I hear with regret that you have secretly
plotted my ruin with Mengli Girai. Remember, my brother, that you
have a conscience and a religion."t The sting of this brotherly letter
consisted in its truth. Ivan had in fact sent the Prince Romodonofski in
1498 to the Krim to promise Mengli Girai that he would always be his
ally against the Prince of Lithuania and the sons of Ahmed. Ivan in his
reply could not deny this, and merely added a tu quofue as to Alexander's
deahngs with the sons of Ahmed. In regard to Kief, he said the pro-
posal was so absurd that no Russian sovereign would ever listen to it.

Meanwhile another element entered into the strife. Those who have
travelled in Lithuania know how bitter has been the struggle there
between the Greek and Latin churches. Ivan professed, as Nicholas
did in 1855, to be the special protector of the Greek church, while
Alexander was a rigid Catholic, and doubtless wished to consohdate
his kingdom by making his subjects adopt the same faith. In 1499 we

* /<f., 355. t Id.t 363.

340 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

find the bishop of Smolensk busy in converting the people of White
Russia to the Greek cult, while Alexander constantly urged on his wife
to join his own church, which she, however, refused to do. Macarius,
the metropolitan of Kief, having been killed in 1497 near Mozyr by the
Perekop Tartars (z>., by the Tartars of Krim), Alexander nominated
Joseph of Smolensk to the post, who with the bishop of Vilna com-
menced a campaign, in which the watch words were, " One fold and one
shepherd." They were supported by papal bulls and by the strong aid of
the secular arm. Many who belonged to the Greek rite fled to Russia.
Among these, we are told, were the Princes of Bielsk, Mossalsk, and
Khotetof, and the boyards of Mtsensk and Serpeisk, who were received
by Ivan contrary to the provisions of the treaty with Alexander.

The Prince Ivan Andrewvitch of Moyaisk, an enemy of Ivan's, had
been granted as an appanage by Alexander of Chernigof, Starodub, Gomel,
and Lubetch, while Ivan, the son of Shemiaka, was similarly endowed
with Rylsk and Novgorod Severski. These two princes were now dead,
and had been succeeded by their sons. Being rigid followers of the
Greek faith, they resented the policy of Alexander, and, forgetting their
family feud, placed themselves and their territory under the protection
of Ivan, a position he gladly accepted. At the same time, declaring
war against the Lithuanians, he rapidly conquered Mtsensk, Serpeisk,
Briansk, Putivle, and Dorogobuj. The Princes of Trubtchefsk, descend-
ants of Olga, submitted, and he in fact conquered all Lithuanian Russia,
from the governments of Kaluga and Tula as far as Kief.* Alexander
now appointed a distinguished soldier named Constantine Ostroisky, a
descendant of the famous Roman of Gallicia, hettman of Lithuania.
Although belonging to the Greek church, he did faithful service to
Lithuania.

Karamzin, in criticising the conduct of Prince Daniel Stchenia, who
objected to command the Russian rear guard, says it was the first of
that series of quarrels about precedence among the boyards which
afterwards proved so disastrous to Russia. A terrible battle now ensued
on the banks of the Vedrosha, in which the Lithuanians were completely
defeated. Eight thousand of them remained on the battle-field, all their
artillery and baggage were captured, and the hetman Constantine was
among the prisoners.t He was taken to Moscow, where he swore the
oath of fealty to Ivan, was created a voivode, and given large domains.
The news of the victory was received with great rejoicings at Moscow,
where such an event was very unexpected. While the Russians invaded
Lithuania on one side, Mengli Girai ravaged it on another. His
sons, at the head of 1 5,000 cavalry, burnt Khmelnik, Kremenetz, Brest,
Vladimir, Lutsk, Braslavl,and other towns of PoUsh GaHicia* Alexander
was not daunted, he put his principal towns in a state of defence, hired

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 34 1

a number of mercenaries, Poles, Bohemians, Germans, and Hungarians,
and entered into an alliance with the Livonian knights, whose master
Walter de Plettemberg was a deadly enemy of Russia. Shortly after
this, on the death of his brother Albert, Alexander was elected King of
Poland. Ivan, nevertheless, determined to prosecute the war. Another
victory was won by his troops near Mitislavl, in which 7,000 Lithuanians
perished. The grand master of Livonia bravely did his part, he
imprisoned two hundred Russian merchants at Dorpat, and with but
4,000 knights and an armed body of some thousands of peasants and
foot soldiers he ravaged Pskof with fire and sword. An army of 40,000
Russians was terribly defeated near Izborsk, the German artillery, we
are told, causing quite a panic among the Muscovites.

The Germans marched from one success to another, but their course
was sharply stayed by the outbreak of a terrible pestilence among them,
and they were forced to retreat precipitately. Ivan now sent his troops
to exact vengeance ; the environs of Dorpat, Neuhausen, and Marien-
burgh were devastated. In a combat near Helmet the Livonians
suffered severely, the regiment of the bishop of Dorpat was destroyed.
A Livonian chronicler tells us the Russians and Tartars did not trouble
themselves to use their scimitars, but beat down the wretched inhabi-
tants with clubs, as if they had been boars. The Russians returned
home again after having had their fill of revenge.*

Ivan now prosecuted his pique against his daughter-in-law Helena and
his grandson Dimitri. He deprived the latter of the title of Grand
Prince, proclaimed Vasili as his successor, and threw mother and son
into prison on a charge of conspiracy. Helena's father, Stephen of
Moldavia, who had recently captured the Polish towns of Kolimia,
Galitch, Sniatin, and Krasnoi on the Dniester, was much exasperated
with the tzar, and persuaded Mengli Girai to complain on his behalf.
Ivan returned the latter a very imperious answer : — " My good nature
raised my grandson to the highest rank. My displeasure has deposed
him because he has plotted with his mother to outrage me. We are
kind to those who treat us well, but ought we to be so to those who act
differently ?" Helena died of grief in 1505, and Dimitri was kept a close
prisoner.t Stephen retaliated by seizing the Muscovite envoys and some
Italian artists who were passing through Moldavia, whom he afterwards
released. He would not come, however, to an open rupture with Russia.
He died in 1504, and before doing so he counselled his son Bogdan to
submit to the Turks, reminded him how much it had cost him to retain
his independence, and that it was better to give gracefully that which it
was impossible to keep. Bogdan accordingly acknowledged Bajazet as
his suzerain, and the transient glory of Moldavia passed away.j

Ivan in 1502 engaged again in war with the Lithuanians and

* Id., 387* t /«/., 397. I /<?., 398*

342 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Livonians, but gained no marked success, and in fact suffered a serious
check at the hands of the latter, under their leader Walter of Plettem-
berg. The next year, at the solicitation of the pope, who wished to arm
Christian Europe to restrain the terrible advance of the Turks, and to
induce the Christian princes to be at peace with one another, Ivan agreed
to a six years' truce with Lithuania, and restored to his son-in-law some
of the conquests he had made on the Dwina. A similar armistice was
entered into between the lieutenants of Pskof and Novgorod, under
which the bishop of Dorpat undertook to pay the Russians tribute.* In
notifying this treaty to Mengli Girai, he told him that it was merely a
truce, during which they could better prepare themselves for fresh efforts
and strengthen the vantage they had gained, and that their offensive
alliance against Lithuania still continued good.t

In 1503 Ivan lost his wife Sophia, an event which seems to have
greatly affected him, and we now find him preparing for his own end by
making his will. By it he nominated Vasili as his successor. Among
the domains of the Russian crown disposed of we hear now for
the first time of Lapland, and we are told further that Riazan and
Perevitesk had been joined to Muscovy by the cession of their Prince
Feodor, his nephew. The Princes of Chernigof, Starodub, Novgorod-
Severski, and Rylsk are still named as independent, although feudally
subordinate to himself. Otherwise all his conquests were treated
as parts of the Muscovite empire. Several towns were given as
appanages to his younger sons, who had their separate civil and military
estabhshments, and appropriated the revenues of their appanages, but
they had no claims on the Imperial exchequer, had not the right to coin
money or to punish the crime of murder. Their property was made
hereditary, but it was only as citizens and not as independent princes
that they held it. The famous Jewish heresy still survived, and Ivan,
who, now that he was nearing his grave, was becoming more a tool in
the hands of the clergy, allowed a bitter persecution to be carried out
against the heretics. Many fled to Germany and Lithuania. Several of
its chiefs were burnt alive in cages or had their tongues torn out, and
. little pity was shown to penitents, Joseph of Volok, a fit companion of
Spanish inquisitors, urging that repentance exacted by fear could not
be sincere.^

A simmering discontent still continued between Russia and Lithuania,
and petty and vexatious complaints were made on either side. We also
find the Emperor Maximilian, still harping upon his Hungarian claims, and
trying to enter into an offensive alliance with Ivan, who was too cautious
to be entangled in disputes that affected his interests so httle. Vasili,
the heir to the throne, was still unmarried although twenty-five years old.
We are told that the old tzar, being very wishful to see him settled

* /d., 405. 1 Id., 406, 1 /(f., 4I2i

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 343

before he died, and there being no time to find him a Royal partner, one
thousand five hundred young Russian girls were passed in review, and
the young prince's choice fell on Solomonia, the daughter of an obscure
officer named Yuri Saburof, descended from a Tartar emigrant named
Murzachet. Karamzin moralises on the dangers incident to princes
intermarrying with their subjects, which nearly always leads to diffi-
culties with the wife's relatives, who acquire a prestige not attainable
by the other noble families. He thinks that it was in view of these
dangers that the choice fell on an obscure person, but in the event the
marriage proved how sound the principle is. The Godunofs, relations of
Solomonia, caused great trouble to Russia in the future, and caused in
fact the supplanting of Ivan's own family.*

Ivan died on the 27th of October, 1505, at the age of sixty-six, and
after a reign of forty-three years, which is by far the most important
in the Russian annals. We are told naively by Karamzin that the
contemporary annalists do not mention that his people wept or showed
much grief at his death, but content themselves with recounting his
great deeds, and thanking heaven for having given such a monarch to
Russia. His was not the character to attract love or sympathy ; it
was the calculating prudence of the lawyer, added to the unscrupulous
and unbending iron will of the statesman. His was a great epoch,
and he stands out in some measure as its type ; everywhere feudalism
was giving place to centralised autocracy, small states were being
coalesced into great ones. It was a period, too, of great discoveries.
Printing was invented at Nuremberg, Columbus discovered another
world, and, what was more important to Russia and its neighbours,
Vasco de Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, found a new road
to India, and supplanted inevitably the trade routes by way of the
Caspian and the Sea of Azof, which had so greatly enriched the masters
of the Golden Horde. No less a discovery, perhaps, was that of Russia
itself, which in Ivan's reign first became really known to the rest of
Europe, and mainly through his efforts who was born the tributary
and dependent of the Tartars and died when he was treated as an equal
by the German Kaizer and the Turkish Sultan. Although he was no
warrior himself, the army was greatly reformed during his reign by the
creation of bodies of mercenary troops, who lived in a special quarter
beyond the Moskva, and also by the introduction of the boyard-
followers, who, like the feudal chiefs of early Europe, received grants of
land on condition of being ready to serve the prince when required.
They formed, as Kelly says, a kind of spahis, such as were till lately seen
in Turkey, having no gradations of rank and dependent solely on the
throne. He exacted rigid discipline, and to him are traced the rozziadi
or tactical rules for the troops, which were generally divided into five

* H., 420.

344 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

sections, the main body, the right and left wings, the advance and rear
guards* " He triumphs over his enemies," said Stephen, " while he sits
tranquilly in his palace, and I, who am always on horseback and in the
field, cannot defend my country."

With the instincts of a lawyer, he preferred a common-place treaty
which secured him an advantage to risking his fortunes on the die of a
battle. He introduced the pomp and ceremony of Western courts into his
own, and by surrounding his person with a certain awe and grandeur, he
began that policy which has created for the Russians an anthropomorphic
deity in their tzar. Like most men of his type, he was imperious and
exacting upon all around him, had a stubborn temper, and little pity or
sensibility ; the knout was unsparingly used upon the noblest in the land.
He revised the taxes, which seem to have borne hardly upon the
peasants, many of whom, we are told, paid a fourth and a fifth of the
produce of their fields and flocks in this way. He also greatly encouraged
commerce, and moved the ancient fair of Kholopi-Gorodok to Mologa.t

Ivan was also the author of new laws. It would seem that the
deficiencies of the ancient code of Yaroslaf I. had been supplemented
by that used at Byzantium.* In 1497 Ivan issued a new code. It
is marked by a draconic and severe character, a tenth of the money
recovered had to be paid to the judges and the sheriff, a certain way of
inducing corruption. " In this barbarous code," says Kelly, " everything
partakes of the keenness of the sword which is brought into action in
every part of it. Single combat decides upon the majority of criminal
offences ; in cases of suspicion when reputation is not spotless, torture is
called in to enlighten justice. A first theft (the spoliation of a church or
the kidnapping of a slave excepted) was punished by the knout and
confiscation of all the criminal's property, half of which went to the
injured person. The poor culprit was given up to his accuser to be dealt
with at discretion. A second robbery was punished with death without
any formality, when five or six honest citizens deposed on oath that the
offender was a known thief.§ In the judicial duels the officers of justice
arranged the details, except in regard to arms, which the contending
parties might choose for themselves, always excepting firearms and bows
and arrows." Some of the clauses of the civil laws are curious. Articles
bought bond fide, as attested by two or three witnesses, became the
purchaser's although stolen, except in the case of horses. Those in
possession of land as owners for three years were deemed its owners,
except as against the crown, when the occupation must be for six years.
A famous clause, which had important results afterwards, was the one
forbidding the peasants to change their lord, except for ten days before
and ten days after the feast of Saint George, and in doing so the peasant
must pay a rouble for it if in the steppe, and a hundred dengas if in the

* li., 431. t Id., 440. I W., 442. § Id., 443. , Kelly, i. 131.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 345

wooded districts. A man might sell himself, his wife, and children as
slaves, but the children of a slave were free if they served another master
or lived by their own exertions. A person marrying a slave became a slave.
Slaves might form part of a dowry or be willed. When captured by the
Tartars they became free on escaping. Ecclesiastics, male and female,
were judged by the bishops and in the ecclesiastical court.* Ivan also
regulated the police, the post stations, and the roads. A curious plan for
insuring silence in the streets at night was putting chevaux de frise there
so as to stop passengers from going quickly. His hand did not spare
the high placed. The archbishop Gennadius was deposed for simony,
and a decree of a council held in 1 503 ordered that endowers should not
be allowed to perform the services of the church. The Turks having
trodden down the Eastern patriarchal sees, we find a bishop of Cassarea
going to Russia to be ordained. We are also told that Ivan greatly
cherished the Russian monasteries on Mount Athos.

Having traced the story of Ivan's latter days, let us revert once more
to that of the Great Horde. Its Tartars continued to be faithful friends
to the Poles in their terrible struggle. About 1500 we are told that
Sheikh Ahmed, with 20,000 cavalry and infantry, planted himself at the
mouth of the Tikhaia Sosna, at the foot of the Dievichie mountains, and
threatened the Krim Khan, who was posted on the opposite side of the
Don with 25,000 men, and was waiting for the arrival of his Russian
allies. " Send me," wrote the latter to Ivan, " by the Don some pieces
of artillery, for form's sake merely, the enemy will fly directly he sees
them." Ivan, although engaged at the time in a fierce struggle with
both the Lithuanians and Livonians, sent the help asked for. Muhammed
Arain, who commanded the Tartars in the Russian service, Prince
Nozdrovati at the head of a body of Muscovites, and a contingent from
Riazan, were ordered to the Don, and some artillery was told off to
follow them ; but Mengli Girai did not await these reinforcements, and,
under the pretence that he was afraid of famine overtaking him, he
retired, guaranteeing to the Grand Prince the approaching destruction
of the Great Horde. " From this time," says Karamzin, " the troops of
Krim pursued the Tartars of the Great Horde, summer and winter,
without ceasing, and devastated their quarters."! In vain Sheikh Ahmed
implored the assistance of the Lithuanians, who were engaged elsewhere.
In vain he neared Rylsk in the hope of finding his allies. He only
encountered the troops of Muscovy ready to repel him. He furiously
accused Alexander of treachery. "It is for you," he wrote, " that we
took up arms, for you we have suffered a thousand fatigues, borne famine
in the midst of deserts, and now you abandon us a prey to famine,
exposed to the attacks of Mengli Girai." Alexander sent sogie presents
to his ally, but he was too busy celebrating his accession to the throne of

* Karamzin, yi. 443-448. t Id., 388.

I U

34^ HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Poland, amidst great pomp at Cracow, to afford more useful succour.
Meanwhile Sheikh Ahmed was deserted by numbers of his princes and
hulans. His favourite wife even left him and sought shelter in the
Taurida. He was further annoyed by his brother Seyid Ahmed, who
had asked for shelter in Russia. This is the last mention we can find of
Seyid Ahmed. From the account of Muhammed Riza, which is very
confused, it may be that he was killed in a fight with Muhammed Girai,
son of MengU Girai.*

Sheikh Ahmed now determined to make overtures to Ivan, and at the
end of 1 501 he sent a murza to Moscow to propose an alliance with him
against Lithuania, on condition that he ceased to protect Mengli Girai
of Krim. " Politics," says Karamzin, " are never vindictive, and Ivan
would probably have accepted these advances but for the clause about
Mengli Girai, who was too useful an ally." He therefore replied, that no
enemy of MengU Girai could be a friend of the princes of Moscow. In
1502 Sheikh Ahmed's Tartars, when suffering from famine, were attacked
by Mengli Girai and scattered or taken prisoners. The latter then wrote
to the Grand Prince, "The country of our enemy is now in our possession,
and I congratulate you as a friend and a brother."t Ivan was too politic not
to attempt to utilise even an enemy who was prostrate. He made overtures
to Sheikh Ahmed, and promised to give him the throne of Astrakhan on
condition that he would aid him against the Lithuanians ; but, followed
by an evil genius, he left, we are told, with his two brothers Khosiak and
Khalek, and sought refuge in Turkey. Thence, however, they were driven
by order of the Sultan Bajazet, who said that Turkey was no harbour for
the enemies of Mengli Girai. Pursued by the princes of Krim, they then
fled to Kief, where, instead of meeting with a welcome, they were basely
imprisoned by Alexander, who doubtless thought he could use Sheikh
Ahmed as a bait to extract terms from the Krim Khan with. He wrote
to the latter, saying, " Your enemy is in our power. If you refuse to
make peace, I can at any moment release the sons of Ahmed."

Ivan counselled Mengli Girai to take no heed of these advances.
" The Lithuanians," he said, " despite all honour, have thrown their ally,
who has so long served them, into chains, and, hke Seyid Ahmed in
former days, this new victim of their treachery will perish in captivity.
Do not fear, therefore, that they will give liberty to your enemy, for they
have reason to dread his revenge." Ivan was right ; for after having
been the plaything of the Polish court for some years, at one time treated
with great consideration and at another imprisoned, he was at length
taken before the diet of Radoml, where he publicly addressed the king,
saying, " Your seductive promises made me leave the recesses of Scythia.
You have given me over into the hands of Mengli Girai. Deprived of
my armies, robbed of my country, I came to seek shelter in that of a

* Vel. Zern., i. 171. t Karamzin, vi. 390.

SEYID AHMED, MURTAZA AND SHEIKH AHMED KHANS. 347

friend. The cruel man has treated me as an enemy, and has cast me
into prison, but," he said, raising his hands aloft, " there is a God who will
not leave your perfidy unpunished." Alexander in turn accused Sheikh
Ahmed of having been the cause of his own ruin, charged his people with
ravaging the environs of Kief, and, complained that instead of attacking
the Russians and marching towards Staradub, he had, contrary to his
advice, clung to the borders of Krim, there to lose his army, while his
journey to Turkey was declared to be to arouse an enemy against Poland
and Lithuania.*

The result was that Sheikh Ahmed was taken away to Troki in
Lithuania, where he was imprisoned. Some time after there arrived at
Troki a deputation from the Nogai Tartars, offering Seyid Ahmed
(.'' Sheikh Ahmed) the throne and demanding his release. This having
been refused, the Khan succeeded in escaping with some Nogais, but he
was waylaid by a body of Polish cavalry, taken again to Troki, and
thence removed to Kovno.t

Thus ended the Golden Horde, which had dominatecf over such a wide
area and filled such a notable place in the history of Eastern Europe.

Before turning to the history of the fragments into which it was
broken, it will not be inopportune to glance at some of the effects which
the long servitude of Russia to the Tartars had produced, and at the
influence which the Tartars had upon Russian institutions. This touches
critical ground. The patriotism of Russian historians has made them
minimise this influence as much as possible, and even almost deny it
altogether. It is true the Tartars were never settled in Russia, and only
had their agents there, but it is nevertheless true that no nation can be
under the absolute yoke of another for two centuries without being
greatly influenced by its suzerain, although he may govern the land from
without. Karamzin confesses that the domination had considerable
influence on the moral qualities of the Russians and their princes.
Slaves seldom have much self-respect, and with them artifice and
cunning take the place of courage and rectitude ; and, as the same
author says, " those who began by deceiving the Tartars ended by
deceiving each other." Honour, glory, patriotism — the virtues of
chivalry — cannot grow in a soil which is not free, and those who are
themselves the objects of tyranny speedily seek compensation by
tyrannising over others. Brutal manners and contempt for law are
other natural fruits of servitude, and necessitate in turn cruel punishment
and inhuman forms of repression. We are not surprised, therefore, to
find Russian history in mediaeval times remarkable for the meanness and
smallness of many of its heroes, and to find also that sordid and corrupt
motives were more natural than more ambitious ones. That those who
had been under the heel of the oppressor for a long time lost their taste

* Karamzin, vi. 393. t Nouv, Journ. Asiat., xii. 357. Note.

348 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and love for liberty, which, as has been finely said, " is the heritage of
the lion and not of the lamb ;" nor are we surprised to find an exceed-
ingly patriotic historian like Karamzin confessing that some of the more
ignoble features in the Russian character of our own day may be
traced to the circumstances surrounding the Tartar domination.

These, however, are mere general influences. We can specify others
more definite and direct. Voltaire's sardonic epigram, that "if you
scratch the Russian you will meet with the Tartar," has been construed
literally by many people, who believe that a great deal of Tartar blood
is to be found among the Russians, and this view has been as fiercely
rebutted by native historians. The fact is, that among the peasants of
Muscovy proper the amount of Tartar blood is almost nil, while in the
provinces bordering the Volga it preponderates immensely. Among the
upper classes, however, there has been a considerable infusion of Tartar
blood. Many princely famiUes among the Tartars accepted baptism and
were adopted into the Russian body politic, and these have since inter-
married considerably with the more purely Slavic families of Muscovy.
In the notes at the end of the chapter will be found a list of such families,
which I have extracted from Von Hammer's Golden Horde.

There are also a considerable number of Turkish words which have
been adopted by the Russians. These were doubtless derived from the
Tartars, who spoke Turkish, the Mongol element among them having
been very small from early times. The long beards worn by the
Russians have been assigned by Von Hammer* and others to a Tartar
origin, but it was more probably an ancient habit of Muscovy, as may be
seen on the figures of Scyths, &c., on coins and other remains. More
probably of Tartar origin were the long boots with their seams decorated
with beads, and the caps worn by the Russians, which among them bore
the Turkish names of tafei or takiye and skufia (uskus).t The names
artagha, altun, kopek, deng, and pul, used for various kinds of money
among the Russians, were of Tartar origin ; similarly the terms arshin,
kile, and aghash, for various measures. The ancient custom called
dershatna proweshe, in virtue of which the debtor had to stand at the
gate of the judge, to be there beaten by the jailor in the pay of the
creditor until he paid his debt, and also the barbarous punishment of the
knout were perhaps of Tartar origin.}

Millet, the favourite grain of the Tartars, was apparently introduced
by them into Russia, as were also the drinks kumis and busa or kwas.
Buckwheat was not improbably imported into Europe through their
influence. The Bohemians call it pohanka, and the Hungarians
tatarka.§ Formerly the Russian women were in the habit of riding on
carts ornamented with red cloth and fastened on runners like those of the

* Golden Horde, 409. t Von Hammer, op. cit., 410. Note. 1 Golden Horde, 410.

U(f., Note, 4.

KASIM KHAN. 349

Tartars. Among the officials of the old Russian court the karauls or
masters of the ceremonies, postelniks (chamberlains), and kilijes were
clearly of Tartar origin, as is proved by their names. In Turkish karaul
means a sentry, kilig a sabre, and post the sheepskin upon which
dervishes squat. The term yarligh {i.e., diploma) is still in use in
Turkey for a patent granted by the Sultan. These, as also the habit of
wearing the cap in church like the Mussulmans, were only abolished by
Ivan. The saddles and bridles were of the Tartar pattern, and we are told
that Daniel of Gahtch used Tartar weapons. It was formerly the custom
in Russia to write kneeling, as the Turks do still. While according to
Von Hammer the art of inlaying silver upon iron and steel, which is still
largely practised in Russia, was of Tartar introduction. The Tartars were
capital smiths.* It is probable that the old system of secluding women,
which prevailed so largely in Russia, was copied from them, " Also the
custom of the tzars choosing their consorts from among the collected
daughters of the nobility, the reduction to slavery of prisoners of war,
the long afternoon slumber, the taste for plumpness of person, the dead
silence in the presence of the tzar, so dead that a foreigner tells us if the
eyes were closed in the midst of the most numerous court the spectator
might have supposed himself in a desert ; the bazaars, the practice of
boxing (the Russians were formerly famous as pugilists), and the hiring
of mourners at funerals."!

I shall presently give a list of distinguished Russian families
descended from Tartar ancestors, showing how very considerable, a graft
the upper classes of Russia received from this source ; and we cannot
fail, even after a cursory examination of Russian ways of thought and
idiosyncrasies, to attribute them very largely to the masters who lorded it
over them for so long. We must now complete our story.

KASIM KHAN.

Among the fragments of the Golden Horde, the Khanate of Astrakhan
has every title to be considered as the right heir of that ancient power.
It was in fact the Golden Horde with a much diminished territory,
and limited roughly to the modern governments of Astrakhan and
the Caucasus, but it was under princes of the same family, and it
retained command apparently of the Caspian trade, and largely
also retained the allegiance of the Nogais. It is not impossible
that on the death of Kuchuk Muhammed his two sons, whose history
I have related, Mahmud Khan and Ahmed Khan to some extent
divided the horde between them, and that Mahmud Khan's portion was
the Lower Volga. At all events the latter struck coins there. J And

* Golden Horde, 411. t Kelly's Russia, i. 148. J Frehn, Res.

393-

350 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

during the reign of Ahmed, as I have already mentioned, we find
Astrakhan, according to the narrative of Contarini, ruled by three of his
nephews, who could be no others than the sons of Mahmud, since he
expressly says their father had formerly been Khan. The most pro-
minent of these, and the only one mentioned by name by the Venetian
traveller was Kasim, the Kassyda of Karamzin. The names of the other
two brothers we can only guess at, but I would tentatively suggest that
they were Janibeg, a prince whose origin Veliaminof Zernof could not
trace,* but who was clearly a person of great consequence at this time,
who was actually nominated as Khan of Krim (as we shall see in a
future chapter) by Ahmed when the latter drove Mengli Girai away, and
who was also a protege of the tzar Ivan. The third brother, I believe,
was Abdul Kerim, who was afterwards Khan of Astrakhan. The first
mention of Kasim known to me was when he lay in wait in the
neighbourhood of Astrakhan to waylay the Russian traveller Athanasius
Nikitin, when on his way to India.t M. Veliaminof Zernof dates this
journey in 1466, and Karamzin+ in 1470. This traveller, in going down
the Volga to Astrakhan, passed the Tartar towns of Uslan and Berekzan,
which were doubtless subject to Kasim. Our next mention of the latter
is in Contarini's travels, which I have already abstracted.! He was then
at issue with his uncle Ahmed. It would seem from the Sheibani
Nahmeh that Kasim's amir el umera was Timur beg, a famous Nogai
chief who has already been mentioned in the history of Ahmed. Kasim
offered shelter to the two grandsons of Abulkhair when their father had
been defeated by Ibak Khan, and we are told the latter, in alliance with
Ahmed, marched against Kasim, who, finding himself too weak to oppose
such a strong army, sought refuge in Astrakhan. There he was
beleagured, and the two young princes who had taken refuge with him
had to cut their way out at the head of forty attendants, after a fierce
struggle. II

Kasim afterwards made peace with his uncle, as I have mentioned,
and in 1480, when Ahmed marched to the Ugra against Ivan III,, one
of the annalists says, " and with the tzar all the horde and his brother's
son, the tzar Kasim and the tzar's sons, and an innumerable quantity of
Tartars."^ This is the last mention I can find of Kasim.

ABDUL KERIM KHAN.

Barbaro, in reporting the war between Mengli Girai and the sons of
Ahmed, says the former marched against Astrakhan, which belonged to
Murtaza Khan.** This seems to be a mistake. In 1490-1 we read that

"Op. cit., i. Note, 50. t Vel. Zern., ii. 235- I vi. 456. M«''» 316-

II Vel. Zern., ii. 235. f Id. ** Op. cit., ed. Hack., 29, 30.

HUSSEIN KHAN. . 35 1

the sons of Ahmed, in alliance with Abdul Kerim, the tzar of Astrakan
who if our contention be right was their cousin, made an irruption into
the Krim, where they were defeated, and lost many of their herds.
Idiku, the son of Ahmed, we are told, was there killed.*

In 1502, when the Golden Horde was finally dispersed, Yusuf
apd Shigavlei, tzarevitches of Astrakhan and nephews of Ahmed
Khan, sought refuge in Russia.t The former, we are told, was the son of
Yakub and the latter of Bakhtiar, brothers of Ahmed.| Sheikh Ahmed
had been imprisoned in Lithuania, as I have described. § According
to Miechof, while he was a prisoner he attempted to escape, and a
number of people, led by Kazak Sultan, a brother german (fratris
germanus, ? his half-brother), were sent on ahead to the Volga to Abdul
Kerim to solicit assistance, but the party were captured as they were
traversing Lithuania, at the instance of Mengli Girai, and finally
imprisoned at Kovno.

In the latter part of 1509, we are told that Abdul Kerim, in aUiance
with the Nogai Murzas Aguish, Akhmet Ali, and Shidiak, made an
attack on Krim, but were defeated by the Khan. || This is the last
mention I can find of Abdul Kerim.

HUSSEIN KHAN.

He was apparently succeeded by Hussein Khan, who is called the son
of Janibeg. That is no doubt of the Janibeg already mentioned, and
who was therefore probably Abdul Kerim's nephew. He was reigning at
Astrakhan when Muhammed Girai, the Khan of Krim, who inherited his
father's ambition and his father's hatred for the Great Horde, and had
already put his son Sahib Girai on the throne at Kazan, now, in the year
1522, marched against Astrakhan. In alliance with Mamai, a prince of
the Nogais, he drove Hussein away and captured the town, and thus
momentarily reunited the Great Horde in his own hands. Hussein was
in close alliance with the Russians, and it was a demonstration which he
made the previous year when Muhammed Girai was attacking them
which probably saved Muscovy from being trampled under by him.
Hussein now sent envoys to lay the condition of his country before the
Grand Prince. " But meanwhile," says Karamzin, " the grandeur of
Muhammed Girai dissolved like a dream." The Nogais conspired
against him, and, as I shall describe in a later chapter, assassinated him
in his tent, while a large part of his army perished miserably in the
steppes ,1"

* Karamzin, vi. 292. t /</., 393- I Vel. Zern., 38. Note, 75.

iAnte,SJi7. || Karamzin, vii. Note, 10. 1 Karamzin, vii. 156-159.

352 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

This was followed by the reinstatement of Hussein as Khan of
Astrakhan. He is so called in a letter of Saadet Girai to the Grand
Prince, written in 1523, in which he calls Hussein his friend.*

KASIM KHAN.

We have no definite information about Astrakhan for some years.
When we again hear of it in 1532, Kasim was its ruler. He is called
Kasai in the Russian chronicles, which is a mere Tartar corruption
of the Arabic name Kasim. He was the son of Seyid Ahmed,
as we learn from the Russian Synodal Register.! This shows
that Astrakhan was now ruled by the descendants of Ahmed
Khan of the Golden Horde, and not by those of Mahmud Khan, his
brother. In 1532 Kasim sent an envoy named Zloba to the Grand
Prince proposing an alUance, but scarcely had the envoys arrived, when
news came that the Circassians had fallen on Astrakhan, carried off the
Khan, killed many princes and people, plundered their corpses, and put
Ak Kubek on the throne.J Kasim apparently died the same year.§

AK KUBEK KHAN.

Ak Kubek was the son of Murtaza Khan, and therefore the first
cousin of Kasim. || He had a brother called Berdibeg or Berdibek, and
was apparently on good terms with the Russians.^ He only occupied
the throne for a few months. It seems he was dethroned by the Nogais.**

ABDUL RAHMAN KHAN.

Ak Kubek was succeeded by Abdul Rahman, who was doubtless a
descendant of Mahmud Khan, as he does not occur among the
descendants of Ahmed Khan in the Synodal Register.tt He was
perhaps a son of Abdul Kerim. He was already on the throne in 1533,
and undertook to be on friendly terms with the Grand Prince Vasih.|J
About 1537 we read that the council of regency, who controlled matters

* Karamzin, vii. 160. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 135.

I Id. Note, gg. Karamzin, vii. igg, 200. § Vel. Zern., i. Note, 135.

il Id. Notes, 21 and 148. •[ Id. ** Id. Note, 148. tt Id. Note. 21.

II Id. Note, 148, Karamzin, vii. 200.

YAMGURCHI KHAN. 353

during the minority of Ivan the Terrible, sent envoys to Abdul Rahman,
who was threatened by the Krim Tartars and the Nogais,* and in that
year, according to the Russian annals, the Nogais drove him away from
the throne and put Dervish Ali in his place. 1

DERVISH KHAN.

Dervish Khan was, according to some and perhaps the best of the
Russian authorities, the son of Sheikh Haidar, the son of Sheikh Ahmed
Khan. One author makes him the son of Sheikh Ahmed.j At all events
it is clear he was a descendant of Ahmed Khan. He was not on the
throne lon^.

ABDUL RAHMAN KHAN (Second Reign).

Dervish was apparently displaced by Abdul Rahman, for on the 20th
of September, 1539, we find the Grand Prince Ivan the Terrible sending
Powadin, the son of Andrew Stephanof, with a letter to Abdul Rahman
to Astrakhan, inquiring after his health. He also sent back to him one
of his people named Epboldu, with his companions. § The next year
Kudahar returned as Abdul Rahman's envoy to the Grand Prince. || In
July, 1 541, there arrived from Astrakhan an envoy named Feodor
Neweshin, who reported to the Grand Prince that the Astrakhan
tzarevitch Yadigar was on his way, that he wished to enter the service
of the Grand Prince, and was then staying at Kasimof with Shah Ali.
With Feodor there went Ishim, the envoy of Abdul Rahman, with a
friendly letter, and a week later Yadigar arrived and entered the Russian
.service.^ The Yadijar or Yadigar Muhammed, just named, was
the son of the Astrakhan Khan Kasim.** We do not hear of Astrakhan
for some years, and when it is mentioned again Abdul Rahman was no
longer Khan. He had been replaced by Yamgurchi.

YAMGURCHI KHAN.

Yamgurchi was the son of Berdibeg and the nephew of Ak Kubek
Khan.tt Like his uncle, he owed his throne to the Circassians.JJ We
first read of him about 1549, when Sahib Girai, the Khan of Krim,

* Karamzin, vii. 313. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 131. J Id. Note, 131.

§/«'• II /<^- Note, 148. %Id. Note, 115, ** /^. Note, 135.

tt Id. Note, 21. II Id., Note, 131.

1 W

354 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

marched against Astrakhan, when we are told Yagmanji, no doubt a
corruption of Yamgurchi, was Khan. On this occasion the Krim Khan
completely defeated the Tartars of Astrakhan, which town he destroyed,
and carried off the inhabitants with their women and wealth to the
Krim.* He apparently nominated his nephew Devlet Girai as Khan of
Astrakhan.

The situation of Astrakhan as an entrepot of trade was too good,
however, for it to be completely eradicated. It was absolutely indis-
pensable for the eastern trade, and however weak in soldiers, its
merchants were rich enough, and we are told that Suliman, the Turkish
Sultan, ordered the Krim Khan to send back its inhabitants to
Astrakhan, which had meanwhile been raised from its ruins, and where
Yamgurchi was still Khan.t In August, 1551, Ishim went as his envoy
to the Grand Prince Ivan Vasilivitch, and on behalf of Yamgurchi
submitted himself and his yurt to the suzerainty of Russia, on the same
terms that Shah Ali of Kazan and the other tzars had done.J

In May, 1552, Kaibula, otherwise called Abdulla, the son of Ak Kubek
Khan, and therefore cousin of Yamgurchi, went to live in Russia. The
Grand Prince married him to a daughter of Jan Ali, brother of Shah Ali,
the former Khan of Kazan, and gave him the town of Yurief as an
appanage.§ Abdulla had a sister, who was married to Ak Murza, the son
of the Nogai chief Yusuf.

Ishim was well received by the Grand Prince, and on his return the
following year he was accompanied by a Russian envoy named
Sebastian. This probably aroused the Khan's suspicions, for we are told
he was only treated with scant courtesy. In the following year com-
plaints arrived at Moscow from Ismael and other Nogai princes against
Yamgurchi.il In 1554 we are told that Yamgurchi, seduced by the
promises of the Sultan of Constantinople, allied himself with Devlet
Girai of the Krim, and with Yusuf, the Nogai chief, who was vexed that
his daughter Shumbeka should have been carried off by the Russians as
a prisoner. The tzar upon this determined to conquer the Khanate.
With him were allied Ismael and other murzas of the Nogais, who were
opposed to Dervish. They asked that Ivan would reinstate Dervish as
Khan.

DERVISH KHAN (Second Reign).

After his deposition from the throne, and during the reigns
of Abdul Rahman and Yamgurchi, Dervish had been a wanderer.

• Nouv. Journ. Asiat, xii. 367. Karamzin, viii. 98. t Karamzin, viii. 129, 130.

I Vel. Zern., i- Note, 131. ^ Karamzin, viii. 129, 130. || S. G.Gmcliu's Travels, ii. 45.

DERVISH KHAN. 355

Thus in 1548 he was in Russia, but the next year, at the
invitation of the Nogais, he went to live among them. In 1551
he once more returned to Russia.* He received Zuenigorod as an
appanage, and Uved there till 1554,+ when the Nogai request came, as I
have mentioned. The tzar sent for Dervish and ordered his troops to
march. They went in three divisions, under Yuria Ivanovitch Pronskoi,
Ignatius Vishniakof, Stephen Sidorof, and other commanders. Besides
them was a contingent of Cossacks, under the hetman Theodore Paulof,
with the elite of the boyard-followers and the Strelitzes. They reached
Zaritzin on the 19th of May. An advance body of light troops was sent
forward to reconnoitre, who met a body of Tartars opposite the Black
Island, defeated them, and captured some prisoners. From their
prisoners they learnt that Yamgurchi had retired from the city and
had occupied a position eight versts from it, while the inhabitants of
Astrakhan had deserted it through fear, and had taken shelter on the
islands. On hearing this the Russian commanders transported these
soldiers from the heavy boats in which they had come to Zaritzin
into lighter ones, and then going on again anchored at Kamen-
skoi Yar, the site of the older Serai, which, says Gmelin, was
called Zarefpody by the Tartars and Bolskoi Serai by the Russians. t
Dividing their troops, one body went on and anchored opposite
Astrakhan. This was on the 29th of May. The gates were open,
and the terrified remnant of the inhabitants fled, but the greater
part were captured by the Christians. Meanwhile another Russian
division, under Vasenskoi, marched against Yamgurchi, who was
defeated after an obstinate resistance, and a large quantity of cannon
and muskets were found in the camp. This camp is fixed with some
probability by Gmelin on the branch of the Volga called Kutum, where
in his day there was still a fortification called Gorodok Yamgurchi {i.e.,
the fort of Yamgurchi). The Khan had put his treasures and seragHo on
board ship, so that they might escape to the Caspian, and had himself
fled. Dervish was now installed as Khan, and the Tartars who remained
behind or had been captured swore fealty to their new lord and to the
Russians. The latter divided their forces into various contingents,
which followed the several arms of the Volga in the Delta, and captured
a great number of Tartars who were either in boats or on the shore, and
released many Russians who had been slaves. Yamgurchi, with a large
body of followers, had retreated by the branch of the Volga called
Mochak, which runs through the steppe of Kislar, and thence to the lake
Beloe, whence he fled to Tiumen. He was sharply pursued, and a great
number of his people with their money, treasures, and weapons were
captured. They reported that his wives had fled to Syshmoshag. The
Russians marched day and night for this spot, which they at length

* Vel. Zern., i. Note, 131. t Id., Note, 148. J Gmelin, ii. 46, 47.

356 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

reached, cut down the guards, and captured the harem and treasure. In
the former were four princesses, named Tevkel, Kanbusa, Erthuana, and
Girinna, The last was enceinte, and gave birth to a son, whom she
called Yarshith. With these four wives were also captured the sons of
Yamgurchi's senior wife Mergivana and his granddaughter Babich.
Meanwhile Yamgurchi, with the principal grandees of Astrakhan and a
considerable army, escaped by the Mochagish swamps to Karabulat.
The Russians, having collected their scattered troops, arrived on the
7th of June at Karabulat, and utterly defeated him. He fled,
first to lake Beloe, where he was again beaten, and afterwards with but
twenty followers to Azof. The rest of his followers were either slain or
made prisoners. On news of this arriving, all the remaining Tartars
collected together and sent envoys to the Russian generals, asking for
clemency and to be treated as their brothers who had already submitted
had been treated. The Russians fixed a day when all who wanted to submit
should go to Astrakhan. There accordingly went Prince Iraklesh, who
was the most eminent of their deputies, and who with the Princes Ishim
and Ali collected their relatives and subjects. There went Enhuvath
Asey with 3,000 armed warriors, 500 murzas and princes, and 7,000
Black Tartars (?>., of the commonalty). They swore that they and their
descendants would become subjects of Russia, and that in case Dervish
died they would ask a new ruler at the hands of the Russian tzar.*
Karamzin adds that they also promised to pay the Russians a tribute of
40,000 altins and 3,000 stock fish, while the Russians were granted the
free right of fishing on the Volga from Kazan to the sea. Having
ordered the grandees to take up their residence in the town, and the
other Tartars to repair to the country round, and having released the
many Russians who were in captivity, and left a body of Cossacks
behind to protect Dervish from his new subjects, and probably also to
act as a salutary check on him, the Russian generals returned home.t

The news of the capture of Astrakhan arrived at Moscow on the tzar's
birthday, and was received with great rejoicings. A solemn Te Deum
was sung, and the generals were handsomely rewarded. The tzar went
out to meet the princesses who had been made prisoners, whom he
treated very kindly, and on the prayer of Dervish sent them back to
Astrakhan, except the youngest, who had given birth to a boy, as I have
mentioned. The mother and son were both baptized at Moscow, the
former receiving the name of Julienne and the latter of Peter. She was
afterwards married to a distinguished Russian named Zacharias Plecheief.
Yamgurchi was not content to be quietly dispossessed. With the
assistance of the sons of Yusuf the Nogai chief, he made an attempt to
capture Astrakhan, but was defeated by Dervish with the assistance of
the Cossacks. Dervish himself was not long quiet, the Russian yoke

* Gmelin, op. cit., 47-5o. t Karamzin, viii. 245-247.

DERVISH KHAN. . 357

was not congenial, lie began to enter into treasonable correspondence
with the Krim Khan Devlet Girai, and appointed Kasbulat, a tzarevitch
of Krim, his kalga.* He allowed the sons of Yusuf murza, who were at
issue with Russia, to cross the Volga, where they defeated Ismael murza
and killed Kasai murza, allies of the latter. On the approach of a force
of Strelitzes he took refuge in Astrakhan, where the Krim Khan sent
some troops and artillery to his assistance. Kaftiref, one of the Russian
officers, meanwhile, we are told, succeeded in restoring peace, and
promised him the tzar's assistance. Dervish, however, continued his
intrigues with the ruler of Krim, and allied himself with the Nogai Yusuf
against Ismael, and then broke out into open revolt. Having put to
death such of the murzas as sided with Russia, he sought refuge with five
hundred men in a small town near the Volga. There he was attacked
by the Russians, and then retired to Kazan. The tzar now sent Ivan
Cheremisinof at the head of the Strelitzes to occupy Astrakhan.
Dervish retired, and still supported by the Krim Tarters refused to make
peace with Russia. But the Nogais, having put an end to their cruel
strife, united their forces to attack him, and captured the artillery
which had been supplied by the Krim Khan, whereupon he fled to Azof,
and thence went to Mecca.t

Thus ended the Khanate of Astrakhan. The tzar appointed Ivan
Cheremisinof its governor, who conciliated the inhabitants by his
generosity and justice. He restored them the arable lands and the
islands in the Delta, and contented himself with imposing a small tribute
upon them. Although the Khanate was at an end, the Imperial race of
the Golden Horde was not extinct. Abdulla and Izak, princes of
Astrakhan, entered the service of Russia, while, as we shall show in a
future chapter, the Royal race descended from Kuchuk Muhammed
revived again in the person of Yar Muhammed, the Khan of Bokhara.

The Astrakhan Tartars have been described in some detail by the
younger Gmelin, who lived a long time among them. He tells us they
are known as Yassakniye Tartars from paying Yassak or tribute, which
they agreed to do when Ivan the Terrible captured their city. They are
divided into three classes. Yurtowishe, those who live in the town ;
Aulnie, those who live in neighbouring villages; and Kochefnieshe, those
who are still nomades. The latter have almost disappeared, having on
the invasion of the Kalmuks in the seventeenth century either amalga-
mated with them or joined the Krim and Kuban Tartars, the Kirghiz
Kazaks, and Bashkirs. A few are still found in the Nogai steppe
towards Kislar. The rapid diminution in the number of the Astrakhan
Tartars may be gathered from the following figures. In the time of the
tzar Boris, Yassak was paid for 25,000 bows. In 171 5, when the Krim
Tartars attacked Astrakhan, they still numbered 1 2,000 men, while when

♦ ld„ 248. t De Guignes, ii. 385, 386.

35S HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Gmelin wrote, in 1774, they barely numbered 2,000 men. They were
divided into Tabuns or villages, over each of which was a Tabunoi
Golowa or Starost, who acted as judge.* After their conquest by
the Russians the Tartars continued to pay them the same tribute they
paid their former masters, and were permitted to retain their old lands.
There were, however, very largely deserted by their fugitive inhabitants,
as I have mentioned, and many of them were sold by their Tabuns to
Russians, Armenians, Bukharians, &c.t Several of the murzas with their
retainers were baptised, and founded the families of the Shadiakofs,
Urussofs, Bashkarofs, Sec. The retainers of the murzas, who were in effect
slaves, were known as Yamiaki or Gemeki. All the Yurtuwishi Tartars
lived, when Gmelin wrote, either in the suburbs of Tzaref, or in six villages
near Astrakhan; three of these were situated on the western branch of the
Volga, called the Boshmakofka, two in the east, and one in the south; the
first, called Kargahk, was a verst in circumference, and contained twenty
famihes ; the second, called Kysan, contained two hundred families and
five mosques ; the third, called Mailegul, had but twenty families and a
circuit of two versts. The two former were eight versts and the latter
ten versts from Astrakhan. In the east was the village of Busdankul
on the Bolda, which was larger than all the rest, and a second village near
the church of Prokofskish containing fifty families. It was called Kazi
by the Tartars, because their most distinguished priests lived there. The
Russians called it Mashaik. The southern village was situated on the
banks of the Kutum, seven versts from Astrakhan, and was called
Jamenel by the Tartars and Tri Protoki by the Russians. + The manners
and customs of these Tartars, which are doubtless the same as those of
their ancestors of the Golden Horde, are described by Gmelin in the
work already cited,§ but they do not form part of our present subject.

jV"^/^ I. — I will now devote a few lines to the two chief towns of the Khanate
of Astrakhan. Astrakhan, called Citra Khan by some of the older travellers,
is a corruption of Haji Terkhan, the name which it bears on numerous coins of
the Golden Horde, and by which it is called in the account of the journey of
Sidi Ali Ibn Hussein, the admiral of Sultan Suliman the Great.|| The
Russians call it Astorokan and Khazitorokan, and the Kalmuks Aiderhan.*[ It
apparently took the place of the town called Sumerkent by Rubruquis.**

The first mention of Astrakhan known to me is in the travels of Ibn Batuta,
who calls it Haj tarkhan, and tells us it was so called from a devout Haj or
pilgrim who settled there, in consequence of which the prince exempted the
place from all duties. "Tarkhan," he says, "among the Mongols denoted a

• Gmelin, ii. 120-122. t Id., izz. J Id., 123, 124.

^ Op. cit., ii. 134-144. I MvJler, Ugrische Volkstamm, 579. •[ Id. ♦♦ Vide ante, loi.

NOTES. 359

place free from all duties."* The famous traveller apparently identified the
name with Terkhan, a title in use among the Mongols and denoting, as Colonel
Yule says, the member of an order enjoying high privileges, such as freedom
from all exactions, the right to enter the sovereign's presence unsummoned,
&c.t It was a title in use among the Turks from early days, and probably
passed from them to the Mongols. It may be compared with that of
Tmutorokan, the city of Tuman, a famous site occupied by a Russian colony in
early days, and identified with great probability with the modern Phanagona.
I may add that Pallas mentions a place in the Krim called Tarkhon-Dip, which
seems to contain the same element. The first part of the name is probably
derived from Haji, a pilgrim. It is curious that, according to Count Potocki,
the ruins at Selitrennoi Gorodok, which I have identified with the older Serai,
are known as Jid Haji, pronounced Jigit Haji by the Kalmuks, which is
probably the name of some saintly person who formerly lived among them.]:
The next time the name occurs is apparently in the account of the ravages
caused l^ the plague in Southern Russia in 1346, when Astrakhan is
named among the towns which suffered from it.§ About the same time
PegoUotti mentions it in his notices of the land route to Cathay. He calls it
Gintarchan and also Gittarchan, both doubtless corruptions of Haji Tarkhan.
He tells us it was twenty-five days' journey with an ox waggon and from ten
to twelve days with a horse waggon from Tana, and one day from Serai
by river. He recommends people who make the journey there from Tana
to take twenty-five days' supply of flour and salt fish. Of meat they would find
enough, he says, at all the places on the way.|| In the Carta Catalana of 1375
and in the Portulano Mediceo it is called Agitarchan, while in Fra Mauro's
map it is called Azetrechan.^ Coins struck there first occur in the year 1374-5,
under Cherkes bek, and on them it is called Hajiterchan.** We next read of
it in the accounts of Timur's campaigns in the Kipchak, when, as I have
mentioned,tt it was captured and destroyed, and its inhabitants put to the
sword.|| Muller argues that on its restoration the site of the town was moved
some distance away to within the Delta,§§ and this is confirmed by a fact
apparently unknown to him, that on the coins of the Golden Horde we meet
with coins of " New Astrakhan " as well as Astrakhan. These occur under
Shadibeg in the year 805 {i.e., 1402 and 1403), while the coins of the older city
range from 1375 to 1427 and 1428.

Our next author is Josafa Barbaro, who wrote about the middle of the fifteenth
century, and who tells us Cithercan stood on the river Itil (?>., the Volga), and
that it was then a little town in a manner destroyed, although in time past it
had been great and of great fame. " For before it was destroyed by Tamerlane,"
he says, " the spices and silk that pass now through Syria came to Cithercan,
and from thence to Tana." The Itil, he says, fell into the sea of Bachu (/.<?,, the
Caspian), about twenty-five miles from Cithercan. |||| When the Venetian
envoy Contarini passed through the Kipchak in 1471, he visited Astrakhan,

* Cathay and the Way Thither, 287. Note, i. t Id.

I Voyage dans les Steppes d'Astrakan, &c,, ii. 38.

$ Muller, op. cit., ii. 579. Karamzin, iv. 339. || Cathay and the Way Thither, 287 and 292.

f7fi?.,287. Note, I. ** Fraehn, Res., 300. tt^«^e,257.

:i Sherifuddin, ii. 37g-33i. §§ Id., 581, 582. Hi Op. cit., ed. Hack., 31.

360 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

which he calls Citracan. He tells us it was a small town surrounded by a low
wall. The few houses it contained were built of bricks, but it was evident that
it had possessed several edifices at no distant date. " It is said," he adds, "to
have been in ancient times a place of considerable trade, the spices which
came to Venice by way of Tana having passed through it. Tana was eight
days' journey distant.*

The destruction of Serai in 1472 by the Russianst no doubt gave an immense
impetus to the growth of Astrakhan, and we find Herberstein a few years later
speaking of it as a wealthy city and the great emporium of the Tartars. He
tells us it lay on the Volga, near its mouth, and ten days' journey below Kazan.
He calls the place Astrakhan, and adds there are some who call it Citrahan.J
His contemporary Paul Centurione, who was sent by the Venetians to the tzar
Vasili to ask him to allow Indian merchandise from Astrakhan to pass freely
through his territory, speaks of it as a principal entrepot of the Indian trade.

Astrakhan was conquered by the Russians, as we have shown, ip 1554. In
1558 the English traveller Jenkinson, in going down the Volga, tells us that
*' On the 14th of July he passed by an old castle, which was Old.Astrakhan,
and leaving it upon the right hand he arrived at New Astrakhan, which the
Emperor of Russia conquered six years past (? four).§ The later history of
Astrakhan forms no part of my subject.

Gamba, who spent some time at Astrakhan about 1820, says the Tartars
then numbered about 10,000, who were mainly descended from the old
inhabitants of the Khapate. They were chiefly engaged in horse and cattle
breeding, as carriers, and merchants, and had a great reputation for honesty.
They were Sunni Muhammedans, and had a beautiful mosque. || Such
are the peaceful remnants of the once terrible Golden Horde. Astrakhan is
now in effect a cosmopolitan place, with a population of Russians, Armenians,
Jews, Persians, Bokharians, Turkomans, and until lately a considerable colony
also of Hindoos, all attracted to the spot by the magnet of trade.

Seraichuk, which is a contraction of Serai Kuchuk, means "Little Serai," and
was an important town of the Golden Horde, situated on the Yaik or Ural, about
fifty-eight versts from its mouth. Near it was the burial place of the Khans of
the horde. This is called Caminazar in the early map of this region, known at
the Fabrica del Mondo by Lorenzo Agnari, while in the Pizziganian map the
royal cemetery is called Torcel.^ Seraichuk is first mentioned by Abulghazi in
describing the reign of Bereke Khan. He says it was founded by Batu.** As
it was near the royal cemetery of the horde, it is not improbable that it was
the same place as the Kok Orda, where Juchi is said to have had his camp.tt
Abulghazi tells us Toktaghu Khan was buried at Seraichuk.|| This was in
1313. A few years later it is mentioned by Ibn Batuta, who passed through it
on his way to Urgenj. It first occurs as a mint place in the year 775 (/.<?.,
1373-4), on the coins of Ilban, while its last occurrence is on the coins of
Dervish Khan in the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth

• Contarini, ed. Hack., 149-151. t Vide ante, 312. I Op. cit., Hack, ed., ii. 76.

$ Muller, op. cit., 586. Note, 7. |j Gamba, Voyage dans la Ruasie Meridionaie, ii. 400.

% Von Hammer, Golden Horde, ii. Note, 5. 280. Note, 3. ** Op. cit., i8i.

]\ Ante, 97. II Op. cit., 183.

NOTES. 361

century it was occupied by the Nogais, and is mentioned by Herberstein as
belonging to one of their chiefs named Shidak.* About the same time it
is named in the narrative of the journey of Sidi Ali, son of Hussein, the
admiral of Suliman.t The English traveller Jenkinson mentions it as occupied
by a Nogai prince vi^hom he calls Smille {i.e., Ismael). In 1580 it v^as captured
by the Cossacks of the Ural, when we are told by Levchine they destroyed it
and killed its inhabitants, without sparing age or sex, and even plundered
the graves of their contents.^

The ruins of Seraichuk were visited by Pallas, who thus describes them
He tells us the ancient town was situated some distance to the west of the
present station of Sarachikofskoi. The ditch is the only part of it which
remains perfect. The rampart can still, however, be easily traced, and is four
or five versts in circumference. On two sides it runs along the Yaik and a
small stream called the Seraichuk, and it is cut through by a canal
which is now dry. Within the enclosure are remains of houses and domes
built of stone. The tiles or bricks are long and wide, and there are fragments
of brown stone filled with fossil shells. This stone is unlike any seen
by Pallas in the neighbourhood. There are few potsherds among the ruins
except some made of a kind of porcelain, having a good enamel glaze
on them, and coloured white, yellow, and blue, and others painted in
different colours. The damp and efflorescence are so great that objects in
iron found there are much corroded, as are the coins in silver and copper
which sometimes occur. Among the Cossacks Pallas met with glass beads
and with pieces of coral and topaz, which were very well worked, and had
come from these ruins. The place is filled with tombs, which are lined with
tiles. Pallas describes the site as most depressing and barren, surrounded
by reeds and marsh plants, and encrusted with salt, and argues that it was
only chosen for purposes of safety when the power of the Golden Horde was
waning.§

In Jenkinson's map there is a place called Shakashik, which is put half a
degree further north than Seraichuk. || Of this town I know nothing.

I inay here add that Yanghikent, the town on the lower Jaxartes mentioned
in ah earlier note,^ is very probably the mint place which occurs on certain
coins of Abdulla Khan in 766 {i.e., 1363-4), under the form of Yanghi Shehr
and Shehr el Jedid.**

Note 2. — Vitut, the Lithuanian king, who was such an important figure in
the history of the latter part of the fourteenth century, about the years 1496-7,
crossed the Don, and having surrounded a horde of Tartars, transported them
to Lithuania, and planted them as colonists between Vilna and Troki.tf
Their descendants still live there,{t and are apparently known as Likani.§§
They are thus enumerated by Latham, who has drawn his information
apparently from the Russian census tables. In Esthonia 12, Kovno 415,
Grodno 849, Vilna 1,874, Minsk 2,120, Podolia 46 ; altogether 5,3i6.|| ||

* Op. cit., ii., Hack, ed., 73, 74. t Journ. Asiat., ist ser., ix. 282.

I Id., XI. 268. § Pallas Voyages, &c., i. 656-658. || Muller, Saml. Russ. Gesh., vii. 439.

H Ante, 290. ** Frashn, Catalogue of Fuch's Collection.

It Bohucz Histoire de la Tauride, 347. H Karamzin, v. ig6. §§ Golden Horde, 364.

HI) Latham, Natire Rapes of the Russian Empire, 148.

IX

362 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Note 1. — Von Hammer enumerates the following Russian families as of
Tartar origin : — Bebikof, Birkin, Blokhin, Boltin, Busolef, Vekentef, Veliaminof,
Verderefski,Vislukhon, Gaiturof, Glinski, Glebof, Godunof, Golovin, Gotowzof,
Davudof, Dashkof, Dershawin, Dobrinski, Duvanof, Dunilof, Durnof, Elisarof,
Elchin, Shdanof, Shemailof, Zagoskin, Zagrashki, Zaitzof-Birdiokin, Zernof,
Zlohin, Ismailof, Isupof, Kamunin, Karandeef, Karaulof, Kasturef, Klementef,
Klushin, Knatof, Kokoshkin, Koltofsk, Korobiin, Koshkarof, Kremenetzki,
Kriokof, Kutumof, Laptef, Leontef, Lopushin, Lupandin, Liobafski, Mansurof,
Massalof, Matioshkin, Merlin, Mestsherski, Molvianinof, Narbekof, Narushkin,
Obesyaninof, Obinyakof, Obyedof, Ogaref, Oknisof, Opraxin, Orinkin, Ostafief,
Paulof, Petrof-Solowogs, Peshkof, Pilfiemof, Plemeannikof, Poshegin, Podolski,
Polivanof, Porowat, Prokudin, Radilof, Rataef, Rostopchin, Rtischef, Saburof,
Safonof, Sverchkof, Svishof, Selivanof, Seliverstof, Simski, Sovin, Somonof,
Sonin, Sorokumof, Sutin, Talusin, Taptukof, Tarbeyef, Tewashef, Tegleyef,
Teryaef, Timiryasef, Tretiakof, Turgenef, Uvarof, Urusof, Fustof, Khabarof,
Khitru, Khofrin, Khoduref, Khomakof, Kohakof-Yazukof, Khonukof, Khot-
yaintsof, Chefkin, Cherimisof, Chirikof, Shishmatof, Sheidakof, Yarief, Yushkof,
Yasikof, Yakoftsef, Yakutin.* This list of names contains some of the best
known in Russian history, and proves what a strong and vigorous graft the
Russian race received from its former masters the Tartars.

Noie ^. — Genealogy of the later Khans of the Golden Horde and the Khans
of Astrakhan.

TiMUR Khan.

Kuchuk Muhammed Khau.

I

Mahmud Khan. Ahmed Khan. Yakub Sultan. Bakhtiar Sultan.
I Yusuf. Sheikhavliar.

Kasim Janibeg Abdul Kerim Seyid Ahmed Murtaza Sheikh Ahmed
Khan. Khan. Khan. Khan. Khan. Khan.

I I I I I

Hussein Abdul Rahman Kasim Khan. | | Sheikh Haidar.

Khan. Khan. | Akkubek. Berdibeg. I

I I 1 I I

Kasbulat. Yadigar. I I Dervish Khan.

Khaibula. Yamgurchi
Khan.

* Golden Horde, 523-529.

CHAPTER VI.

THE KHANS OF KAZAN AND KASIMOF.

KAZAN.

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN AND HIS PREDECESSORS.

I HAVE mentioned that when the patrimony of Juchi Khan was
distributed among his sons each one seems to have inherited a
certain number of clans and a separate camping ground. The
main horde in the west under Batu pastured the country watered by the
Volga and the Don. This pasture ground of the Golden Horde on the
Volga was limited apparently on the south by the Caspian, near which
were Batu's winter quarters, and on the north by the town of Ukek,
which, according to more than one testimony,* marked the limit of the
actual country of the Golden Horde on the north. It was probably an
old frontier, and was the previous boundary of the Comans or Poloutzi.
North of this and extending over the modern province of Kazan was the
ancient Bulgaria, formerly a flourishing kingdom. At the time of Batu's
invasion it was occupied apparently by the Chuvashes (who, according
to the best modern Russian inquirers, are the descendants of the ancient
Bulgarians), by the Cheremisses, Votiaks, and Mordvins. The so-called
Tartars of Kazan, who now form such an imposing element in the
population of this district, were originally no doubt a part of the Golden
Horde, and migrated there after the great Mongol invasion. When and
under whom they migrated is not an easy matter to settle. Bolghari
* occurs as a mint place of the Golden Horde as early as the days of
Ankbugha,t but this may not mean that any Tartars were then living
there, but merely that the town was subject to their control. In regard
to the princes who first founded a quasi independent authority in this
district we have but the faintest light. It is generally assumed that
Ulugh Muhammed was the first to do so, but this is a mistake. Let us
follow his pedigree somewhat. Barbaro, who was a first-rate authority
since he was a contemporary, says he was the son of Hassan Oghli.l He
also describes him as having a grandson grown up in 1437, proving he
was then an old man. Abulghazi tells us he was the son of Hassan
Oghli, surnamed Ichkili Hassan, § In a genealogy of the tzars of

* Vide ante, 100. tW, 113. I Golden Horde, 390. Note, 3. § Op. cit., 187.

3^4

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Krim and Kazan, quoted by M. Vel. Zernof,* he is called the son of
Zekil Assan Ulan. In the register of the Synodal Library, quoted by the
same author, Ulu Ahmet (as he is there called) is made the son of Seche
Assan Ulan. In the register of the Archives he is also made the son of
Segen Assan Ulan.t There is in fact no difference of opinion, and this
being so and remembering his future history, it is very curious that none
of the authors who have discussed the origin of the Kazan Khans have
seen that he was not only the son of Hassan Oghli, but also that his
father was the chief of Bulgaria before him. It is at all events a more
than remarkable coincidence that Muhammed should have been the
son of a Hassan, that a Hassan who was chief of Bulgaria at
the time when Muhammed's father must have lived had a son
called Muhammed Sultan ;+ that Ulugh Muhammed himself should
have become ruler of Bulgaria, and that there should be no
evidence of any kind to militate against the position. I therefore
conclude without hesitation that the Hassan whose history I have
related,§ and one of whose coins struck in 1372 is extant, was the father
of Ulugh Muhammed. He was not improbably also the brother of Azis
Khan. I have argued that Hassan's father was called Ali Beg.||
Abulghazi makes Hassan the son of a person whose name is read
doubtfully by Des Maisons as Habin6, which is perhaps a corruption
of Ali Beg.H M. Vel. Zernof reads the name Hina,** while he
says that the Russian genealogical tables agree with Abulghazi in
deducing Ulugh Muhammed from Tuka Timur.tt I do not see any
reason whatever for doubting this conclusion, and it is very probable
that Bulgaria was assigned to Tuka Timur as an appanage, and
that Mangu Timur enlarged it by granting his son Ureng, Krim and
Kaffa, as I have mentioned. U At all events, both the royal stems
of Krim and Kazan seem to have been descended from this Tuka
Timur.

Tuka Timur had a son Oreng, or Uz Timur, as he is called by
Abulghazi. Uz Timur had a son Saricha Kunchak Oghlan,§§ who had
two sons, Tokul Khoja and Tulek Timur. |||| Habin^, we are told, was
the son of Tulek Timur, and Hassan Oghlan the son of Habin«5. Habino
or Ali Beg was probably ruling in Bulgaria when it was attacked and
appropriated by Pulad Timur the Sheibanid, as I have mentioned.^^
Pulad was driven away by the Russians in 1367, and killed by Azis
Khan.*** We next meet with an enigmatical sentence in Von Hammer,
which I cannot quite understand. He tells us that in 1370 Prince Dimitri
Constantinovitch of Suzdal sent his brother Boris and his son Vasili
with a great army against the Khan of Bulgar, Hassan (? Haidar), who

• Op. cit. t Id., i. Note, 21. J Ante, 207.

S Ante, '20^,207. II /d. f Abulghazi, op. cit., 187. •* Op. cit., i. Note, 80.

t1 Id. II Ante, 199. *§ Id. \\\\ Id., 201. Abulghazi, 187.

ff^n<^204. *** Id.

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN. 365

on the break up of the kingdom of Janibeg and Berdibeg had seized
upon that district, as Taghai had upon the land of the Mordvins. With
this expedition went the Tartar envoy Haji Khoja. They displaced
Haidar from the throne of Bulgar, and put upon it the son of the Bak.*
This sentence as it stands is contradictory and unintelligible, and I
formerly was disposed to think that what was meant is, that when Pulad
Timur was driven away from Bulgaria it was occupied by Haidar (whose
origin I don't know unless he was the brother of Mengli Girai of Krim,
which is not improbable), who was replaced by the son of the Beg {i.e.^
according to my reading by Hassan); but it would seem from Karamzin,
who calls Hassan the enemy of Dimitri of Suzdal, that it was Hassan
who was then displaced and Haidar seated on the throne.t Hassan is
said to have captured Serai in 768 of the hej. {i.e.., 1369), and, as I have
said, we have a coin of his struck in 1372.+

In 1376 we find the Grand Prince Dimitri sending an army under the
command of Prince Dimitri Michaelovitch to conquer Bulgaria. He was
joined by the sons of the Prince of Suzdal. The people of the country
marched to meet them on camels and making ferocious cries, hoping thus
to frighten the horses of the Russian cavalry, but it was of no avail. The
Russians burnt the villages, the winter quarters, and boats of the Tartars,
and forced their two rulers, Hassan and Muharmned Sulian {i.e., Ulugh
Muhammed), to submit to the Grand Prince. They also paid him a
sum of 2,000 roubles, a part of which went to Dimitri of Suzdal, and gave
3,000 roubles to be distributed among the soldiers ; and as a proof that
they consented to become tributaries of Russia, they received into their
town a Muscovite customs-officer. § If Hassan was displaced, therefore,
from the throne of Kazan, it was only very temporarily. The expedition
last mentioned was followed by the invasion of Bulgaria and Russia by
the Sheibanid Prince Arabshah, as I have mentioned, || and this again by
the /rule of Toktamish, whose father, according to my reading of the
authorities, was the cousin of the father of Hassan. U During his reign
it would seem that Bulgaria was subject to him, though probably
mediately, and Hassan or his son Muhammed doubtless continued to
rule there.

About the year 1375 a band of buccaneers from Novgorod plundered
the banks of the Volga as far as Astrakhan, where they were destroyed
by the Tartar Prince Salchei, and in 1378 another band of them was
destroyed near Kazan by the Viatkans.**

In the campaign of Toktamish against Timur in 1397, the contingent
of Bulgaria is mentioned as if under a separate jurisdiction.tt It was
during the same year that the buccaneers from Novgorod made another

» Golden Horde, 321. t Op. cit., v. 49. J Vide ante, 207. $ Karamzin, v. 49-51.

'^ Ante, 212. il Ftd« table at the end of this chapter. **yl«f^, 229.

tt Id., 244.

366 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

raid upon the Bulgarian towns of Yukotin, Kazan, &c., and ravaged
them mercilessly.*

In 1395 Timur made his second attack upon the Golden Horde, in
which he laid the power of Toktamish in the dust, and four years later
we find the Grand Prince Vasili sending his brother Yuri at the head of
a large army, which captured Bolghari, Yukotin, Kazan, and Kremenchug.
For three months the Russian troops ravaged the land, and returned
laden with a rich booty. Never had the Russians penetrated so far into
the Tartar country, and from this time Vasili styled himself Prince of
Bulgaria.t

The invasion of Timur, although it apparently did not overflow
Bulgaria, caused a revolution in its government. Its extent and nature
we cannot quite follow. It would seem at all events that Hassan and his
son Ulugh Muhammed were ejected, for in one account we read of a
chief called Abdul Khan, who is even said to have ruled there when
Timur arrived, and who had two sons named Altun Bek Khan and Alim
Bek Khan, who are made in the saga to be the founders of Kazan.l In
another account Timur is made to destroy Kazan, which is said to
have been rebuilt by a chief named Ilkhan Khan.§ Alim Bek, it is
suggested by M. Vel. Zernof, is the same person as the Ali Beg to be
named presently.

In the year 141 1, we are told by Karamzin that Daniel Borisovitch, one
of the princes of Nijni Novgorod, at the head of the guard of the
Bulgarian. Princes^ defeated Peter Dimitrovitch, brother of the Grand
Prince Vasili, at Liskof, while Talich, the voivode of Daniel, assisted by
the tzarevitch of Kazan, with less than five hundred men, Russians and
Tartars, pillaged the ancient city of Vladimir, but after these successes
Daniel was abandoned by his allies, the Tartars of Kazan, who returned
home with their booty. ||

A few years later Ulugh Muhammed displaced Chekre, the Khan who
ruled at Serai, and until 1437 he was constantly mixed up with the
history of the Golden Horde, as I have related in a previous chapter.^
In that year he was defeated and driven away by Kuchuk Muhammed.
In order to understand his subsequent history, we must remember that
he was Prince of Bulgaria or Khan of Kazan before he became chief of
the Golden Horde.

I have mentioned how, when defeated and driven away by Kuchuk
Muhammed, Ulugh Muhammed sought refuge at Bielef in Lithuania,
relying on the friendship of the Grand Prince Vasili, to whom he had
proved a faithful patron, but he calculated without his host. Vasili
allowed him to settle for a while on the banks of the Oka, in the district
of Bielef, and within the modem province of Tula, but either through

• lA., 250. t Karamzin, v. 197, 198. \ Vel. Zern., i. Note, 3. S Id.

II Karamzin, v. 244 and 248. ^ Vide ante, 275-283.

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN. 367

jealousy or through fear of the new Khan of Serai, against whom no
doubt Muhammed was plotting, he at length ordered him to leave. The
latter was hurt by the ingratitude, and he wrote a letter to the Grand
Prince, which has been preserved in the Russian archives. It is thus
translated by Tornirelli. " My liege and brother, — Do not refuse me the
short space of time necessary to prepare for my departure. I will soon
quit your territories, where you are unwilling to grant me an asylum. I
have never done you evil nor meditated doing so ; why, therefore, do you
seek to dissolve a friendship which on my part shall continue to the
grave ? If God restores me my kingdom, I will then prove the sincerity
of my present manifestations ; but if you still doubt my integrity and
friendship, take one of my dear sons as a hostage. Nay, more, accept in
writing an assurance on my part with my seal and signature, containing
a solemn oath that I will never disturb the goodwill which has hitherto
existed between us, either by dissension or war ; and I here conjure your
God and mine to destroy me as a perjurer, and to strike me even by the
death of my children if ever I infringe upon my solemn oath."*

We are told that in his extremity he also prostrated himself at the
door of a Russian church and uttered the following prayer. " God of
the Russians, who regardest not the faces of men but their hearts, thou
knowest how just is my cause. Thou seest the frightful situation to
which my enemies have reduced me, and the ungrateful manner in which
the Grand Duke repays the love I bore him and the benefits I have
rendered him, and yet the latter seeks to deprive me of life. God of the
Christians, be therefore a just judge between us, protect the innocent and
punish the guilty."

The letter I have mentioned Ulugh Muhammed sent off with an
embassy of three princes, named Ediberdei, the Beg Hussein of Serai,
and Hussein Khoja.t

Meanwhile the Grand Prince had despatched an army of 40,000 men,
commanded by his cousins Shemiaka and Dimitri the Red, who
beleagured Bielef. They were obdurate and refused to listen to Muham-
med's entreaties, but were brought to their senses by a sudden panic
which seized their troops, and in consequence of which they broke up and
hastily retired, pursued by the Tartars. Muhammed, however, was too
prudent to miscalculate his real power, and having left Bielef, he,
according to Karamzin, who is followed by Von Hammer, traversed
the country of the Mordvins and settled down at Kazan.| These
writers make him the founder of the Khanate of Kazan, which we have
seen was practically founded long before ; his father having in fact
reigned there. My learned friend M. Vel. Zernof even goes further than
this, and assigns the foundation of the Khanate to Muhammed's son,§ a
view in which I cannot concur. In 1439 Ulugh Muhammed marched

* Tornirelli, i. 76. t Golden Horde, 386. J Karamzin, v. 327. Golden Horde, 387.

^ Op. cit., i. Note, 3.

368 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

upon Moscow, which was abandoned by the weak-kneed Vasih, who
retired beyond the Volga, and left its defence to the Lithuanian Prince
Yuri Patrikievitch. The Tartars were not strong enough to take the
town, but contented themselves with plundering the neighbourhood and
burning Kolomna, and afterwards returned with their booty.* We do
not hear of Ulugh Muhammed again for five years, when we find him in
possession of Nijni Novgorod, where he passed the winter of 1444-5. In
the spring of 1445 he marched upon Murom, and thence sent on an
army commanded by his sons Mahmudek and Yakub, to attack the
Muscovites.

The Grand Prince in turn collected an army, and his cousins
Shemiaka, Ivan of Moyaisk, Michael, his brother, Prince of Vereia, and
Vasili of Borosk, grandson of Vladimir the Brave, ranged their forces
under his banner. Muhammed thereupon retired, and some of his
people were beaten by the advance guard of the Russians, but Vasili,
afraid of exposing his men to a winter campaign, ordered them to retire.
In the following year he heard that Muhammed's forces had made a
fresh invasion. His own troops had been meanwhile disbanded. He
hastily collected the forces of Moscow, and was joined by the voivodes of
Nijni Novgorod, who had been forced by famine to escape from their
fortress after burning it, and soon after they were joined by the princes of
Moyaisk, Vereia, and Borosk, with a small contingent. The treacherous
Shemiaka stayed away. On the other hand, he found an ally in the
Tartar tzarevitch Berdata. With these forces he set out and encamped
near Suzdal, on the borders of the Kamenka, but his whole force, we are
told by the authorities, only numbered 1,500 men, which is assuredly
more a patriotic than a grave statement. Notwithstanding their
inferiority, they attacked the enemy in the open, near the monastery of
Saint Euphemius. The Tartars at first gave way, upon which the
Muscovites broke their ranks and proceeded to plunder the dead and to
loot. Their enemy's retreat was but a ruse ; he turned upon them when
they were scattered and overwhelmed them. The Grand Prince had his
hand pierced by an arrow, lost several of his fingers, and received
numerous wounds, thirteen of them on his head. He at length surrendered
himself as a prisoner, together with Michael, Prince of Vereia, and his
principal boyards. The two Tartar princes rested two days after their
victory at the monastery of Saint Euphemius, and having taken off the
golden cross Vasili wore about his neck, they sent it to his wife and
mother as a witness of their victory, while their troops proceeded to
ravage the neighbourhood.! The honest Russian chronicler in reporting
these events remarks on the defeat, " that the God of the Christians aids
even the infidel when his cause is just."| The citizens of Moscow, who

Karamzin, v. 327, 328. Vel. Zern., 137. t Karamzin, v. 3^9-373-

I TornirtUi, op. cit., i. 78.

ULUGH MUHAMMED KHAN. 369

momentarily expected the arrival of the victorious army, had further to
deplore the destruction of all the wooden buildings in the Kremlin, which
were destroyed by fire.* The city was now deserted by the mother and
wife of the Grand Prince, with the chief boyards, who retired to Rostof ,
and Boris, Prince of Tuer, seized the opportunity for making a raid upon
Torjek. The citizens of the capital drew themselves together and prepared
to fight, but the prudent Tartars, content with their brilliant victory,
retired with their booty and their illustrious prisoner to Kurmuish.

Ulugh Muhammed now sent an envoy named Biguich to Shemiaka,
the cousin and bitter enemy of Vasili, who had failed to assist his relative
in the late struggle. Shemiaka received the envoy with great honour,
and then sent Theodore Dubenski, his principal secretary, to negotiate a
treaty with Muhammed, by which Vasili was to be kept in perpetual
durance and Shemiaka was to be created Grand Prince, dependent on
the Khan ; but Muhammed, who was nervous about the delay of his
ambassador returning, and whose capital had been attacked by a
Bulgarian Prince, agreed to allow Vasili to return on the payment
of a small ransom, and hastened homewards. Vasili was met at
Pereislavl by a large cortege of people, whose enthusiasm was a reminis-
cence of the glorious reception accorded to his grandfather Dimitri
Donskoi on his triumphant return.t

I mentioned how Ulugh Muhammed had sent his envoy Biguich to
Shemiaka. We are told that the two descended the Oka from Murom
to Nijni Novgorod, whence they returned again on hearing of the release
of Vasili. There Biguich was arrested by Prince Obolenski. I shall not
repeat how Shemiaka captured his cousin the Grand Prince and blinded
him, how he afterwards released him, and how his partisans assembled
an army to reinstate him.j We are told that as the latter marched
towards Moscow they met a body of Tartars and were about to attack
them, when they discovered they were allies, and were commanded by
Mabtnudek and Yakub, the sons of Ulugh Muhammed. They said they
had heard of the sorry plight to which the Grand Prince had been
** reduced, and had accordingly marched to his assistance. They were
cordially received and joined the main army.§ This was in the autumn
of 1446. Let us now revert once more to Ulugh Muhammed.

The prince who had usurped authority at Kazan is called Libey,|| which
name, as M. Vel. Zernof says, is clearly a corruption of Ali beg or Ali bek.
He is elsewhere called Asyi, which the same learned author considers a
corruption of the Arabic Gazi (/.<?., conc[ueror of the unbelievers), a title
adopted by Muhammedan princes after victories over infidels, as will be
remembered by those who were interested in the recent capture of
Sukhum Kaleh by the Turks and its consequences. He was doubtless the

Karamzin, V. 373. t /a^v 377. 378. 1 Fnf* a«.'e, 301, 302. § /<^.» 393» 394.

n Id., 376. Vel. Zern., i. Note, 3.

I Y

370 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

AH beg already mentioned.* Muhammed, it would seem, never returned
to his ancient capital, but was assassinated by his son Mahmudek at
Kurmuish.t Mahmudek on this occasion also killed his younger brother
Yusuf^ This was apparently in the autumn of 1445. Thus passed
away, at no doubt an extreme old age, one of the most enterprising of
the Tartar princes, whose life was full of romantic adventures, and who
had felt many changes of fortune.

MAHMUDEK KHAN.

It is not improbable that the murder of Ulugh Muhammed was
connected in some way with the strife between the Grand Prince Vasili
and Shemiaka. We at all events find the latter intriguing with the
people of Viatka and those of Kazan,§ and in the famous protest made
by the Russian bishops against the conduct of Shemiaka he is accused
of having instigated Mahmudek, the tzarevitch of Kazan, to imprison the
Muscovite envoy,! and we are told that in 1446 (that is, in the very year
of his accession), seven hundred of his troops attacked Ustiuge, and
compelled it to pay a tribute of furs, but many of them were drowned in
the Vetluga on their return. The first important act of Mahmudek's
reign was to march against Ali beg (who had usurped authority at Kazan),
and to kill him. He then occupied the town. In 1448 Ivan, the eldest
son of the Grand Prince Vasili, marched at the head of an army to drive
the Kazan Tartars from the district of Murom and Vladimir.^ During
the latter years of Vasili these Tartars were tolerably quiet. We are
told indeed that the Grand Prince meditated an attack upon them, but
on their Khan sending him envoys he made peace with them. The date
of Mahmudek's death is apparently not known. He left two sons
behind him, Khalil and Ibrahim.

KHALIL KHAN.

Khalil succeeded his father. We know nothing of him except that he
married Nursaltan, the daughter of the Nogai Timur, and only occupied
the throne for a very short time,** when he was succeeded by his brother
Ibrahim.

IBRAHIM KHAN.

Ibrahim married his brother's widow. His uncle Kasim, who, as I
have mentioned, had taken refuge in Russia, had married his mother, the

* Ante, 366. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 3. lid. § Karamzin, v. 4D2. 0 •''^•. 405-

% Id., 410. Golden Horde, 394. ** Vel. Zern., i. Note, 21.

IBRAHIM KHAN. . 37 1

widow of Mahmudek.* Kasim was ambitious of possessing himself of the
throne of Kazan, of which he was in fact the rightful heir, and he entered
into secret negotiations with Abdul Mamun and other grandees of the
principality to depose the young Khan Ibrahim, his stepson, and at the
same time asked assistance from the Grand Prince Ivan III. The latter
eagerly seized the opportunity, and in September, 1467, sent an army
against Kazan, under the orders of Kasim and the voivodes Prince Ivan
Jurgivitch and Ivan Obolenski Striga. The season proved very severe,
and the invaders were forced to retire. In the retreat the Russians
suffered badly, and were driven to the necessity of eating meat in a
season of fasting, which Karamzin names as a most unusual occurrence.t
The Tartars contented themselves with sending a detachment as far as
Galitch, which did not do much damage. In the early spring of the
next year the Russians sent another army, under Simeon Romanovitch,
to ravage the country of the Cheremisses, a northern dependency of
Kazan. We are told they marched for a month through forests shrouded
in snow, along the then uninhabited banks of the Vetluga, the Usta, and
the Kama. They at length reached the Cheremis country, rich in cattle
and very fertile, which was governed by its own princes. There they
murdered the inhabitants, and ravaged the land in the cruel fashion
then universally prevalent, which justified all crimes committed against an
enemy. They advanced to the environs of Kazan, and then retired gorged
with booty. " Simeon returned," says Karamzin, " with the title of victor,
gained by slaughtering several thousand people without a fight.'' Mean-
while another corps of Russians drove the Tartars from Kostroma and
the neighbourhood of Murom. The Cheremisses became Russian
subjects, but had to change their allegiance very shortly, when the
Kazan Khan sent an army into their country.! The Grand Prince also
ordered the voivodes of Moscow, GaUtch, Vologda, Ustiuge, and Kich-
menga to concentrate a large force on the Kama. Having met at
Kotelnich, in the district of Viatka, they traversed the country of the
J^heremisses as far as Tamluga, and then followed the Kama to Bela-
Voloyka, everywhere devastating the country and slaughtering or making
prisoners of the inhabitants as they went. The only Tartars they
encountered were a small body of two hundred, whose fortress they
captured, slaughtered the garrison, and carried off the two leaders. On
the Kama they secured a great quantity of merchants' barques richly
laden, and returned home through Great Russia. Another body of
Russians, under Prince Riapolofski, the voivode of Nijni Novgorod,
defeated a party of Kazan Tartars on the Volga, and captured the Tartar
Prince Khosum Berdei, who was sent on to the Grand Prince.

In the spring of 1469 Ivan determined to strike a more serious
blow against the Khanate. The boyard-followers of the various

* /</. 1 Karamzin, vi. 13. Vcl. Zern,, i. Note, 22. I Karamzin, vi. 14.

372 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

towns, the merchants and other inhabitants of the capital took up arms
under Prince Obolenski, and Constantine Bezzubtzef was appointed
commander-in-chief of the forces. They were ordered to rendezvous at
Nijni Novgorod. Boats were armed at Moscow, Vladimir, Kolomna,
Suzdal, and Murom, and the people of Dimitrof, Moyaisk, Uglitch,
Rostof, Yaroslavl, and Kostroma went down the Volga. Those from the
other towns went by the Oka, the whole joining at the meeting of the
two rivers. This lordly naval display was a new event in Russian
history, but barely had the plans of campaign been arranged when the
Grand Prince ordered the commander to halt at Nijni Novgorod, and
only to send some small bodies of volunteers down the river. This
change of policy is accounted for by Karamzin on the ground that Kasim,
the Khan of Kasimof^ had died, and that Ivan probably hoped to gain
his ends through the influence of his widow, who was Ibrahim's mother.*
In vain the commander told his troops of the wishes of the tzar, they
would punish the infidels and win glory in fighting. They spread their
sails and raised their anchors accordingly. They went on to old Nijni,
leaving their commander behind, and elected Ivan Runo their leader.
They were not long in appearing before Kazan, whose outskirts they
surprised in the night. The Russians entered the streets without meeting
with any resistance, and killed and robbed all who opposed them. They
released many prisoners from Moscow, Riazan, Lithuania, Viatka,
Ustiuge, and Perm, and set fire to the houses, and the Tartars who
had shut themselves up therein with their treasures were burnt to
death. Having gorged themselves with booty and destroyed what they
could, the Russians remounted their vessels and descended the river as
far as the island of Korovnichy, where they remained for a week quite
inactive. This aroused suspicions against Runo, and it was asked why
he did not proceed to storm the town of Kasan itself, and he was accused
of having received a large bribe from the Khan.t

The latter was not likely to remain with folded arms while his capital
was surrounded with flames. He collected the troops of Kazan and
those of the Kama, the Viatkans and the Bashkirs, and an escaped
prisoner brought the Russians word that they might expect an attack the
following day. They accordingly determined to forstal matters. They
placed a body of troops on some barges, and ordered them to rendezvous
at the island of Irikhof, while with another body they went along the
banks. The Tartars were badly beaten, and their boats were compelled
to take shelter within the city. Having assembled at the island of
Irikhof, they were joined by their former commander, the voivode of
Nijni Novgorod, who, having sent off couriers to Moscow to announce
what had happened, determined to prosecute the war, and sent orders to
the people of Viatka to join him before Kazan. The Viatkans gave a

T Id., 18-20.

IBRAHIM KHAN. 373

judicious answer, having determined to remain neutral between the two
combatants, and Bezzubtzef having in vain awaited their arrival for a
month, and beginning to suffer from famine, determined to retire once
more to Nijni Novgorod. On the way he met Ibrahim's mother, who
told him her son had agreed to accept terms from the Grand Prince, and
that the war was at an end. The Russians were leisurely enjoying them-
selves when they were suddenly attacked by the cavalry and the
war boats of the Kazanese. A violent interchange of missiles took place
between them, after which the Russians continued their retreat.*

Meanwhile the Grand Prince had sent another division, under the
command of Prince Daniel of Yaroslavl, by water to Viatka, to impress
such of the Viatkans as he could meet with into the service, and to
march with them against Kazan. His soHcitations were as ineffective as
those of the agent of Bezzubtzef. Notwithstanding this he determined
to march with such troops as he had upon Kazan. Ibrahim having
heard of his advance, planted his war boats on the Volga and his cavalry
on its banks to intercept him, and a fierce struggle ensued. The
Russians were badly beaten and lost most of their men. The contingent
from Ustiuge with Prince Vasili Ukhtomski alone cut their way through
and reached Nijni Novgorod. He is said to have jumped from boat to
boat belonging to the enemy, and dealt many a death-blow with his
mace.t

Ivan determined to repair this disaster, and accordingly despatched
an army under his brothers Yuri and Andrew, with all his guard and the
princes in his service. While a large contingent marched overland, a com-
plementary flotilla went by way of the Volga. They laid siege to Kazan,
and having defeated the Tartars in a fight, Ibrahim was constrained to
make terms and to set at liberty forty years' accumulations of prisoners,
which had been captured from the Russians in many struggles. J

/Notwithstanding his promises Ibrahim, in 1478, having heard a false
rumour that Ivan had been defeated by the people of Novgorod and had
had to retire to his capital wounded, invaded the province of Viatka, laid
siege to several towns, desolated some villages, and carried off a body of
prisoners to make into slaves. The following spring the Grand Prince
had his revenge. The people of Ustiuge and the Viatkans burnt the
villages on the Kama, while Vasili Obrasetz did the same on the Volga.
He advanced from Nijni Novgorod against Kazan, which he besieged,
and from which he was forced to withdraw by a storm. Ibrahim again
asked for peace, which was granted to him, and he died directly after-
wards, leaving a great number of children by different wives.§

During the reign of Ibrahim there occurs a person who has hitherto
been a puzzle. He was called Murtasi, and in one account is called the
son of Mustapha tzar of Kazan, but no such person as Mustapha occurs

* Karamzin, vi. 20-23. t Id., 24. I Id., 25. § Id., 227, 228.

374 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

among the recorded Khans of Kazan. M. Vel. Zernof suggests that he
was the Mustapha mentioned as having been killed in a fight on the
Listari against the Grand Prince Vasili.* Mustapha is there simply
called tzarevitch of the horde. Fortunately a coin has survived to our
day struck by him, on which he is called the " Just Sultan Mustapha
Khan, son of Ghayas ud din Khan."t This shows he was a son of the
Khan of the Golden Horde. Murtasi occurs for the first time in
147 1, when he was summoned to Moscow by the Grand Prince. He
took part in 1472 in the war against Ahmed Khan, and in 1473 the
Grand Prince gave him the new town (Gorodok) on the Oka with several
domains. He was still in Russia in 1480. J

ALI OR ILHAM KHAN.

A general anarchy now arose in the horde. As I have said, the two
brothers Khalil and Ibrahim had successively married Nursaltan, the
daughter of the Nogai chief Timur, who now married for her third
husband Mengli Girai, the Khan of Krim. She was an ambitious and
restless woman, and it would seem intrigued to have her own son
Muhammed Amin nominated as Khan of Kazan, to the prejudice of
Ibrahim's elder son AH or Ilham, whose mother was- called Batmassa
Solta,§ and who was supported by a party within the horde, and also by
the Nogais. The stepson of Mengli Girai received the countenance of
the Muscovite tzar, who probably dreaded a close alliance between the
Khan of Kazan and the Nogais.

Ali eventually seized the throne, and his rival Muhammed Amin fled
for refuge to Moscow, where he seems to have appealed to the Grand
Prince. Ivan in 1482 sent an army from Nijni Novgorod, which
advanced as far as Kazan, when at the request of the Khan peace was
made. II Muhammed Amin was granted Koshira as an appanage by the
Russians. The accounts of what happened in the next few years at
Kazan are very confused. They have been analysed at some length by
M. Vel. Zernof. 51 It would seem that Ivan, who was indifferent as to
which brother was Khan of Kazan so long as he was obedient to himself,
first supported one and then the other. In 1484 he sent an army
against Kazan, which captured Ali and put Muhammed Amin in his
place.**

Herberstein describes his deposition thus. He says that, " not being
entirely obedient to the Grand Prince, he was on a certain occasion
made drunk at a festival by some of the councillors of the Prince of

* Vide ante, 300. t Soret, Lettre a M. le Capitaine Kossikofski.

I Vel. Zern., i. Note, 38. § Herberstein, ii. 58. || Vel. Zern., i. Note, 61.

1i Op. cit., i. Note, 62. *• Vel. Zern. Note, 62, p. 190.

ALI OR ILHAM KHAN. 375

Muscovy, whom he had sent thither to watch the disposition of the king,
and who in that state placed him in a carriage as if with the intention of
conveying him home, but the same night they took him towards
Moscow.* The same author confuses the events which followed.

It would seem he was immediately replaced by Muhammed Amin, but
the next year an army was again sent against Kazan by the Russians,
which displaced the latter and reinstated Ali.t Shortly after another
revolution of the same kind seems to have occurred. A large army,
under the command of the famous Princes Daniel Dimitrivitch
Kholmskoi, Alexander Vasilivitch Obolenskoi, and others set out on the
24th of April, 1487, and arrived before Kazan on the 24th of May. A
hard struggle took place outside the town, which ended in the defeat of
the Tartars. Ali took refuge in the town of Kazan, but another Tartar
named Alighazi, who remained outside with his contingent, caused the
Russians some loss. He was eventually driven over the Kama.+ After
a siege of three weeks Ali was forced to give in, and together with his
wife and mother, two of his brothers, and many other grandees, was
carried off prisoner to Russia. § Ali and his wife were sent to Vologda,
while his mother and the rest were sent to Kargol, near Bielosero. || The
victory was celebrated with great rejoicings at Moscow, the bells were
rung and thanksgivings said.^ All's two brothers, who were taken
prisoners with him, were doubtless Melik Tahir and Khudaikul.** The
latter was baptised on the 21st of December, 1505, under the name of
Peter, and a month later married Eudoxia, the sister of the Grand Prince
Vasili. Surely a strange wedding, and one proving how important the
Tartars were in Muscovite eyes. The ceremony was performed in the
cathedral by the archbishop of Spass,tt and the convert was given the
town of Klin and some villages near Moscow as an appanage. Melik
Tahir remained a Mussulman. On his death, according to Herberstein,
he left many children, who together with their mother were baptised.
Two of them, named Vasili and Feodor, are mentioned in the Russian
registers. }J It is not known when Melik Tahir died, but his son Feodor
is mentioned as governor of Novgorod in 1531. This also shows how
the Tartars were adopted into the Muscovite body politic. Khudaikul
or Peter apparently died about the year I523.§§ By his marriage with
the princess Eudoxia he had two daughters, Anastasia, who married
Prince Feodor Michaelovitch Mitislafski, the other daughter, whose name
we don't know, married Prince Vasili Vasilivitch Shuisky.|||) As
Karamzin says, the Muscovites had not at this time a sufficient regular
force to garrison and hold such a wide district as the Khanate of Kazan,
occupied by a hostile race, Ivan therefore contented himself with taking
the title of Prince of Bulgaria.^^

=* Herberstein, ii. 58, 59. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 62. I Id. § Id,

II Id. Page 30. H Id. Note, 62. *=^ Id. Note, 63. If Id.

11 Id. ^ Id. nil Id. %^ Karamzin, vi. 229.

376 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

According to Herberstein, Ali was immediately succeeded by his half-
brother Abdul Latif, whose reign, however, was a very short one, and he
almost directly gave place to Muhammed Amin.*

MUHAMMED AMIN KHAN.

Muhammed Amin reigned as the protege of the Grand Prince, and we
are in fact told that the crown was put on his head by Prince Kholmski,
who punished several turbulent ughlans or princes with death.t In 1489
the Grand Prince received envoys from the Khan of Tiumen and the
Nogais demanding the release of Ali. To these he replied with some
firmness that, if they wished for his goodwill, they must not address him
thus, but return the fugitives that had taken refuge with them.
Muhammed Amin was married to a daughter of Musa, nephew of Timur
and grandson of Idiku. Meanwhile the Grand Prince used the oppor-
tunity of his supremacy over Kazan to thoroughly subdue the turbulent
republic of Viatka. When Ivan marched against Klinof, the chief town
of Viatka, its citizens drove away his representative. He accordingly
sent a large army against them^ which compelled them to submit. Their
liberties were taken from them, they were given, says Karamzin, a new
civil constitution conformable with the laws of autocracy, and all the
notables, citizens, and merchants were conducted to Moscow, with their
wives and children. The citizens were transported to Borosk and
Kremenetz, and the merchants to Dimitrof J Thus did that most
Machiavellan prince stamp out the germs and seeds of liberty by
transporting the classes among whom it mainly thrives. The Viatkans
were colonists from Novgorod, who had first settled among the Finnish
Votiaks in the thirteenth century, and eventually appropriated the whole
country between the Kama and the Yug, and between the mouth of the
Viatka and the Syssola. They traded with the Permians and Bulgarians
of Kazan, and furnished Novgorod and Moscow with great stores of furs,
while their piratical raids on the Kama and the Volga caused much
harass to the people of Vologda, Ustiuge, the country of the Dwina, and
Bulgaria.

In the latter part of the fourteenth century their towns were ravaged
by Toktamish, and they were gradually subjected by the Grand Princes.
The conquest of Viatka by Ivan was speedily followed by that of Arsk,
a small principality forming part of the ancient Bulgaria. Its princes
were transported to Moscow, where they took the oath of allegiance to
the Grand Prince, and were then set at liberty.§

In 1492, to please the Krim Khan, the tzar sent Abdul Latif, covered
with honours to his brother Muhammed Amin at Kazan, but he refused

♦ Op, cit., ii. 59. t Karamzin, vi. 229. J Id., 238. $ Id,, 240.

ABDUL LATIF KHAN. 377

to comply with Mengli Girai's request that he should make over Koshira
to the tzarevitch Mahmudek, the son of Mustapha.*

Muhammed Amin seems to have been of a truculent disposition, and
so ill-treated and oppressed the grandees that they sent an invitation to
Mamuk, a prince of the horde of Sheiban, to go and deliver them from
his yoke. He appealed to the Russians for help. Thereupon Prince
Riapolofski marched at the head of a powerful army to his aid. This
repressed the rebellion, and Mamuk was driven away. The Russians
returned home again, but they had hardly been gone a month when news
arrived at Moscow that Mamuk had returned and had driven Muhammed
Amin away again.t This was in 1496.I

MAMUK KHAN.

Mamuk, we are told, only knew how to pillage, and was devoured with
avarice. He took their goods from the merchants, and their riches from
the grandees, and he went so far as to imprison those partisans to whom
he owed his crown. He tried to capture Arsk, but he failed in doing so ;
nor could he re-enter Kazan on his return thence, for the citizens manned
the walls and called out that they had no need of a robber king. He
accordingly went home again to his own country. §

ABDUL LATIF KHAN.

The people of Kazan now appealed to the Grand Prince. They
complained of the misconduct of Muhammed Amin, and then said, " We
want another tzar of your choice. If, lord and Grand Prince, you would
do us a great favour, do not send Muhammed Amin to Kazan again as
ffchan, who committed many outrages against our khatuns {i.e., wives),
which was the reason we appealed to Mamuk." They asked him instead
to send them Abdul Latif, the brother of Muhammed Amin. This he
agreed to do. He arrived at Kazan in May, 1497, and was duly installed
by the Russian princes Simeon Kholmski and Feodor Pahtski, who
exacted from the people an oath of fidelity to the Russians. Muhammed
Amin received Koshira, Serpukhof, and Khotum as a fief, where by his
cupidity and baseness he speedily created great mischief. |i

The Grand Prince sent word to the Khatun Nursaltan of what had
occurred, and promised her that Kazan should always remain in her

family. She wrote to thank him, and told him she meditated a

* Hi, 293. t Karamzin, vi. 339. J Vel. ^ern., i. 31. § Karamzin, vi. 339.

1) Karamzin, vi. 339, 340. Vel. Zern., 31. Note, 64.

37S

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

pilgrimage to Mecca, and on her return intended to pass through Russia
to visit her sons.*

About the year 1499 Agalak, who is called the tzarevitch of Sheiban,
and the brother of Mamuk, took up arms against Abdul Latif The
Grand Prince thereupon sent an army under Feodor Belski to the rescue.
He returned after driving Agalak away, and left behind him Michael and
Loban Riapolofski to protect the Khan. Some months later they
defeated the Nogai chiefs Yamgurchi and Musa, who had attacked
Abdul Latif t These attacks were probably made in support of the
Khans of Astrakhan, who had claims to be considered as the masters of
the Golden Horde. The deposed Khan, Abdul Latif's brother,
Muhammed Amin, meanwhile had a high command in the Russian army
in the campaign against Lithuania in the year 15004

Two years later, in January, 1502, the Grand Prince, under the plea
that Abdul Latif had committed much injustice, ordered Prince Vasili
Nozdrovati to seize him and conduct him to Moscow, whence he was
removed to Bieloozero, where he was confined.§ One author says the
order to arrest Abdul Latif was sent to and performed by Kalamet or
Kel Ahmed. II

MUHAMMED AMIN (RESTORED).

The real motive for the deposition of Abdul Latif was probably a wish
on the part of the Grand Prince to reward Muhammed Amin. The
latter was at all events sent to Kazan as IChan, and was married to the
widow of his brother Ali, the former Khan. He proceeded to put
to death Kel Ahmed, who had filled an important r6le in the affairs
of Kazan.! Mengli Girai, the Krim Khan, was not pleased at the
deposition of Abdul Latif, and to appease him the Grand Prince gave the
deposed Khan an establishment befitting his rank.** Muhammed Amin
was not long in showing his true colours. He divided his attentions
between his money and his wife, the widow of Ali. Her former
husband's grievances and her own exile at Vologda had apparently
embittered her against the Russians. She exerted every means in her
power to induce her husband to throw off his allegiance to the tzar. She
bitterly reproached Muhammed with being nothing better than a slave,
decorated with the title of monarch. "The Mussulmans," said she,
" should give laws to the Christians, and yet you scruple not to obey the
Giaour. What are you but a slave of the Prince of Moscow ? To-day
on a throne, to-morrow in a dungeon ; you will finish your days in fetters.

* Karamzin, vi. 340.
\ Vel. Zern., i. Note, 65.

t /rf„ 360. I td., yjz.

f/rf.,i. Note, 65.

S Id,, 394. Vel. Zern., 31.

** Karamzin, vi. 395.

MUHAMMED AMIN KHAN. 379

as did your ancestor Ali Khan. An object of universal contempt at
present, you have it in your power to raise yourself to the highest
pinnacle of glory. Throw off, therefore, a degrading yoke, or die the
death of a hero ! "

Muhammed loved his wife passionately, and her eloquence and
caresses at last effected her purpose. In compliance with her counsels,
the Khan resolved to massacre all the Russians who inhabited his
dominions. The festival of John the Baptist was the day appointed for
this horrible act of barbarity. On that day a celebrated fair annually
took place in Kazan, at which merchants from all the Muscovite
provinces were wont to assemble in great numbers. The latter came^ as
usual, little expecting the dreadful fate which awaited them. A great
number fell a prey to the blade of the assassin— men, women, and
children — while others were driven to the Nogai steppes and their goods
confiscated. The chronicles inform us that the Khan ordered the
treasures and merchandise belonging to the victims of his cruelty to be
brought to his palace, and the floor of a vast saloon is said to have been
entirely covered with gold and silver and other precious objects.* He
disdained to eat any more out of copper vessels, and only appeared at his
feasts, which were brilliant with precious stones, in very costly garments.
Even the poorest inhabitants of the town were enriched. Those who
hitherto had only worn sheep's skin clothes, both in winter and summer,
were now dressed in silk, and like peacocks promenaded in front of their
houses to display their garments of various colours.t The Kazan Khan
had also imprisoned a Russian envoy named Michael Kliapka. Knowing
that the Russian tzar would not be long in taking a terrible vengeance,
he collected his troops, 40,000 from Kazan and 20,000 Nogais, crossed
the frontiers of the districts of Nijni Novgorod and Murom, and laid
siege to Nijni, whose suburbs he burnt. When news of this reached
the tzar in August, 1505, he sent Prince Ivan Ivanovitrh Gorbati and
the boyard Simeon Ivanovitch Voronzof to the relief of Murom.
Khabar Zimski, the governor of Nijni Novgorod, having but a feeble
garrison in the place, released three hundred Lithuanian prisoners, who
had been captured on the Vedrosha, supplied them with arms, and
promised them their liberty on condition that they behaved themselves
like men. They saved the fortress. Being skilful archers, they killed a
great number. of the enemy, including the prince of the Nogais, who was
Muhammed Amin's brother-in-law. The Nogais thereupon refused to
fight, and a violent quarrel arose between them and the troops of Kazan,
and after trying in vain to appease them, the Khan raised the siege and
returned home. The Lithuanian prisoners were released and rewarded
with presents, &c. The Russian commanders, although at the head of
100,000 men, did not advance beyond Murom, and pusillanimously

* Tornirelli, op. cit., i. 82-84. Karamzin, vi. 420, 421, f Karamzin, vi. 422.

380 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

allowed the Tartars to withdraw with their booty.* A few months after
this, namely, in October, 1505, the Grand Prince Ivan III. (whose reign
we have considered in detail in the previous chapter) died, and was
succeeded by his son Vasili. We must now take up the thread of
Russian history once more.

The new tzar in 1506 sent a new army against the contumacious people
of Kazan. He prepared two divisions. One of these went by water,
under command of his brother Dimitri, with the voivodes Feodor Belski
and Shein, and the princes Alexander, Rostofski, Paletski, and Kurbski.
With the advanced guard of the right wing went the tzarevitch Janai,
with the Tartars of Gorodetz, the murza Kanbur, &c. On the 22nd of
May the infantry of this division had already disembarked at Kazan.
Notwithstanding the heat of the weather and their own fatigue, they
engaged the enemy and drove him towards the walls of the town, but the
Tartar cavalry having attacked them in rear, cut off their retreat and
threw them into confusion ; many of them were killed, others were
drowned in the lake Paganoi, or were made prisoners ; the rest
retreated to their boats and awaited the cavalry, which presently
arrived.t This disaster was caused largely by the impetuosity of Dimitri,
who had been ordered not to attack the town until the arrival of rein-
forcements, which had been despatched under the command of Prince
Kurbski.

Meanwhile, on the 22nd of June, the day of the great Kazan fair,
Muhammed Amin, fancying the Russians had finally withdrawn, was
holding high festival on the plain of Arsk, which was dotted with a
thousand tents. The foreign merchants were busy exposing their
wares, when suddenly the Russians fell on them, " as if from the clouds,"
says the chronicler, perpetrated a terrible butchery, and forced the
miserable Tartars to retire to the town, where many of them trampled
one another to death in their haste to escape.^

It would have been an easy task to have taken possession of Kazan at
that moment of disorder, but, by a singular fatality, the Russians pursued
the very conduct which had been the ruin of their enemies. Finding the
plain strewn with objects of value and covered with choice viands, and
that most inebriating of all beverages, kwas or hydromel, they rushed
with avidity on the tempting fare, and, drinking to a state of intoxication,
fell asleep. The Tartars, informed of this, made a furious sortie with
20,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. They rushed, sword in hand, on
their unresisting foes. So great was the slaughter that out of a hundred
thousand men, seven thousand alone are said to have escaped from the
blade of the Muhammedans.

The Princes Kurbski and Paletski were killed, the voivode Shein was
made prisoner, and the terrified fugitives, when they had reached the

* Karamzin, vi. 422, 423. Vel. Zern., i. 32, 33- Note, 66. t Karamzin, vii. 5, 6. I Id., 7.

MUHAMMED AMIN KHAN. 38 1

river, cut the cables of the boats. The Muscovite cavalry commanded
by Feodor, Kisselef, and the tzarevitch Zadenai, son of Nur Daulat, alone
showed any spirit, and in retreating towards Murom defeated a body of
Tartars which attacked it near Sura.

Herberstein describes these events somewhat differently. He says
that when the people of Kazan heard of the terrible preparations made
by the Grand Prince against them, and saw that they were unequal to
contend with the enemy in an engagement hand to hand, reasoned how
they might circumvent him by stratagem. After having therefore
openly pitched their camp in front of the enemy, they placed the flower
of their forces in ambush in convenient spots, and then assuming the
appearance of being struck by panic, suddenly deserted their camp and
betook themselves to flight. The Russians, who were at no great
distance, becoming aware of the flight of the Tartars, broke their ranks
and rushed precipitately upon the camp of the enemy, and while they
were engaged in plunder, and trusting in their own security, the Tartars
came forth from their ambush, together with the Cheremissian archers,
and carried such slaughter among them that the Russians were com-
pelled to leave their artillery and flee.

In that fight two bombardiers left their guns and fled, but were kindly
received by the prince upon their return to Moscow. One of them
named Bartholomew, who was an Itahan by birth, afterwards conformed
to the Russian ritual, and received large presents, together with great
authority and favour from the prince. A third bombardier returned from
the slaughter with the gun under his charge, and hoped to receive great
and substantial favour from the prince for the care with which he had
preserved and brought back his piece. But the latter, addressing him
with reproaches, said : " In thus exposing me and thyself to so great
danger, thou hast shown a wish either readily to take to flight or else to
surrender both thyself and thy gun to the enemy. Why this preposterous
diligence in preserving thy gun ? I make no account of thy boasting. I
.have still men remaining who know not only how to found artillery, but
also how to use them."* This was assuredly a strange encouragement to
de^s of valour.

Thus the reign of Vasili, like that of his father, commenced with
an unfortunate expedition against Kazan. It was necessary to
recover his prestige that something should now be done. Daniel
Schenia was ordered to march towards the Volga, but hardly had this
famous voivode set out when Muhammed Amin, either through fear or
the advice of the Krim Khan, wrote Vasili a humble letter in which he
asked for pardon and peace. He agreed to give up the Russian
merchants and prisoners he had taken, and swore to be a firm friend to
Vasili.t Vasili continued his father's policy towards Lithuania, and his

* Herberatein, ed. Hack., ii. 59, 60. t Karamzin, vii, 9.

382 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

intercourse with his brother-in-law Alexander was a mixture of querulous
carping and frigid politeness. The latter died in 1506, and Vasih sent
off two envoys to his sister Helena, Alexander's widow suggesting that
the Polish grandees should elect him their king, and thus unite the
crowns of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland. If this plan had succeeded,
as Karamzin says, the results would indeed have been important, and the
terrible strife of three centuries between Poles and Russians would
perhaps have been avoided ; but it was not to be, the Polish nobles
elected Sigismund, brother of Alexander, to be their king, and Vasili,
under the pretext that the Lithuanians had made raids on his borders,
attacked them. At this time we read of a double treachery, Constantine
Ostroyski, whom we have already mentioned as having received an
appanage from Ivan, broke his oath and joined Casimir. On the other
hand, Michael Glinski, a very powerful and rich Lithuanian noble, who
was sprung from a Tartar stock, and who had while Alexander was on
his death-bed defeated the Krim Tartars, who had made an invasion,
quarrelled with Sigismund, and with his friends went over to Alexander,
and promised him his services if he would obtain for him the principality
of Kief. A war now followed, in which there was no important result
gained, and peace was signed on the basis of the status quo, Sigismund
resigning to his rival the conquests of Ivan, and Vasili giving up his
claims upon Kief and Smolensk.* On the part of the Russians this
treaty seems to have been a hollow one. Vasih wished first to secure the
hearty co-operation of Mengli Girai of Krim, whose zeal for Russia seems
to have been very cool latterly.

We now find Vasili crushing the community of Pskof, which had
preserved its municipal liberties under the rule of Ivan. It was a famous
and ancient city, with a history reaching back six hundred years, another
Novgorod, of which it called itself the younger sister, and with which it
formed one eparchy. Its wealth was due to its trade with the Germans,
and its warlike spirit had been nurtured by its almost heroic struggles
with the knights of Livonia. It had a special class of possadniks who
managed the merchants, and were hereditary, otherwise its constitution
was very similar to that of Novgorod. It had its general assembly and
the right of electing its own minor judges. But these democratic
institutions were incompatible with the growing autocracy of the govern-
ment, and were accordingly doomed. As in most similarly constituted
societies of mercantile oligarchs, there was much jealousy and intrigue,
and much persecution of the peasant class. This was apparently fanned
by the authorities at Moscow, whose deputy was very unpopular. An
appeal was made to Vasili, and he went in person with a grand cortege
towards the city. Complaints were invited. Thereupon the chief
possadniks and merchants repaired to the tzar to lay their case before

* Karamzin, vii. 23.

MUHAMMED AMIN KHAN. 383

him. Having heard it, he sided with the deputy and arrested the
deputation, which comprised the chief men in the place. The heads of
the tallest poppies were absolutely in his grasp, and how could the rest
resist the hurricane. It was decreed that the popular assembly should
cease, and that the bell by which it had been summoned should be
taken away, while the tzar claimed the appointment of the judicial
authorities. Three hundred of the principal families were transported to
Moscow. The lands of the exiles were confiscated and given to
Muscovite boyards. A tariff was fixed for merchandise where goods had
been hitherto bought and sold quite freely, and a crowd of functionaries
entered the place and robbed and plundered the inhabitants terribly.
" It is thus," says the native annalist, " that the glory of Pskof was
echpsed ; taken, not by unbelievers but by the Christians. Oh, city ! once
so powerful, now but a vast solitude; an eagle with many wings and sharp
talons has descended on thee, and has torn out of thee three cedars of
Libanus ; thy beauty, thy riches, and thy citizens ; has covered thy markets
with ordure ; has dragged away our brothers and sisters to distant lands
where none of their ancestors lived."* Thus passed away another certre
of light in those grey northern climates, and, like their contemporaries "the
most Catholic kings of Spain" who drove out the Moors, it seems as if the
Russian princes were determined to root out all the foreign influences
which the German merchants of Livonia and the Hanse imported into
Russia, and to girdle it round with that self-contained isolation which has
been the great drag-chain on the progress of its people.

In 1 5 10 Nursultana, the wife qf Mengli Girai of Krim and the mother
of Muhammed Amin and Abdul Latif, went to Moscow with her son
Sahib Girai and three envoys, to ask permission to visit Kazan. She
was received very hospitably by the Grand Prince, who allowed her to
proceed, after a stay of a month at Moscow. She spent nearly a year at
Kazan, during which she urged upon the Khan the policy of being on
friendly terms with the Russians. In this she succeeded, and Muhammed
-Amin wrote a letter to the Grand Prince, promising in future to be
always faithful to him, and asking him to send an envoy. Ivan Cheladnin
ac(iordingly went, and to him the Khan described the reason for his late
duplicity, and accused his wife of having seduced him from his allegiance.
Nursaltana spent six months at Moscow on her return journey.t

The quarrel between Sigismund of Poland and the Grand Prince will
be better told in the next chapter.

Vasili now entered into a treaty with the Hanse towns, in the vain
hope of reinstating the prosperity of Novgorod, but its trade had in fact
taken its final departure, and, after a suspension of twenty-five years, had
found a fresh route and outlet for itself. We now read of mutual
embassies between the Russian tzar and Selim, the new Sultan of Turkey.

* Karamzin, vii. 50. t Id., 58, 59.

384 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The envoys of the latter were received by the tzar and his courtiers in
their rich fur and bejewelled dresses. They bore two letters, one written
in Arabic and the other in Servian. There was no definite treaty made,
and the efforts of the Turkish envoys to persuade Vasili to send Abdul
Latif to the Krim were unsuccessful.*

Mengli Girai of Krim died in 15 15. To punish the recent ill conduct
of the Krim Tartars, the Grand Prince had imprisoned Abdul Latif, the
former Khan of Kazan, but on the accession of Muhammed Amin, to
please that prince, he was again released, given the right of audience and
permitted to hunt ; but Vasih refused to send him to his mother, who
wished him to accompany her to Mecca.t Soon after Muhammed Amin
fell ill. We are told he " became covered with ulcers, filled with worms,
and the air was infected with his foetid breath." He attributed the
horrible condition to which he was reduced to the wrath of Heaven.
Remorse for his perfidy and cruelty wrung his heart. " The God of the
Russians," he observed to his attendants, " is chastising me. Ivan acted
towards me with paternal affection, and I, seduced by an ambitious
woman, repaid his kindness with the basest ingratitude. Now that I am
on the verge of the tomb, neither a throne, nor riches, nor grandeur, nor
the most beautiful women, are of any value to me ; all these must I leave
to be enjoyed by others." In hopes of finding consolation in his misery,
he sent an ambassador to Vasili, with a present of two hundred horses
richly caparisoned, a royal suit of armour, a buckler, a tent made of
rich embroidered tissue, which he had received as a present from the
king of Pfersia, with numerous precious objects, implored his for-
giveness for the past, and asked that he would appoint Abdul Latif as
his successor. Vasili granted him the pardon he solicited, and, in token
of his goodwill, sent back the ambassador with gifts for the humbled
Khan, and he made over the town of Koshira as an appanage to Abdul
Latif.t The condition of Kazan greatly troubled the Krim Khan, who
was afraid the murzas would call one of the Astrakhan princes, his
enemies, to the throne. He accordingly sent a very gracious letter to,
Moscow, in which he promised great things on condition inter alia that
the Grand Prince would secure the throne of Kazan for his stepson
Abdul Latif §

The latter did not long survive. He died at Moscow on the 9th of
November, 15 18, and thus the Grand Prince lost a valuable hostage for
the good behaviour of the rulers of Krim and Kazan. A treaty is
extant between Vasili and Abdul Latif, some of whose provisions
are curious. In it the latter promised to remain faithful, and to have no
dealings with the tzar's enemies. He promised that when he, his
ughlans, princes, or people traversed Muscovite territory, they would

* /d., 73. t /d., 90. t Tornirelli, i. 85, 86, Karamzin, vii. 94, 95.

§ Karamzin, vii. 95, 96.

SHAH ALI KHAN. 385

abstain from plundering or molesting the Christians, and any Tartar thus
offending was to be executed on the spot. The envoys who Abdul
Latif should send to the Grand Prince or his sons were to be supplied
with provisions free, for themselves, their people, and horses, by
the Russians. Those who travelled for trade or on private business
were to pay for theirs, but whoever he was, if he used violence
to get food and suffered accordingly, he was not to have reparation.
Merchants and envoys from Russia to the hordes were not to be
■molested, nor were Russians who accidentally fell into the hands of the
Tartars to be detained. Neither party was to harbour Tartars belonging
to the other, nor those which belonged to the four great clans of Shirin,
Barin, Arjin, and Kipchak. The Khan was not to make war without the
Grand Prince's knowledge. He was to be content with Yurief, not to
leave Muscovy, and to be obedient to the Grand Prince.*

On the death of Abdul Latif the Krim Khan drew nearer to Vasili,
in the hope of securing the succession to the throne of Kazan
when it should fall vacant, for his brother Sahib Girai, and he sent him
an important envoy.t The event he foresaw came quickly, Muhammed
Amin died in great torments in 1519, and his spouse, afraid of punish-
ment, put an end to her life with poison.l

SHAH ALI KHAN.

With the death of Muhammed, Amin the descendants of Ulugh
Muhammed who were attached to Muhammedanism came to an end.
Those who had been baptised were clearly not available as chiefs of the
Khanate, and the Grand Prince had to turn elsewhere. He naturally
objected to nominating a near relative of Muhammed Girai of Krim, and
thus once more reconstituting the Khanate of Serai. Pretending that the
y^people of Kazan would not hear of such a thing, and that they would
either have a prince of the Nogais or the Khan of Kasimof for their
chief, he appointed the latter. His name was Shah Ali, the son of Sheikh
AvHar, son of Bakhtiar Sultan, the brother of Ahmed Khan of Serai.
According to the account of the Tartar annalists, this prince was a
monster both in mind and person : " his ears were of an enormous size
and length, his legs and arms ridiculously short, and his belly of a
prodigious magnitude." Herberstein says, "he was corpulent, with a
small beard and an almost feminine face, which showed he was not fit to
be a warrior." This personal deformity, added to the circumstance of
his being a vassal of the Russian tzar, rendered him obnoxious to every
class of his new subjects. They loaded him with reproaches and

* Vel. Zern., i. Note, 70. t Sec next chapter. | Kar^mzin, vii, 117, Tornirelli. i. 86.
2 A

386 HISTORY OP THE MONGOLS.

contumely, and Shah Ali never failed to reply to these remonstrances
otherwise than by putting the murmurers to death. This severity only
served to render him more and more odious to the nation he governed,
and a conspiracy was soon formed against him. The inhabitants of
Kazan secretly despatched an embassy to Muhammed Girai, soliciting
him to send his brother, Sahib Girai, to be their sovereign. The
ambassadors returned some time after to Kazan, bringing with them the
young prince.*

He entered the town without encountering any resistance, and was
proclaimed tzar there. He arrested Shah Ali, Karpof a Muscovite
voivode, and Vasili Yurief, the envoy of the Grand Prince, while the
Russian merchants were pillaged and imprisoned. No one, however, was
put to death, and to show his moderation, Sahib Girai took the deposed
Khan under his protection, and allowed him to go to Moscow with his
wife, horses, and a guide. He also released Karpof. On his way Shah
Ali suffered great distress. He met some Russian fishermen who
generally spent the summer on the Volga, and were escaping towards
Moscow on account of the troubles at Kazan. He was obliged to share
their diet of roots and herbs, and went through great- privations before he
reached the Russian frontiers. Thence onwards to Moscow was a royal
progress. Everywhere the grandees went to meet him, and showed
him marked attention, while all the boyards of the council went
out to meet him. He was received by Vasili at the foot of the palace
staircase. " God be praised," said the politic Russian tzar, " you are
alive, that is enough." The two sovereigns embraced shedding tears.
Vasili thanked his protege for his faithfulness to Russia, gave him
presents, and promised him satisfaction. t

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN.

The Krim Khan knew well enough that the forcible revolution which v
he had caused at Kazan would bring him into conflict with the Russians,
and he determined to forestall the vengeance of the Grand Prince. He
summoned the Krim Tartars, the Nogais, and the Cossacks of the
Dnieper to his standards, while Sahib Girai set out from Kazan along
the Volga, and met him at Kolomna. They marched upon the Russian
frontier. This was in 1521. I shall describe this campaign in the next
chapter. Here it will suffice to say that the Tartars won a very
important victory. Such a savage invasion had not been witnessed in
Russia for many years, and troops of Russian slaves, the product of the
campaign, were sold at Kaffa and Astrakhan.^ The Grand Prince
speedily recovered his spirits, and we now find him completing the

• Tornirelli, 86, 87. t Karamzin, vii. 133. \ /<f., 139.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN. 387

work of the consolidation of his empire by absorbing the principality
of Riazan.

Ivan, its young prince, had been a minor and under the tutelage of
Vasili. He was now anxious to be independent, and began to correspond
with the Krim Khan, and proposed in fact to marry the latter's daughter.
He was summoned to Moscow, and when he arrived there was arrested,
and his principality, which had had a separate history for four hundred
years, was annexed. It is one of the richest parts of Russia. " Each
grain of wheat there," says Herberstein, " produces sometimes two or
more ears, and the stalks grow so thick that horses cannot easily pass
through it, nor the quails fly out of it. It abounds in honey, fish, birds,
and wild beasts."* Its situation on the route to Azof and Kaffa was also
very important as an outlet to Russian trade. Its people were warUke,
and VasiH, to prevent future troubles, scattered them in various parts.t
The fate of Ivan of Riazan was speedily followed by a similar one which
overtook his brothers Vasili Shemiakin, prince of Severski, and Feodor
of Starodub, and thus the last of the independent principalities of Russia
perished.

In 1522 Muhammed Girai of Krim captured Astrakhan, and almost
directly afterwards was killed by the Nogais there. When Sahib Girai
of Kazan heard of his brother's success, he proceeded to put to death
such of the Russian merchants as he could lay his hands upon, as well
as Vasili Yurief, the Grand Prince's envoy,^ and, according to the
chronicler, " he spilt blood like water." The Grand Prince determined
to punish this atrocity, and set out with his army for Nijni Novgorod,
where he arrived in August, 1523. Thence he despatched two arma-
ments. One under the command of Shah Ali went by water, while a
second army marched by land, ravaging the country and making
prisoners the inhabitants. They went as far as the outfall of the Sura,
where a wooden fortress was built, which was given the name of Vasili-
Gorod. The Grand Prince returned to Moscow shortly after, and Shah
, Ali and the Russian generals performed their parts successfully.§ Sahib
Girai, knowing that the strife would recommence the following year, now
declared himself a vassal of Suliman, the famous Sultan of Turkey, and
asked him to revenge him against Vasili. The prince of Mankub, who
was then at Moscow as the Turkish envoy, told the boyards there that
Kazan had become a Turkish province. They replied that this could not
be, as Sahib Girai was a mere rebel who had no right to dispose of it.||

In the spring of 1524 the war was again renewed, and the Russian
forces were again divided into two divisions, that which went by the
Volga being again commanded by Shah Ali, while Khabar Simski
commanded the cavalry which marched, by land. The whole army

♦ Op, cit., ii. 9, 10. tM, II. J Karamzin, vii. 157.

Vel. Zern., i. 5a. Karamzin, vii. 161. II Karamzin, vii. 162.

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

numbered 150,000 men. Sahib Girai, on hearing of the approach of this
armament, sent for his nephew Safa Girai, the son of Feth Girai* (who
was only thireen years old) from Krim, while he himself fled for
protection to the Turkish Sultan.

SAFA GIRAI KHAN.

The Tartars of Kazan, who feared and hated the Russians, ashamed
of the flight of their Khan, put Safa Girai in his place, swore to die for
him, and, uniting with the Chuvashes and Cheremisses, prepared for a
vigorous resistance.t We are told that on his journey to Kazan, Safa
Girai stopped at the island of Gostinoi {i.e., the island of merchants),
near Kazan, where he was received with honour by the princes of the
country.

Seyid, the chief priest of the district, was held in such estimation that
even kings in meeting him would stand, and bowing the head, take his
hand as he sat on horseback, an honour otherwise granted only to
sovereigns. Dukes did not salute even his hands but his knees, simple
nobles merely saluted his feet, while plebians were content if they could
only touch his garments or his horse with their hand. He secretly favoured
Vasili, and took measures to seize Safa Girai, that he might send him
bound to Moscow, but when the boy was captured he (doubtless Seyid is
meant though the phrase is ambiguous) was publicly put to death with
the knife. ]:

Meanwhile the Russians continued their advance, and we are told the
Volga seemed covered with their boats. They arrived at the island of
Gostinoi on the 7th of July, and stayed there twenty days awaiting the
arrival of the cavalry. Petty skirmishes ensued, and Shah Ali, who
despised his youthful antagonist, recommended him to return home and
not be responsible for the blood that would be shed ; but the young
prince replied, " The throne will be the prize of victory. To arms!"§'
Meanwhile the wooden ramparts of Kazan were fired by some Russians,
who had been bribed for the purpose, and were burnt to the ground.
Instead of taking advantage of this piece of good fortune, the Russian
generals merely stood by as spectators, and allowed the citizens to
restore them, and on the 28th of July transferred their camp from the
banks of the Volga to those of the Kazanka, where they again awaited a
favourable opportunity for twenty days, while the Cheremisses harassed
their camp, wasted the country round, and intercepted their communi-
cations. " Two governors," says Herberstein, " had been appointed to
look after the commissariat. One of these, Ivan Paletzki, after loading
his vessels with provisions from Novgorod, had to descend the river to

*VeI. Zero., i. Note, got t Karamzin,vii. 163. I Herberstein, ii. 68. $ Karamxin, vii 163*

SAFA GIRAI KHAN. . 389

join the army, but after depositing his provisions he returned home rather
precipitately. The other had been sent for the ?ame purpose with five
hundred soldiers overland, but was slaughtered with his men by the
Cheremisses, scarcely nine of them escaping in the confusion. The
commander himself fell into their hands badly wounded and died.
When the rumour of this slaughter reached the army, so great a
consternation arose in the camp, increased by a groundless report that
the whole of the cavalry were slain to a man, that nothing was thought
of but flight."* The only question was whether they should go up the
stream or down. Meanwhile Paletzki again ventured to make his
way to the distressed army, but his armament was surprised in a fog
on the Volga by the Cheremisses, who also barricaded the river at
the point where its stream is divided by many islands with trunks
of trees and stones. This caused such terror that he abandoned
ninety of his largest barges, each manned by thirty men, and loosing the
anchor of his own boat, reached the camp in great distress.t The
disaster gave rise to an old Russian proverb, " Beware when the Cheremis
is beside you." " The Volga," says the chroniclers of Kazan, " became
for the barbarians like the Tigris, a river filled with gold, for besides
cannons and ammunition, they also drew out of the river some precious
Russian armour and much money."+ Paletzki suffered another defeat on
his return, and not only lost his boats, but only escaped with a very few
men.

Meanwhile a body of horse, which had been sent to the rescue by
Vasili, had two engagements with the Tartars and Cheremisses in
crossing the Viega, which falls into the Volga, but succeeded in defeating
the Tartars and in joining the main army. Thus reinforced the Russians
proceeded to besiege the town. This was on the 15th of August. They
pursued a pusillanimous policy, and when six Tartars advanced near their
camp and bearded them, Shah Ali was ordered not to attack them, although
he had 2,000 men under his command. The enemy adopted Fabian
^tactics, and when the Russians pursued hotly they turned suddenly round
and laid many of them low with a shower of arrows. Meanwhile the
bombardment of the town commenced, and a lucky Russian cannon ball
killed the only skilled gunner in the place. Some of the Lithuanian and
German mercenaries now wished to make an assault, but were rebuked
by the weak-kneed general, who, knowing the straits his army was
reduced to for want of food, and perhaps also gained over by Tartar
bribes, entered into negotiations with the garrison for a truce, which were
gladly seconded by the Tartars. The siege was accordingly raised.
Herberstein says that the report of bribery was strengthened by the fact
that a Savoyard was caught in the attempt to escape to the enemy with
the gUn which had been intrusted to him, and acknowledged upon close

* Op. cit., ii. 70. t Herberstein, if. 70. I Karamzin, vii. 1S5, 166.

390 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

examination that he had received from the enemy silver money and
Tartar goblets, that he might induce many to desert with him, and
although taken in so manifest a crime, a heavy punishment was not
inflicted on him.* The Russian army carried home with it the seeds of
disease by which its numbers were reduced to one-half. Ivan Belski,
the principal Russian commander, was disgraced, but afterwards
pardoned, on the solicitation of the metropolitan; and the Kazan envoys
went on to Moscow to treat for peace.

The great entrepot of trade at this time between Russia and the East
was at the Isle of Merchants already named, where great fairs were held.
Vasili forbade his merchants to repair there, hoping that the Tartars, who
bought much salt from the Russians, would be greatly inconvenienced.
He fixed a new site for the fair at Makharief, in the government of
Nijni Novgorod, a sterile place where there had been an old monastery,
founded by Macarius of Unya, which had been destroyed by the Tartars
in the reign of Vasili the Blind. But trade is a fickle mistress, the
merchants refused to repair thither, and the effect of the removal was to
inflict great loss on the Russians themselves ; " for," says Herberstein,
" it produced a scarcity and dearness in many articles which it had been
the custom to import through the Caspian Sea from Persia and Armenia,
by the Volga from the emporium at Astrakhan, and especially of the
finer kinds of fish, among which was the belluga, which is taken in the
Volga both above and below Kazan."t The fair of Makharief lived on,
however, and eventually became one of the most famous marts in the
world, and the mother of the modern fair of Nijni Novgorod. Let us
now turn once more to Russia.

Solomonia, for many years the wife of Vasili, had borne him no
children, and on the advice of his boyards he determined " to cut down
the sterile fig tree and to plant another in its place." She was compelled
by force to take the veil in a monastery at Suzdal. She declared
confidently that God would avenge her, and her part was taken by
many of the notables and clergy. Although his wife had taken the veil,
Vasili was still married in the eyes of the church, and it was only by the
pliant aid of the metropolitan Daniel that the difficulty was got over,
and he proceeded to marry Helena, the daughter of the refugee Vasili
Glinski.J And we are told that to give himself the airs of youth he had
his beard shaved, and was otherwise rejuvenated. We now find Vasili
in communication with the pope, who tried to tempt him by the off"er of
the kingly dignity (which it was the pope's prerogative to confer), to join
in a crusade against the Turks, and to aid in the union of the Eastern
and Western churches, but Vasili replied to the advance with courteous
phrases and nothing more.

Meanwhile the Emperor Maximilian had died and been succeeded by

♦ Op. cit., 72. t Id., 72, 73. J Id., 173.

SAFA GIRAI KHAN. 391

Charles V., and we read how embassies passed between the youthful
kaizer and the Grand Prince. Russia was also in close communication
with the Archduke of Austria, whose envoy was the well known Baron
Herberstein, the author of the famous description of Muscovy, from
which I shall quote largely presently. A more or less hollow truce was
continued with Sigismund of Poland, which was varied by perpetual
treacheries, jealousies, and border raids. In this period of great
deeds Sweden was also rising from the state of chaos in which it had
long rested. This was under the famous Gustavus Vasa, who freed his
country from the Danish yoke and was on terms of amity with Vasili.
The latter was also on terms of cold and platonic friendship with the
Porte, whose merchants made their way to Moscow.

After the campaign in 1524 the envoys of Kazan went to Moscow, and
a hollow peace was entered into which lasted for a few years. Safa Girai
bore the Russian yoke very uneasily, and went the length of insulting the
envoy of the Grand Prince. The latter probably only too pleased
to have a pretext for revenging his former ill success, in the spring of
1530 sent an army against Kazan. This was as before divided into two
portions, one went by the Volga, and the other, commanded by the Princes
Ivan Belski, Michael GUnski, &c., by land. Safa Girai on his part
prepared for a brave resistance. He was joined by 30,000 Nogais, sent
by his father-in-law Mamai, and also summoned the Cheremisses to his
assistance. To protect his capital he constructed a wooden palisade and
a deep ditch, which crossed the plain of Arsk from the Bulak to the
Kazanka, while he enclosed the town with a new rampart of earth
and stones. After five or six ineffectual attacks, the Russian cavalry
was joined by the infantry, which had gone by water. A con-
tinuous struggle followed, but the Tartars, who fought bravely enough
during the day time, became very lax at night, and some of the young
Russian warriors having noticed by the moonlight that the sentinels were
asleep, advanced cautiously to the palisades, which they smeared with
^ resin and sulphur, and then set fire to them. The town was soon girdled
with flame, and the Russians rushed to the assault amidst the smoke and
confusion. They speedily won the environs, and plied their torches
and swords with effect. Without counting those who perished in
the flames, 60,000 Tartar soldiers and citizens thus perished. Among the
former was a famous Kazan champion called Atalik, who had laid many
a Russian low. Safa Girai retired to the town of Arsk, but meanwhile
the Russian commanders showed so little vigilance that the Cheremisses
succeeded in capturing their baggage, sixty-six cannons, and a great
quantity of ammunition, and in killing the princes Obolenski and Dorogo-
buiski, and other persons of distinction. The Russians proceeded to lay
siege to Kazan, which had barely 12,000 defenders, but Prince Belski,
whose integrity was suspected, consented to make peace. He was
Vasili's nephew on his mother's side, and returned to Moscow, where his

392 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

uncle, much irritated at his pusillanimity, ordered him to be put to
death. He was only saved by the prayers of the metropolitan. He was,
however, imprisoned, and three years later he is again found in command
of the Russian armies.*

The people of Kazan now sent the princes Tagai, Tevkel, and Ibrahim
to Moscow to offer their most abject submission and ask for pardon.
Vasili who was anxious for peace, granted them terms on condition that
they liberated the Russian prisoners and restored the guns and
ammunition which had been captured by the Cheremisses, but Safa Girai
seized the Russian envoy and refused to sign the treaty unless the
prisoners and cannon captured by Prince Belski were also restored.
The boyards having communicated this news to the Kazan deputies,
Prince Tagai replied, " We have already heard what the Khan has done,
but we are neither liars nor perjurers. The will of heaven and of the
Grand Prince will assuredly be accomplished. The most distinguished
of our countrymen have perished in fighting or are overcome with stupor,
Safa Girai rules as he likes with his Krim Tartars and Nogais. He
arouses excitement by raising the rumours that Russian troops are on the
march, and his perfidy covers us with confusion. We will collect our
people and drive him away, and the Grand Prince shall give us a new
tzar." The boyards replied that they were indifferent who ruled at
Kazan, if he was only faithful to Russia. " Well then," said Tagai,
" recall the innocent Shah Ali, victim of his enemies, and let him return
with us to the town of Vasili. Thence we will proclaim to the Tartars
of Kazan, to the Cheremisses of the mountains and the plain, as well as
to the princes of Arsk, that the Grand Prince has pardoned us. We will
tell them the tzar has killed us, but the Grand Prince has restored us to
life again. The Tartar prisoners who languish in the dungeons of Kazan,
brave relatives, brothers, and friends will aid us, and we shall secure
eternal peace." Vasili consented accordingly to Shah Ali returning with
the envoys. Tagai kept his word faithfully. He wrote a letter to his
co-citizens, aroused a rebellion, and deposed Safa Girai, who in a .
transport of rage had ordered all the Russians imprisoned at Kazan to
be put to death. He was told to withdraw without delay. His wife was
sent back to her father Mamai, and in the tumult which ensued, several
Nogais and Krim Tartars, favourites of Safa Girai, were killed. The
Princess Gorkhanda, sister of Muhammed Amin, was one of the
principal movers in the revolution, and the chief priest, the ughlans,
princes, and murzas hastened to acquaint Vasili with the banishment of
Safa Girai, and asked him to nominate in his place not Shah Ali, whose
vengeance they feared, but Jan Ali, his brother, who was then lord of
Meschersk (?>., Khan of Kasimof), a request to which Vasili acceded.t

Karamzin, vii. igo-192. t Karamzin, vii. 192-194.

JAN ALI KHAN. 393

JAN ALI KHAN.

Jan Ali set out for Kazan, accompanied by a numerous suite, and he
was duly installed on the throne by the Russian deputy Morozof, amidst
the apparent rejoicings of the murzas and people, who duly swore
allegiance to their new ruler. Vasili was so pleased with their behaviour
that he ceded to them the cannons, &c., which they had captured in the
former campaign.*

In the spring of 1533 Appai Ughlan, and Kadush, brothers of Prince
Otushef, Kutlugh Pulad, Prince of Gorodetz, and Evdek Bakshi, went to
Ivan soliciting on behalf of Jan Ali, the Prince Taba, the ughlans, the
princes, the karachis, and the people, permission for Jan Ali to marry the
daughter of the Nogai Prince Yusuf, " who would secure him peace with
this powerful horde." Vasili gave his consent to the match.t Shah Ali
did not acquiesce willingly in his brother's good fortune. Since his own
deposition in 1521 he had lived in Russia, and probably at Moscow.
On the promotion of Jan Ali to Kazan, he was given the towns of
Koshira and Serpukhof as an appanage, where he had a retinue
of ughlans, princes, murzas, &c., drawn from his old Khanate cf
Kazan.l He seems to have intrigued with the Kazan Tartars to displace
his brother, and was thereupon deprived of his appanage and banished
to Bielozersk.§ Let us turn once more to Russia.

The year 1531 was marked as an epoch in Russian history by the
birth of the famous tzar Ivan Vasilivitch, otherwise known as Ivan IV. or
the Terrible. Popular tradition says that his birth was attended by
thunder and lightning, an omen which was favourably interpreted by the
priesthood, who here filled the office of the augurs at Rome. The news was
received with great joy throughout Russia, and an amnesty was granted
to distinguished pohtical prisoners. The various towns sent deputations
to congratulate the Grand Prince. Hermits issued from their cells to
^ve the little stranger their blessing, and were admitted to the royal
table, and Vasili had some magnificent reliquaries made in honour of
Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, the two patrons of Moscow. At this time
he received embassies from Peter, the voivode of Moldavia, who showed
such a bold front to the Poles, Lithuanians, and Tauridans, all enemies
of Russia, from the princes of Astrakhan, and the murzas of the Nogais.
The most interesting of the envoys came, however, from Baber, the
founder of the Mongol empire in Hindostan, who sent Khese Husein to
arrange that his envoys and merchants with their wares might have access
to Muscovy, and vice versd. Vasili responded favourably to these
advances, but the chronicler says he did not give Baber the style of

♦ Id,,, vii. 195. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, $3. Karamzin, vii. 195.

X Vel. Zern., i. 56, 57. Notes, 95, g6. § Id. Note, 97. Karamzin, vii. 196.

2B

394 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

brother, not knowing whether he was an independent sovereign or only
the administrator of the Indian realms.*

Soon after this Vasili fell ill, and having appointed his son Ivan, who
was but three years old, his heir, with Helena as his guardian till he was
fifteen years old, and having donned the habit of a monk and adopted
the monkish name of Varlam, he died on the 3rd of November, 1533.

He was a prudent sovereign, who enlarged the power and resources of
Russia very considerably, and although not a genius he did not, on the
other hand, leave his successors either the duty or glory of remedying his
mistakes.t His hand was heavy on those who committed offences, either
verbal or in act, against the throne. " For," as Karamzin says, " in that
age, clemency was interpreted as weakness, and a pardoned fault easily
became no fault at all in the eyes of the people." Among the illustrious
men at Vasili's court was a famous monk of Mount Athos, known as
Maximus the Greek, who was widely known for his learning. He became
the centre of literary culture in Russia, but thereby incurred the jealousy
of the clergy, and eventually won the displeasure of Vasili by dis-
approving of his divorce. He was imprisoned in a monastery at Tuer,
on a charge of having falsely interpreted the Scriptures. i Vasili
increased the pomp of his court, and was fond of magnificent display ;
and in his intercourse with foreign princes he styled himself Tzar
and sovereign of all the Russias, Grand Prince of Vladimir, Moscow,
Novgorod, Pskof, Smolensk, Tuer, Yugoria, Permia, Viatka, Bulgaria,
&c., Monarch and Grand Prince of Novgorod-Severski, Chernigof,
Riazan, Volok, Kief, Belsk, Rostof, Yaroslavl, Bielozersk, Udoria,
Obdoria, Condia, &c.§ He was the first to summon German doctors to
Russia, and otherwise encouraged scientific men to settle there, and
published some judicious laws and ordinances. Inter alia having
received many complaints about the ill deeds of his judges at Novgorod,
he appointed that forty-eight sworn assessors should be elected and sit
with them ; " a privilege," Karamzin says, " which was obtained by the
free citizens of Novgorod on account of their iterated complaints, whik
the inhabitants of other parts of Russia, who were too much accustomed
to this kind of injustice, remained silent." || Vasili had the wooden
ramparts of several towns replaced by brick walls. Those at Nijni
Novgorod still remains, as does the church of Saint Nicholas Gostimski
in the KremUn, which was his work.

His reign was also marked by various ecclesiastical reforms. Com-
munity of goods was introduced into the monasteries of Novgorod, and it
was appointed that nunneries should be presided over by women and not
by male abbots. The Laps of the Neva and the Kandalagian gulf, as
well as those of Kola, were baptised at their own request, and became in

* Karamzin, vii. 300. + Id., 218. \ Id., 225. { Id., 332.

\ Id., 234.

JAN ALI KHAN. 395

name at least Christians.* On another side we find the Greek church of
Byzantium oppressed and down-trodden by the Turks, and leaning for
sympathy and succour on Moscow, whence monetary aid was forwarded
to it. We ought not to forget, while making our somewhat limited
survey, that the reign of Vasili was a famous epoch in history, marked
elsewhere by such renowned sovereigns as Leo X. at Rome, Maximilian
and Charles V. in Germany, Louis XIL and Francis L in France, Sehm
and Suliman in Turkey, Henry VI IL in England, Gustavus Vasa in
Sweden, and Sigismund in Poland. Lastly, it was the age of Luther,
whose position and arguments were not favourably received in Russia,
where Maximus the Greek wrote a discourse on "The Heresy of
Luther."t

The church, like the other institutions of the empire, was becoming
more and more a department of the State. The metropoHtan, instead of
being elected as formerly by an assembly of archbishops, bishops,
abbots, and priors, was chosen by the tzar himself. The metropoHtan
Bartholomew resigned his office rather than submit to be dragged at his
heels, and was replaced by a young ecclesiastic named Daniel, whose
character may be gathered from a story told by Herberstein, " that being
corpulent and having a red face, he used to expose himself to the fumes
of sulphur, and thus make himself pale before appearing in public, so
that he might simulate at least the appearance of austerity .J Under the
metropolitan were the archbishops of Magrici (?) and Rostof, and the
bishops of Tuer, Riazan, Smolensk, Permia, Suzdal, Kolomna, Chernigof,
and Serai. § No one could become a deacon, and a fortiori a priest in
Russia unless he was married, and they were often married and ordained
deacons at the same time. When the wife of a priest died he was
suspended from his functions, while he lived in chastity he might serve
in the choir ; but no widower could administer the sacraments unless he
entered a monastery and hved according to rule. If he married again
he ceased to have anything in common with the clergy. A priest could
4>ot administer the sacrament, or baptise, or perform any other duty
unless a deacon were present. For secular offences, such as theft and
drunkenness, the priests were punished by the secular arm, and
Herberstein says he saw some priests at Moscow publicly whipped,
whose only complaint was that they were beaten by slaves and not by
gentlemen. || Except the bishoprics and monasteries, the church was badly
endowed, and the priests had but a scanty income. There was only one
altar in each church, nor was service performed at it more than once
a day. The priests were only bound to perform three services weekly.
They wore the same dress as the laity, except a small skull cap to cover
the tonsure and a broad hat to keep off the heat and rain, or else an

* Id., 238, 239. t Id., 247- I Op. cit., i, 54. § U., 55.

II I^^^ 56.

396 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

oblong beaver hat of a grey colour, and they carried staves called
possoch. The heads of monasteries were styled archimandrites (abbots)
and hegumens (/.<?., abbots). The life in the monasteries was an austere
one ; no harps or musical instruments were allowed there, and the inmates
abstained entirely from meat. There were also many hermits, who, like
St. Simeon Stilites, raised their small cells on columns, and were called
stolpinki, from stolp, a column. The archbishops, bishops, and abbots
wore round black mitres. The bishop of Novgorod, however, used a
white two-horned one after the Roman fashion. Their dress was hke
that of the monks, except that it was sometimes made of silk, especially
the black pallium, with three stripes waving like the flowing of a river,
from the breast in every direction, to signify that from their mouth and
heart flowed streams of the doctrine of faith and good works.* The
bishop of Novgorod wore a white pallium.

The policy of the previous few reigns had concentrated a terrible
power in the hands of the Grand Prince. The lives and fortunes of laymen
and clerics, of lords and commonalty, were equally at his command,
says Herberstein. He was ignorant of contradiction, and everything he
did seemed right and just, for the Russians believed the Grand Prince to
be the executor of the divine will, and called him God's key-bearer and
chamberlain. " God and the Great Prince know " was a common phrase
with them, and he adds, " It is matter of doubt whether the brutality of
the people has made the prince a tyrant, or whether the people them-
selves have become thus brutal and cruel through the tyranny of their
prince."t It was not only a moral force he could command, but
he also had probably the most imposing army in Europe, consisting of
300,000 boyard-followers and 60,000 peasant soldiers, who marched under
a banner on which was represented Joshua staying the course of the
sun. The armature of this force is interesting, and I will take the
description from Herberstein. He says : — " They have small gelded
horses, unshod and with very light bridles, and their saddles are so
adapted that they may turn round in any direction without impediment^
and draw the bow. They sit on horseback with the feet so drawn up
that they cannot sustain any more than a commonly severe shock from a
spear or javelin. Very few use spurs, but most use the whip, which
always hangs from the little finger of the right hand, so that they may
lay hold of it and use it as often as they need, and if they have occasion
to use their arms they let it fall again, so as to hang from the hand.
Their ordinary arms are a bow, a javelin, a hatchet, a stick like a csestus,
which is called in Russian kesteni,_ in Polish bassalich. The more noble
and wealthy men use a lance. They have also suspended from their
arm oblong poignards Hke knives, which are so buried in the scabbard
that they can scarcely touch the tip of the hilt or lay hold of them in the

* Id., 58, 59. t U., 32.

JAN ALI KHAN. 397

moment of necessity. They have also a Ion?: bridle, perforated at the
end, which they attach to a finger on the left hand, so that they may hold
it at the same time as they use the bow. Moreover, although they hold the
bridle, the bow, the short sword, and the javelin in their hands at the
same time, yet they know how to use them skilfully without feeling any
inconvenience.

" Some of the higher classes use a coat of mail, beautifully worked on
the breast with a sort of scales and with rings ; some few use a helmet
of a peak form, like a pyramid ; some a dress stuffed with wool, to
enable them to sustain any blows. They also use pikes."

Herberstein tells us "the Russians employed cavalry almost exclusively
in their fights. In this and their tactics they clearly imitated the Tartars,
among whom sudden rushes and surprises formed the main element of
warfare. They employed cannon in sieges, but had no field pieces.
They were very impetuous in the first charge, but their valour did not
hold out long, for they seem," he says, " as if they would give a hint to
the enemy as much as to say, ' if you don't flee, we must.' They seldom,'?
he adds, "take a city by storm or by a sudden assault, but prefer a long
siege and to reduce the people to surrender by hunger or by treachery."^
In contrasting the Russian soldier with the Tartar, he says, "The
Russian when he once takes to flight thinks there is no safety but
what flight may secure him, and if captured neither defends himself nor
asks for quarter. The Tartar, on the contrary, if he be thrown from his
horse and stripped of all his weapons, and be even very severely
wounded, will generally defend himself with his hands, feet, and teeth,
when and how he can, as long as he has any breath in his body."t The
Russian camps were very large. The chief officers alone had tents. The
soldiers made themselves huts of wattles and wrappers. Nor did they
fortify their camps with either ditches or an array of chariots. The fare
of the soldiers was very poor. Each man carried his own provisions,
consisting of ground millet, salt pork, some salt, and occasionally a little
jpork. This was eked out with fruits, onions, garlick, and other herbs.
They relied more on numbers than personal bravery, and avoided close
encounters if possible, endeavouring either to circumvent or surround
their enemy. They had a great many trumpeters, and used another kind
of musical instrument called surun, which they blew for an hour
incessantly. They wore short boots of a reddish colour, with the soles
protected by iron nails, while their shirts were ornamented round the
neck with various colours, fastened with necklaces or with silver or
copper gilt beads with clasps. Like the Tartars, they were fond of
wresthng and boxing matches, in which the feet as well as the hands
were freely used and very great violence displayed. The Russian
punishments were of a cruel and barbarous kind. Thieves when caught

* Id., 97. t ^d., 98.

398 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

had their heels broken ; they were then allowed to rest for two or three
days until they swelled, when they were made to walk again." As among
most barbarous nations, the women were badly treated. " They consider
no woman virtuous," says Herberstein, " unless she live shut up at home
and be so closely guarded that she go out nowhere. At home the
women did nothing but spin and sew, and had no authority in the house,
all the domestic work being done by servants. They held unclean all
animals strangled by a woman's hands. Women were seldom admitted
to churches, and still more seldom to friendly meetings, unless they were
very old and free from suspicion ; on certain holidays, however, they
were allowed, as a special gratification, to meet in very pleasant meadows,
where they sat themselves on a kind of wheel of fortune and were moved
alternately up and down, or sat in swings, and otherwise made merry
with clapping of hands and singing, but no dancing." Surely a very
ingenuous way of amusing themselves, which would hardly be appreciated
by our blas6 beauties. Herberstein has a well known story of a German
blacksmith who had married in Russia, and whose wife asked him one
day why he did not love her. The husband replied that he did so
passionately. She said in reply she had not had any proofs of il since
he had never beaten her. He promised he would not in future fail in
this respect, and not long after he beat her most unmercifully, and con-
fessed to Herberstein that in consequence his wife loved him much more
than formerly. So he repeated the exercise frequently, and finally, while
the envoy was still at Moscow, he cut off her head and legs !!!*

Marriages were arranged between the parents, and the young people
did not see one another before they were united. " Learn what she is
from others who have known her," was the reply of parents to inquisitive
bridegrooms. All the gifts presented to the pair at the wedding, or their
value duly appraised, had to be returned to the givers, sworn appraisers
being actually employed in disputed cases, so that marriage presents
were purely a conventional form of civility and cost nothing. The whole
country was cankered with that corrupt bureaucracy which is still its^
bane, and the poor and the helpless had everywhere to go to the wall,
while the meekness of the suffering class was only relieved by servility
and meanness. It is no bad proof of degradation that the term
Krestianes, by which the proud Mussulmans designated the despised
Christians, should have been the generic name given by the Russian
grandees themselves to the humble classes. Surely an astounding
perversion of the name Christian. Justice was then as now bartered to
the richest. As a judge once told Vasili, " Sire, I always believe a rich
man rather than a poor one."t

Torture was applied with great cruelty to extract confessions; splinters
were driven under the nails, or frozen water allowed to fall drop by drop

* Id., 94, 95. t Karamzin, vii. 353.

JAN ALI KHAN. 399

on the head and other parts of the body. These, as well as the knout,
the patriotic Karamzin assigns to the influence of the Tartars.* Com-
merce was flourishing. The Poles and Lithuanians trafficked at
Moscow, the Swedes, Danes, and Germans at Novgorod, the Turks and
other Asiatics at the famous fair formerly held at Kholop.t Furs and
honey were the chief Russian products exported, while the silks and
spices of the East were cheaper there than in Germany. Kaluga was
famous for its wooden articles, Murom for its fish, Pereislavl for its
herrings, and Salovski for its salt ; but the enterprise of the mer-
chants was crippled by having no outlet into the ocean ; the White Sea
being the only exit they had, and this had a very dangerous and
uncertain navigation. Silver money was struck at Moscow, Novgorod,
Tuer, and Pskof. The money of Moscow, Herberstein says, was not
round but of an oval form, and called deng. On one side was an
inscription, on the other formerly a rose, but when he wrote a man on
horseback. A hundred of these dengas made a Hungarian gold piece,
six dengs made an altin, twenty a grifna, a hundred a poltin, and two
hundred a rouble. The coin of Novgorod was double that of Moscow in
value. They also had copper coins called polani, sixty of these went to
a deng. They had no gold money. They exported furs and wax to
Germany ; leather and narwhal teeth to Lithuania and Turkey ; saddles,
bridles, cloth, and leather into Tartary.j Arms or iron were only
exported to places on the east and north by stealth. The posts were well
regulated. This was doubtless a Tartar heritage, and notwithstanding
the very bad roads, we are told that the journey from Novgorod to
Moscow, of 542 versts, was performed in sixty-two hours, while travellers
paid six dengas for each ten versts. §

Moscow was a very large place for those days. In 1520 it contained
41,500 houses. The Kremlin was alone called the city ; round it were
grouped the large wooden palaces of the greater clergy and the nobles.
Most of the churches were also built of wood. The shops were arranged
pi bazaars or Gostinoi dvor, as they are to this day. In winter corn,
meat, hay, wood, See, were sold on the ice on the frozen Moskwa. The
ancient Russian proverb, that a man buys with open eyes (/.^, "caveat
emptor") shows that chicane and over-reaching were then as now the laws
of commerce, while usury was rampant, and twenty per cent, was
deemed moderate. Slavery was general in Russia, says Herberstein,
and the lords styled themselves slaves of the monarch. || These serfs
were chiefly debtors, prisoners of war, men who had been bought,
and their descendants. Karamzin tells us the condition of the free
peasants was much worse than that of the serfs, and the latter when
manumitted often sold themselves again. They farmed the lands of the
gentry, giving labour in lieu of money for rent ; and so exacting were the

=* Id., 254. t Id.t 253. I Herberstein, 112, § Id., 108. |i Karamzin, vii. 264.

400 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

latter that the peasants had only two days a week left for their own use.
They were terribly oppressed and poor. The old man had to work for
his bread like the young. Thus the class of serfs was largely recruited ;
for thus only could the poor secure attention when ill or old, with a
provision for their families.

The peasants, Karamzin says, had no rights in the land ; they enjoyed
personal liberty and their own chattels, but the land belonged from time
immemorial to the princes, boyards, warriors, and merchants, who
farmed it out to the free peasants.

Having thus given a picture of Russia at the period of its emancipation
from Tartar influences, we must on with our story.

On the death of Vasili he was succeeded by his eldest son, the famous
Ivan IV., better known as Ivan the Terrible, during whose infancy the
affairs of the State was controlled by a council of regency. One of the
first acts of the new reign was to enter into a fresh treaty with Kazan, by
which Jan AH and his people recognised the suzerainty of Russia.* This
good feeling was, however, of very short duration. The Tartars were
naturally irritated at their dependence on the Russians, whom they
looked upon as infidels, and Sahib Girai used this feehng for furthering
his intrigues. They no doubt also thought the minority of the Grand
Prince a good opportunity to further their ends. Headed by the tzarina
Kofgorshad, Prince Pulad, and the various ughlans and princes, they rose
in rebellion against Jan Ali, and having dethroned him, put him to death
on the banks of the Kazanka. This was in September, I535.t

SAFA GIRAI KHAN (Second Reign).

The conspirators recalled Safa Girai from the Krim, and he
married the widow of Jan Ali, the daughter of the Nogai Prince Yusuf.
This revolution was apparently not joined in by all the Kazan Tartars.
A considerable number of them, representing no doubt the partizansof
Russia, were opposed to it. News arrived that some of this section, num-
bering about five hundred, had repaired to the Volga, and sent to ask the
Grand Prince to support them and to nominate Shah Ali, who was still in
confinement at Bielozersk, as Khan of Kazan. He was accordingly
summoned to Moscow, where he had a very stately reception. He went
with his wife Fatima, and on being presented to the Grand Prince, who
was then but six years old, and was seated on his throne, he fell on his
knees and addressed him amidst tears : —

" Your father, the Grand Prince Vasili Ivanovitch, showed me great
kindness when I was but a boy, treated me as a father treats his son,
gave me Kazan, made me a tzar, and otherwise showed me his goodwill.

• Karamzin, vii. 316. t Vel, Zcrn., i. Note, 99. Karamziu, vii. 328.

i

SAFA GIRAI KHAN.

401

Through my fault strife arose at Kazan between the princes and the
people, and I had to return again to your father at Moscow. He again
supported me and gave me towns as an appanage, when through pride
and perfidy I again behaved ill to him. God did not pardon my fault
and your father sent me into banishment. Now you, my liege
remembering your father's goodwill towards me, have overlooked my
ill-doing, and God has put it into your heart to again befriend me." On
hearing these words Ivan raised Shah Ali from the floor, kissed him and
offered him a seat beside him, robed him in a rich pelisse, and then
dismissed him to his lodgings. The Khan requested permission to be
presented to Ivan's mother Helena, who granted him an audience at
the palace of St. Lazarus, where she received him very graciously,
surrounded by the principal boyards and court officials and their wives.
Ivan went to meet him in the vestibule, and presented him to his mother.
Shah Ali prostrated himself with his head on the floor, and repeated his
self-accusation, and his gratitude for the princesses' favour, and protested
his own faithfulness in future. He envied the fate of Jan Ali, his brother,
who had died for the Grand Prince, and hoped that a similar fate for
himself might efface the traces of his crime. Feodor Karpof, one of the
great officials, answered for his mistress, and said; " Tzar Shah Ah, the
Grand Prince Vasili banished you. We and our son Ivan have absolved
and pardoned you your fault. Be worthy of this high favour. We will
forget the past in the presence of your oath of fidelity." After this Shah
Ali withdrew. His wife Fatima was afterwards received in state, the
ladies of the court assisting her to descend from her sledge. Helena
welcomed her at the vestibule, and the Grand Prince saluted her in the
Tartar fashion. She afterwards dined at the same table with the regent
Helena, while Ivan and the boyards ate in another apartment. The
chronicles give the names of the various noble ladies who took part in
the banquet. The grandees of the court acted as waiters, and Prince
Repnin filled the office of cup-bearer to Fatima. At the close of the
banquet, as was usual, Helena presented the tzarina with a cup. Never,
according to the annalists, had there ever been such a great feast at
Moscow.*

The section ot Tartars who disapproved of Safa Girai were not
successful in their conspiracy, and the Russians, having received an
insolent letter from him, the princes Gundurof and Zamuizki were
ordered to march against them ; but they retired at the sight of the
Tartars, while, the latter overran and plundered the province of Nijni
Novgorod, and defeated the people of Balakhna who opposed them. The
Russian generals came face to face with the Tartars near Liskof, but
neither side seemed anxious to come to blows, and both sides at night-
fall retired in opposite directions. The two Russian generals were super-

* Vel. Zern., i. 60-63. Karamzin, vii. 329-331.
2 C

402 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

seded and imprisoned, and their successors defeated a body of Tartars
and Cheremisses near Koriakof. The prisoners were sent to Moscow,
and there condemned as traitors and rebels, and were all put to death.*
Safa Girai was also supported by his uncle Sahib Girai, the Khan of
Krim, who, in a letter written in 1538, menaced the Russians with his
vengeance if they should dare to interfere with the affairs of Kazan.t

The Tartars of Kazan continued to molest the Russian frontiers. The
Russian general Zassekin was killed in a fight with them between Galitch
and Kostroma, and in January, 1537, Safa Girai in person approached
Murof, whose environs he burnt, but he retired rapidly when the Russian
standards came in sight. Peace was at length secured by Safa Girai
acknowledging himself a Russian subject. This was in 1538.I

In December, 1540, Safa Girai is again found marching upon the
Russian borders, encouraged apparently by his uncle Sahib Girai. His
army comprised Kazan and Krim Tartars and Nogais, and proceeded to
attack Murom, which was bravely defended by its garrison. Prince
Dimitri JBelzki set out from Vladimir to its assistance, and was joined by
Shah Ali with the Tartars of Kasimof. The latter attacked the Nogais
who had plundered the neighbouring villages at Meshchera, and captured
many of them, sending some as prisoners to Moscow.§ Safa Girai
himself fled so hastily that the Russian commanders could not overtake
him.

This failure seems to have caused great discontent at Kazan, where
many of the chief men, headed by Pulad, began to correspond secretly
with the Russians, promising to rise if the Grand Prince would send an
army to assist them. They complained bitterly of the exactions they
suffered from the Khan, who sent the booty he plundered from them to
the Krim. The Russians received these advances cordially, but post-
poned action until matters were somewhat riper. |i This was prudent, for
the Tartars were very fickle, and in 1 542 we find Pulad again at peace
with Safa Girai, and the Tartars making advances for a more durable
peace. We are told, however, that the Princess Gorshadna wrote to the ▼
Grand Prince foretelling the approaching downfall of Kazan.^

Safa Girai postponed coming to definite terms. At length tired of his
treacheries, the Russians in 1 546 sent two armies against him, one from
Viatka and the other from Moscow, which appeared before Kazan on the
same day. Having burnt its environs, killed many Tartars there and on
the banks of the Sviaga, and carried off several distinguished persons,
they retired again without suffering any loss. The Khan, persuaded that
this attack had been instigated by some of his grandees, put several of
them to death, and drove others away. We learn from a letter from the
Nogai princes to the Grand Prince Ivan, that Mamai Seyid, a tzarevitch

* Karamzin, vii. 332. t Id., 340, 341. I Id., 341-343-

$ Vel. Zern., i. 63. Karamzin, viii. 19, 20. || Karamzin, viii. 20. ^ /</., 40.

SHAH ALI KHAN, 403

of Astrakhan, also made an attack on Kazan at this time * These things
only increased the Khan's unpopularity, and his people again appealed to
the Grand Prince for assistance, promising if he would send them troops
to hand over the Khan and thirty of his chief supporters to him ; but he
insisted that they must first seize and imprison Safa Girai. An outbreak
now broke out at Kazan, and the latter fled, while several grandees were
killed by the people.

SHAH ALI KHAN (Second Reign).

The council, ughlans, and princes now met together, swore to be
faithful to Russia, and recalled Shah Ali, who went accompanied by
3,000 Tartars of Kasimof, and was duly installed on the throne by the
Princes Dimitri Belski and Paletski, amidst great rejoicings.

But these friendly demonstrations were but a mask for treachery and
violence. A few weeks subsequent to his return the whole of his escort
was cruelly massacred ; several murzas, attached to his person, were
thrown into prison ; and a few Russian voivodes, who had accompanied
him from Moscow, alone escaped, to bring back to Ivan an account of
these proceedings.

" Shah Ali himself, a prisoner rather than a sovereign, and surrounded
by subjects who hated and despised him, employed the only means in his
power of diminishing the animosity which was testified against him ; he
concealed his anger, and strove to gain the goodwill of the Tartar
grandees and people by banquets and presents, and other pretended
marks of confidence and satisfaction. These affected and false caresses,
which only served to show his pusillanimity and dissimulation, rendered
him still more contemptible than before. His palace became his prison ;
there the grandees of his empire daily assembled, unwelcome and
uninvited guests ; its halls hourly rang with the noise of their revels, or
the sound of their arms. At the banquet these audacious nobles drank
from the royal cup, and, not content with similar outrages, they frequently
stole the gold and silver vessels that stood on the Khan's table, in hopes
of provoking his anger, and causing him to commit some act of violence
which might give them a pretext for satisfying their resentment."t

Such were the indignities which Shah Ali was hourly forced to endure.
He bore them patiently during the space of a month, without evincing
any mark of dissatisfaction ; at length, finding the throne he occupied a
place of increasing danger, he resolved to fly from his audacious subjects.
This was not, however, an easy task, for all his movements were strictly
watched, and it was difficult to evade the vigilance of the thousand spies
by whom he was surrounded. He imagined, however, an expedient

Vel. Zern., i. Note, 118. t Tornirelli, i. 97, 98.

404 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

which was attended with success. He invited all the murzas, grandees,
and principal merchants of Kazan to a sumptuous banquet ; tables
loaded with provisions and inebriating liquors were laid out for the
people in the court of the palace ; debauch and intoxication soon spread
through the town, and in the midst of the disorder and riot, Shah Ali
found means to effect his escape by a private door of the palace. Three
days elapsed ere the inhabitants of Kazan were aware of his evasion.
Enraged at the discovery, they put to death a prince of the name of
Chura, and several other eminent personages, who had facilitated the
flight of the Khan.*

This Chura, we learn from Karamzin, was one of the principal men in
the country, and a partisan of the Russians, who, having in vain tried to
bring the Tartars to their senses and to treat Shah Ali better, had
advised the latter to fly, and supplied him with a boat on which he
escaped by the Volga, and was afterwards provided with horses by the
Tartars of Gorodetsk.t

SAFA GIRAI KHAN.

The Tartars now recalled Safa Girai. It seems that when he retired
from Kazan he sought assistance from Yusuf the Nogai chief, his father-
in-law, with whom he had been at issue. The Nogais were inclined to
kill him, but he appealed pathetically to them, and, quoting the proverb
that " the sword will not strike a repentant head," he said that many of
the Tartars of Kazan were ready to go over to him if he only got some
assistance from the Manguts or Nogais. He promised to make over to
Yusuf the town of Arsk and the mountain district of the Cheremisses, and
to otherwise reward his followers. "Thus spoke Safa Girai and his
Krimean following," says the letter. Yusuf accordingly supplied him with
an army ; but it would seem that these treacherous allies had quite made
up their minds to put Safa Girai to death, for the^Nogais had ever been,
at deadly issue with the Girais, and were friendly to the descendants of
Tughluk Timur, who reigned at Astrakhan, and of whose stock Shah Ali
was a member. They intended in fact to support the latter and to give
him Yusuf's daughter in marriage ; but their plan was frustrated by his
flight, and finding the land without a ruler, they saw no benefit in putting
Safa Girai away, and having taken Kazan, they reinstated him there as
Khan, and then returned homewards to Mangut.J

Safa Girai now surrounded himself with Krim Tartars and Nogais,
and ruled with a rod of iron. Seventy-six murzas and princes, who
were attached to Shah Ali, fled and took refuge in Russia, and the
Cheremisses sent to inform the Grand Prince that they were ready to

* Tornirelli, 98, 99. t Karamzin, viii. 54. 53. Vel. Zern., »• Note, 118,

I Vel, Zern., i. Note, ii8.

UTAMISH GIRAI KHAN. 405

march and join the Russians in attacking the usurper; but as it was
winter it was necessary to postpone measures for a while. In order to
encourage the Cheremisses, however, a body of troops was sent to the
outfall of the Sviaga, under Prince Alexander Gorbaty, which devastated
a portion of the country of Kazan, and then returned to Moscow.*

In December, 1547, the Russians had another campaign against
Kazan. Ivan commanded the troops in person, and ordered them to
rendezvous at Vladimir, while Shah Ali was told to repair to the mouth
of the Zy will with his Tartars, The army was well prepared for a winter
campaign, but instead of snow there was a deluge of rain, so that the
carts and artillery could scarcely make their way along. On the 2nd of
February the tzar, who had passed the night at Elna, fifteen versts from
Nijni Novgorod, arrived at the island of Robotka. All at once the ice
on the Volga, which was covered with water, gave way with a great noise,
and the artillery was swallowed up in the river, while a large number
of men perished. After waiting on the island for three days in the hopes
of a frost arriving, and afraid of this presage, Ivan returned again to
Moscow, but he ordered Prince Dimitri Belski to advance on Kazan.
The latter was joined by Shah Ali with his contingent. Safa Girai, who
awaited them in the plains of Arsk, was completely defeated by the
advance guard under Prince Mikulinski. He lost several distinguished
prisoners, and at length took refuge in the town. To revenge this defeat
a body of Tartars ravaged the villages of Golitz, but they were overtaken
by Yakoflef, the voivode of Kostroma, and destroyed, and their chief
killed on the banks of the little river Egof ka. After spending a week
before the town the Russians retired.t Safa Girai did not long survive
this campaign, and in Tvlarch, 1549, news arrived at Moscow that he was
dead. He had fallen against a pillar when drunk, and had thus killed
himself.t

UTAMISH GIRAI KHAN.

Two of Safa Girai's sons, named Bulak and Mobarek Girai, were at
this time in the Krim, where they had been imprisoned by his uncle
Sahib Girai. Of his widows one was sent home to Siberia to her
father ; another to Astrakhan ; the third to her brother, the Shirin beg
in the Krim ; the fourth, a daughter of a Russian prince who had been
made prisoner, afterwards died at Kazan. His favourite wife was
Suyunbeka, the daughter of the Nogai murza Yusuf, already mentioned.
By her he had an infant son named Utamish Girai, whom the grandees
now placed on the throne. They at the same time sent a letter to the
Krim Khan, asking him to send one of his sons to defend them against

* Karamzin, vili. 55» 5^. t Karamzin, viii. 94, 95. + Vel, 2ern., i. Note, 119.

4o6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the Russians. Saliib Girai remitted this matter to his suzerain at
Constantinople, who appointed Devlet Girai, the son of Mubarek Girai,
who was then Hving at the Porte, to the throne of Kazan. This was
apparently displeasing to Sahib Girai, who determined to murder him
en route, a policy which was the cause of his own overthrow, for when
Devlet Girai reached the Krim he displaced him from the throne there.*

Ivan, the Russian Grand Prince, deemed the anarchy which prevailed
at Kazan a good opportunity for attacking that restless and dangerous
neighbour. A formidable army was prepared, of which the main body
had its rendezvous at Suzdal, its advanced guard at Murom, its rear
guard at Yurief, while the right and left wings respectively were at
Kostroma and Yaroslavl. The Grand Prince left his capital on the 24th
of November, 1549, and went to Vladimir, where he received the blessing
of the metropolitan, who exhorted the voivodes to renounce their jealousy
of one another and to serve the tzar faithfully. The army then went to
Novgorod.t It was accompanied by Yadigar, the tzarevitch of Astrakhan?
Shah Ali, the tzar of Kasimof, whom it was Ivan's intention to put on the
throne of Kazan, and who the Nogai murza Yusuf wished to unite with
his daughter, the widow of two Khans of Kazan. |

They arrived before Kazan on the 14th of February. Ivan encamped
on the lake Kaban, Shah Ali and the main army on the plain of Arsk,
while Yadigar with the left wing posted himself on the river Sani,
opposite the town, other divisions with the artillery were planted at the
mouth of the Bulak and on lake Paganovo.§

The investing army was 60,000 strong, and the bombardment was very
effective against the wooden ramparts of Kazan. A general assault was
ordered, but it was not successful, although many were killed on both
sides. Among others a tzarevitch, the son of the youngest tzarina, and
the Krimean Prince Chelbak. Meanwhile a sudden thaw set in, the ice
on the river broke up, and the roads became almost impassable. Fearful
of a famine, the tzar ordered a retreat, which was only effected with
difficulty. II

Having arrived at the mouth of the river Sviaga, fourteen miles from
Kazan, the tzar remarked a lofty and rugged eminence, then called the*
"Round mountain." Accompanied by Shah Ali and several of his
nobles, he climbed up to its summit. The extensive view which it
commanded, ranging over parts of Kazan, Viatka, Nijni Novgorod, and
the deserts of Simbirsk, delighted Ivan, and the idea struck him of
building on this spot a town, whose proximity to Kazan might facilitate
its conquest. He is said to have exclaimed to those around him, " Here
shall rise a Christian town ; we will hem in Kazan, and God will deliver
its capital into our hands."*F The Russians were disappointed at the

* Vel. Zern., i. Note, 120. .Karamzin, viii. 99. t Karamzin, viii. 99.

I Vel. Zern., i. Note, 121. $ Id. Note, 123. 1! Id. 11 Tornirelli, i. 102.

UTAMISH GIRAI KHAN. ^ 407

Vesult of the campaign, and apparently blamed the voivode Belski, whose
name had become an ill omen in regard to Kazan, and it was said that
to reward his want of energy and of zeal the Tartars had spared his
domains when they made a raid upon Russia. He died the same year
with the reputation of a traitor. The Krim Tartars and Nogais both
molested the Russian frontiers after the retreat of the army, probably by
way of diverting them from Kazan. The Tartars of the latter place now
sued for peace. Their request was supported by the Nogay Yusuf, who
cited the Koran and the gospel in favour of peace, and pushed his plan
©f marrying Safa Girai's widow to Shah Ah, a plan which was agreeable
to the Russians. The Grand Prince demanded that the Kazan Tartars
should send him five or six distinguished men as envoys, and despatched
Shah Ah and five or six hundred men to build the town at the mouth of
the Sviaga already mentioned. This was in 1551.*

"There existed and still exist in Russia markets for the sale of wooden
houses, ready constructed,-and which take to pieces, like the models of
castles, bridges, &c., which we see in toy shops. Entire streets of these
houses were wont to be arranged in similar market places, so that an
entire town might be bought in an hour and built in a week. Ivan
availed himself of this circumstance, had embarked on the Volga
numerous rafts containing the materials of a fortress, already prepared
for the promptest construction, and a division of troops was sent to
protect the workmen."! They seized the ferry boats on the Volga and
Kama to prevent communication with the other side. It was on the
evening of the i6th of May that Prince Obolenski first unfurled his
standard on the Round mountain, and there said the evening prayer.
Two days later, at daybreak he fell suddenly on the outskirts of Kazan,
put to death a thousand Tartars and more than a hundred murzas and
other chiefs who were asleep, and released a great number of Russian
prisoners. He returned to the Round mountain on the 24th of May. It
was then covered with a forest. This was speedily cleared, the circuit of
the new town wall was then traversed with a cross and holy water,
palisades were quickly driven in, and a church dedicated to the Virgin
and Saint Sergius erected. In the course of a month the town of Sviask
■was put together. Many of the people round were frightened at these
preparations and submitted to the Russians, especially the Chuvashes,
Cheremisses, and Mordvins, who sent some of their grandees to Moscow
to swear fealty to Russia. The tzar granted them a diploma sealed with
a golden seal, attached them to the new town of Sviask, and granted
them an exemption from tribute for three years. To test their zeal he
ordered them to march upon Kazan. They dared but obey, assembled
in large numbers, went on a fleet of Russian boats towards that city, and
fought with the Tartars on the plain of Arsk. They fled at the report of

* Karamzin, viii. 105. t Tornirelli, i. 102.

4o8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the enemy's artillery, but, as Karamzin says, " if they did not prove their
courage they at least showed their fidelity." Their princes, murzas, and
elders visited Moscow in some numbers, and received presents of pehsses,
pieces of cloth, arms, horses, and money. They praised the tzar, and
boasted loudly of their new masters. Ivan, well pleased with his success
so far, sent a large number of medals to Shah Ali to be distributed
among the soldiers.* Meanwhile the new fortress was not long in
assuming an imposing appearance. A few months after its foundation it
contained a cathedral, six churches, a monastery, and numerous habita-
tions. By the desire of Ivan several nobles, tradesmen, and mechanics
settled there, and built themselves houses, so that this new town soon
presented a flourishing aspect.t Meanwhile confusion reigned at Kazan,
whose garrison numbered about 20,000 warriors, but whose principal
inhabitants entered into secret intrigues with Shah Ali. The Russians
devastated the neighbouring villages, cut off the supplies of the town,
and occupied the country from the mouth of the Sura to the Kama and
the Viatka. The regent Suyunbeka, although she seems to have put the
town in defence and to have shown some vigour, was devoted to pleasure
and spent much of her time with Kochak, a Crimean ughlan, who was
detested by the people. The grandees of Kazan wished to submit to
Ivan, but this was opposed by the Crimean Tartars there, who, proud of
Kochak and expecting succour from Krim, Astrakhan, and the Nogais,
urged the tzarina to resist. Kochak doubtless intended to marry her,
kill her son, and seize the throne ; but a sedition having broke out in the
town, three hundred of the principal Tartars from the Taurida fled ;
they were intercepted by the Russians. Many of them perished on the
banks of the Viatka. Kochak, with forty-five of his countrymen, were
captured and put to death at Moscow.^ The grandees of Kazan now
made overtures to the Russian generals, sent ambassadors to Ivan
requesting him once more to appoint Shah Ali as their Khan, promising
at the same time to liberate all the Russian prisoners that had fallen into
their hands, and to yield up to him their Princess Suyunbeka and her
infant son Utamish Girai. Ivan willingly consented to a proposition so
favourable to his plans, and sent one of his chief boyards, Adashcf, with
a considerable force, in order to reinstate Shah Ali on the throne, and to
enforce the fulfilment of the terms of the treaty. He exacted likewise
that the mountainous portion of the Kazan territory, lying between
Sviask and Kazan, should be accorded to the Russians, and should
henceforth be reckoned as a part of the Muscovite dominions. This
unexpected demand astonished the inhabitants of Kazan, and bitterly
grieved even Shah Ali himself.

" What kind of a kingdom will be mine," said he, " and how can I
claim or expect love from my subjects, when I am forced to surrender so

* Karamzin, viii. 108. t Tornirelli, i. 103. J Karamzin, viii. log.

Xn-AMISH GIRAI KHAN. 409

important a portion of their territory?" Adashef and his voivodes to
this complaint returned no other answer than that " such was the
pleasure of their tzar." Too late the grandees repented that they had
solicited the interference of Ivan. In vain they strove to retract their
promise, and escape from its accomplishment by a thousand cunning
pretences. Adashef would not allow himself to be imposed on, and
demanded the immediate fulfilment of the treaty. " Either," said he (as
report the Russian annalists), " Suyunbeka and her son must be placed
immediately in our power, or our tzar will come in the autumn to ravage
your country with fire and the sword, and punish the faithless grandees
of Kazan." This menace produced the desired effect, and the Kazanians
shortly after despatched a messenger to Shah AU, still in the Russian
camp, inviting him to enter the town, and informing Adashef that
Suyunbeka and her child were on their way to the Muscovite camp at
Sviask.* This painful departure from a town where she had reigned as
sovereign has been touchingly described by the historian Karamzin.
" Not only Suyunbeka," writes this historian, " but every inhabitant of
Kazan shed tears, when it was known that the unfortunate princess was
to be delivered up as a prisoner to the Muscovite tzar. Uttering no
complaint against the grandees or the people, and accusing her destiny
alone, in her despair she threw herself on the tomb of her youthful
husband and envied the rest he enjoyed. The people stood by in
sorrowful silence. The grandees endeavoured to console her ; they told
her that the Russian tzar was kind and generous, that many Mussulman
princes were in his service, that he would doubtless choose among them
a husband worthy of her, and would give her some sovereignty. The
whole population of Kazan accompanied her to the banks of the
Kazanka, where a magnificent barge was waiting for her. Suyunbeka,
slowly drawn in a car, left the town, taking her infant son with her, who
was still in the nurse's arms. Pale as death and almost inanimate,
hardly could she find strength enough to descend to the port; on
entering the bark, she tenderly saluted the people, who, prostrate
before her, bitterly sobbed while they showered their blessings on their
much-loved sovereign." Prince Obolensky received her on the banks of
the Volga, compUmented her in the name of the Russian tzar, and set
sail with her towards Moscow, taking with him likewise the infant
Utamish Girai, and some of the Crimean grandees.t Suyunbeka was
married for the third time to Shah Ali, whose person was as odious
and deformed as had been the character of her former husband Safa
Girai. Utamish was baptised on the 8th of January, 1553. He died on
the nth of June, 1556, and was buried in the church of the Archangel at
Moscow. The name of Suyunbeka still survives in the traditions of
Kazan, and a tower there bears her name.l

* Tornirelli, i. 104, 105. f Karamjsin, viii. iii, 112. I Vel. Zcrn., i. Note, 125.

2D

4IO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

SHAH ALI KHAN (Third Reign).

Having despatched the tzarina and her son to Moscow, the Russian
generals now insisted on the surrender of the captives at Kazan and on
an oath of fidehty from the Tartars. Shah AH also sent some of his
dignitaries (Shahbaz, his chamberlain, Bitikei, his equerry, &c.) into the
town to prepare the palace. The following day the citizens and their
leaders assembled in the open fields, and after listening to the form of
oath, thanked Ivan for sending them Shah Ali ; but they would not
speak of the cession of part of their country. " Do you think," said the
boyards, " that Ivan is as frivolous as you. Look towards the mouth of
the Sviaga. You will there see a Christian town. The people in its
neighbourhood have solemnly submitted to Russia, and have actually
made war on Kazan. Can they after this submit to you ? Forget the
past, for you cannot recall it."* The treaty was accordingly duly signed
by the principal inhabitants, and the tzar attached his seal to it. During
three days crowds of people went to take the oath. After which, namely,
on the 1 6th of August, Shah Ali, accompanied by three hundred princes,
murzas, and Kazaks of Kasimof, and three hundred streHtzes, made his
pubhc entry into the town.t

The boyards Bulgakof and Khabarof installed him on the throne. The
court of the Khan's palace, we are told, was at this time crowded with
Russian prisoners, many of whom had been twenty years in slavery. Shah
Ali announced their deliverance to them. They could scarcely beUeve it,
and, with their eyes bathed in tears, they raised their hands aloft to thank
heaven. "Ivan reigns in Russia," said the boyards to them, "return
home, and do not fear that you will again fall into captivity." They were
supplied with necessaries at Sviask and, without counting those who
went another way towards Perm and Viatka, sixty thousand returned
home by way of the Volga. " Never," says the annahst, " had Russia
seen such a sight. It was like a second migration of the Israelites."

The Russian army now returned home, leaving a body of five hund^red
men behind, under Khabarof, to protect Shah Ali, while Prince Simeon
Mikulinski was nominated commandant of Sviask.J Meanwhile the
conditions under which Shah Ali took the throne were such as to prevent
lasting tranquilHty at Kazan. The Tartars resented the cession of the
mountainous part of their country to the Russians, and the transfer to
them of so many of their dependents, the Chuvashes, Cheremisses, and
Mordvins, while the Russians, not satisfied with this, wished to treat the
Khan as a mere dependent. They sent him and his wives rich presents,
robes, precious cups, and money, but at the same time demanded that

Karamzin, viii. 113. t Vel. Zern., i. 69. Note, 126.

I Karamzin, viii. 113, 114.

SHAH ALI KHAK, . 411

Kazan should deem itself like Kasimof, a dependence of the empire.*
Placed in this way between his own subjects and the Russians, Shah
All's place was by no means enviable. He asked in vain for the restora-
tion of a portion only of the mountain district, and on his request being
refused, he winked at the retention of many Russian prisoners in chains
by the Tartars, and told the Russian officers he feared a sedition.
Meanwhile a conspiracy did arise ; some of his grandees plotted with the
Nogais to kill him and all the Russians. He thereupon determined upon
a terrible vengeance. He gave a grand feast in the palace, and ordered
all the guests, both those convicted and those suspected of treachery, to
be put to death. Some were killed in the dining saloon of the palace,
and others in the court yard. Seventy princes, ughlans, and murzas
perished in this massacre, where All's supporters and the Russian
strelitzes acted as executioners. The massacre is said to have lasted
two days, and three thousand people altogether perished. The
frightened citizens hastened in large numbers to leave Kazan.t This
state of anarchy caused considerable anxiety at Moscow, whence
Adashef was sent to tell Shah Ali that it was impossible matters could
go on in this way, and that it would be necessary for the Russians to
enter the town to protect him and to restore order. Ali made a strange
reply. " I see I cannot reign here. I am detested by the princes and
the people. And why ? If Ivan would restore the mountainous district
he has appropriated, then I would answer for the fidelity of the Tartars ;
otherwise I must abdicate and return to his majesty, for I have no
other asylum on earth ; but I am a Mussulman, and I will never consent
to admit Christians into Kazan. Nevertheless, I will promise that if the
tzar will continue to be gracious to me, I will exterminate the remaining
traitors and destroy their artillery, and thus prepare him an easy victory.*
Adashef returned with this answer to Moscow, where Kostrof and
AUmerdi, envoys from Kazan, who were enemies of Shah Ali, had
arrived. They represented. Shah Ali as an assassin and robber, and that
the -Tartars dearly wished to put an end to his excesses, and they
answered for the fidelity of the town if he were removed and a
Musc6yite governor placed there. They asked that the Russians should
occupy the town while they retired to the suburbs and neighbouring
villages. t TornirelH says these arguments were used by a Kazan Tartar
named Chabkun, who had settled for some time at Moscow and gained
the confidence of Ivan, and had afterwards moved with his family to
Kazan, where he formed the resolution of ruining Shah Ali.§

The result, at all events, was that Ivan despatched Adashef to Kazan
with orders to depose the Khan, and told him to promise the latter a
pension and his favour if he quietly allowed the Russians to enter. " I

Vel. Zern., i. 70, Note, 128. t Karamzin, viii. 116. Tornirelli, i, je6, 107.

I Karamzin, viii. 117, 118. § Op. cit., i. 107.

412 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

do not regret the throne. I have not been happy on it. My life here is
in danger, and I consent to submit to my sovereign ; but do not suppose
I will break the law of the Prophet and surrender the town. You may
take it by force or by stipulation, but do not expect me to open its gates
for you." Neither the menaces nor entreaties of Adashef would induce
him to hand over the principality, but meanwhile, to please the tzar, he
caused several cannons to be destroyed, and sent some muskets and
ammunition to Sviask, and then issuing from the place as on a fishing
excursion, accompanied by many princes, ughlans, and a body of
strelitzes, he ordered the Russians to surround them. " You sought to
assassinate me, you have calumniated me at Moscow, and traitors to
your tzar, you wished to replace him by a Russian governor. Very well,
let us go and present ourselves before his tribunal." They accordingly
went together to Sviask. Thus did Shah Ali, for the third and last time
abandon Kazan.

YADIGAR KHAN.

On the withdrawal of Shah Ali, Prince Simeon Mikuhnski informed
the Tartars that their wish was accomplished, the Khan was deposed,
and it only remained for them to swear allegiance to the Russians. This
they agreed to do if he would send them from Sviask the Princes
Shabkun and Burnak, who had submitted to Russia, to guarantee the
good faith of the latter. These princes accordingly went to Kazan with
the Russian officers, and the grandees, the citizens, and villagers duly
took the oath of allegiance, and prepared lodgings for the governor and
the occupying troops. The wife of Shah Ali was sent to Sviask, and
Prince Mikulsinki was invited to go to Kazan. The people went out to
meet him, and prostrated themselves before tiim with their faces to the
ground, in token of their servitude. He was accompanied by soqie
troops. He was about to enter when a sedition broke out in the place.
Three grandees whom he had allowed to return excited the people
against the Russians, and spread the report that they were come to
exterminate them. The gates were accordingly closed, the Tartars took
up arms. Nothing could pacify them. At this news Prince Mikulinski,
leaving his army behind him, advanced with a small escort towards the
town, where the principal gate, that of the tzars, had been closed, the
walls being hned with troops.

In vain some of the Tartar leaders advised prudence ; they would not
allow the troops to enter, seized a number of boyard followers and
Russian baggage waggons, and put Chabkun, ^who had turned traitor,
at their head. The Russian generals thereupon returned to Sviask,

YADIGAR KHAN. 413

imprisoned all the dignitaries of Kazan they could lay their hands on,
and reported the state of things to the authorities at Moscow.*

The news of what had happened at Kazan reached Moscow in March,
1552. Ivan at once ordered his brother-in-law, Daniel Romanovitch, to
march towards Sviask and Shah Ali to go to Kasimof, and proclaimed in
the council that the time had arrived for humbling the pride of Kazan.
Levies of the various Russian troops were ordered to assemble at Nijni
Novgorod, Murom, &c. Matters did not begin well, for a terrible attack
of scurvy decimated the Russian ranks at Sviask, while the Tartars
succeeded in reducing the Chuvashes, &c., who depended upon that
town, and who made raids upon the Russian cattle, while they also
defeated several detachments of Russians, and put such of them as
they got hold of to death. They also offered the throne of Kazan to
Yadigar, the son of Kasim Khan of Astrakhan.t He had taken part in
Ivan's campaign against Kazan in 1549 and 15 50, J and afterwards
seems to have gone to live among the Nogais, whence he was now sent
for.§ He went at the head of five hundred warriors to Kazan, where he
mounted the throne and swore an implacable hatred against Russia, ||
Meanwhile the Russians made great preparations for the campaign. A
vast Russian army, under the most distinguished commanders, was
posted in the country between Koshir and Murom, while the Oka and
the Volga were crowded with boats laden with artillery, munitions, &c.,
en route for Nijni Novgorod. Ivan had sent for Shah Ali, who, although
from his obesity unfit for the profession of a soldier, was a man of sound
judgment. He recommended the campaign to be prosecuted in the
winter, urging that it would make a bridge for them over the forests and
lakes and marshes, but Ivan was too impatient to start to wait for the
winter.^ " The army is ready, the munitions have been sent on, and
with the help of God we will find a way to gain our end." His
separation from his wife Anastasia, whom he loved so well, is touchingly
recorded in the Russian annals. " Far advanced as she was in
pregnancy, and on the eve of giving an heir to Ivan and the Russian
ti^one, she wept bitterly and clung to the arms of her husband, as if
resolved to prevent his departure. The young tzar evinced a firmness in
that trying moment that struck and astonished the spectators of the
scene ; he endeavoured to console his weeping bride, he told her that he
had to fulfil his duty as tzar, and that to die for his country would be his
glory. Invoking the protection of the Most High on his suffering and
despondent spouse, he is said to have exclaimed, ' Pray for me, Anastasia,
in the midst of danger, and to prayer add good deeds that your prayers
may be heard. In your hands I place my sovereign powers. Cherish the
poor and unfortunate, open the prison gates, remove the chains even

* Karamzin, viii. 120-122. t Vel. Zern., i. 72. Note, 134. I Id., 67, 68. Note, 123,

§ Id. Note, 134. D Karamzin, viii. 131. H/^., 136.

414 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

from the criminal and the condemned, if you find it advisable to do this
during my absence, and trust that God will protect me for your sake ; nay
that he will reward me for the sacrifices I am forced to make for the
good of my country.' These words inspired Anastasia with an almost
miraculous courage. She removed her arms from Ivan, whom she had
hitherto held with an almost convulsive embrace, and flinging herself on
her knees, she prayed aloud for the health, the victory, and the glory of
her husband. Ivan, casting a farewell glance on Anastasia, bent his
steps to a neighbouring church, where he prayed long and fervently, after
which he rose and embraced the clergy, the nobles, and the people
present, all of whom melted into tears. Quitting the church, he mounted
his horse and rode to Kolomna, where his troops were assembled."*

Meanwhile the Krim Tartars made a diversion on the side of Kazan,
and made an attack on Tula, whence they were speedily forced to retire.t
Ivan devoted himself to the details of the campaign. One division of the
army marched to Vladimir and Murom, under his own orders ; another
went by way of Riazan and Mechera, with orders to join him in the
plains beyond Alatir. Murmurs began to break out among the soldiers,
especially those from Novgorod and the boyard-foUowers, who com-
plained of the continuous fatigues which they had undergone ; but Ivan
made a special appeal to their patriotism, and said he should count those
only as his faithful friends who went on with him without wavering.
This had the desired effect, and a general submission followed.

Ivan first went to pray before the image of the Virgin at Kolomna,
which had accompanied Dimitri Donski on his victory against Mamai,
and he also visited the tomb of Alexander Nevski. At Vladimir he learnt
that the plague which had decimated the troops at Sviask had ceased,
that the soldiers there were ardent for the war, and that the neighbouring
mountaineers had been reduced to obedience. He also received
encouraging messages from his wife and the clergy at Moscow. He
himself showed great energy and vigour in regulating the details of the
campaign.t At Murom he was joined by Shah Ali, who was sent on
towards Kazan by the Volga, with Prince Peter Bulgakof and a body'^
strelitzes. The main army was transported over the Oka on bridges, and
marched by the forest of Sakana on the banks of the Veletema, by the
Shileksha and the town of Sakana, where a body of auxiliary Tartars and
Mordvins joined it ; on the ist of August the waters of the Mana were
blessed, and the river was crossed below Alatir, and soon after it was
joined by another division. Though forced to penetrate through deserts
and forests, the army seems to have been amply supplied by its hunters
and fishermen, and by the wild fruits which grew there. " We took with
us," says an eyewitness, " no provisions, nature spread an abundant
table for us everywhere. We constantly encountered numerous herds of

* Tornirelli, i. 115. t Vide next chupter. I Karamzin, vi. 143, 144.

YADIGAR KHAN. 415

elks, the rivers teemed with fish, and the birds fell at our feet.* At
Burucheief envoys came from the Cheremisses to announce their
entire submission, and that the right bank of the Volga was pacified.
They undertook to prepare roads and to make bridges on the way, and
the tzar invited their elders to his table. On the 6th of August Ivan
arrived at the little river Kivata, where the troops of Sviask went to meet
him under their several commanders. He gave them a grand feast on
the plain of Beisa. The sight was a splendid one ; the broad Volga with
its wooded banks and islands on one side, the dark forest panelled with
green pastures and round hills on the other, while beyond the river the
plains stretched away interminably. Occasionally on the higher ground
and in the hollows villages of the Chuvashes were passed, where hydromel
and bread were presented, which were very welcome as it was a season
of fasting ; the soldiers drank pure water, but no one complained.

" On the 13th of August the army arrived at Sviask. With the liveliest
satisfaction," says Tornirelli, " the young monarch made his entry into
the stronghold, escorted by a detachment of light cavalry, and accom-
panied by the clergy of the town and the heads of his army. His first
visit was to the cathedral, where he assisted at the performance of divine
service ; after which the priests and the boyards congratulated him as
the conqueror and the master of the country of Sviask. He then
traversed the town, examining attentively its fortifications, streets, and
houses, and testifying his delight and approbation. Enchanted with the
picturesque situation of the town, he is said to have remarked to his
boyards that the whole of Russia could not afford a similar landscape.
A house had been prepared for his reception. He refused, however, to
inhabit it, exclaiming, * We are on our march ;' and mounting his steed
he returned to his tent in the midst of his soldiers."

The Russian annahst reverts with pride to the singular and striking
scene which this new citadel presented on this occasion. " A multitude
of merchants with various species of merchandise had arrived thither
from Moscow, Yaroslavl, and Nijni Novgorod ; the port was crowded
w^<h barges loaded with provisions. The banks of the river Volga
presented the appearance of a fair ; all felt," as remarked the annalist,
" as if at home, all had wherewith to eat well and drink well, regale their
friends and make merry. Little wonder is there that the Russian
soldiers, worn out with fatigue, should have wished as they did to take
rest in the midst of this scene of plenty and pleasure, but Ivan resolved
to push forward without delay to Kazan."t

A council was now called, which was attended by Shah Ali, Prince
Vladimir the son of Andrew, and other boyards, where it was determined
to send a summons to Kazan to surrender, and thus save bloodshed.
Shah Ali himself was ordered to write to Yadigar, who was his relative

* Jd,, 145. t Tornirelli, i. 118, 119,

4l6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

(both belonged to the royal house of Astrakhan),* promising him the
tzar's favour if he would submit. A letter was also sent to the Kul
Sherif-Mollah, promising him similar clemency.t Ivan also released the
Kazan Tesik.l

The siege of Kazan, like the defeat of Mamai, is still fresh in the
memory of the Russians, and is a subject of conversation as much in the
peasant's hut as in the palace. "This," says Karamzin, "is chiefly
because it was the first attempt made by the Russians to capture a strong
fortress by strategic art, and partly because of the intrepidity and heroic
defence of the Tartars, which made the victory such a costly one."§ To
the Tartars it was a vital question. Not only was their independence
menaced, but it was also a matter of religious duty not to allow a
Mussulman State to be subjected by Christians. They boasted that it
was not the first time that they had seen the Muscovites retire from their
walls, and that their fruitless efforts had ever been crowned by retreat,
which had afforded them a subject of amusement.il

At the head of 150,000 warriors Ivan, on the 19th of August, encamped
on the Volga, while Shah Ali set sail to occupy the " isle of strangers ;"
but continuous rains had converted the country into a marsh, and it was
necessary to restore the roads. When they arrived on the Kazanka a
message came from the Khan Yadigar breathing defiance, and saying
that he was waiting for the banquet to commence.^ Presently a murza
named Kamai deserted to the Russians, and reported that Yadigar, the
chief Imaum, and the Nogai princes Isenek, Chabkun, Atalik, Islam,
Aliki Narikof, Kebek Tumenski, and Derbish had so inflamed the
fanaticism of the people that no one was in favour of peace ; that the
fortress was well supplied with food and ammunition ; that it was
defended by 30,000 Tartars and 2,700 Nogais, and that Prince Yapancha
had been detached with a body of cavalry towards the plains of Arsk to
arouse the people there, and to continually harass the Russians. Kamai
was well treated, and orders were given that one division should occupy
the country of Arsk, another the banks of the Kazanka, a third be planted
behind this, while Shah Ali was to post himself behind the Bulaka, niar
the cemetery, and the cavalry of the guard was to protect the district
known as " the meadows of the tzar."

It was an early hour of the morning when Kazan with its lofty
minarets and majestic mosques first presented itself, enveloped in a mist,
to the sight of the Russian tzar. That moment was a solemn one. Upon
a given signal the whole army suddenly suspended its march, then
amidst the sound of trumpets and other martial instruments, a banner

♦ Vide Table at the end of the last chapter.

t A mosque bearing the latter's name still remains at Kazan.

I This is probably a corruption of Tajik {i.e., a Persian from Mavera ul nehr). It stands here

for merchant. (Vel. Zern., i. Note, 141. Karamzin, viii. 149.)

i Karamzin, viii. 1491 150. D Id., iji. Vel. Zern. Note, 143.] f Karamzin, 15a.

YADIGAR KHAN. 4^7

was seen to rise and to float proudly in the air. Sacred was that banner
to the Russians, for it had waved in the hands of Dimitri Donski nearly
two hundred years before, at the time when that prince vanquished the
Tartars and saved his country from threatened destruction.

At the sight of this glorious memorial Ivan and his soldiers knelt upon
the earth. The tzar, making religiously the sign of the cross, exclaimed
aloud, "Almighty God! it is in thy name that we march against the
infidel." Divine service was then performed. At the termination of this
ceremony the tzar addressed a few words to his army — swore not to
abandon the widows and orphans of those who should fall in the struggle,
and made a solemn vow to sacrifice his life, if necessary, to insure the
triumph of the Christians.

Ivan and his warriors then advanced beneath the walls of Kazan. A
deep and inconceivable silence reigned throughout the town ; its streets
and habitations seemed abandoned, so profound was the tranquillity that
existed at that moment, not even a sentinel was to be seen on the
ramparts, and many of the Russian voivodes were of opinion that the
Tartar Khan, terrified at the approach of the Muscovites, had fled with
his army and the entire population of Kazan to the neighbouring
forest.

But hardly had the Russian advanced guard crossed the canal called
Bulak, from whence the palace of the Khan and the numerous mosques
of the city became clearly evident, when a terrible noise succeeded the
deep silence which had hitherto astonished the assailants. " The air,"
says Karamzin, " rang with yells, rage, and fury, the massive gates of
the fortress rolled upon their hinges with a hissing noise, and fifteen
thousand Tartar horse and foot rushed upon the Muscovite strelitzes, who,
unable to resist this impetuous and unexpected shock, gave way and fled
in disorder. Their complete destruction would have been inevitable, had
not a fresh legion arrived in time to protect them. A bloody struggle
then ensued, and continued to rage till the Tartars thought fit to retire
within the walls of the fortress from which they had a few hours previous
SG-^arlessly sallied."*

Kazan was now beleagured, and three canvas churches were erected in
the camp. I will abstract a long passage from Tornirelli, who has well
condensed Karamzin's account of the siege.

" The first night which the Russians passed under the ramparts of
Kazan was both ominous and discouraging. A violent tempest broke
out about midnight : the tents of the soldiers, and even that of the tzar,
were torn to pieces by the wind ; the barges which had been sent from
Moscow with provisions all sank beneath the stormy waters of the Volga;
consternation spread through the Russian army, and many of the
voivodes believed that the tzar, in this critical emergency, would be

* Tornirelli, i. 121-123.
2 E

41 8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

forced to make a precipitate and disgraceful retreat. Ivan, however, did
not lose courage ; he sent without delay to Sviask for provisions, and to
Moscow for warm clothing for the soldiers, and openly declared his
intention of establishing his winter quarters under the walls of Kazan,
should the tempestuous weather prevent the continuation of the siege.

In the meantime the Tartars day and night continued to make furious
and almost hourly sallies from the town. The Russians could scarcely
enjoy a moment's rest. This ardour on the part of the besieged lasted
several days ; at length, however, their impetuosity appeared to have
abated, not from a diminution of courage, but from total exhaustion.
Every prisoner that was taken by the Russians affirmed the same fact,
that the inhabitants of Kazan were prepared to die, but had resolved
never to yield their native town to the invaders as long as there remained
a single man capable of raising a sword in its defence.

Although these frequent sorties had caused the Tartars a considerable
loss of men, the rage which animated them had by no means diminished,
as the following circumstance will prove. The tzar, in hopes of inducing
the inhabitants to surrender without a further effusion of blood, had
ordered all the prisoners he had taken to be attached to stakes, near the
trenches, in order that the latter, by their prayers and supplications,
might induce their fellow-citizens to save them from threatened death by
opening the gates of the city to the Russians. The Tartars, however, in
answer to their entreaties, directed a volley of arrows against their
unfortunate companions, exclaiming, " It is better that they should
receive death from the hands of true believers, than from those of the
accursed Giaours." This ferocious act of fanaticism filled the tzar and
the whole of his army with horror, and proved to the invaders that
they had to deal with enemies whose extermination alone could ensure
victory.

One of the Tartar warriors who most distinguished himself during
the siege was Prince Yapancha, who is reported in the Muscovite
annals to have performed prodigies of valour. Concealed with a small
band of followers in a neighbouring forest, he at every instant pre-
cipitated himself on the Russian camp, killing hundreds of his enemies,
and spreading terror and panic at every fresh attack. By means of
signals he had established a communication with the inhabitants of
Kazan, and a banner, planted on a lofty tower, gave him to understand
|;he most favourable moment for attacking the Russian troops. He found
means to intercept every supply of provisions for the invading army, and
so effectually that the latter began to suffer most cruelly from hunger
This terrible foe at length caused such an extreme discouragement
among the Muscovite soldiers, that the tzar was forced to assemble his
boyards in council, to take measures for the removal of the evil. A
tolerable idea may be fonne4 of the consideration in which Yapancha

YADIGAR KHAN. 419

and his followers were held, from the number of troops that went against
him — no less than thirty thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot
soldiers, under the command of a brave, experienced general, Prince
Alexander Gorbaty Shuisky. This army marched to the forest of Arsk,
in which our hero was concealed. Its leaders thought fit to employ a
stratagem to insure success. Hardly had the Russians appeared upon
the plain of Arsk, ere Yapancha, at the head of his gallant band, rushed
upon them with his usual intrepidity. The Russians, pretending to be
defeated, took to flight after a short struggle, while Yapancha, unable to
restrain his impetuosity, and considering his enemies routed, pursued
them vigorously towards the town. In the meantime a fresh corps had
arranged itself on the borders of the forest, and having intercepted all
communication with this place of refuge, the entire army of the Mus-
covites fell upon Yapancha and his deluded band. Overwhelmed by
numbers, surrounded on every side by relentless foes, there remained for
this brave prince no other alternative save that of yielding himself a
prisoner or dying sword in hand; he chose the latter, and, fighting
resolutely to the last, fell bravely with his gallant companions, all of
whom, even without one single exception, were exterminated.

This formidable enemy once removed, the Russians regained their
former ardour, and proceeded to attack a stronghold erected by the
Tartars in the neighbourhood of the forest of Arsk, and situated between
two marshes ; this fort was surrounded by a double palisade, a rampart
of earth, and a deep trench ; its position rendered it almost impregnable.
The assault took place ; both the assailants and the assailed performed
prodigies of valour, but the Russians succeeded in getting possession of
the place. The whole of the garrison died at their post of duty, and the
earth was covered with heaps of mutilated bodies. On the following day
the victors advanced to the town of Arsk, situated in a pleasant and
wonderfully fertile locality, where the grandees of Kazan possessed their
country seats and rich villas. The citizens of Arsk abandoned their
dwellings on the approach of the Russians, who found in the deserted
toifrn abundance of provisions, consisting of cattle, poultry, bread, honey,
&c., as well as divers kinds of furs, and numerous objects of great value.
" The Russians," say the chronicles, " lived in the midst of abundance,
took what they wished, burnt the neighbouring villages, massacred the
inhabitants, sparing the women and children alone." Having likewise
rescued many Christians, whom the Tartar nobles had employed as
slaves, the Russian army returned to the camp of Ivan, bringing with
them such a profusion of cattle and other articles of food, that from that
moment, the annalists inform us, " provisions became so cheap, that a
cow might be bought for ten dengas (a Russian farthing), and an ox for
twenty." The tzar and his followers were full of joy.
But this success was soon followed by evils that converted this joy

420

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

into sorrow. The weather suddenly changed ; heavy rain, unusual at
this period of the year, fell incessantly ; the winds became so boisterous
that nothing could resist their violence ; and this fury of the elements at
last became so awful and irresistible as to induce the Muscovites to
attribute the evils to supernatural influence. Prince Andrew Kurbsky,
who distinguished himself for his valour during this siege, and who
wrote an historical work about Europe at this period, assures us, as a
solemn fact, "that the magicians of Kazan every morning at sunrise
betook themselves regularly to the ramparts of the fortress, that there
they uttered frightful cries, placing themselves in the most hideous and
contorted attitudes, agitating their robes, and exciting, by means of
infernal spells and sorcery, tempests, gusts of wind, and torrents of rain,
so that in a short space of time the driest spots were converted into
marshes, the tents flooded with water, and the soldiers were wet from
morn till night." This firm belief in the supernatural agency which the
Tartars employed became so strong in the minds, not only of the
soldiers, but even in that of the tzar and his boyards, that Ivan was
forced to hold a council, in which it was resolved that measures should
be taken without delay to destroy the diabolical influence. All were
unanimously of opinion that, to thwart the powers of hell and its demons,
it was advisable to employ the powers of heaven — at least those which
its ministers had at their disposal, and could turn to account in
this critical emergency. Accordingly messengers were despatched to
Moscow, with orders to bring from thence the miraculous cross of the
tzars. On its arrival at Kazan a grand ceremony took place : the whole
camp was asperged with holy water, after which Prince Kurbsky assures
us " fine weather returned, the army recovered from its panic, and from
that moment the Tartar enchanters, abandoned by the devils, their allies
and coadjutors, lost their former power."

Convinced that they had no longer to contend with demons as well
as men, the Russian troops recommenced operations with redoubled
activity. Ivan had in his suite a foreign engineer, a Scotchman by birth,
who rendered the tzar no small service during the siege. By his advice,
a huge tower of wood was erected opposite the principal entrance of tfie
fortress called the " Royal Gate ;" and on its summit were placed sixty
pieces of cannon, ten of which were of a considerable magnitude. This
terrible battery, raised high above the fortifications, kept up a continued
fire against the fortress. The defenders of Kazan still, however, stood
firm, and replied from the ramparts by an unceasing discharge of
musketry, which caused great ravage among the Russian troops. On
this occasion, Ivan once more repeated his former propositions of peace
to the besieged ; informing them that if they were unwilling to surrender
themselves prisoners, they were at liberty to go, with their Khan,
wherever they pleased, and to take with them their property, wives, and

YADIGAR KHAN. 42 1

children ; that all he sought was to gain possession of the town, built by-
force on the Russian territory : to these, and other propositions, the
inhabitants of Kazan — unbent by suffering, and unawed by peril —
returned as disdainful an answer as that they had given on the first
approach of the Muscovite tzar.

In the meantime the Russians had been actively employed in
advancing the wooden tower nearer and nearer the fortress, until at
length it was only separated from the very wall by a deep moat, about
twenty feet wide. This had not been accomplished, however, without
great bloodshed. Day and night both armies had been incessantly
engaged. On one occasion, when, worn out with fatigue, the Russian
soldiers had laid aside for a moment their arms, the inhabitants of Kazan,
to the number of ten thousand, sallied from the fortress, and rushed
towards the tower with such impetuosity that the Russians, abandoning
their posts, took to flight in the greatest disorder. The moveable tower,
with all its artillery, was at that moment in the hands of the Tartars.
The Muscovite voivodes felt the imperious necessity of regaining their
cannon, the loss of which would probably have obliged them to raise the
siege. Accordingly, Prince Vorotinsky and the principal boyards of Ivan
rushed, sword in hand, upon the Tartars, calling out to the fugitives to
return and help them. The latter, seeing the heads of the army
struggling with thousands, regained their courage, and returned once
more to the struggle, exclaiming, " We will not abandon our fathers."
The battle was in consequence renewed with redoubled energy. In the
meantime, several other corps of the Russian army arrived, one after the
other, at the scene of contest. The Tartars, though forced to contend
with enemies three times their number, still stood firm, and defended for
a long time the trophies they had taken ; at length, however, they were
forced to give way, and to retire once more within the walls of the city.
This combat is reported in the Russian annals as one of the bloodiest
and most fatal that occurred during the siege.

The Russians had now been upwards of five weeks under the walls of
Kasan, during which time, although more than ten thousand Tartars had
been killed, partly by the Russian artillery, partly in the various combats
that had taken place, yet the difficulty of getting possession of the city
seemed as great as ever. Winter hkewise was drawing near; and its
approach caused more dread among the Muscovite troops than even the
dangers of the siege. Ivan, in consequence, finding that the whole army
anxiously desired the termination of the enterprise, began to take
measures for a general assault. In order to diminish the dangers of this
project, as well as to strike a severe blow at the besieged, the tzar
ordered a mine to be dug under the gate of Arsk, near which the Tartar
barracks were situated, and where the defenders of Kazan had formed
subterranean excavations to hide themselves from the fire of the Russian

422 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

cannoneers. This mine finished, Ivan ordered the match to be applied.
Nothing could surpass the horror and consternation of the inhabitants
of Kazan when the unexpected explosion, like the shock of an earth-
quake, took place ; and for a few minutes the silence of the grave reigned
throughout the town. The Russians took advantage of that moment of
general panic to penetrate into the city. Their approach restored to the
Tartars their presence of mind ; they rushed to encounter the assailants,
and after a warm struggle, succeeded in driving them from the ramparts,
all of which were cleared, with the exception of one tower, called the
Arsk turret, which Prince Vorotinsky took possession of, and from which
the Tartars strove in vain to drive him. This gallant prince, when his
companions in arms retired from the fortress, is said to have exclaimed
to the voivodes, "Return soon, we will await your arrival here;" and he
kept his word.

On the following day the tzar announced to his soldiers his intention
to execute the general assault, which the Russian annalists have [called
" the grand exploit." Having arranged his troops in ' the most advan-
tageous manner, and established several mines under the walls and
principal turrets of the fortress, he ordered that every soldier, " previous
to drinking the general cup of blood,* should purify his soul by prayer,
and receive the holy communion." This accomplished, Ivan resolved to
try for the third time, whether the voice of persuasion might not influence
the Tartars at that hour of danger; accordingly he sent several venerable
old men, whom he had taken prisoners, to Kazan, with offers to forgive
the inhabitants their resistance, if they would yield up the town without
bloodshed. But the answer of the latter proved how useless was all
attempt at persuasion or remonstrance with men to whom death was as
nothing. " We seek no pardon," said these gallant warriors ; " let the
Russians occupy our towers and level our walls, we fear them not — we
will construct new towers and raise new walls ; and once more we repeat
that either our bodies shall be buried lifeless under the ruins of Kazan, or
we will force our enemies to raise the siege." Having received this
answer, Ivan fixed the morrow for the assault. -^

The night which preceded the execution of this perilous undertaking
was spent, by both the besiegers and besieged, in active preparations for
attack and defence : none thought that night of rest.

On the 2nd of October, 1552, a date so memorable in the Russian
annals, the assault was accompUshed. The events of that celebrated day
have been so admirably described by the Russian historian Karamzin,
says Tornirelli, that I do not remember ever having read a page of the
history of any country more eloquent or more interesting. I give the
details as he relates them.

" Day," says the historian, " dawned upon a pure and unclouded sky.

* Such is the expreision in the Russian annals.

YADIGAR KHAN. 423

The inhabitants of Kazan were stationed upon the ramparts of the
fortress, while the Russians stood at the foot of the walls ; the Muscovite
banners floated in the wind, and the profound silence of the army, which
had not yet received the order to commence the assault, was interrupted
only by the shrill sound of our martial instruments jarring discordantly
with those of the enemy. The Tartars gazed fiercely at our troops, while
our archers, bow in hand, and the cannoneers with lighted matches, stood
awaiting the signal for slaughter. The Russian camp was almost entirely
deserted : scarce a sound was heard there save the solemn chant of the
priests, who were celebrating the holy mass in the presence of the tzar
and some of his most illustrious boyards. At length the sun appeared
on the horizon ; at that very moment, and when the deacon engaged in
reading the gospel was pronouncing the words ' There shall exist but one
flock and but one shepherd,' a frightful explosion, which made the earth
tremble and shook the church to its very foundations, was suddenly
heard. The tzar having advanced to the threshold perceived the terrible
effect of the mines. The town was completely enveloped in darkness ; a
horrible medley of mutilated corpses and ruins, cast into the air in the
midst of volumes of dense smoke, fell back upon the fortress. Divine
service was for a moment interrupted; but the tzar, concealing his
emotion, re-entered the church and caused the Liturgy to be continued.
While the deacon, praying with a loud voice, was addressing pious
invocations to Heaven, that it should deign to strengthen the power of
the tzar, and place at his feet the enemies of Russia, a second explosion,
more terrible than the former, was heard, followed by the cry of the
whole army, ' Bokh snami !^^ (God is with us.) At the same moment the
Russian battalions precipitated themselves on the fortress, where the
Tartars, displaying a wonderful intrepidity, and invoking Allah and
Mahomet, awaited them with a firm step. They allowed the assailants
to approach within a certain distance without bending a bow or dis-
charging a single musket, but on a given signal they suddenly let fly such
a volley of bullets, stones, and arrows, that the very air was darkened.
In the meantime the Russians, encouraged by the example of their chiefs,
reached the foot of the ramparts. The Tartars rolled upon them from
the su'mmit of the walls enormous wooden beams, which crushed
numbers as they advanced ; they poured boiling water on the heads of
the assailants, and, recklessly braving danger and death, they exposed
themselves openly to the fire of the batteries and musketry. In that
critical moment, the least delay would have been attended with results
fatal to the invaders. Their number diminished every minute; many fell
dead or mortally wounded ; others, struck with terror, abandoned their
arms, but the more intrepid reanimated by their heroism their intimidated
comrades. These might be seen precipitating themselves in the breaches
made by the cannon, scaling the walls with ladders, clinging to the

424 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

parapets, climbing on the heads and shoulders of their companions, and
fighting hand to hand with the besieged in every direction.

" At length, when divine service was completed, the tzar mounted his
war-horse, and advanced towards the scene of the conflict : ere he
arrived at the spot, the banner of the Christians was seen floating above
the walls of the fortress, while the army of reserve welcomed with a
thousand acclamations both the approach of their monarch and victory.

" But the victory was not yet entirely decisive. The Tartars, broken
through on every side, hurled from the ramparts and turrets, with the
madness of despair, formed themselves into columns in the streets and
alleys of the town, where they still struggled, scimitar and poniard in
hand, with the Russians. Never was a ineUe more bloody : the walls of
the houses, the very roofs were disputed by both parties ; the earth was
covered with severed limbs and mutilated bodies. Prince Vorotinsky
was the first who brought the news to the tzar that the Russians were in
the town, but he added that the combat continued to rage with unabated
fury, and that it was urgently necessary to succour the troops. Ivan
immediately sent forward a division of his own guards, with several
voivodes. Having received this assistance, the Russians soon became
victorious in every direction, and succeeded in repulsing the Tartars
even into the very palace of the Khan, which was surrounded with"
fortifications. Yadigar himself, after defending for some time the
entrance to his palace, and vainly endeavouring to repulse the assailants,
accompanied by the most illustrious of his warriors, slowly retired from
the castle towards that part of the town called the ' Teretzsky Ravine ;'
here he suddenly halted, and then made a new and desperate attack upon
the Russian troops. That attack for a time turned the balance of victory
on the side of the Tartars.

"The Russians, masters of a town celebrated for its wealth and
magnificence, unable to resist the temptation which its treasures excited,
abandoned their posts, and rushed to pillage the shops and houses ; even
the officers, whom the tzar had sent forward for the express purpose of
repressing this disorder, allowed themselves to be equally influenced fey
this thirst for riches, and forgot their orders in the midst of the seducing
occasion. The cowards also, who in the heat of the combat had flung
themselves on the earth, feigning to be dead or wounded, now arose, full
of life and vigour, and rushed to participate in the general pillage.
Even that portion of the Russian troops charged with the care of the
ammunition waggons, together with a great crowd, consisting of
victuallers, vendors, and labourers, hurried hkewise into the town,
loading themselves with objects of gold and silver, furs, stuffs, and
numerous other articles of value, which they brought back to the camp,
where there existed a scene of inexpressible confusion.

" It was in the midst of this disorder that Yadigar, with a small but

YADIGAR KHAN. 425

chosen band of Tartars, charged vigorously that portion of the Russian
soldiery which had remained faithful to its duty : the attack was so
impetuous that the latter was forced to give way ; its retreat at the
same time spread consternation among the pillagers, who took to flight,
and flung themselves from the summit of the walls and ramparts,
exclaiming, ' All is lost ! sauve qui pent !'

" The tzar, in the midst of the panic and disorder of his troops, which
induced him to suppose that the Tartars had repulsed the whole of his
army from the town, showed nevertheless, on this occasion, uncommon
presence of mind and courage. 'He was surrounded,' writes Prince
Kurbsky, ' by the venerable counsellors of his empire, grown grey in
arms and the practice of virtue.' Obedient to their advice, the tzar had
the magnanimity to place himself, with the Christian banner in his
hands, at the entrance called the Royal Gate, in order to stop the
fugitives. Half of his select cavalry, consisting of twenty thousand men,
alighted from their horses, and penetrated on foot into the town, followed
by the aged nobles, placed thus in the same ranks with their children.
This troop, fresh and valiant, clad in glittering armour, precipitated itself
like a thunderbolt on the Tartars. The latter resisted long and bravely;
at last, having formed themselves into close battalions, they retreated in
good order towards a high stone mosque, where the Imams, Mollahs,
and other ministers of the Prophet were assembled. It was not with
presents, humble solicitations, or prayers for mercy, that the latter came
to the rencontre of the Russians; but sword in hand, and urged by the
most ferocious despair, they rushed upon their ranks, where they were
all sacrificed.

"Yadigar, with the small remnant of his gallant troops, retreated
once more to the palace of the Khans, where he defended himself for
upwards of an hour ; the Russians, however, succeeded in breaking down
the gates and forcing an entrance. What an astonishing spectacle struck
their notice ! — the wives and daughters of the Tartars, dressed in their
richest costumes, were there to intercept the advance of the invaders ;
the^e they had assembled, with no other defence save their youth and
charms! while their fathers, husbands, and brothers, surrounding the
person of the king, continued to fight with the ardour of desperation. At
last the Tartars, in number about ten thousand, retired through a gate at
the back of the palace, which led to the lower portion of the town.
Prince Kurbsky, at the head of two hundred warriors, endeavoured to
intercept their passage : he barred up the narrow streets and lanes, and
opposed fresh obstacles to their retreat at every moment; the prince
remained courageously at his post until he was joined by a portion of the
Russian troops, who fell upon the rear of the Tartars. The latter,
surrounded on every side by their enemies, without a hope of safety, and
forced as they advanced to trample at every step upon the dead bodies

2F

426 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of their comrades, worked nevertheless their way to the outer wall of the
town ; arrived here, they placed Yadigar in safety in a strong tower, and
expressed a desire to parley with the besiegers. The voivode Dmitry
Paletsky immediately upon this ordered his troops to cease the combat,
and marched towards the Tartars. ' Listen ! ' exclaimed the latter ; ' as
long as our Government existed we were ready to die in defence of our
prince and country. Kazan is now in your power ; we yield up to you
our sovereign, alive and unvvounded, for we are no longer able to defend
him from injury ; lead him to your tzar ; for our part, we will descend
into the plain, resolved to drain with you in battle the last drop of the
cup of life.' They then delivered their Khan Yadigar to the care of
Paletsky, together with an aged noble, one of the principal dignitaries of
the State, and two Mamichis, or companions of the fallen monarch. A
few minutes after, the battle recommenced with renewed fury. The
Tartars at first directed their retreat towards the right of the Russian
camp, but, encountered by the artillery in that direction, they turned to
the left, and casting aside their cumbrous armour, they forded across the
Kazanka. Their number had now diminished to five thousand. This
remnant, met by a division of Russian cavalry under the command of
Prince Kurbsky and his brother Roman, still continued to fight with the
intrepidity of men who feared not death ; the Russians, after undergoing
a terrible loss, were forced to give way, while the Tartars, continuing
their retreat, advanced towards a thick forest, in which they sought a
shelter. Feeble as they were now and few in numbers, their astonishing
valour and heroism still rendered them objects of terror to the invaders ;
the tzar, therefore, despatched a division of light cavalry to cut off their
retreat from the forest. Encountered by this fresh troop, the Tartars still
continued the fatal and useless struggle : ' Not one of them,' say the
Russian annalists, ' yielded himself a prisoner,' and the few that were
taken were covered with wounds, which had rendered them incapable of
defence.

" The town, now completely in the hands of the besiegers, was on fire
in several directions: the battle had ceased, but not the effusion of htood,
for the conquerors, irritated by the vigorous and obstinate defence of
their enemies, massacred all whom they met with, in the mosques,
houses, and cellars. The court of the palace, the streets, ramparts, and
ravines, were encumbered with thousands of dead bodies; the plain
between the town and the Kazanka presented the same scene. The
discharge of the artillery and musketry was no longer heard, but the
clang of the sword, the shrieks of the dying, and the cries of the victors,
succeeded these frightful explosions. It was then that Prince Vorotinsky,
commander-in-chief of the army, sent off a message to the tzar, which
ran as follows: — 'Rejoice, Prince ! your valour and good fortune have
insured you the victory; Kazan is in our power, its Khan at your mercy;

YADIGAR KHAN. 427

the Tartars are all destroyed or taken prisoners ; incalculable riches have
fallen into our hands. We await your orders.'

" ' Glory be to the Most High ! ' exclaimed the tzar, raising his hands
to heaven. Immediately after, he ordered a Te Deum to be sung near
the sacred banner, and having, with his own hands, planted the holy
cross on the principal gate of the fortress, he marked out a spot for the
erection of the first Christian temple in this Mussulman land.

" On the 3rd of October the dead were buried, and the whole town
entirely cleaned. The following day the tzar, accompanied by his clergy,
members of the council, and the generals and chiefs of his army, made a
solemn entry into Kazan, and laid the first stone, in the spot he had
previously chosen, of the ' Cathedral of the Visitation ;' he then accom-
panied a procession round the town, and consecrated Kazan to the true
God. The clergy sprinkled the streets, walls, and houses with holy
water. Invoking the benediction of the Almighty on this new rampart
of the Christian faith, they supplicated Him to preserve its inhabitants
from all diseases, to sustain their courage, and to render this conquest
henceforth the glorious inheritance of Russia. The tzar then gave orders
to repair as quickly as possible the fortifications, and, accompanied by
his voivodes and dignitaries, he betook himself to the palace of the
Khans, on which the Christian banner was now floating."

Prince Alexander Shuiski was nominated governor of Kazan, and
fifteen thousand boyard-foUowers, three thousand streUtzes, and a
number of Cossacks were left behind as a garrison. Ivan's grandees
advised him to stay till the spring and to detain his army, so that he
might thoroughly subdue the five tribes of the Mordvins, Chuvashes,
Votiaks (of Arsk), the Cheremisses, and the Bashkirs of the Upper
Kama, many of whose hordes had not acknowledged the Russians, while
they had been joined by the fugitive Tartars from Kazan ; but the tzar
was eager for a triumphant entry into his capital, and was encouraged by
a number of his officers, who also longed for repose. Having heard
mass in the new church of the Visitation, he embarked on the Volga, and
weitt by way of Nijni Novgorod, where he received the congratulations of
his wife, and then went on by land towards Moscow, and heard en route
of the birth of his son Dimitri. He alighted to return thanks at the
churches of Vladimir and Suzdal, and the famous monastery of Troitzki.
A vast crowd came out from the capital and lined the way along which
he passed. He dismounted and publicly thanked the clergy, in feeling
and dignified terms, for the way in which they had supported his troops
and his own efforts in the campaign, and received a suitable reply ; after
which the crowd, clerical and lay, prostrated themselves before him and
loudly blessed him.*

Fetes and rejoicings followed each other quickly at the palace, rich

* Karamzin, viii. 198, 207.

428 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

furs, precious cups, horses, weapons, &c., to the value of forty-eight
thousand roubles, equivalent probably to a million of the present roubles,
were distributed as largess, without counting the domains and estates
with which the officers were rewarded. In memory of his great victory,
Ivan founded the church of our Lady of Good Succour, which is situated
near the gate Nikolski, is surmounted by nine cupolas, and is one of the
most famous monuments of Moscow.*

Meanwhile matters did not go on very well at Kazan, the tribes of the
mountain and the plain rebelled, and slaughtered several Russian mer-
chants, for which seventy-four of them were put to death ; the Votiaks and
Cheremisses refused to pay tribute, rose against the Russian functionaries,
and defeated the strelitzes and Cossacks sent against them, kilUng eight
hundred of them. They built a fortress on the river Mecha, seventy
versts from Kazan, and the voivode Boris Soltikof having marched
against them in the winter, his men were buried deep in snow, while the
enemy on snow shoes surrounded him on all sides, killed five hundred of
his people, and captured and put him to death. Meanwhile Ivan himself
was laid prostrate by a fever, the first symptom of that terrible malady
which afterwards made him such a savage.t On his recovery he sent a
large force against the rebels, which destroyed their fortress on the
Mecha, and advanced as far as Viatka and the country of the Bashkirs.
There were daily combats in the forests and amidst the snow, in which
the enemy had ten thousand men killed, while six thousand were
captured, as well as fifteen thousand women and children. Among the
dead were two inveterate enemies of Russia, Prince Yapancha and
Aleka, a chief of the Cheremisses. They also ravaged the plains of
Kazan, and captured one thousand six hundred distinguished Tartars,
who were put to death. The fugitives driven to bay sought shelter in
various secluded localities, where they erected fortresses, and continued
to harass the Russian merchants and fishermen on the Volga. Mamich
Berdei, one of the chiefs of the flat country, having carried off a Nogai
prince with him, gave him the title of tzar, but seeing he was incom-
petent, he cut off his head, put it on a pole, and thus addressed it : " We
made you a tzar to lead us in war and to gain victories, but you and your
cavalry have done nothing but plunder us. Meanwhile your head may
reign on this high throne." This turbulent person, who was constantly
inciting the mountaineers to rebel, was at length captured by them by a
ruse ; being invited to a banquet, he was made prisoner and sent off to
Moscow. In reward for which the tzar remitted some of their burdens.
For five years the terrible struggle went on, the land being wasted with
fire and sword. Many of the Kazan people became Christians, while
others who remained Muhammedans sided openly with Russia. They
were given grants of land, &c. The rebels were at length worn out and

♦ Id., 209. t Id., 216.

KASIM KHAN. 429

their chiefs exterminated ; the more distant Bashkirs offered to pay
tribute, and in 1557 Ivan sent Simon Yartzof to restore prosperity to the
land, which was strewn with ruins and tombs. Thenceforward Russia
remained in peaceable possession of Kazan. In 1555 it was created a
bishopric. The first bishop was called Gury; his tomb still remains in
the cathedral of Kazan. The ancient annals of Kazan offer no further
events which are capable of interesting the general reader. Peace and
tranquillity succeeded the storms and struggles, rife with ruin and
slaughter, which had so long disturbed and devastated this country.
The Tartars who had escaped from the sword were forced to build for
themselves a new town or suburb in the plains, which lay outside the
walls of the city on the lake called Kaban, which they still inhabit at the
present day. The old town was rebuilt by order of Ivan. Its commerce
soon began to flourish anew, the traces of desolation and ravage
gradually disappeared, and in a few years Kazan, so lately the scene of
war and bloodshed, presented the appearance of a rich and flourishing
city. In this state it remained, gradually increasing in size and
importance, till a fresh enemy — fire — in a series of most terrible con-
flagrations, reduced it on several occasions to ruins. Like a phoenix,
however, Kazan each time seems to have arisen from its ashes more
beautiful and imposing than before, on each occasion it was quickly
rebuilt on a new and improved plan. The number of public buildings
were augmented, and continued yearly to augment, so that at the present
moment Kazan, as we have before said, is certainly one of the finest
towns in the empire. As regards the number of its inhabitants, its
riches, and splendour, it only yields the palm to the two Russian capitals,
St. Petersburg and Moscow.

K A S I M O F.
KASIM KHAN.

When Ulugh Muhammed was killed by his son Mahmudek, two of his
other sons, named Kasim and Yakub, fled to Cherkask, and thence to
the Grand Prince at Moscow. This was in the spring of 1446. They
became his faithful alHes and assisted him in the struggle in which he
was engaged with Shemiaka.* In 1449 we find them again marching
with the Grand Prince against Shemiaka, but no fight took place, as peace
was brought about between the rivals at the instance of the metropolitan
and clergy.t The same year Seyid Ahmed, of the Great Horde, made a
raid as far as Pokhra, and carried off Maria, the wife of Prince Vasili
Obolenski. Kasim having heard of this, marched with his Tartars, overtook

+ Vd. Zern., i. 2. Karamzin, v. 394. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 9.

430 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the plunderers, and recovered the prisoners and booty they had captured.*
In the spring of 1450 the two brothers took part in the bloody fight at
Galitch against Shemiaka. In the autumn of the same year the Grand
Prince being at Kolomna, heard that Malim Birdei Oghlan, with some
other princes and a body of Tartars from the steppe, was invading his
borders. He accordingly sent Kasim against them, together with some
troops from Kolomna, commanded by the voivode Constantine Alexan-
drovitch Bessutzof. They defeated the invaders and drove them back
to the river Betius.t In 1452 the Grand Prince sent his son, together
with the tzarevitch, Yakub, and a considerable army, against Shemiaka.
They made a raid as far as Koksheng, wasted the land, and made
many prisoners, and having marched as far as the mouth of the Waga
returned home again.J

During the six years from 1446 to 1452 we therefore find the two
brothers constantly in the Russian service. We do not again read of
Yakub, and he either died or left the country. Kasim was rewarded for
his services by the grant of Gorodetz on the Oka, in the government of
Riazan, with a small district. From him this town took the name of
Kasimof, and thus was founded within the Russian borders a small semi-
independent Khanate, which lived for many years.

The foundation of this petty Khanate was no doubt a piece of wise
policy on the part of the Grand Prince. He could thus play off his
protege against the Khans of Kazan, whose rising power was becoming
a menace to Russia.

We now read that Abd ul Mumin and other grandees of Kazan sent
to invite Kasim to go there and displace his nephew and stepson
Ibrahim. He, as I have mentioned, easily persuaded the Grand Prince
to assist in the enterprise, and marched with his contingent in the
autumn of 1467 towards Kazan. This expedition, as I have mentioned,
was unfortunate, and the allied armies suffered a good deal on their
retreat. Soon after this he died. M. Vel. Zernof dates his death
probably in 1469, as in that year his widow was sent to Kazan by the
Grand Prince on a mission to her son Ibrahim.§ Kasim is tradition-ally
supposed to have built the first mosque and the palace at Gorodetz, but
if he did so it is probable that all remains of his structure have long
ago disappeared and been displaced by later buildings. ||

DANIYAR KHAN.

Kasim was succeeded by his son Daniyar (a Tartar corruption of the
name Daniel), who with Murtaza, the son of Mustapha, took part in

♦ Id. Note, 10. 1 Id. Note, 12. 1 Id. Note, 13. § Op. cit., i. 10.

I) Vel. Zern., op. cit., 10-15. Notes, 24-32.

NURDAtfLAT KHAN. 431

Ivan's campaign against Novgorod in 1471, with all his tzarevitches,
princes, and Kasaks (?>., common Tartars).* In this campaign he lost
forty of his men, and was thanked for his services by the Grand Prince.t
We are told he was not allowed to make any prisoners however. It
would hardly have been seemly for a Christian champion like Ivan to
allow a Mussulman to do so.+

In 1472 we find Danai or Daniyar in alliance with the Russians in
their war with Seyid Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden Horde. Murtaza
also took part in this war.§ In 1475 Mengli Ghirai, the Khan of
Krim, urged the Grand Prince that he should send the tzarevitches
Daniyar and Murtaza against Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden Horde. |(
In 1477 the former again took part in the campaign against Novgorod.^

In 1 48 1 we find him mentioned in the will of Andrew, the Grand
Prince's brother, who in it repays the latter a sum of thirty thousand
roubles, which he had paid on his behalf to the Tartars of Kazan and
the tzarevitch Daniyar.** In 1483 we read how a German physician
who had gone to Muscovy was well treated by the Grand Prince, but
having been called in to treat the tzarevitch Daniyar, his patient died on
his hands, whereupon he was handed over to his son Kara Khoja, who
had him put to the torture, but afterwards allowed him to be ransomed.tt
The exact year of his death is not known, we only know that in i486
Nurdaulat is mentioned as Khan of Kasimof.

NURDAULAT KHAN.

Nurdaulat was the son of Haji Ghirai of Krim. I shall describe in the
next chapter his reign in the Crimea, and how he was driven out thence
together with his brother Haidar in 1478, and forced to take shelter in
Lithuania, and thence in Russia. This took place in 1480.lt The
same year Berdaulat, the son of Nurdaulat, having been killed by a
Tartar, we are told his father killed the murderer with his own hand.§§
Later in the same year Haidar was banished by the Grand Prince to
Vologda. 11 II We now find Nurdaulat taking part in the famous struggle
with the Golden Horde, in which, while the Grand Prince encountered
the Tartars in the field, Nurdaulat made a diversion and captured
their capital.lFlf It was probably as a reward for his services on this
occasion that Nurdaulat was made tzar of Gorodetz by the Grand
Prince. We now find Murtaza, the Khan of the Golden Horde, and the
mortal enemy of MengU Ghirai, writing to Nurdaulat and his patron the
Grand Prince, intending apparently to set up the former against Mengli

• Vide Vel. Zern., i. Note, 34. t Id., 16. t Op. cit., 16. Note, 35.

§ Id., i. 17. Note, 38. i Id.. 17. H Id. Note, 40.

** Kararazin, vi. 201. Vel. Zern., i. 17, 18. tt Vel. Zern., i. 18. Note, 41.

II Vel. Zern., i. 22. ^Id.,23. Note, 53. ||||/<*.,23. Note, 54. ^^ Ante, 322.

432 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Ghirai.* This intrigue was fruitless, as we shall see. Nurdaulat

probably died shortly after this, and he is not named after the year
1487.

SATILGAN KHAN.

Nurdaulat was succeeded by his son Satilgan,t who is first named in
1496, when we read of the yassak or tax which he drew from Riazan.J He
is not again named until 1 504, when he is mentioned in general terms in
a treaty or compact made between Vasili and Yuri, the sons of the Grand
Prince, in regard to the dues to be paid to the Tartars. § The mention
of this tax introduces a curious question. It would seem that so long
as the Russians paid dues to the Tartars these were apportioned out
among the various towns, and thus became charges on the appanaged
princes, and we consequently find in the will of Ivan III. a provision
specifying the contributions which these appanages were to pay. Thus
we are told that towards every thousand roubles so owing to the Tartars
of the Great Horde, Krim, Astrakhan, Kazan, and the towns of the
tzarcvitches {i.e., Kasimof, &c.), the Grand Prince was to pay on behalf
of Muscovy, Tuer, Old Riazan, and Perewitsk, 716^ roubles and 2^
dengas ; Yuri, for Kashin, was to pay 82 roubles 10 copecks ; Dimitri,
for his appanage, including Supzof and Opok, 58 roubles, 50 copecks,
and 7 dengas ; Simeon, for his appanage, 65 roubles 10 dengas ; and
Andrew, for his land as well as for Staritza, Kholm, &c., 40 roubles, 50
copecks, li dengas; while his nephew, for his domain, as well as for Kolpi
and Buyagorod, 37J roubles. || In 1 505 Satilgan and his brother Janai, with
their oghlans and Kazaks, marched under the banners of the Russian
Grand Prince in his attack upon the Khanate of Kazan. IT Satilgan is
mentioned for the last time in 1506, when he took part in the
unfortunate campaign of that year against Kazan.**

JANAI KHAN.

It is clear that Satilgan was no longer Khan of Kasimof in 1508, and
was probably then dead, for we then find his brother Janai ruling there.
In the war between the Grand Prince Vasili and Sigismund of Poland
in 1508, a contingent of Tartars from Gorodetz, under the orders of
Muhammed Amin, the son of Karachuk Mirgen, took part. ft At the
same time another contingent, under the orders of Janai, was ordered to
march against the Lithuanians.!! We do not again hear of Janai.

* See next chapter. t Vel. Zern., i. Note, 59. J Id., 26. § Id., 28. i Id,, 28.

i;/</.,33. Note, 66. **/<<., 34- tt /d., 37- Note, 73. II /</., 37-

SHAH ALI KHAN.

SHEIKH AVLIYAR KHAN.

433

On the death of Janai the small Khanate of Kasimof passed out of the
hands of the family of Kazan into that of Astrakhan, and in 1512 we
find its Tartars, under the command of Sheikh Avliyar, marching to the
assistance of the Grand Prince in his attack on Smolensk.* Sheikh
Avliyar was the son of Bakhtiar Saltan, brother of Ahmed Khan, of the
Golden Horde.t He had sought refuge in Russia in 1502. J In 1508
he ruled at Suroshik, and took part in the Lithuanian war, and four
years later, at I have mentioned, he is spoken of as Khan of Kasimof.
He married Shah Sultana, daughter of the Nogai Prince Ibrahim. § We
know nothing more of him.

SHAH ALI KHAN.

Sheikh Avliyar was succeeded by his son Shah Ali, who was Khan of
Kasimof in 15 16, when he is so mentioned in a letter of the Krim Khan
to the Grand Prince, li who complained that a prince of Astrakhan should
thus be z. protege of Russia. In 1518, on the death of Muhammed Amin,
the Khan of Kazan, Shah Ali was nominated in his place, as I have
mentioned. IT and he mounted the throne there in the spring of 15 19.

JAN ALI KHAN.

He was succeeded as Khan of Kasimof by his brother Jan Ali, who
is mentioned as a tzarevitch at Meshchersk {i.e., Kasimof) in 152 1. He
took part in the war against Lithuania in 1528, and in 1531 he was
also summoned to occupy the throne of Kazan, from which Safa Girai
hadbeefi deposed by the Russians.**

SHAH ALI KHAN (Restored).

During Jan All's reign at Kasimof Shah Ali, his brother, seems to
have lived at Moscow in honourable exile, sharing in the various
expeditions of the Grand Prince. This was from 1521 to I532.tt On
Jan All's elevation in the latter year to Kazan, Shah Ali was granted the
towns of Koshira and Serpukhof, but having intrigued in the affairs of
Kazan, he was deposed and sent with his wife to exile at Bielozersk ; his

* Vel. Zern., 5. 37- + Id., 38-45. I Id., 38. S Id., 47. 1 Id

n[^ff/f,3S5. ♦*YeI,Zcrn.,i. 49-56. ttM.,56.

20

434 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

ughlans, princes, muizas, and people were scattered among the Russian
towns of Tuer, Novgorod, Pskof, &c,, and suffered great distress, and
many of their women Avere baptised.* In the latter part of 1535 Shah
All regained his liberty.t His brother Jan Ali had been murdered at
Kazan in the spring of this year,+ and a party of the Kazan Tartars
wished to put Shah Ali on the throne. I have described his gratitude,
and the efforts made by the Russians to displace Safa Girai and to seat
him on the throne.§ Meanwhile he had been again^ invested with the
Khanate of Kasimof, and is found in command of its Tartars in 1540.II
In the summer of 1543 he granted the monastery of Troitski liberty to
freely navigate the Oka, to fell timber in the woods of Kashirsk, and
also to cut down trees in which bees had deposited honey.^ In 1546,
Safa Girai having been driven away from Kazan, Shah Ali was once
more seated on the throne there, but occupied it only a short time.**
We find him taking part in the attacks on Kazan from 1547 to 155 1. In
this last year he again occupied the throne there, but found it untenable,
and abandoned it the following year, and again returned to Kasimof. tt
He took part in Ivan's final campaign against Kazan, on whose capture
he congratulated him and rode beside him when he entered the city in
triumph.tt From the spring of 1553 to the end of 1557 Shah AU con-
tinued to reign quietly at Kasimof, while his Tartars were largely
employed in the Russian service.§§ In the end of 1557 he took part in
the war against Livonia. He is mentioned by Solomon Henning and
other chroniclers of that campaign, and by Hiarn and Kelch, the
historians of Livonia, who describe the doings of his people in much the
same terms that his contemporaries did those of Batu Khan ; women
were ravished, children were torn from their mothers wombs, while
many were strewn over with gunpowder or fat and then set on fire.||||
But these cruelties, as M. Vel. Zernof says, were not confined to the
Tartars. They were practised no less by Christians, and notably by the
Russians in their terrible campaigns in Livonia and Lithuania.

In 1558 the English traveller Jenkinson passed through Kasimof on
his way from Moscow to Bokhara. He calls the town Cassim, and its
ruler the tzar Zegoline.^^ After his Livonian campaign Shah All
returned again to his capital, where he Hved peaceably till 1562 while a
contingent of his Tartars shared in the Livonian campaigns which were
fought during the interval.*** In 1562 Shah Ali took part in person in
the war against Sigismund of Poland, In 1564-5 he was at the head of
an army on the borders of Lithuania.

Shah AU died on the 20th of April, 1567, and was buried at Kasimof,
where his gravestone still remains.ttt His mausoleum, called Tekie by

/rf., 57. t /d., 60. I Ante, ^00. i Ante, 400,401. (I Vel. 2rern/, f. 65' li/i.,65.

** Ante, 403, tt Vel. Zern.,i. 70-72. Hid., 75,76. §$W., 76-81.

1111 Op. cit., 8;?. Note, 157. •!•[ /rf., 8S. *♦♦/</., 89. 1tt/<f.,94.

MUSTAPHA ALI KHAN,

435

the Tartars, still remains at Kasimof, a beautiful specimen of Mussulman
architecture, which we shall describe in a note further on.

SAIN BULAT KHAN.

Shah Ali died without issue, and his heritage at Kasimof passed to
another branch of his family. In 1570 we find it ruled by a prince
named Sain Bulat. This we learn from the reported address of the
Russian envoy Novossilzof to Selim, the Sultan of Turkey. " My master,"
he said, " is not an enemy of the religion of Mahomet, many of his
vassals are followers of the prophet, and adore him in their mosques.
Such are the tzar Sain Bulat at Kasimof, the tzarevitch Kaibula at
Yurief, Ibak at Surojek, and the Nogai princes at Romanof, for in Russia
every one may freely follow his religion. At Kadom, in the province of
Mechera, several of the tzar's functionaries are Mussulmans. It is true
the late tzar of Kazan (Simeon) and the tzarevitch Murtaza have become
Christians, but this was at their own request."* Sain Bulat is called the
son of Bekbulat, who had been living in Russia since 1 562. M.Vel. Zernof
has shown that the latter was the son of Boghatyr or Behadur Suhan,
one of the many sons of Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden Horde,t so
that the fathers of Shah Ali and Bekbulat were first cousins. Sain
Bulat took part in Ivan's campaign against Novgorod in 157 1-2, and in
that of the next year against Sweden, In the end of 1573 he became a
Christian, taking the name of Simeon.:]: This necessitated his resignation
of the throne at Kasimof He had some strange adventures afterwards.
Ivan in his curious phrenzy had him crowned as tzar, and reserved to
himself merely the title of Grand Duke. He apparently took the title of
tzar of Tuer, and married the sister of the boyard Feodor Mitislavitch.
On the accession of Feodor Ivanovitch to the throne he was obliged to
quit T>ier, where he had held a gorgeous court, and to go into retirement
at^Kushahn. He soon after became blind, a result ascribed to poison. It
was"" apparently contemplated by some to raise him to the Russian
throne.§ He at length died in 161 6.

MUSTAPHA ALI KHAN.

It is not known whether there was an interregnum after the resignation
by Sain Ali of the throne of Kasimof, but in 1577 we find it occupied by
Mustapha Ali, the son of Abdulla Akkubekof. Akkubek was Khan of
Astrakhan,!! and was the first cousin of Bekbulat, the. father of Sain

* Karamzin, ix. 322-231. t Op. cit., ii. g-"- i. Note, 82. I Vel. Zcrn., ii. 24.

J Karamzin, x. 288, 289. |j Vide ante, 352.

436 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Bulat. His son Abdulla, also called Kaibula,* first settled in Russia in
1552. He married the daughter of Jan Ali and niece of Shah AH, and
was given the town of Yurief as an appanage. t It was his son Mustapha
who was now made Khan of Kasimof He took part in Ivan's campaign
in Livonia in 1577,+ and again in 1578, when he joined the Russian forces
with a contingent and with his two brothers Budali and Arslan Ali.§ In
1584 Ivan announced to the Turkish Sultan that Mustapha had been
made Khan of Kasimof in the place of Simeon. || He was at Moscow in
1586 at the presentation of the Polish ambassador. We don't hear of
him again, but he apparently did not die till 1590, as on a tombstone at
Kasimof his daughter Takbilde is said to have died in 1608, aged
seventeen years.

URAZ MAKHMET KHAN.

About 1588 we find a certain Uraz Makhmet, who is called a
tzarevitch of the Kazaks, settling in Russia, apparently involuntarily.
He is also called Uraz Makhmet Odanovitch.^ He took part in the
tzar Feodor's campaign against the Swedes in 1590. In 1594 we find
Tevkel, the great chief of the Kazaks, writing to ask the tzar to send him
his nephew Uraz Makhmet. The tzar replied that he would liberate
him if Tevkel would send one of his own sons in his place.** In 1597
Uraz Makhmet was present at the grand reception given to the Austrian
envoy, the burgrave Donaf.tt In the following year he joined the
Russian forces in a campaign against Krim. About the year 1600 Uraz
Makhmet was nominated Khan of Kasimof JJ The genealogy of this
chief has been preserved in a singular way. It is engraved on a silver
casket dated in 1012 of the hej. {i.e., a.d. 1603-1604), and preserved in
the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg.§§ From this it
appears he was the son of Odan Sultan, the son of Shigai Khan, the
son of Yadik Khan, the son of Janibeg Khan, the son of Borrak Khan,
the chief of the White Horde ;|||| and this is confirmed by a Tui^icish
chronicle pubhshed in 1854 by Berezine.^«[ In 1601 Uraz Makhmet
visited Moscow, and is afterwards found stationed on the frontiers of
Krim to guard them.*** In 1502 he was again in Moscow, probably to
be present at the reception of the Danish prince John.

We now reach the period of disorder in Russia marked by the
appearance of the False Dimitris. The second of these pretenders was
openly supported by Uraz Makhmet and the Tartars of Kasimof, and he
is constantly mentioned during the troubled events of 1 608-1610. In the

* Vel. Zern., i. Note, 148. t Id. \ Vel. Zern., ii. 27. § Id., 80.

11 Id., 83. «[ Id., 97-102. •* Id., 104. tt Id., 105. II Id., 1 10.

§§/</., Ill, [ijl See i»M Chapter on the Kazaks. ■"•[/(/., 121. *''*/^., 452.

SEYID BURGAN khan. 437

latter year he came to a violent end. He was living with his son at
Kaluga, where the Pretender held his court. One day his son reported
that Uraz Makhmet contemplated killing Dimitri, upon which the latter
determined to forestal him, invited him to a hunt, during which he and
some retainers fell on the Kasimof Khan and killed him, and threw his
body into the river Oka. Dimitri reported that he had himself been
attacked by Uraz, and had killed him in self-defence. In revenge, for 'the
death of the Khan, Peter Urussof, a Christian Nogai in the service of
the Pretender, fell on him in turn, beheaded him, and then sought shelter
in the Krim. Uraz Makhmet was buried at Kasimof, Avhere his grave-
stone was recently found.*

ALP ARSLAN KHAN.

In August, 1614, the tzar Michael appointed Alp Arslan Khan of
Kasimof. He was the son of Ali, the son of Kuchum, the famous
Siberian Khan, who will occupy us in a later chapter. Alp Arslan was
made prisoner when a child by the Russians in 1598, in the bloody
struggle on the banks of the Ob, where Kuchum was defeated.f In 161 2
we find him in the Russian service and taking part in the war against the
Poles and Lithuanians, on which occasion he seems to have behaved
badly, and to have shown more energy in pillaging than fighting. In
1616 he was at Moscow at the same time as John Merrick, the English
envoy, and there would seem to have been a quarrel about precedency
between them.+ He was again there in 1617, when there seems to have
been a similar question about the relative importance of the Persian
envoys. In 1623 he was again at Moscow, and full details are extant
of the elaborate feasting and ceremonial with which he was entertained,
which are given by the learned historian of the Khans of Kasimof § It
is not known exactly when he died, but it was probably in the latter
part of /1 626. II

SEYID BURGAN KHAN.

Arslan was succeeded by his son Seyid Burgan, who appears as Khan
of Kasimof for the first time in 1627. In 1630 he is mentioned in a hst
of the princes dependent on the Russians. In 1636 the famous traveller
Adam Olearius visited Kasimof, which he tells us was subject to a Tartar
prince, whom he calls Res Kitzi, who lived in a stone palace with his
mother and grandfather. He was twelve years old. The Russians had
tried to persuade him to become a Christian, the tzar having promised, if

r Id., 463-466. t Yel. Zern., iii. i. I Id., 16. § Id., 21. H Id., 14.

438 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

he did so, to give him his daughter in marriage, but he had excused
himself on account of his youth, and said he would postpone his decision
till he was older. The envoy presented him with a pound of tobacco and
a bottle of French brandy. He excused himself for not offering him
hospitality in his house on the ground that the Russians were very
jealous of his having intercourse with strangers. He sent him, however,
a present of two sheep, a measure of quas, one each of beer and brandy,
some pieces of ice, some kumis, and fresh butter, which he said his
mother had made with her own hands.* The name Res Kitzi here
given him by Olearius was probably a local nickname given him by the
Tartars. Fra^hn explains Reis Kitzi as meaning the little captain, but
Vel. Zernof disputes the explanation.t His mothei-'s name was Fatima
Sultan, and her father's Ak Muhammed Seyid Chakulof. He was pro-
bably the grandfather referred to by Olearius.]:

In the end of 1653 Seyid Burgan went to Moscow with some other
Tartar princes, and took the oath of fealty. The ceremonies gone through
on this occasion have been recorded in some detail. § On this occasion
Seyid Burgan presented the tzar with a flagon worked with gold and
inlaid with precious stones, which is still preserved in the armoury at
Moscow. About 1653 he became a Christian and took the name of Vasili,
and in December of that year we find him dining with the patriarch
Nikon and the tzar. As he retained his authority, this was an important
revolution, for hitherto all the princes of Kasimof had been Mussul-
mans. He lived at Kasimof till his death, which happened about 1679,
and spent most of his time in Moscow. He is frequently mentioned in
contemporary documents as attending the court with his wife Maria and
his sons Michael and Vasili. He took part in the Swedish campaign of
1656, and in that in Little Russia in 1678.

FATIMA SULTAN.

Seyid Burgan was the last Khan of Kasimof. His descendants now
virtually lost their independence, and were classed among other subject
princes ; but his stock still remains, and I believe M. Vehaminof Zernof,
the learned historian of his house, is one of his descendants. For a
short time after his death Seyid Burgan's mother, Fatima, was acknow-
ledged as tzaritza, and was granted the rights possessed by her son. She
probably died in 1681, and with this shadow passed away another
independent Tartar house.

Vcl. Zcrn., iii. 186, 187. t Id., 190. J U., 19a. i Id., aoa.

NOTES. 439

Kotc I. — Bolgharl was the most famous city of the Golden Horde after its
capital Serai, It is situated on the left bank of the Volga, about six miles from
that river, about ninety versts south of Kazan, and eighty versts north of
Simbirsk. It is a city of great antiquity, and its history is long and famous.
It is first mentioned eo-nomine by Ibn Fozlan, who was sent there on an
embassy by the Khalif of Baghdad, and who reports that he was sent in
answer to an invitation from Almus, the then king of the Bulgarians, that the
Khalif would send him priests to convert his people to Muhammedanism and
architects to build mosques in his capital. Of the mission thus sent Sausen
el Rassy was the head and Ibn Fozlan the secretary. It arrived at Bolghari
in May, 922. The Bulgarian king with a cavalcade went out to meet the
embassy in state, and when it drew near he alighted and threw gold coins over
the party. He gave a grand feast at which other kings of the country were
present. Almus himself was dressed in black and wore a black turban, and
his queen sat beside him. The result of the visit was the conversion of the
Bulgarians, which, according to Ibn Fozlan, took place in 942 a.d. Like other
Arab travellers, Ibn Fozlan enlarges on the severe climate of Bulgaria and the
shortness of the day in winter. He tells us, however, that it grew abundance
of corn, barley, and millet; apples of a bad quality and nuts; also fir trees,
from the sap of which the natives made an intoxicating drink. Horse flesh
and millet, fish oil and hydromel were the chief food of the people. A tax of
an ox skin for each family was paid to the sovereign. Leather was then, as it is
now, a famous product of the district, and a well known kind of it is still known
as Bolghar among the Persians, Bukharians, and Kalmuks. The town was
the resort of merchants from various quarters, and among others it was the
resort of Norsemen, and we still have extant an account of a Norse funeral
that took place there. Ibn Fozlan tells us the king had a tailor from
Baghdad who made his clothes, and that his throne was covered with gold
brocade of Greek manufacture. As early as the middle of the tenth century
even the common people of the town wore boots, at that time considered a
great luxury, for we find that the lower classes of the Russians all wore the
common laptyi, a species of sandal made of the bark of trees. Ibn Fozlan
also reports that it was the custom when anyone met the king in the streets
to remove his hat and make a profound inclination, that his queen sat beside
him aVpublic audiences, that at feasts he sat apart, and sent a piece of meat
round to ^ach of the guests, and that hydromel was drunk in profusion. Theft
and licentiousness were punished very severely, and thus men and women
bathed safely together in the public baths and rivers without being dressed or
veiled. The Bulgarians, like the modern Bashkirs, greatly reverenced
serpents, which they would not kill, and they looked upon the howling of dogs
as a good omen. A house struck by lightning was deemed accursed and
abandoned for ever. But their most singular custom was that of hanging all
men distinguished for learning. This extraordinary ostracism, which is
reported by several Arab writers, was excused on the ground that such men
were more worthy of serving God than mankind.*

"■ Tornirelli, ii. 242-247.

440 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

After the foundation of the Russian kingdom by Rurik and his followers, the
Bolghars were constantly at feud with the Russians.

Yakut, who wrote in the thirteenth century, describes the town of Bolghari
as follows :— " This city," he says, " is built of fir, its walls and fortifications
are of oak, it is surrounded on every side by the Turks," (a term used indis-
criminately by the Arabs to include Slavs, Turks, Cheremisses, Chuvashes, &c.)
" Between it and Constantinople is a two months' journey. The Bolghars are
engaged in an unceasing war with Constantinople. With them the day lasts
but four hours, the remaining twenty form the night. This country is very
cold ; during the long winter the earth is covered with deep snow.''* Bolghari
seems to have been wasted by the Mongols in i226.f When they made their
great invasion 1238, Subutai was deputed to conquer Bolghari, which was
sp^dily reduced to obedience,J and it became in effect their fixed capital. Serai
being their moveable one. Although not the residence of their Khani, it was
the principal mint of the Mongols. It possessed a coinage before their arrival,
and after their conversion to Muhammedanism the greater part of the coins of
the Golden Horde were apparently coined there. Bolghari occurs on coins with
the names of the great Khakans Mangu and Arikbugha, which I have assigned
to the reign of Bereke,§ and which begin the series of coins of the Golden
Horde, and it appears continuously down to the reign of Kuchuk Muhammed,
at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Marco Polo calls Serai and Bolghari the capitals of Bereke KhanJ It was
described by Abulfeda, who tells us it was situated about twenty days' journey
from Serai, in a rich valley, and contained considerable baths, but there
was no fruit of any description there, for trees, in consequence of the
great cold, never took root, and still less the vine. Its inhabitants were
Muhammedans of the Hanefitish sect.^ Ibn Batuta, who visited this district
in 1324-5, also names the town.*** Tornirelli, I do not know on what authority,
tells us that Uzbeg Khan built a vast number of stone edifices, mosques and
schools at Bolghari. ft In the succeeding period of turbulence, as I have
shown, Bolghari became the seat of separate lines of princes, Pulad Timur
Hassan, &c4+ It was apparently ravaged by Russian pirates from Novgorod
in 1367.§§ The historians of Timurs campaign in the Kipchak, such as
Sherifuddin, do not mention any attack made by him on Bolghari. The native
traditions, which are of weak authority, make out that he captured it aiSHhe
hour of the Friday prayer, and that it then contained 10,024 large houses. A
large number of the inhabitants and the Khan Abdulla (?) were massacied,
while his two sons escaped to the forest. The name of Bolghari occurs for the
last time on a coin dated S18 hej. (/.<?., I4i5-i6).!;lj Is seems afterwards to
have been deserted and displaced by Kazan.

Tornirelli has described its ruins in some detail. He says that at the period
of the visit of Peter the Great, in 1722, there existed on the site of this desolated
capital upwards of seventy imposing structures, all in a tolerable state of
preservation. In 1768 another Russian sovereign, the Empress Catherine II.,

• Tornirelli, ii. 200. ^ Ante, vol i. 137. I Ante, ^g. ^ Ante, 111-113.

I Yule, op. cit., 1-4. IT Tornirelli, op. cit., i. 201, 202. ♦* Ante, 165. tt Op. cit., ii,, 255*

II Vide ante, 203-207, J§ Karjimain, v. X2. il| Yule, op. cit., i. 7.

NOTES.

441

visited the same spot, accompanied by three celebrated academicians, Pallas,
Levchin, and Ozeretzkofski. The latter, in an account of his travels which
he subsequently published, states that he found on these plains but forty-four
ruins, of which he gives the names and measurement alone, without other
details. Thus in less than forty-six years twenty-six buildings had dis-
appeared. At the present day there remain but six.* The most famous of
these is a lofty turret called the " Great Column " or " Round Tower," the
;summit of which terminates in a cone surmounted by the crescent. It is built
of huge masses of grey stone, and was undoubtedly a misguir or minaret.
The ground on which it was built having partially sunk is probably the reason
why it inclines considerably on one side, like the leaning tower of Pisa. A
stone staircase inside, which is pierced with light holes, leads to the summit
of the tower. The minaret was repaired some years ago, at the expense of a
rich Tartar merchant of Kazan, who was wont with his family to perform an
annual pilgrimage to these ruins.t A figure of this minaret may be seen in
the atlas to Pallas' Travels, and in the third volume of Erdmann's Beitrage.
This tower is situated at one corner of a rude square enclosed by fragments of
troken walls, which probably once formed part of a mosque. Besides this there
is an old Russian church said to have been built out of the debris of the mosque.
Like the minaret, this church also leans. " Be it remembered, en passant, that
both the tower and church, in losing their perpendicular position, have turned
towards each other in the inclination, so that the lofty Moslem minaret seems
to be bowing to the Christian temple, which humbly returns the polite
g€Sture."J East of the tower is a tolerably perfect Tartar oratory, which was
afterwards converted into a church dedicated to St. Nicholas. Its lower story
is a square, its upper one an octagon. It is vaulted throughout. § Its walls
are embossed with a very peculiar and original species of architectural
ornament, and the mouldings that adorn the corridors and doorway are of
great beauty and taste. || Within the enclosure are remains of other walls and
foundations of houses ; outside are remains of a building called by the villagers
Gretsheskaia Palata or the Greek Palace. About three-quarters of a mile from
the great tower is a group of buildings the largest of any in Bolghari. Its
oorthcrn part forms a kind of vestibule, and is built of large Tartar bricks, on a
foundation of dressed limestone ; the windows and capitals are also made of
bricJ^and it is divided into two portions, one of them square, the other oblong,
by a trajisverse wall. From the latter there is an entrance into the principal
room, which is built of large blocks of polished stone. Each corner is occupied
by a small chamber, so that the principal apartment is in the shape of a cross.
This room receives its light from a large cupola, in the centre of which is an
octagonal opening, while eight small lights correspond to the eight sides of the
octagon which it surmounts. A similar small cupola, similarly lighted, is over
each of the four chambers above mentioned. These cupolas, large and small,
still retain traces of stuccoed ornament. On the south side of this room \s,
placed a third series of three apartments. The central one has a vau^t
underneath it with remains of water courses. Erdmann SiUggests that the

''.Op. cit., 205. t Tornirelli, ii. aao. I Tornirelli, ii. 230.

§ Pallas, op. cit,, i. i£7. U Toxnirelli, ii. 225.

'1 H

4^2 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

whole has been used as a bath, perhaps one of those mentioned by Abulfeda,
which seems very probable. The structure is known to the natives as the
Bielaya Palaka, or the White Palace.* A third ruin is known as the Chernaya
Palata or " Black Palace." This occupies the centre of the old town, and is
also built of limestone and bricks. It is a very large building of a square shape.
Tornirelli says it is infinitely higher than any other of the ruined structures, and
bears marks of a superior style of architecture and elegance. The part that
remains is in an excellent state of preservation, particularly the interior, which
is ornamented and wrought in a very peculiar and original manner. In many
places the stucco with which the ornaments and pilasters were made is still
intact.t It is traditionally described as the Suderski Dome or Judgment Hall,
and, as Pallas says, this was not improbably its original destination.

There remains at Bolghari a portion of a second minaret, similar to the one
already described, but smaller both in height and other proportions. It stands
quite erect, and is surmounted by an iron railing, which was added by the rich
Tartar already referred to, and whose name was Yunusof. Around it lie
scattered numerous fragments of- walls half-buried in grass and furze, which
are supposed to be the remains of the mosque to which the minaret was
attached. Not far from here stood a few years ago the ruins of the palace of
the Khans, of which nothing remains but a heap of stones.J Such are the
principal ruins which still remain of the famous city of Bolghari. Besides
them there are other relics of the old town. Thus a large number of sepulchral
stones, remarkable for their size and inscriptions, are let into the walls of the
church and monastery in the village of Bolghari. These have legends written
in Arabic, Turk, and Armenian. Peter the Great ordered copies of them to be
taken, and Levchin published some of them from the transcript of a Tartar
mollah. They have also exercised the ingenuity of Klaproth and the Armenian
scholar St. Martin. Forty-seven of these inscriptions are extant, written in
Turkish and Arabic, and three in Armenian. Of those in Turkish and Arabic,
Klaproth says that twenty-three are dated (being the oldest of them) in the
year 623 of the hej. {i.e., 1226), and the chronograms on them speak of it as the
year of persecution, meaning no doubt the year in which the town was first
assailed by the Mongols. Three others are dated respectively in 1271, 1291,
and 1292. Eighteen more in various years from 701-742 he}, (i.e., 1302-1342).
These inscriptions give the name of the deceased, his origin and digpity^
Some of them are those of religious, others of laymen ; some of men, others of
women. Of some it is said they came from Shamakhia in Persia, and of one
that he came from Shirvan. The three Armenian inscriptions, according to
St. Martin, belong to the commencement of the fourteenth century.§

The country round Bolghari has long been a rich mine for treasure-seekers.
Here are found great quantities of small silver coins of the size of one's nail
made of very fine silver, and bearing Arabic and Cufic legends ; others badly
struck and very thin, are of debased silver ; on one side they have a number
of stars on them, and on the other some small points, with a circle
enclosing a tamgha or mark, such as is still used, says Pallas, by the Bashkirs

* Pallas, op. cit., 189-191. Muller, Ugrische Volkstamm, 2420, 1 Toinirelli, 230,

I Tornirelli, i. 230, 231. § Muller, op. cit., ii. 424, 425.

NOTES. 443

and others who cannot write. These signs occur most frequently on the
copper coins. Pallas gives some figures of them in his atlas. They doubtless
date from before the Mongol conquest. With the coins are found gold and
silver ornaments well worked, such as earrings, &c. ; ornaments in iron and
pewter, iron mirrors with raised ornaments on one side, tools, &c., but few
weapons ; a great number of spindle whorls, some of baked clay, others green
or enamelled, and clay vessels, also enamelled.*

Tornirelli says there are also found there long thin sticks of silver, about 2^
inches long, which are therefore like the primitive Russian roubles. During
his short stay there he bought from the peasants a variety of old copper coins,
a copper jug, and two skulls, found by a man while digging the foundations of
his cabin. A famous object found there was a massive goblet of pure gold,
finely wrought with basreliefs, and bearing various inscriptions in the Tartar
language. This cup is now in the Romantzoff Museum at St. Petersburg.
" An old major of the name of Yukof," says Tornirelli, " whose estate was
situated some ten or twelve miles from Bolghari, during a series of several years
purchased from the peasants all that was found on this spot, and contrived to
get together an interesting collection of Bolghar antiquities. One of the
objects, a poniard, attracted general attention. This poniard from the point
of the handle is sixteen inches in length, the handle alone is about five. The
blade is made of the purest Damascus steel, dark as the raven's wing. The
handle is of ivory, ornamented on the side by a bright row of red sardonyx
stones (an Asiatic precious stone), set in silver ; but the most remarkable part
of this poniard is its scabbard, formed of pure silver, ornamented with a treble
circle of handsome arabesques of filagree work, and various other fantastic
carvings. This sheath is so perfect in its workmanship that it might rather be
taken as the chef d'Q;uvre of some celebrated modern silversmith, than as an
antique Asiatic production found in Bolghari, and lying for centuries in the
earth. From the rich and elaborate workmanship of this poniard, we must
suppose that in belonged to some wealthy Bolghar warrior, in whose hand,
says Yurtkulsky, many a time it caus'ed the blood of the Muscovites to flow.
This poniard, as well as many similar objects found in Bolghari, gives us good
reason for believing that the Bolghars had attained to great perfection in the
art of working metals, an opinion corroborated by a remark made by the old
major we have spoken of, who relates, says Yurtkulsky, that when the
sheath, of the poniard we have described was found one of the rings was
broken ; the major, wishing to get it mended, got it soldered by several of the
best silversmiths in Kazan, but it was always done in such a manner that the
least blow or stroke broke it again, although no silver was spared in the
soldering. It was clear that the silver of which the sheath is formed was
mixed up with some other metal or substance which increased its strength. I
have heard that another landed proprietor of the province of Kazan, whose
estate is near Spask, possesses likewise a collection of Bolghar antiquities,
consisting of arms, such as pikes, lances, halberds, blades of swords, &c. I
regret to say I had not the opportunity of seeing these various interesting
articles."!

♦ Pallas, op. cit., i. 193. I94- t Tornirelli, ii. 240, 241.

444 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Let us now turn to Kazan. Kazan in Arabic means a cauldron. Some
suppose the town was so called from its being surrounded by mountains and
forming a hollow something like a cauldron. The legends of its foundation
give a different etymology. According to these its founder Batu was once
feasting here, when the only cauldron which the party had to cook their dinner
in was lost in the river, which was thence called Kazanka, whence the name of
the town ; but it is clear that Kazanka is merely a Russian adjectival form
derived from Kazan.

An old legend, preserved by a writer of the sixteenth century, whose
narrative was published at St. Petersburg in 1791, tells a story about the
original site having been frequented by great numbers of serpents, some with
two heads, one like a bull's, the other a serpent's ; the former feeding on vege-
tables, the latter on men and animals. There were other serpents like vipers and
dragons, which constantly harassed Batu and his followers, and devoured many
of the workmen who were building the town. A sorcerer was summoned, he
surrounded the chosen site with hay, furze, and venomous herbs, and then set
fire to the hedge so made. The serpents were either burnt or suffocated, but
a large number of men, horses, and camels also fell victims. The surrounding
marshes and woods still swarm with serpents. In spring they collect in
myriads on the hills which remain uncovered by the inundation. Dr. Fuchs,
one of the professors of the university, mentions how he one day in the end
of May came across one of these hills covered with serpents of various sizes ;
how the police officers and others took their guns loaded with heavy shot and
fired upon the reptiles. " Thousands," he says, " leaped into the water, but
although we kept up an active fusillade for several minutes, the hillock still
remained like an ant hill, covered with serpents. Forced to abandon this spot,
we drew near a second, and a third, but finding everywhere similar obstacles
to our landing, we were obliged to continue our navigation. Near Kazan is a
mountain on which is a monastery called Zilantof, a corruption of the Tartar
for serpent hill, and a Tartar legend affirms the hill was once the retreat of a
dragon, which on being killed, its effigy was put by the Khan on the arms of
Kazan, which still represent a winged and crowned serpent of a fantastic shape.*

Another legend assigns the foundation of the town to the time of Timur.
We are told that when he overran Bulgaria he beleagured Bolghari for seven
years, during which its Khan Abdulla was killed, while his sons Altin Bek and
Alin Bek escaped. The former on Timur's withdrawal founded the town of Iski
Kazan, which got its name from a kettle, which his attendants had taken to
the river to fill with water for his bath, being lost. Iski Kazan remained the
capital for a century. A later prince named AH Beg removed the site to
Vanghi Kazan {i.e„ New Kazan), the present town.t

So much for the legendary accounts of the foundation of Kazan. It will be
noticed that the former one attributes its foundation to Batu Khan, but this is
exceedingly improbable. The name does not occur anywhere till long after
his day, while it certainly existed some time before Timur's invasion, and it is
more likely that it gradually sprang into existence on the decay of Bolghari*
which it displaced.

* Tornirelli, i. 67-74. t Muller, op. cit., ii. 435, 436.

NOTES. 445

It does not occur as a mint place of the Mongols, and as far as I know is
mentioned for the first time in 1371, when it was attacked by the sons of
Dimitri of Suzdal, as I have mentioned.* It doubtless first became important
in the days of Ulugh Muhammed and his father Hassan, when it became the
capital of the Khanate of Kazan. Unlike Bolghari, which is now a mere
ruined village, Kazan has continued to be a flourishing town, and one-third of
its inhabitants are still Tartars.

Ermann says the extent of the old Tartar city was hardly less than that of
the Kazan of to-day. It stretched along the Bulak from its mouth nearly
two miles to the south, almost to the little Kaban lake, and its diameter along
the Kazanka was of equal length. The walls round it measured twenty-eight
feet in thickness, and were formed of two parallel wooden fences twenty-five
feet asunder, and having the space between them filled up with stones and
clay. The wooden fences, as well as the towers over the gates, were formed
of oak timbers of extraordinary thickness. The gates with their towers were
thirteen in number, those which were due east and west leading to the Kremlin.t
The town was devastated by fire three times during the first century of the
Russian occupation, and again more terribly in 1774, so that but few remains
of the old city are to be found. Among the most famous is the tower of
Siyunbeka, "which," says Tornirelli, "is in the eastern part of Kazan, near
one of the gates, where the Russians began their attack. The beauty of its
architecture, grace of its form, and perfect construction, can scarcely be
imagined by those who have not seen it. It is square and composed of several
stories, which gradually diminish in size towards the top ; the last has a sharp,
steeple-like form, ending in a point. From the extremity of this lengthened
cone rises an arrow of brass, which supports a Russian eagle above two
crescents ; above the eagle is a gilded globe, supposed by many to be made of
pure gold, and in which the Tartars believe are concealed precious documents
relating to their liberty and religion. It is built of bricks, strongly joined
together by a very compact mortar, is about two hundred and forty feet high,
and contains a dilapidated staircase inside. Close to the tower, and joined to
it by a wall, is another building; like it, it is square and of considerable
dimensions. The second story is surrounded by a vaulted gallery, resembling
the aisles of a Gothic church. Like the tower, it is made of bricks, and in
stjle resembles the tower, and is quite Asiatic in style. It was doubtless a
palace Tradition makes out that it was the ancient palace of the Khans.
Each story of the tower was surrounded by a parapet, where, as in eastern
fashion, sentinels were planted to give warning of danger.":}: Erdmann and
Tornirelli, in the works already cited, have described in some detail the aspec^^
of the modern Tartar city, of its houses and mosques, and to those works I
would remit those who wish for more information.

A third site within the Khanate, which is of some interest, is the ancient
town of Bulimer, now represented by Biliarsk. The foundation of this town
is assigned in the legends to Alin Bek, the second son of Abdulla Khan,
already mentioned. It is situated at the sources of the lesser Cheremshan.
Its ruins are still imposing, and built of large squared stones, which must have

* Ante, 207. t Ermann's Travels, i, 154. J Op. cit.* i. 295-297.

446 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

been brought from the Kama. The whole are surrounded by a triple ditch and
rampart, the inner one enclosing the citadel, of which the ruined walls and a
massive tower, built of stone and red tiles, still remain. Among the walls
Rytschkof found glazed pottery, of a blue and green colour, and also pieces of
decayed iron. Inter alia he found an instrument of iron which is at once an
auger, a hammer, a saw, a fire steel, and a pair of pincers, and this so neatly
made that it is not larger than a penknife. That the inhabitants practised
agriculture is proved by the furrows which still exist on the neighbouring
ground. The history of the town is very obscure. It was called Bulimer by
the Tartars, and still earlier Bular ; and according to Frsehn it was confounded
by some of the Arab writers with Bolghari. Rytschkof says a Tartar prince
named Balin Gosya governed here as late as 1677 ;* doubtless he was an
appanaged prince. Among the ruins many gravestones still remain. They all
have Tartar and Arabic inscriptions. The inhabitants call these graves, Balin
Gus, and not only the neighbouring Muhammmedans but also the more distant
Bashkirs visit them in the summer, deem them holy, and pay them reverence,
believing that their saints are buried there. The inhabitants attribute the
destruction of the town to Timur.t Tornirelli adds that its inhabitants saved
their lives by opening their gates to the invaders, but that, like Bolghari, it
was reduced to ashes.f The same author tells us the rampart of Bulimer
was twenty-five feet high and upwards of fifteen versts in circumference. §

We must lastly devote a few lines to a description of Kasimof. Kasimof
took its name from Kasim, to whom the place was granted as an appanage by
the Russian tzar.|| It had formerly borne the name of Meshcherskii, and
was situated on the banks of the Oka in the principality of Riazan. It was
also known as Gorodetz,^ and as Khan Kirman.** The district was largely
occupied by the Finnic tribes, Moskwa and Meshchera, and had been the site
of a petty principality. Schtschekotof assigns the first building of the town to
George Dolgoruki in the year Ii52.tt Alexander Nevski is said to have died
there. It was destroyed in the terrible Tartar invasion of 1376, was again
rebuilt, and until 147 1 was known as Novoi Nisovoi Gorod (t.^., the lower new
town) ; afterwards it got the name of Kasimof from Prince Kasim, and it is
mentioned by Herberstein under the name of Cassimovgorod. Pallas, who
visited the town in 1768, tells us that it then contained some important ruins.
Thus he mentions a tall misguir, formerly attached to a mosque then
destroyed, but which was being rebuilt at the time of his visit. Thr fower
was built of well dressed stone and the mosque of brick. Other Tartar ruins,
also made of stone, remained in a court and garden. These, he says, seemed
to be the remains of the Khan's palace, and there were formerly there a
triumphal arch with ornaments of a Gothic pattern and Arabic inscription, a
quadrilateral dwelling-house, and a public charnel-house. The proprietor had
destroyed these remains to make lime with the stone. The mausoleum of the
Khans was well preserved, and Pallas gives a plate of it. It was quadrilateral
in shape, with a cornice and a few ornaments on it. At its western end was a
small cell, apparently used as an oratory. It was vaulted beneath. In this

* Muller, op. cit., ii. 433. t Muller, op. cit., ii. 434. \ Op. cit., 260.

^ Op. cit. ii. 236. I|^n/«, 430. f Vel. Zernof, i. 3. •* Id.,y. 11 Id.

NOTES. 447

vault were several tombstones, containing well preserved Arabic inscriptions.
The skeletons formerly lay on wooden stands, but had been disturbed when
Pallas visited the place, and he found the bones scattered here and there, and
mixed with pieces of yellow, green, or orange taflfeta.* It would appear that
the Khan's palace was really built of wood upon stone foundations, as was the
general custom.! The Khans mausoleum above mentioned was built by Shah
AH, and is known to the natives as the Tekie. An inscription states that it
was built by Shah AH Khan, on the 21st Ramazan, 962 (i.e., gth August,
1555). M. Veliaminof Zernof has described the gravestones found in the
Tekie and their inscriptions at great length.l He also gives a restoration of
the mosque above named, which he shows was also the work of Shah Ali.

Nofe 2. — Among the regalia of Russia preserved at Moscow are two crowns,
known respectively as the crowns of Kazan and Astrakhan. Neither of them
has any distinctive Tartar features about it, and it seems very improbable
that they ever belonged to the Tartar princes. They were very possibly
rather made for Ivan when he assumed the style of tzar of Kazan and of
Astrakhan. These gorgeous head dresses are figured in the sumptuous work
published by the Russian Government on the Imperial treasures at Moscow.
They each consist of a fur cap, surmounted by a pyramidal crown of gold,
richly jewelled. One of them has a series of projecting rims, crenellated in a
graceful fashion, and evidently of Italian cinquecento workmanship. The
other is apparently of Russian fabric, and is composed of gold inlaid with
steel or niello, in the fashion still prevalent in Tula work, and also pyramidal
in shape.

JVbie 3. — It is a very curious fact about the history of Kazan that none of its
princes struck coins. As the striking of money is among Muhammedan
peoples the chief sign and token of independent sovereignty, and as Bolghari
was the most famous mint place of the Golden Horde, it seems very strange
that the Kazan princes did not strike money, while their contemporaries at
Astrakhan did so. Perhaps they deemed themselves in some measure
dependent upon the latter princes, who, as I have shown, were the real heirs
of the old Khans of the Golden Horde.

No^e 4. — Genealogy of the Khans of Kazan and Kasimof of the house of

Ulugh Muhammed.

Ulugh Muhammed,

I

Mahmudek Khan. Yusuf. Kasim Khan. Yakub.
I I

I Daniyar Khan.

Khalil Khan. Ibrahim Khan.

I

Ali or Ilham Khan. Muhammed Amin Khan. Abdul Latif Khan,

Pallas Voyages, i. 40-43. j Vel, Zernof, i. 15. I Op. Cit., i. io.>i34.

CHAPTER VII.

THE KHANS OF KRIM.

HAJI GIRAI.

THE origin of the Khanate of Kiim is involved in great obscurity,
and is a good instance of the contradictions and difficuhies
which surround Tartar history. Its Khans all bore the family
name of Girai (a Tartar name which occurs elsewhere), and were
descended from the founder of the dynasty, Haji Girai. Up to him we
have small difficulty in tracing back the history of the Khanate, but
when we try to unravel the story of his origin and connections we are
met by almost insuperable difficulties.

Von Hammer has devoted a long paragraph* to a discussion of his
■parentage ; so has M. Veliaminof Zernof.t The authorities are very
contradictory and diverse. The Turkish historian Jenabi and the author
of the Munejimbashi make him a son of Kuchuk Muhammed, which is
impossible-l Others make him a son of Ulugh Muhammed, which also
seems inadmissible. In the R is wan pashasade he is made the son of
a third Muhammed, who is said to have died in I447.§ The short
history of Kazan makes Haji Girai a brother of Jelal ud din, and there-
fore a son of Toktamish ; but no such name as Haji Girai occurs among
the recorded sons of Toktamish, Here, however, we get on more
probable ground. In the synodal register of the monastery of Storo-
schefski, already quoted, we find a genealogical table given in which
Haji Girai is made a son of Devlet Berdi, the son of Toktamish, and we
are further told that Devlet Berdi lived in Lithuania with Vitut.|| This,
as has been said, agrees with the statement of the Polish chronicfers,
who tell us he was a son or grandson of Toktamish, that he was born at
Trokoi, near Vilna in Lithuania, and obtained the sovereignty of Krim
through Vitut's influence.1[

In confirmation of this conclusion it may be added that Haji Girai
was always the zealous friend of the Lithuanians,** and further, that we
find a person of the name of Girai or Kirai sent as an envoy by the
ruler of Lithuania to the Grand Prince.ft Another piece of evidence

* Golden Horde, 399, 400. t Op. cit., i. Note, 44. J Golden Horde, 399. § Id., 400.

II Vel. Zernof, i. Note, 21. Muller, in his genealogy of the Krim Khans, also makes Haji
Girai the son of Devlet Berdi. (Sam)., &c., ii. 22.)

^ Karamzin, v. 440. Golden Horde, 400. ** j[d.

tt Golden Horde, 403. Karamzin, vi. 62.

HAJI GIRAI KHAN. 449

pointing in tlie same direction is contained in a document of his
grandson, also named Haji Girai, dated in 1529, cited by M. Veliammof
Zernof,* in wliicli he refers to Toktamish as his ancestor.

The Nogais also spoke of the Krim as the country of Toktamish, as
they referred to Astrakhan as the country of Timur Kutlugh. On the
other hand, we have in the pages of Abdul Ghaffar a ver)' circumstantial
story which deduces Haji Girai from another source. He tells us that
after the death of the Nogai chief Idiku, and in 1430, the amirs Shirin
and Barin, Chekhreh, Serai, and other Tartar chiefs met together to
choose a chieftain, and as there were no descendants of Toktamish
remaining they were much embarrassed. They at length, he says, found
a prince of the race of Toktamish, named Ulugh Muhammed, the son of
Hassan Jefai, who was very rich in herds. Hassan, he says, was a near
relative of Toktamish, and had another son named Bash Timur (Tash
Timur), who was the father of Haji Girai, chief of the family of the
Girais.t This account makes Haji Girai the nephew of Ulugh
Muhammed, and also makes Tash Timur the latter's brother. It seems
not at all improbable, for we know that the Khans of Kazan and Krim
were on very intimate terms, and we are not otherwise told who Tash
Timur was. Again, it is strange that Khuandemir makes Devlet
Berdi not the son of Toktamish but the son of Tash Timur,f thus
bringing Devlet Berdi and Haji Girai together, but as brothers and not as
father and son. Abulghazi calls him the son of Ghayas ud din Khan,
the son of Tash Timur, son of Muhammed Khan, and it is apparently
following him that Fraehn makes Tash Timur the son of Ulugh
Muhammed. Ghayas ud din is made a son of Shadibeg Khan by
Khuandemir and Langles.§

Again, Miechof makes Ulanus {i.e., Ulugh Muhammed) the first Khan
of Krim, and tells us he was followed by Tash Timur, who fought with
Vitut against his brother (.?) Kutlugh Timur and was beaten. He also
makes Seyid Ahmed the son of Tash Timur, and tells us he was expelled
by Haji Girai. ||

1^5^ Timur was probably the Tash Timur Oghlan who is mentioned
among the chiefs of Kipchak, who fled on the invasion of Timur. M.
Soret has published a very curious coin, which was struck at Krim in the
year 797 {i.e., 1394-S), bearing on one side the name of Tash Timur, and
en the other that of Toktamish.^ This again supports the same con-
clusion. In the absence of positive proof, I am strongly disposed to
conclude that Haji Girai was in fact the son of Tash Timur and nephew
of Ulugh Muhammed, which explains the bitter strife there always was
between the Khans of Krim and those of the Golden Horde.

The native tradition of the origin of the name Girai, as reported by

* I. Note, 44. t Langles, op. cit., 390, 391. J Ante, 274.

§ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 391. || Miechof De Sarmatjcs, ch, xvi.

% Soret Lettre a M. Capitaine Kossikofski, &c., 31,

21

450 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

M. Ferrand, who was a surgeon in the employment of the Krim Khan
Haji Sehm Girai, is that about two centuries before his time the Tartars
were in a state of terrible confusion, in which all their princes perished
but one, who was ten years old, and who was protected by a peasant
named Girai. The Tartars having got into a state of confusion, and not
knowing where to look for a prince, the peasant presented his protege,
who was identified by certain marks as belonging to the royal stock.
Tliey accepted him as their ruler, and he adopted the name of his
benefactor as his family name.* De Bohucz says Haji Girai was so
called because he was wont to answer people in Lithuanian with the
word gueray, meaning well.t Whatever his origin, Haji Girai was
clearly z. protege of the great Lithuanian king Vitut, and on his death in
1430, he was a faithful friend of his successors Ladislas and Casimir,
He did not make cither peace or war without their knowledge. He
always had some Polish gentlemen at his court, and protected the Polish
merchants who passed through his kingdom on their way to Kaffa, while
he carefully respected the borders of Poland. Meanwhile his constant
enemies were the Tartars of the Golden Horde, who were always at issue
with the Poles, and were incited to ravage Podolia by the discontented
Lithuanian nobles, who were on bad terms with their Polish suzerain.
He was also at issue with the Genoese, who were the allies of the Golden
Horde, and from whom he apparently captured Kaffa.J Chalcocondylas
describes this last struggle. He tells us how the Tartars, having pillaged
Kaffa, the citizens about the year 1442 sent to Haji Girai to seek for
peace. Getting no satisfaction from him, they declared war, and would
have been probably utterly crushed but for the opportune arrival of
reinforcements from Italy. They then encamped on the banks of the
river, and, full of contempt for their enemies, took no precautions. Theii;
temerity was well punished ; their army was almost destroyed, only a
few escaping, who set sail again for Galata. §

In 1453 there happened one of the most momentous events in the
world's history, and especially momentous in the history of the Tartars.
This was the capture of Constantinople by the Sultan of the Osn-vinli
Turks. Among its defenders the brave little contingent of two thousand
Genoese, under Justiniani, fought bravely but unavailingly. The repubhc
afterwards bought from the Sultan the right of trading in the Euxine, but
it shortly after quarrelled with the Grand Seignior, and had the temerity
even to declare war on him. The Genoese were not fortunate in this
struggle, and were obliged to make over their colonies of Kaffa and
Corsica to the singular trading guild of St. George, a rich and elaborately
organised corporation, the ancestor of the later and more famous trading
companies of Holland and Great Britain in India and elsewhere. ||

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 350. Note. t Histoire de la Tauride, 330.

; De Bohucz, 351. § Stritter, iii. 1189. De Bohucz, 331. || De Bohucz, 331, 332.

HAJI GIRAI KHAN. 45 1

Meanwhile Haji Girai continued a faithful friend to Poland. In 1455
Seyid Ahmed of the Golden Horde having made a raid towards Podolia,
Haji Girai issued from Perekop, and having defeated him compelled him
to retire. Seyid Ahmed turned aside to his friends the Lithuanians, by
whom, as we have shown, he was treacherously arrested and handed over
to Casimir,who imprisoned him at Kovno.* Haji Girai offered the latter
to put all his Tartars at his service in return for an annual payment of
ten thousand florins, which was accepted, but when by some inadvertence
it was not regularly paid his Tartars ravaged the Palatinates of Podolia
and Russia.t It is said that the proud Tartar chief went so far as to renew
the gift of Russia to Poland, which had been made by Toktamish and
sealed the deed with the golden seal of Krim in the year 867 of the hej.
{i.e., 1461). In 1465 Pope Paul II. sent Louis of Bologna, the Franciscan
patriarch of Antioch, as an ambassador to solicit Haji Girai's aid in the
crusade which was projected under the emperor Frederick III. against
Muhammed and his Turks. It was assuredly an embarrassing invitation
to ask the turban to range itself under the cross. The request was
cleverly fenced. Haji would do as his friend Casimir of Poland did.
Casimir's feuds with Russia and the Teutonic knights made it imprudent
for him to quarrel with the powerful Turks. t From his early training in
Lithuania he had imbibed a certain respect for Christianity, and not only
was he singularly tolerant, but is even said to have offered gifts at a
chapel of the Virgin near the town and mountain of Kierkel in the
Taurida.§

The last recorded event in Haji Girai's life was his struggle with
Kuchuk Muhammed, the Khan of the Golden Horde. This was about
1466. He was apparently making preparations for war when he
suddenly died, not without suspicions of poisoning. Dlugosch tells us
he died in August, 1466, and Muhammed Riza in his history of the Krim
Khans puts his death in the same year.H He was a constant friend of
Poland, says Dlugosch, and he sums up his character in the phrase,
'• humanus civihsque et bene agendi cupidus."1[ According to Jenabi he
leftfftwelve sons, but his notice is very confused.** Abulghazi tells us he
left eight, whom he names Devletyar, Nurdaulat Khan, Haidar Khan,
Kutluk Seman, Kildish, Mengli Girai Khan, Yamgurchi, and Ustimuntt
The Russian registers give him five sons, whom they name Nurdaulat,
Haidar, Mengh Girai, Ustimur tzarevitch, and Haji tzarevitch.+J Haji
Girai struck coins at Krim.§§

* Ante, 305. 1 De Bohucz, 352. I ^d., 353- % Id-> 355-

II Vel. Zcra., op. cit., i. Note, 44. ^ Id. ** Id. Note, 48. tt Op. cit., 1S7.

n Vel. Zern., i. Note, 47.

^ Frshn Res., 413. Biau Catalosue of Oriental Coins in the Museum of Odessa, 62.

452 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

NURDAULAT KHAN.

Haji Girai was succeeded by his son Nurdaulat, who sent an envoy in
1467 to the PoUsh king to announce his accession, and his hope that
Casimir would continue on the same friendly terms with him that he had
been with his father Haji Girai. These courtesies were duly reciprocated
by the Polish authorities.* His reign, however, was a very short one, and
two years later (/>., in 1469) he was expelled by his younger brother
Mengli Girai, who had hitherto lived at Kaffa, under the protection of
the Genoese.t Nurdaulat took refuge at Moscow.^

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN.

Early in the year 1469 Mengli Girai sent envoys to Casimir of Poland,
announcing his accession and offering him an alliance against any of his
enemies.! His people are called the Tartars of Perekop by Dlugosch.
The same term is applied to them by Herberstein at a later day. He
did not reign very long.

The city of Kaffa was governed by a consul sent every year from
Genoa, and two councillors elected by the municipahty. The district
round the city was governed by four judges, who were subject to a
prefect, who was elected by the Khan. The prefect Mamai having died,
his widow, by corrupt means, persuaded a certain Petrokos to nominate
her son Seidak to the vacant post. The Khan's choice, however, fell
upon another Tartar named Eminek. Mamai's widow proceeded to
bribe the Genoese consul with two thousand ducats, and one of the
judges with one thousand ducats, and it was determined to accuse
Eminek of a conspiracy to hand over Kaffa to the Sultan. The Khan,
Mengli Girai, accordingly deposed him, but refused to appoint Seidak,
and nominated Kara Murza, a protegd of his brother Haidar instead.
Three thousand sequins were liberally distributed by Mamai's wiriow,
and a certain Squarciafico duly informed Mengli Girai that he was at
the mercy of the Genoese, and unless he would appoint Seidak they
threatened to release his elder brothers, who had better claims to the
throne than he, from Soldaia. This argument prevailed; Seidak was
duly appointed prefect, and Eminek was deposed. This was in 1474.
The latter complained to the Sultan, while Haidar Sultan, at the head of
a number of discontented people, drove Seidak away, re-established
Eminek, and blockaded Kaffa. The Tartars, who had hitherto not
ventured far to sea, went to the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and
there captured two Genoese galleys, which were on their way to relieve

* Vcl. Zcrn., i. Note, 44. t U, Note, 45. I Id. § Id.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 453

Kaffa.* Meanwhile Haidar, at the head of seven thousand Tartars,
against the will of the Khan, made a raid upon Poland and Podolia,
and caused much distress there.t This is the account of the Polish
historians. According to Karamzin, however, the Polish king had
supported the party of Nurdaulat, and had in consequence gained the
resentment of MengH Girai.

The Grand Prince Ivan, who had probably heard of this, eagerly
seized the opportunity of acquiring an ally to play off against his
dangerous neighbour the King of Poland. Availing himself of the
services of a rich Jew of Kaffa named Kokos, he found Mengli Girai
anxious to meet his approaches, and accordingly sent him a friendly
letter by Yusuf, Kokos's brother-in-law. Such was the commencement
of an alliance which was destined to be of considerable moment in
Russian history. A treaty was drawn up between the two princes, by
which they became mutual allies. Thieves and malefactors who sought
refuge over the frontier were to be punished, and prisoners to be
ransomed. On his return home Haji Baba, Mengli Girai's envoy, was
accompanied by Niketas Beklemishef, who was empowered to add some
supplementary clauses to the treaty, and inter alia to promise that Ivan
would give the Khan an annual present. It was also agreed that while
Ivan gave his assistance against the Golden Horde, the Krim Tartars
were to reciprocate the good offices as against Poland. Beklemishef
returned to Moscow with the murza Dovletek, bearing the confirmation
of the Khan, which Ivan received in his own hands, and even went the
length of lowering the crucifix in the presence of the murza. After a stay
of four months at Moscow, Dovletek returned to the Taurida, accompanied
by Alexis Starkof, the bearer of another friendly letter from the Grand
Prince.t Before Starkof could fulfil his mission, however, Mengli Girai
had lost his throne.

In 1475 Eminek and his partisans offered to acknowledge the Sultan as
their suzerain, and invited him to repair to Krim* The Sultan at this
time was the famous Muhammed II., who had lately captured Con-
standfllbple. He accordingly sent his vizier Kuduk Ahmed Pacha, with a
large fleet, an army of ten thousand azapes (?), and a similar number of
janissaries to the Krim. At the first sight of the Turkish fleet the citizens
lost heart. Seidak fled, the old walls of the town could not long
resist the bombardment, and an Armenian who had become its ruler
surrendered at discretion. Karamzin says he was bought. The lives of
the citizens were spared, but their property was confiscated. They were
first ordered to repair to the Town Hall and to pay down a sum of twenty
thousand ducats. Forty thousand Genoese were transported to Con-
stantinople, and there settled as colonists in a district which had been

* Bohucz Histoire de la Tauride, 333-335' t ViAc Vel. Zern., i. Note, 46.

i Karamzin, vi. 105, ie6.

454 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

depopulated. All the slaves became the property of the Sultan. The
natives had to ransom themselves ; they were allowed to keep half their
goods, and were subjected to tribute. One thousand five hundred
children were transferred to the seraglio. The palaces, churches, and
principal buildings were razed. On the eighth day Ahmed gave a grand
banquet, on the second storey of the Franc Asur, to the principal
Armenians who had betrayed the town. On descending by a narrow
ladder they found an executioner ready to receive them, and were
beheaded one by one. Squarciafico, the principal author of the recent
troubles, was sent for punishment to Constantinople, where his immense
wealth was also transported.* Thus perished this famous Genoese
colony, which had existed for four centuries. It was known as the Little
Constantinople, and monopolised a great share of the trade to the East.
That trade fortunately soon found a fresh route by the Cape of Good
Hope, but meanwhile we can hardly realise how its diversion must have
impoverished the steppes of Kipchak, and what a terrible blow to their
prosperity was struck when the rich and intelligent Genoese merchants
were driven away. We are told Simon, the bishop of Kafifa, had gone
to ask assistance from Martin Gartold, the Polish palatine of Kief. The
news of the capture of the city reached him at table, and he died suddenly
from grief. One of the transports, on its way to Constantinople, was
seized by the captives on board, and found its way to the Moldavian king
Stephen.

The capture of Kaffa by the Ottomans was speedily followed by that
of Sudak, Balaklava, and Inkerman. The inhabitants who had fled there
were either killed or sent to Constantinople. Cherson and Tana, a chief
mart of the Venetians, were pillaged and razed, liospro, which the
Genoese called Aspromonte, and where they had a consul, and Kertch,
which had suffered much from the Circassians, only cost their captors a
march, and Mankup, whose position was deemed almost impregnable
was captured.t Thus was overrun the famous peninsula of Krim, and
thus did the Ottomans plant their foot firmly on the northern shores of
the Euxine, where they remained so long. Many Russian mer(;liants
perished, " the first Russian blood," says Karamzin, " which was shed by
the sword of the Ottomans. t Among the prisoners carried off was
Mengh Girai, with some of his relatives. Some accounts say he was
captured at Kaffa, others at Mankup. §

NURDAULAT KHAN (SECOND Reign).

The expedition of Sultan Muhammed was directed against the
Genoese, and not against the Tartars, with whom the Turks apparently

* De Bohucz, op. cit., 335, 336. t Karamzin, vi. 107. J/t^. 5 Vel. Zern., i. Note, 48.

JANIBEG KHAN. 455

did not come into conflict, and whose foothold in the Krim had been
rather that of suzerains of the Genoese than actual occupiers. Their
camps were outside the Krim, the chief one being near Perekop. There
Nurdaulat now resumed his authority as Khan. According to the recent
Turkish historian Khair Ullah, the Sultan wished to be friendly with
Nurdaulat and to win him over, and accordingly imprisoned Mengli
Girai in the castle of the Seven Towers ; and as the Ottomans were this
very year carrying on a war in Moldavia, they asked him to send a
contingent or make a diversion ; as he failed to do so, the Sultan set
free Mengli Girai.* We are told he treated him with great consideration,
and having given him an army, sent him to the Krim to conquer it and
hold it as th.Q pi'otege and vassal of the Ottoman Porte.t

Fr^hn has published two silver coins of Nurdaulat, apparently struck
in the year 878 hej. {i.e., 1473-4).! There is an episode in the history of
the Khanate at this time which is difficult to understand. We are told
that in 1476 Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden Horde, sent an army,
commanded by his son, which overran the Krim and drove Mengli
Girai away ; but Mengli Girai was then a prisoner, and perhaps
Nurdaulat is meant.

JANIBEG KHAN.

Whatever the explanation, it would seem that Ahmed nominated
Janibeg to the vacant throne. He was probably one of the nephews. §
The first notice of him I can find is in Ivan's letter to MengH Girai,
written in 1475, in which he says that during the previous summer
Janibeg, or Zenebek, as Karamzin calls him, wished to enter his service,
but he had refused, being persuaded that he was Mengli Girai's enemy
If the latter did not object, however, he would send a courier to the
horde to fetch him.|| When Janibeg became Khan of Krim, in 1477, he
sent an. -envoy named Jafer Berdi to Moscow, to inquire if, in case of
banis?{ment, he could hope for an asylum in Russia. The Grand Prince
replied, " When you had neither lands nor power, and were only a simple
Kazak, you asked me if you might find a resting-place within my borders
in case your horse should be weary of wandering in the deserts. You
know that I then promised you rest and peace. If you should again be
unfortunate and need a refuge, be assured you may have it here."^ Ivan's
envoy was also instructed to renew the alliance which had been formed
between himself and Mengli Girai,** Janibeg did not reign long, and we
are told he was driven away by Mengli Girai, who hastened to announce

* Vel. Zern., i. Note, 48. t Karamzin, vi. 108. Vel. Zern., i. 20.

I Coins of the Ulus Juchi, 40. Vel. Zern., i. Note, 51.

§ Vide ante, 350. U Karamzin, vi. 106. ^ Id., 109. ** Id.

456 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

his renewed accession to the throne, to Ivan. It would seem that during
Janibeg's reign Nurdaulat had a kind of joint authority in the horde, for
we find him in 1478 sending envoys to the Polish king to make a treaty
of peace with him.*

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN (Second Reign).

We are told that Mengli Girai's new nomination as Khan of Krim was
attended with great pomp. The Divan assembled, and the Sultan
attended in person. The Khan was dressed by the chamberlain in a
superb kaftan of golden tissue edged with ermine, while a cap bordered
with sable and ornamented with a diamond aigrette was put on his
head. The Imperial sword-bearer gave him a sword with a golden hilt
garnished with diamonds, and put the quiver and bow on his shoulders.
The diploma of investiture was then read, and the mufti addressed the
Khan. On going out from the hall he was presented with a richly
caparisoned horse, and was escorted to his palace by the grandees.
A short time after he went to Koztof in the Taurida, where he was well
received, and where the Sultan's chamberlain also went to publish his
appointment and the Imperial confirmation. The return of Mengli Girai
led to the withdrawal of Nurdaulat and his brother Haidar from Krim,
and they sought refuge, first in Lithuania and then in Russia.t

This was a notabb epoch in Tartar history. It was as the feudatory
of the Sultan that Mengli Girai now returned, and thenceforward Krim
must be looked upon, as Egypt and Tunis were in later days, as
provinces dependent in a measure upon the Ottoman crown, although
enjoying a great measure of independence. By a treaty between Mengli
Girai and his patron, it was agreed that the power of appointing and
deposing the Khan should rest with the Sultan, who should limit his
choice, however, to descendants of Jingis Khan. That the Sultan should
never on any pretext put to death either a Khan or a member of the
family of Girai. That the private property of the family else**vhere
should be deemed inviolable. That in the Khutb6 or public Friday
prayer the Khan's name should be read after the Sultan's. That any
favours officially demanded should be granted. The Khan's standard
was to have five tails, that of the Sultan having six. And in each
campaign the Porte was to pay a hundred and twenty purses for the
sustenance of the Khan's guards, and eighty purses for the Kapikuli
mursas.l It would seem the Khans had also the right of striking money,
while the Sultan claimed the appointment of the cadhis to collect the
customs at Kaffa and Mankup.§ Besides his mere treaty rights, we

• Vel. Zern., i. Note, 51. t Vel. Zern., i. 22.

I Peysonnel, ii. 228-230. Langles, 403-406, § Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 351-353.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 457

must remember that the Sultan, as the successor of the Khalifs, the
guardian of the keys of Mecca and the head of the faith, had an especial
claim to reverence from such good Mussulmans as the Krim Tartars.
On his return to the Krim, Mengli appointed his son Muhammed Girai
as kalga,* and gave him command of the right wing of the army,
the chiefs of the " Karaju," which included those of Barin, Arghin, and
Kipchak of the left, and the chiefs of the tribe Shirin of the centre.t

The Tartars were by no means pleased at the way in which Mengli
Girai had surrendered their independence, and some fresh clauses were
afterwards added, by which the Khan reserved the right of awarding
life and death and the appointment of his own kalgas and other
officials. The Sultan promised to pay for four thousand men as
his guards, to limit the succession to the family of Girai, to allow
the Tartars to trade freely in the Black Sea, in case of war to provide
the Tartar contingent with provisions, and to allow them to keep any
booty they made. He reserved the town of Kaffa and the right of
keeping a garrison at Kozlof, and, as the successor of the Khalif, that
of appointing and deposing the ecclesiastical officials.^

Mengli Girai on his return did not behave well to the Genoese, who
had befriended him. After landing at Kozlof he marched upon the town
of Solgat or Old Krim, against whose governor he had a grudge, although
his son was engaged to the latter's daughter. The town having been
captured, the Genoese were cruelly put to death, and the Armenians and
Greeks transported to the south of the peninsula.§ Barbaro would make
out that Mengli Girai acquired his authority in the Krim without the
consent of the Turks. The curious story he tells is as follows. Mengli
Girai having been released from prison, was allowed by the Turks to
return once more to Kaffa and to move about there on his parole. " One
day," says our author, "there happened a shooting for a prize there.
The manner whereof is, they hung up on certain poles set up like a
gallows, a ball of silver, tied only with a fine thread. Those now that
should shoot for the prize shoot thereat with forked arrows on horseback,
and fii'^t must gallop under the gallows, so that being in his full career
passing a certain place he must turn his body and shoot backwards, the
horse galloping all the time straight on. He who cut the thread won
the game. Mengli Girai chose this opportunity to escape, and having
planted a hundred of his partisans outside the town in a small valley,
and feigning to run for the game, he made away to his company, where-
upon the force of all the island (/.<?., of Krim) followed him, but having
grown strong he took Surgathi, and having slain Eminekbi, made himself
lord of all those places."]!
This is quite irreconcilable with other accounts, but it has a certain

* Vide Notes'. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii, 353. J Dc Bohucz, 358. $ /./., 338.

i Barbaro, 29,

2K

458 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

quaint local colour about it, and may have some foundation. Mengli
Girai introduced a new policy into the Krim. As a dependent of the
Sultan he was not careful, like his father, to court alliances that promised
to be useful, but apparently deemed all his neighbours fit subjects for
plunder. We accordingly find him at issue with Casimir of Poland, and
drawing nearer to Casimir's great enemy the Grand Prince Ivan of Russia.
The ruling motive of the Khan's foreign policy was his hatred of the rival
Khans of the Golden Horde. He notified his accession to the Grand
Prince, and was congratulated by him. In 1480 Ivan sent him an envoy
named Ivan Zvenetz, who was commissioned to tell him that it was
entirely through a personal regard for himself that he had given an asylum
to his brothers Haidar and Nurdaulat, and he offered to assist him in his
struggle with Ahmed of the Golden Horde if he in return would aid him
against Casimir of Poland. Zvenetz was also secretly to offer the Khan an
asylum in Russia whenever he was driven from Krim, and to promise to
employ the forces of Russia to reinstate him. This was so grateful to
the Khan that he entered into an offensive and defensive alliance with
Russia.* When Ahmed, the Khan of the Golden Horde, was overthrown
in 1481, Ivan sent the boyard Timothy to Mengli Girai with the news.
We are told the latter had an interview with Eminek (who was friendly
to Russia), and gave his son Dovletek a passport sealed with a golden
seal to reside where he liked in Russia.t

A year later we find Casimir intriguing to detach Mengli Girai from
his Russian alliance, and even succeeding in corrupting Eminek, who
undertook that his master should make peace with Poland. Ivan
hearing of these intrigues, sent some envoys to the Krim, by whose
persuasion Mengli Girai marched with a large body of cavalry in the
autumn of 1482 to the Dnieper, and even captured Kief, took its voivode
prisoner, burnt the monastery of Pechersky, and sent as a present to the
Grand Prince the massive chalice and paten of the church of St. Sophia.
This policy of employing the Mussulman Tartars to plunder the Christian
Russians in the former alma mater of Russian culture was not very
welcome to the Muscovite people. The Grand Prince, however, \v;^o was
a pohtician with little sentiment, sent to thank Mengli Girai, told him
that he meant to fulfil his part of the treaty, and reported how, at great
cost, he had kept a strict watch over his brothers and rivals Haidar and
Nurdaulat.J The old feud between Mengli Girai and the chiefs of the
Great Horde still continued, and the latter, notwithstanding the Sultan's
orders to the contrary, were determined to prosecute their plans. In
1485 they overran the Krim in the manner I have described.§

Meanwhile Ivan kept up a close intercourse with the Krim Khan. In
i486 we find him sending him a present of three pelisses, one of lynx,

• Karamiin, vi. 174, 175. t Id., 203. J Karamzin, vi. 212, 213.

hAnU, 329-331.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 459

another of marten, and the third of squirrel, three sable skins, and a
double ducat; two ducats were sent to his wife, to his brother Yamgurchi,
and to each of his children. Having heard that his wife Nursaltan was
possessed of the famous pearl of Toktamish, which had probably been
captured at Moscow in the reign of Dimitri Donskoi, he repeatedly
asked for it, and she eventually sent it to him.* We now find Murtaza
Khan of the Great Horde trying to get Nurdaulat, the late Khan of
Krim, into his possession, in order no doubt to set him up as a rival to
his brother Mengli Girai.t The King of Poland at the same time tried
to gain over Haidar, another of his brothers, but the Grand Prince kept
a strict surveillance upon both of them, and would not let them leave.
MengU Girai was not unwilling to share his throne with Nurdaulat, and
wrote to the Grand Prince asking him to release them, adding that
he did not fear Haidar, and that he might go where he wished. But
Ivan refused, saying in most characteristic phraseology, that " ambition
knew neither fraternity nor gratitude," and that with his genius and
numerous partisans Nurdaulat would not be contented with half a
heritage of which he had once possessed the whole, a truth which the
dictates of friendship made him announce to him.l

The Krim Tartars formed at this date, as I have described, an
advanced post of the great Ottoman empire, which for many years
unwittingly did the work of Russia by pulverising the power of its bitter
rival Poland. Desiring to enter into an alliance with Turkey, Ivan
sounded Mengli Girai, who, appealing to Constantinople, received the
answer, " Mengli Girai, if the ruler of Moscow is your brother he shall
also be mine." Meanwhile the Russian merchants had almost ceased to
visit Azof and Kaffa, so great were the exactions of the Turkish pasha.
The latter laid the blame on Mengli Girai, whom he accused of per-
suading the Russians to stay away. The Khan of Krim having asked
Ivan to justify his conduct to his master, he accordingly wrote in 1492
to Bajazet, setting out how the pasha of Azof had the previous year
forced the Russian merchants to dig a ditch there, and to carry stones
to m?^e it with ; and that at Azof and Kaffa they were compelled to
surrender their goods for one-half of their value ; if one of them was
ill the goods of all were put under seal, and if he died they were largely
confiscated. The Turks did not recognise the Russian testamentary
dispositions, but deemed themselves the universal heirs. Ivan set out
that it was for these reasons he had forbidden his merchants to visit
Azof and Kaffa, and ended up by suggesting that Bajazet should send
him some envoys. This letter was written in August, 1492. Meanwhile
the Grand Prince was on very friendly terms with Mengli Girai. In
1490 Prince Romodanofski went to the Krim to assure the Khan that his
master was always prepared to attack the Great Horde. Shortly aftef

* Karamain, vi. 231. 232. t Ante, 331. I Karamzin, vi. 232, 234.

460 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Mengli Girai won a considerable victory over the latter.* In reply to
the solicitations of the Grand Prince that he should attack Casimir,
Mengli Girai wrote in 1492 to say he was building a fortress at the mouth
of the Dnieper as a menace to the Poles. This was Otchakof, built, as
I believe, on the site of the old town of Torchesk. The prudent Ivan
reminded his ally that it was not by building fortresses a long way off,
but by harrying their land, that he would harass the Lithuanians. Each
monarch was fond of presents, and we find Mengli Girai soliciting
jerfalcons and sables for the Sultan, while Ivan asked as the reward of
his services against the Great Horde, for Mengli's great red ruby. The
cautious Muscovite monarch also insisted that the correspondence
between the rulers of Krim and Kazan should pass through his hands,
where it was no doubt duly checked, t

Ivan now pressed more urgently on the Krim Khan that he should
attack the Lithuanians. Alexander had sent Prince Glinsky to him to
complain of the building of Otchakof at the instance of Ivan. Mengli
Girai detained this envoy, laid siege to Kief, and set fire to the environs of
Chernigof, but was compelled by an inundation of the Dnieper to return
to Perekop. Shortly after Otchakof, which had cost 1 50,000 altins, was
destroyed by Bogdan, the leader of the Cossacks, to the great chagrin of
the Khan, who was much tempted by the offer of 13,500 ducats as a
ransom for the Lithuanians he held in bondage, and also under pressure
from Turkey to make peace with Casimir. Of this he informed Ivan,
and also of his determination to remain faithful to the Russians, and he
in fact continued to harass the Lithuanians.^

Casimir of Poland died in 1492, and was succeded by Alexander, who
had married Ivan's daughter Helena.§ This led to peace being made
between the two powers, and we read how, news having arrived that
Mengli Girai, Ivan's faithful friend, was meditating a raid upon
Lithuania, Helena joined in her husband's entreaties to her father to
prevent him. Ivan was in an embarrassing position, for he had made
peace with Alexander, their common enemy, without acquainting Mengli
Girai. When he now wrote to inform the latter, he was met^by a
dignified rebuke. " Your letter surprises me," wrote the Khan. " You
know that, faithful to my promises and to my friendship, I have sacrificed
my private interests for you, and have never neglected an opportunity of
assisting you against your enemies. ' A friend and a brother are two
treasures : happy he who possesses them.^ Penetrated with this sentiment,
I have harried the country of the Lithuanians and have fought against
the sons of Ahmed. I have closed my ears to the proposals of Casimir
and Alexander. What is now my reward? You have made friends
with my enemies, and left me a victim to their vengeance. You have

* Karatnzin, ri. 291, 293^ t /i.. 29s, 294. I Id., 303, 304,

f Antt, 337. 338.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 461

not confided a syllable of your intentions to your brother. You have
deemed him unworthy of sharing in your plans."

Notwithstanding his letter, Mengli Girai was willing to make peace
with the Lithuanians if they would pay the cost of his armament. The
diplomatic Ivan determined to utilise his influence with the Krim Khan
by making fresh demands upon Alexander. He insisted on his daughter
having a Greek church within the palace, and that she should not wear the
Polish dress, nor be surrounded with Catholic servants.* These demands
were firmly refused.

The Turkish Sultan had replied to Ivan's letter already quoted, for-
bidding under severe penalties any extortions on Russian merchants at
Kaffa and Azof; he also sent an envoy, accompanied by some Constan-
tinople merchants to Moscow by way of Kief. They were stopped and
sent back again by order of Alexander of Lithuania, on the plea that
Turkish envoys had never hitherto crossed Lithuania and that they
might ibe spies. These grievances, we are told, Ivan magnanimously
overlooked, and even went so far as to write a paternal letter to Alexander
when the latter proposed to create an appanage for his son Sigismund
out of Kief, reminding him of the terrible mischief the system of
appanages had caused in Russia. One can hardly doubt that there was
some hidden policy behind this advice. It was treated with scant
courtesy, and Alexander's reply was bitter and caustic. Ivan contented
himself with entering into a new alliance with Mengli Girai and Stephen
of Moldavia.

A revolution now took place at Kazan, by which Muhammed Amin gave
place to Abdul Latif. Both these princes were sons of Nursaltan, the
wife of Mengli Girai, and Ivan sent to tell her, and assured her at the
same time that the principality should always remain in her family. She
wrote to thank him, and told him she had recently returned from a
pilgrimage to Mecca, and that she intended going to Russia to see her
children. Mengli Girai also presented the Grand Prince with the ruby
ring of Muhammed II. Ivan now sent off Michael Plestcheief as his
envoy to the Sultan Bajazet, whose son Mahmed-Shikhzoda was the
sultan of Kaffa. He was furnished with letters and guides by the Krim
Khan. As usual, Ivan gave punctilious directions as to his envoy's
behaviour. He was not to kneel nor to address himself to the pashas,
but only to the Sultan himself. He carried out his instructions too
faithfully ; when the pashas asked him to dinner and offered him a
present of some rich robes and of 10,000 sequins for his entertainment,
he replied boorishly that he would not wear their garments, had no
need of their money, and wished to communicate with the Sultan
personally. Bajazet, notwithstanding this rudeness, was very complacent,
and sent Ivan a civil message. In a note which he wrote to Mengli

* Anfti 334, 325i

462 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Girai, however, he complained of the rudeness of the envoy, and said
that he did not send any of his own people back with him lest they
should be uncivilly treated ; he also ordered that his son, the sultan of
Kaffa, should correspond directly with the Muscovite tzar *

Meanwhile he continued to encourage the Krim Khan.t The latter
demanded from the Lithuanians the cession of Kief, Kanief, and other
towns formerly conquered by Batu. He was somewhat embarrassed,
however, by the policy of the Turkish sultan. " Tiie Sultans," he wrote
to Ivan, "are not straightforward people, their actions do not correspond
with their words. Formerly the lieutenants of Kaffa were subordinate to
me. Now it is governed by Bajazet's son, who certainly listens to me,
for he is young, but who can answer for the future. As an old proverb
says, * Two sheep's heads cannot be put in the same pan.* If we quarrel
things will go badly, and you know men will not stay where they are not
comfortable. You therefore capture Kief and Cherkask. I will send my
people across the Dnieper, and you may dispose of them as you will."
Ivan replied, " I constantly pray God to restore to us our ancient
patrimony of Kief, and nothing will be more agreeable to me than the
idea of being your neighbour."+

The unnatural struggle between Ivan and his son-in-law Alexander
continued, as I have described, and Mengli Girai reaped a natural
harvest in ravaging the unfortunate Lithuanians. He made a terrible
raid into their country in the year isoo.§ The following year we find
Alexander allying himself with Sheikh Ahmed of the Golden Horde,
whose people were very hard pressed by the Krim Khan, while Sheikh
Ahmed himself was forced to seek an asylum in Lithuania, where he was
imprisoned. ||

MengU Girai wrote to inform Ivan of his success against his com-
patriots, and was duly thanked by him, and at the same time reminded
that but half his work was done, and urged to continue the cam-
paign against Poland.lF Soon after a coolness arose between the two
allies, in consequence of Ivan having dethroned Abdul Latif, the Khan
of Kazan, the Krim Khan's stepson, and once more replaced hii« by
Muhammed Arain. Mengli Girai wrote to urge that Abdul Latif was but
a young man, and his faults were those of youth, and asking the Russian
tzar to grant him an appanage in Russia or else to let him go to the
Krim. He threatened to break off his alliance with him unless he kept
his plighted word on this matter, and he added, " I send you a ring made
of the horn of an Indian animal called kaherden, which is an antidote
Against all poisons, wear it on your finger as a mark of my friendship,
and you will secure mine by granting my request." Ivan did not like to
trust Abdul Latif in the Krim, but he reconciled Mengli Girai by granting

* Karamzin, vi. 341*3434 i Vide ante, 329. I Karamzin, vi. 365. i Ante, 3^0.

B /<^.i 347. ^ Karamzin, vi., 390.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 463

the young prince a suitable establishment in Russia. The Krim Khan
thereupon sent his sons at the head of ninety thousand men to invade
Lithuania.* They ravaged Podolia, Red Russia, the Palatinate of
Sendomir, the environs of Rzeszof, Yaroslaf, Radom, and Belz, crossed
the Vistula, and pillaged Opatof and Kunof. The town of Pasianof
alone offered a slight resistance. They returned to the Krim with an
immense booty, and the following year commenced to pillage other
towns.t Well might the learned archbishop just quoted wonder how it
was possible for an army of Tartars thus to traverse at discretion ten
degrees of latitude, always marching through a hostile country and
always plundering, and yet with no efforts made to defeat him, or to
recover the plunder or prisoners he was carrying off. Well might he inveigh
against a republic of rich proprietors who, each shut up in his castle,
cared little for the citizens of the unwalled towns or the peasants, who were
being swept off, and less for the common- weal and against a disintegrated
oligarchy, with a king having Uttle power, and an exchequer seldom full,
and otherwise badly organised; and well might he long for some despotic
hand to seize the helm, and make the rich and powerful sacrifice them-
selves somewhat for the good of the State, and organise a power strong
enough to repel these barbarians.

This condition of things in Poland partially explains and excuses a
step which Alexander took at this time. His faithful ally Sheikh Ahmed,
who had with every confidence trusted himself in Lithuania, was put in
durance by Alexander, who now had something to hold in ierrorem over
the Krim Khan, to whom he in fact wrote to tell him that his enemy was
in his power, and that if he refused to make peace, he could at any
moment release him.| A treaty was accordingly entered into with
Mengli Girai, on condition that Sheikh Ahmed should be kept in
confinement. This was in i505.§

The tzar Ivan IIL died the same year, and was succeeded by his
son Vasili,|l who sent envoys to the Krim Khan to renew his father's
treaty with him.^ This was followed by the unfortunate expedition to
Kazafi, which I have already described.**

Meanwhile, notwithstanding these treaties, the Tartars continued to
ravage Poland and Russia. In 1506 they wasted Podolia and the
neighbouring districts, carrying off a hundred thousand prisoners and a
large booty. Having returned again, they reached within a day's
march of Lida in Lithuania. Alexander, who was on his death-bed,
exhorted his timid people to make head against them, and we are told
that Prince Michael GHnski, putting himself at their head, routed them.tt
The following year they made a raid upon Russia, but they were

* Karamzin, vi. 393-395. t De Bohucz, 362. X Ante, 346.

^ De Bohucz, 364. J-i4«««, 343. f Karamzin, vii. 4. ** Anie.iZo.

It De Guignes, iii. 398. Karamzin, vii. 15.

464 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

defeated in recrossing the Oka, and forced to abandon the booty they
had captured.* These raids were probably made against the Khan's
wishes, for his authority over his turbulent subjects was not very great.
In 1509 we find him writing to Vasili, asking him to send him his
stepson Abdul Latif, the young prince of Kazan. This was refused, but
the tzar granted the latter the town of Koshira as a fief; and soon after,
Mengli Girai having probably heard of the peace which Vasili had made
with Sigismund of Poland,t sent some envoys with a treaty signed with
a golden seal, in which an alliance, offensive and defensive, against
Lithuania and the Astrakhan Tartars was stipulated for. He also
promised to protect Russian merchants, &c. These envoys were very
well received. They twice dined at Vasili's table, and in token of good-
will he twice put his hands on them. Mengli Girai asked his friend
to send an army against Astrakhan, promising in return to press
upon the Lithuanians. He asked also for falcons, sables, narwhal's
horns, cuirasses, and a large silver vase, and for the tribute
which the princes of Odoef were wont to pay him, and further, that
Abdul Latif might be allowed to go to the Krim to see his mother.J
This last request was refused, but in lieu of Koshira Vasili gave the
young prince the town of Yurief, and the grant and Abdul Latif's oath
of fidelity to Russia were attested by the envoys of Krim. Vasili also
refused to embroil himself with Astrakhan on the plea that Russia was
too weak and too much menaced. He sent Morozof, governor of
Perevitsk, to take back his answer. This envoy had not an easy time of
it. The Tartar grandees had not forgotten that they were formerly
masters of the Russians, and treated him with scant civility. "I
dismounted," he says to Vasili, " before the palace. At the entrance I
met the princes of the Khan. They all saluted your ambassador except
the murza Kudoiar, who would have treated me as his servant. The
interpreter having refused to translate his insolent language, the murza
got furious and wished to stab him, and tore with violence a pelisse from
the hands of my secretary, who bore the presents. At the entrance my
way was stopped by the sentinels with their batons, who demanded an
entrance fee. I pushed aside their batons and entered the presence of
the tzar, who with the tzarevitches received me well. They presented
a cup out of which they had themselves drunk, and I in turn presented
it to the princes except Kudoiar, and I said to the Khan, Great king,
judge between me and this insolent murza. I am your servant as
well as my master's, but not the servant of Kudoiar. By what right
does he insult an envoy and take from us the presents we bear for you."
Mengli Girai made some excuses for the murza, but on Morozof's
withdrawal he reprimanded him and drove him away. Morozof himself
was not apparently very conciliatory, and on one of the Khan's sons

* De Guignes, loc. cit. t^H/^382- I Karamzin, vii., 27.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 465

having menaced him with imprisonment on account of the meanness of
the presents he bore, he repHed, " I do not fear your chains, I only fear
God, my prince, and your tzar. If you insult vte, my master will no
longer send you persons of distinction." The fact was, Mengli Girai was
getting old, and the reins of power in such a turbulent community
needed a stronger hand.

In 1 5 10 Nursaltan, Mengli Girai's wife, visited Moscow, as I have
described,* and returned home again favourably impressed with her visit,
but matters did not proceed according to her wish. The mutual strife of
Russia and Poland made it easy for the wily Tartars, who plundered
both countries and took bribes freely from both sides, to play their cards.
We now find them allying themselves with Sigismund, Alexander's
successor. He undertook to pay the Krim Khan an annual subsidy of
fifteen thousand ducats on condition that he broke with Russia and
ravaged its frontiers. Accordingly in May, 1512, Ahmed and Burnat
Girai, sons of Mengli Girai, entered and pillaged the provinces of Bielef
and Odoef. They retired, however, on the approach of the Russians
under Daniel Stchenia. Ahmed Girai then turned towards Riazan,
where a similar bold front on the part of the Muscovites made him
withdraw. Burnat Girai was more venturesome. He advanced as far as
the capital of Riazan, and captured some of its fortifications, but was
then driven away by a Muscovite army, which pursued him across the
steppes as far as Tikaya-Sosna. Vasili wrote to complain, and Mengli
Girai replied that what had been done had been the work of the young
princes, without his authority or even his knowledge. Thus was
destroyed for ever, says Karamzin, the alliance between Krim and
Russia, which had been of such service to the latter in consolidating its
power, and Krim became in future one of its most troublesome enemies.t
Vasili determined to strike the evil at the root, declared war against
Sigismund, and bitterly announced that as long as his horse could walk,
or his sword preserved its edge, he would not allow Lithuania either
peace or repose. He set out with a large army, and to animate the
courage of his soldiers, provided casks of hydromel from which
they could help themselves as much as they pleased. This made
them drunk, and they were defeated in an assault on Smolensk. Vasili
withdrew to Moscow, but he was not long before he again attacked
the same city and devastated its environs. He was obhged, however, to
raise the siege on account of the approach of winter. Between these
two attacks died Helena, Vasili's sister, who had been the cause of so
much irritating interference in the affairs of Lithuania on the part of
the Grand Prince. VasiU now entered into an alliance with the
Emperor Maximilian against Sigismund, by which the former was to
conquer Kief and the latter Prussia, which belonged to the Pohsh

* Ante, 383. t Op. cit., vil. 62.

466 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

king. The treaty was of small consequence, as the fickle emperor soon
changed his policy, but the fact of his having treated Vasili as an
emperor and given him the title of kaizer was afterwards remembered by
Peter the Great, and made the foundation of his own claims.*

In 1 5 14 we find Vasili sending an embassy to solicit a written treaty
of peace with Selim, the new Turkish Sultan, who had mounted the
throne after deposing his father. The grand vizier Kamal proudly
informed the boyards that he was not instructed to enter into such a
treaty with them, but that his master liked to know who were his friends
and who his enemies, so that he could regulate his conduct towards
them.t

About this time the Russians again marched on Smolensk. They had
with them a famous artillery train, manned chiefly by Germans and
Bohemians. The terrible havoc committed by the bombardment so
affected the citizens that they insisted on the surrender of the town.
Vasili entered it in triumph, received the homage of the inhabitants, and
marked his prudence by extreme clemency, by the renewal of the
privileges granted by former sovereigns and the distribution of largess.
Smolensk had been in Lithuanian hands for one hundred and ten years.
Its manners and costume had changed considerably, but its people still
remained Russians, and for the most part attached to the old faith.

Lord Beaconsfield has well said that the fortune of war is as change-
able as the moon. Soon after the capture of Smolensk the armies of
Moscow and Lithuania met on the river Orscha, the former eighty
thousand strong and the latter thirty-five thousand, but discipline, unity
of command, and skill made up for a want of numbers. The Russians
were disastrously defeated. The two chief commanders, six principal
boyards, thirty-seven princes, and more than one thousand five hundred
gentry, with all the luggage, artillery, and standards were the prizes of
the victors, and the Russian loss was altogether about thirty thousand
men.t The Lithuanian commander on this occasion was the famous
Constantine Ostroiski, of whom we have previously spoken. After his
victory he advanced upon Smolensk. • Treachery showed itself among
some of the citizens there. Thereupon its commander, Prince Shuiski,
had the traitors seized and hanged on the wall in view of the besieging
army ; some dressed in the fur and damask dresses which Vasili had
given them, others with silver cups, also his presents, hung about their
necks ; and when the assault was given it was bravely repulsed. The
Lithuanians merely succeeded in recovering Dubrovna, Mitislavl, and
Krichef, which had passed for a short time into Russian hands. This
was in 15 14. The news of Sigismund's victory soon reached the Krim, and
Muhammed, the Khan's son, determined to take advantage of it, and he
was urged to do so by Eustace Dashkovitch, a famous Lithuanian, who

* Id., 68. t Karamrin, vii. 73- I ^'^•. 83.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN. 467

had, like Constantine Ostroiski, submitted to the Russians, and, hke that
prince, returned once more to his own country. Having obtained from
Sigismund the grant of Kanief and Cherkask, he became the real
founder and organiser of the Cossacks of the Dnieper or Zaporogian
Cossacks. He gave them chiefs, appointed them a special discipline,
and introduced among them the use of the gun and sword.* He and his
people formed for a long time a famous bulwark to Poland and
Lithuania, but on this occasion the young Krim Sultan somewhat
disappointed his ally, and retired without capturing the Ukraine towns,
which were the latter's aim. We now find Vasili sending an envoy to
Constantinople to complain of the conduct of the Krim Khan. Selim
was too much occupied with his Persian campaign to pay much attention
to these matters, and merely ordered that the traders at Azof and Kaffa
should not be molested.t

This was directly followed by the death of Mengli Girai, who for some
years had been a mere phantom sovereign. He was perhaps the most
famous of all the Krim Khans, and was a figure in general European
history no less than in that of Russia. He took part with fifty thousand
Tartars in the wars of Bajazet in Moldavia, and in reward for his services
at the capture of Kilia and Akkerman he was assigned an annual revenue
from the ports of Kaffa, Koslef, and Balaklava, which was administered
as long as the Khanate lasted, by an aga who was named Yali Agasi
(z.(?., the Aga of the Shores), and who had also control of Kilia and
Akkerman, which formed part of the grant.t Mengli Girai also subdued
the people of Circassia, and built the palisade of Ferhkerman at Perekop,
and those of Jankerman and Karakerman on the Dnieper, and estab-
lished a school and mosque at Seljaik.§

During his reign the Venetians acquired and lost the monopoly of the
Euxine trade, which they bought from the Porte for an annual payment
of one thousand ducats. Besides the many private ships which were
engaged in the trade, the Venetian Government employed twenty-four
itself, of which four made an annual voyage from the Don to the Palus
M^otis. The chief merchandise exported from Tana, now called Azof,
which was their principal mart, was wax, for which the Venetians had a
famous reputation, and of which vast quantities were then used in the
services of the church ; corn, flour, butter, salt fish, caviare, and furs of
all kinds ; the rhubarb root from Astrakhan, hemp, flax, and coarse
linen.

The Venetians did not long retain their monopoly however. The
Turkish Sultan having cast longing eyes on the island of Cyprus, the
noble Venetian Cornaro gave his daughter in marriage to James, king of
that island, and at the same time she was declared to be the daughter of

*/</., 86, 87. 1/^.,88. I Nouv. Journ. Asiat,, xii. 358. Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 44.
^ Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 359.

468 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the republic, and the Venetians took the island solemnly under their
protection. Bajazet, much annoyed, declared war against them,
and interdicted their access to the Black Sea ; and although this was
afterwards removed, the competition of the Greeks and Turks greatly
affected their trade. Eventually Sultan Suliman entirely prohibited them
from trafficking there, and reserved its commerce for his own subjects.*

Mengli Girai struck coins at Kaffa and Krim.t He died in 1515, and
left several sons. Muhammed Girai, Behadur Girai, Mahmud Girai,
Feth Girai, Bektash Girai, Mubarek Girai, Sahib Girai, and Saadet
Girai are mentioned by the author of the history of the Krim Khans,
translated by M. Kazimirski. Ahmed, named by Karamzin as
Muhammed's next brother and kalga, was probably the same person as
Behadur. He also names another son named Burnat.J Mengli Girai
was succeeded by his eldest son Muhammed.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN.

The new Khan was very different to his father. He was a drunkard
and a slave to women, and was better fitted for the leader of roving
plunderers than the sovereign of a settled State. On his accession he
appointed his brother Behadur Girai as kalga, and sent another brother.
Sahib Girai, as a hostage to Constantinople. He treated the envoy of
Vasili with courtesy, but, seduced by the bribes of Sigismund, speedily
changed his policy, demanded that the Grand Prince should restore the
towns of Briansk, Starodub, Novgorod-Severski, Putivle, and the other
conquests of Ivan to the Lithuanians, that he should set free the
prisoners he had made, and should pay a tribute to him for Odoef, and
he accompanied his demands with a threat of war. Vasili meanwhile
intrigued with some of the grandees of the horde, and especially with
Muhammed II.'s brother, who was kalga or heir to the throne. He
treated the Krim Khan's envoy with distinction, and to please him
released Abdul Latif, who had been put under arrest. He was allowed
to go hunting and to visit the palace, but was not permitted to join his
mother, who wished him to accompany her on a journey to Mecca.
Mamonof was sent to the Krim with Vasili's answer, which was a firm
assertion of his rights over the Lithuanian towns, and a refusal of the
demands of the Khan. He was also commissioned to gain over the
grandees of the horde. His mission was nearly successful. Muhammed
Girai undertook to break off his connection with Lithuania, and to send
one of his sons to Russia as a gauge of his sincerity, on condition that
Vasili would despatch an army to Astrakhan. The treaty was nearly

De Bohucz, 366, 367. t Blau, op. cit., 62. Frsehn Res., 413.

I Nouv. Journ. Asiat,, xii. 359.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN. 469

signed, when an envoy came from Sigismund with a present of five
hundred pieces of cloth and thirty thousand ducats. This was too much
for the versatile Khan, and he at once changed his policy. There was a
famine impending over the Taurida in consequence of the bad harvest,
and we read that Behahur, son of Muhammed, made a raid upon Russia
and devastated the country of Mechersk and Riazan. On Vasili com-
plaining, Muhammed disavowed his son's acts. Meanwhile the Grand
Prince continued his intercourse with Muhammed's brother Ahmed, who
wished to secure himself an asylum in Russia in case of a revolution, for
he said " We live in unfortunate times, our father exercised supreme
authority over his sons and the princes, while now under my brother
every prince pretends to be tzar."* Ahmed was in command of Ochakof,
and without regard to his brother's aUiance with Lithuania, he fell upon
the latter country. Muhammed Girai himself, who with one hand
received the gold of Lithuania, held in the other the sword with which
he determined to secure fresh booty for himself, aware that the mutual
jealousy of Vasili and Sigismund would prevent him from being crushed,
accordingly sent forty thousand horsemen to ravage the south of
Lithuania.t At this time {i.e., in 15 16) the throne of Kazan became
vacant by the death of Muhammed Amin, and the Krim Khan, afraid
that the Nogais might secure the throne for one of the Astrakhan princes,
his rivals, again sent an envoy to Moscow with fair promises. His
crooked steps were once more turned aside by an opportune arrival of
Lithuanian gold, and instead of a treaty of peace, we read how in 15 17
twenty thousand troops from the Taurida made a raid upon Russia, and
advanced as far as Tula, whence they were forced to retire, and lost the
greater part of their number in a hasty retreat. J Vasih missed few
opportunities of harassing his Lithuanian neighbour. We now find him
entering into an alliance with the king of Denmark and the Teutonic
Knights, who had grown rich, had lost some of their martial qualities
and been subjected by the Polish king, but who promised to revive
under a more ambitious master. On the J 5th of April, 15 17, there
arri'^i^d at Moscow, on an embassy from the German Emperor, the
famous Baron von Herberstein, who has left us such a graphic account
of Muscovy. His object was, if possible, to secure a peace between
Russia and Lithuania, so that the Christians might offer a united front
to the Turks, who had recently captured Damascus, Jerusalem, and
Egypt, and whose progress was naturally viewed with alarm. These
negotiations did not stop the chronic war, and we find Sigismund
in the autumn of the ^ame year entering Russia to revenge himself
for a raid made upon his borders shortly before. A considerable
struggle ensued, in which the Lithuanians were beaten, the defeat of
Orsha was revenged, and the famous general Constantine Ostroiski

* Karamzin, vii. 93. t Id., 94. 1 lA., 97.

47© HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

acquired the soubriquet of the " fugitive."* Herberstein returned home
without effecting his purpose, and we soon after find Maximilian writing
to the Grand Master of the Teutonic order, with a message that sounds
strange indeed in our ears. " The integrity of Poland is necessary for the
general interest of Europe. The greatness of Russia is becoming
dangerous."t Negotiations continued, and at length Vasili agreed to a
truce with Lithuania during the year 15 19, on the basis of the slatus quo.
This was immediately followed by the death of Maximilian.:^

Abdul Latif, the Kazan refugee at Moscow, died in November, 15 18.
On Latif 's death Vasili sent the officer in whose arms he died to acquaint
his mother, and to complain of the raids made by the Krim Tartars.
Shadrin, the Muscovite charge d'affaires, returned to Moscow with
Muhammed Aga, and they were shortly afterwards followed by Chelichef,
Shadrin's companion, and by Kudoiar, an envoy from the Khan. They
were attacked and pillaged en route by the Tartars of Astrakhan, near
the river Samara, and had to march on foot as far as Putivle. Mean-
while the kalga Ahmed wrote to the Grand Prince, saying he could not
any longer support the ill-behaviour of his brother the Khan, and wished
to migrate to Russia. Vasili was also informed by Muhammed Girai
that his sons Behadur and Alp Girai had marched against Lithuania with
one hundred thousand men. He had also refused a sum of fifteen
thousand ducats which Sigismund had offered him. Shortly after
Ahmed was killed by his nephew Alp Girai, who took his place as
kalga. Hemmet, son of Ahmed, was then at Constantinople. § Soon
after this Appak, a favourite of the Khan's and a persona grata at
Moscow, was sent to Vasili with the draft of a treaty, in which an alliance
was proposed against Lithuania and the family of Ahmed {i.e., the
Khanate of Astrakhan). Appak wore a turban, and refused to take it
off before the Grand Prince. " Why this innovation," said the boyards,
"you are neither Turk nor Mollah, and are not going to make the
pilgrimage to Mecca." He replied, he had obtained permission from
his master to make the pilgrimage, and had therefore donned the head-
gear of a pilgrim. Appak presented Muhammed Girai's letter on
his knees, and the treaty was put on a table beside the cross, when
VasiU swore these words : " Appak, I swear much friendship for my
friend Muhammed Girai, and swear to treat his friends as my own, and
to march against his enemies. Although Astrakhan is not here named,
I promise to march against it." He then lowered the crucifix.il

Muhammed Girai had determined that his brother Sahib Girai should
occupy the throne of Kazan, but Vasili, who was not anxious to revive
the Golden Horde again in its integrity in the person of the Krim Khan,
and who was treated as the patron of Kazan, nominated Shah Ali, the

1

♦/</., 106-108. tW., 112, 113. I/<i., 114. § Karamzin, vii. Note, 32.

11 Id., vii. 115 and 117.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN. 471

grandson of Ahmed of the Great Horde, who was a refugee in Russia, to
the post.* This took place while Kappak was at Moscow. Kappak
demanded how Vasili, the friend of the Krim Khan, could put his enemy
on the throne in this way. " Is there a dearth of princes," he said,
" or is the blood of the Great Horde better than that of Mengli Girai ?"
Vasili explained, probably with little sincerity, that it had been his
intention to nominate a relative of the Krim Khan to the post, but that
the grandees of Kazan insisted upon having Shah Ali, and in default
threatened to choose a Khan from among the Nogais or the Tartars of
Astrakhan. Appak was, it seems, satisfied with this answer, and soon
after and in the following year, 15 19, we read how the kalga Behadur
made a raid upon Lithuania at the head of one hundred thousand men,
ravaged the country with fire and sword, and advanced as far as Cracow.
Having defeated Constantine Ostroiski, he captured sixty thousand
prisoners, and slaughtered even a greater number.

Appak left Moscow much pleased with his visit, but the Grand Prince
deemed it prudent to conciliate one whom the Krim Khan feared, namely,
the Turkish Sultan, and he accordingly sent as his envoy thither
Golokvastof, who was further instructed to have an interview with
Hemmet, the son of the murdered kalga Ahmed, who had been friendly
to Russia, and whom report said the Sultan intended to promote to the
Khanate of Krim. He was to offer him an asylum in Russia, and also
an appanage. Selim received the envoy well, ordered his pashas to
march to the frontiers of Lithuania, and to encourage free trade between
Turkey and Russia.t

We now find Leo X,, whom we are accustomed to consider rather as
the patron of art and neo-paganism, and as a confirmed sensualist,
who had sustained Sigismund and denounced the Russians as heretics,
busying himself in an endeavour to stir up some enthusiasm among the
Christian nations and to arouse them against the Turks. His medium
of communication with VasiU was the Grand Master of the
Teutonic knights, who was a Foman Catholic. He urged upon Vasili
that v^s the descendant of a Greek princess he was the legitimate
descendant of the old emperors of Byzantium, that the unity of Poland
and Lithuania would cease on Sigismund's death, and it was therefore
prudent for him to wait till his western neighbours were separated ; that
the Greek church being without a virtual head, would have to elect the
Russian metropolitan as its patriarch, and he pressed him strongly to join
the Christian league against the Muhammedans.t The counsel of the
pope did not override Albert the Grand Master of the Prussian knight's
hatred for Sigismund, and when the envoys of Vasili repaired to his
capital, Konigsberg, and took him a large consignment of ducats, he
prepared to attack Lithuania.§ The Russians made a cruel and

* Ante, 385. t Id., 121. I fd., iai-125. i Id., 126, 127.

472 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

devastating raid upon the Lithuanian borders, and Sigismund saw his
people decimated, not only by war but by pestilence ; but he was equal
to the occasion. Having made a six months' truce with Russia and the
Krim Tartars, he concentrated his forces upon the Prussian knights.
Albert's few hundred followers fought bravely, and the mercenaries he
hired in Germany laid siege to Dantzig, but they were forced to withdraw
by want of resources, and he was compelled to make peace after losing
Marienverder, Holland, &c.*

A more powerful diversion in favour of the threatened fortunes of
Poland was made by Muhammed Girai of Krim, who had suspected the
motives of Vasili in nominating Shah AU to the throne of Kazan,
but had nursed his hatred during the reign of the great Turkish Sultan
Selim. When the latter died, in 1 521, Vasili sent an envoy to compliment
his son SuHman on his accession, who urged upon his vassal the
danger he would incur by molesting Russia. The latter urged upon
him in turn, '^ That Vasili was leagued with the enemies of the Porte,
that he supplied the king of Persia with artillery and with men to
work it, and that he was endeavouring to stamp out the faith at Kazan
and to displace its mosques by Christian churches." His intrigues, we
are told, were frustrated by the pashas of Azof and Kaffa, and when
Suhman turned his arms against Hungary, Muhammed Girai was
ordered to devastate Lithuania. We thus see that the progress of the
Turks in Europe was at every point assisted by the policy of Russia.

Shah Ali, the Khan of Kazan, was utterly despised by his people,
and Muhammed Girai, taking advantage of this, urged upon them to
accept his brother Sahib Girai as their ruler. The latter accordingly
marched thither, seized the town, imprisoned Shah Ali, the Russian
envoy Vasili Yurief, and the voivode Karpof, and pillaged and laid
hands on the Russian merchants ; he afterwards permitted Shah Ali
to retire to Moscow.t Having seized Kazan, and knowing that Vasili
would not submit to such an affront, he collected a great force, and
being joined by the Nogais and the Cossacks of the Dnieper, rapidly
advanced upon Muscovy. Vasili had only time to collect a meagre
force on the Oka, which was put under the command of the young
prince Dimitri Belski. This was badly defeated. Meanwhile Sahib
Girai advanced along the Volga from Kazan, and joined his brother
at Kolomna, devastating the country as he went, massacring the people
and desecrating the churches.J The monastery of Saint Nicholas on the
Ugrisha and the village of Ostrof, Vasili's favourite residence, were burnt,
and climbing the heights of Vorobief, overlooking Moscow, the Tartars
made themselves drunk with hydromel from Vasili's cellars. The
confusion inside the city may best be described in the words of a con-
temporary author, Herberstein.

• /rf., 129. t Ante, 386. I Karamzin, vii. 134.

MUHAMMED GIRAl KHAN. 473

'•■ Such was the tumuU," he says, " which arose at the gates from the
thronging of women, children, and other helpless people, who in their
intrepidation fled into the fortress with carriages and vehicles of all
kinds, that in their haste they checked each other's progress, and many
were trampled under foot. This immense concourse of persons caused
the air to become so pestilential in the fortress, that if the enemy had
remained three or four days under the walls of the city, they must have
been seized by the plague and died, for in so great a crowd huddled
together they were obliged to satisfy nature wherever they could find a
place. There were at that time at Moscow some Livonian ambassadors,
who mounted their horses and betook themselves to flight, and seeing
nothing around them but fire and smoke, and supposing themselves to
be surrounded by Tairtars, made such speed that in one day they reached
Tuer, which is thirty-six German miles distant from Moscow. The
German bombardiers deserved great praise on that occasion, especially
one Nicholas, born not far from Spier, an imperial city of Germany near
the Rhine, to whom was committed, in very flattering terms, the task of
defending the city by the governor and all the councillors, who were
almost stupefied with excess of fear, and who begged him to bring up the
larger guns, which were used for breaching walls, under the gate of the
fortress, in order to drive away the Tartars. The size of these guns,
however, was such that three days would scarcely be sufficient to convey
them to the spot, and they had not enough gunpowder even to load the
largest gun with one charge, for it is continually the custom with the
Russians to be behindhand in everything, and never to have anything
ready, but when necessity presses they are anxious to finish everything
rapidly. Nicholas therefore considered it advisable to have the smaller
guns, which were kept hidden at a distance from the fortress, quickly
fetched into the intei^ior on men's shoulders ; but during the delay a cry
suddenly arose that the Tartars were at hand, which caused so much
fear amongst the townspeople that the guns were left scattered, and even
the defence of the walls was neglected. If a hundred of the enemy's
cavalryfhad at that time attacked the city, they might easily have razed
it to the ground with fire. In the midst of their fear, the governor and
the garrison thought it best to appease king Muhammed Girai by sending
him a great number of presents, principally consisting of mead, in order
to induce him to raise the siege. Muhammed Girai accepted the gifts
and promised that he would not only raise the siege but would also quit
the province, if Vasili would bind himself in writing to pay him a
perpetual tribute, as his father and ancestors had done.- Letters to this
effect having been wiUingly written and accepted, Muhammed Girai with-
drew his army to Riazan. After granting the Russians permission to
redeem and exchange prisoners, he sold the rest of his booty by auction.
There was at that time in the cam.p of the Tartars one Eustace,

2 M

474 TTTSroRY OF THE MONGOLS.

surnamecl Taskovitch, a subject of the King of Poland, who had brought
forces to the assistance of Muhammed Girai, for hostiUtles were at that
time pending between the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of
Muscovy. This man brought up to the fortress some of the spoils for
sale, with the intention that when an opportunity offered he should rush
into the gates together with the Russians who had come out to make
purchases, and beating down ^the sentinels, thus take possession of the
fortress. The king was willing to aid the attempt with corresponding
subtlety. He sent one of his people in whom he could place confidence
to demand of the governor of the fortress, as the servant of his tributary,
to supply him with whatsoever he required, and to come himself to him.
The governor, however, Ivan Kovar, who was well acquainted with
warlike matters and with the stratagems employed therein, could not be
induced on any account to leave the fortress, but simply replied that he
had not yet learned that his prince had become the tributary and
servant of the Tartars, but that when he should be officially informed on
that point it would be necessary that he should receive instructions as to
what he should do. Whereupon the prince's letters, in which he had
bound himself to the king were produced and exhibited. While the
governor was thus perplexed by the exhibition of these letters, Eustace,
in pursuance of his own plan, approached nearer and nearer to the
fortress, and in order the more perfectly to conceal his plan, the Kniez
Feodor Lopata, a man of distinction, with several other Russians who
had fallen into the enemy's hands in the taking of Moscow, were restored
upon payment of a certain ransom. In addition to this, several of the
prisoners who had been too negligently guarded, or had in any manner
l)een relieved from labour, had escaped into the fortress, and as the
Tartars approached the fortress in great multitudes to demand them
back again, and did not withdraw from the fortress although the Russians
in the fright gave up the refugees, this accession of new comers greatly
increased the number of the Tartar assailants, so that the terror and
despair of the Russians, on account of the danger which threatened them,
was so complete that they w^ere quite at a loss what to do. At this
juncture one Johan Jordan, an artilleryman, a German, who came fiom the
Innthal, estimating more clearly than the Russians the magnitude of the
danger, of his own accord discharged the guns which had been ranged in
order against the Tartars and Lithuanians, and so terrified them that they
all left the fortress and fled. The king {i.e., the Khan) sent Eustace, the
contriver of the above plan, to remonstrate with the governor on account
of the injury thus inflicted, but the latter declared the bombardier had
fired the guns without his consent or knowledge, and laid all the blame
of the offence upon him ; upon which the king demanded that the
bombardier should be given up to him, and, as often occurs in desperate
cases, the greatest number decided that the man by whom they had been

MUHAMMEP GIRAI KHAN, 475

delivered from the fear of their enemies should be given up. The
governor, Ivan Kovar, alone refused, and by his extreme goodness that
German was on that occasion saved, for it so happened that the king,
either from impatience of further delay, or because he considered his
soldiers already sufficiently incumbered with booty, and that his own
interest required it, raised his camp, and departed for Taurida, le-ivinc^
^behind in the fortress those letters of the Prince of Moscow by wlilch lie
•had bound himself to pay him a perpetual tribute. But he took with
-him from Moscow so great a multitude of prisoners as would scarcely be
<£onsidered credible, they say that the number exceeded eight hundred
thousand, part of whom he sold in Kaffa to the Turks, and part he slew.

" The old and infirm men, who will not fetch much at sale, are given
up to the Tartar youths (much as hares are given to whelps by way of
their first lesson of hunting), either to be stoned or to be thrown into the
sea, or to be killed by any sort of death they might please. Those who
are sold are compelled to serve for full six years ; after that they are set
free, but dare not leave the province. Sahib Girai, King of Kazan, sold
all the captives which he took from Moscow to the Tartars, in the
mercantile city of Astrakhan, which is situated not far from the mouth of
the Volga."*

Karamzin tells us the Eustace Taskovitch above mentioned was the
hetman of the Cossacks of the Dnieper.t He is called Eustace, Prince
Rushinskoi by Scherer.J The Tartar invasion left grim traces along its
course. We are told that all the villages from Nijni Novgorod and
Voronetch as far as Moscow were burnt, and the inhabitants for the most
part carried off.§ Herberstein tells us the Germans who had done so well
were meanly treated by Vasili, an early proof of the jealousy of Russian
officials. In punishing those who had been guilty of ill-behaviour the
real offenders escaped, and a scapegoat was found in an experienced
officer named Ivan Vorotinski, whose punishment vicariously covered
the ill-behaviour of others less worthy than himself ||

Muhammed Girai issued orders on his return that his people were to
keep-^hemselves in readiness for a campaign, and in the spring Vasili
posted a strong force on the Oka to repel them. It was the best
equipped army the Russians had as yet put into the field, and we are
told that this was the first occasion on which field artillery was used Ijy
them.

The Grand Prince was so elated by the sight of his troops that he sent
Muhammed a message by a herald, saying, '^ Traitor, you have broken
the peace, violated treaties ; like a brigand, an assassin, and an
incendiary you have attacked my country unawares ; but, if you have the
.courage of a warrior, come now, I challenge you to fight in the open.

'Herberstein, ii. 62-65. T Op. dt., vii. 137. J Annalea de la Petite Russia, ii.

§ Karamzin, vii. 139. [ Herberstein, ii. 65. Karamzin, vii. 140,

476 HISTORY OF THE MOXGOLS.

country." The Khan replied '' That he knew the road to Russia, as well
as an opportune time for attacking it, and that he was not in the habit of
taking counsel from his enemies as to when and where he should fight."
He in fact marched against the Circassians and Mingrelians.*

As the summer waned without the arrival of the Tartars, Vasili
retired to Moscow, and there met the Prince of Mankup, who went as
the envoy of the Sultan Suliman, but nothing followed but an inter-
change of civilities. It is curious to trace the course of Russian
diplomacy at this time, and its servile fawning on the Sublime Porte,
while the Turks were devastating Western Christendom, and trampling
down Hungary, conquering Rhodes, and attacking Malta. t Vasili, after the
late inroad, was desirous of making peace with Lithuania, and a truce of
five years, beginning with December, 1522, was agreed upon, by which
the Dnieper, the Ivaka, and the Meria were treated as the frontiers of
the two countries, and Smolensk remained attached to Russia. Thus
terminated a struggle which had lasted ten years. One of its conse-
quences was the ruin of the Teutonic order. Sigismund acknowledged
its Grand Master as hereditary ruler of the towns under the control of
the Order, on condition that he became a feudatory of Poland, and he
granted the new sovereign as arms a black eagle, having his own initial
" S." inserted in it.J Thus commenced the history of Modern Prussia.

Vasili had no wish to embroil himself with the Krim Khan, but kept
his eyes steadily fixed on Lithuania. Notwithstanding the murderous
raid the Tartars had made on Russia, we find the Grand Prince sending
an envoy named Naumof to the Crimea to offer peace. The Khan
assented to this, and then proceeded with his campaign against
Astrakhan, with whose princes the Girai's had a never-ending
quarrel.§ Muhammed was successful, and the Astrakhan Khan was
driven away ; but in the midst of the rejoicings after the victory, the
Nogais, who had been his allies, treacherously plotted against him, and
having suddenly attacked the Khan and his son Behadur in their tent,
they put them to death, and falling unawares on the Taurians, who were
carelessly enjoying themselves in their camp, they dispersed them and
pursued them as far as the Don. Two of Muhammed's sons, with' some
fifty princes, reached the Taurida, but the ruthless Nogais pursued them
there, and harried the cattle and burnt the villages of the Krim
Tartars. The latter, having collected a force of twelve thousand men,
ventured to oppose them, but were completely defeated, and with
difficulty saved themselves at Perekop, which was defended by the
Sultan's janissaries. To complete their misfortunes, the hctman of
the Cossacks of the Dnieper, who had formerly been their ally, attacked
and burnt the defences of Ochakof, and carried off all that was portable. ||

* De Guignes, iii. 40^, t Karamzin, vii. 143. J Id., 145, 146. § /t/.,

J Id:. 158, 159.

SAADET GIRAI KHAN. . 477

Such a disaster proves how very fickle and transitory the good fortune
of nomade communities often is. It seems hardly credible that the
power of a kingdom which had recently ravaged the very heart of
Russia should have been so easily shattered by such an attack.

Muhammed Girai was fifty-eight years old when he was killed. He
left four sons, Baba Girai, Gazi Girai, Islam Girai, and Uzbeg Girai.*
Muhammed Girai struck coins at Krim, Kaffa, and Baghchi-Serai.t

GAZI GIRAI KHAX.

The people of Krim, when they heard of the fute of the Khan,
repented having deserted him, and after burying his body with due
solemnity, proceeded to instal his son Gazi Girai in his place. The latter
nominated his brother Baba as kalga. Fearing that the brothers might
revenge themselves on them for the misfortune which had overtaken
their father Muhammed, the Tartars began to declare against Gazi,.on
the ground that he had not been confirmed by the Turkish Sultan,
and they accordingly sent Memish bey mirliwai of the tribe Shirin, to
Constantinople, with an account of what had occurred, and a request
that Gazi should be deposed. Having met there with Saadet Girai,
the brother of Muhammed, who had been sent, to the Sultan as a
hostage, he encouraged him to make an attempt upon the throne.
Saadet duly obtained investiture, and set off for the Krim, accom-
panied by a number of janissaries. The uncle and nephew were now
ranged on opposite sides, and were about to fight, when, by the
intervention of Memish bey and others, an arrangement was made,
by which Saadet was to be Khan while Gazi became his kalga. The
two princes proceeded to B'aghchi-Serai, but as Gazi was about to take
the oath of allegiance, and to lower the lappet of his robe for the
purpose, one of the Khan's attendants, who had been previously
instructed, struck him from behind and killed him. Baba Girai suffered
the same fate. Gazi Girai was only twenty years old when he was thus
killed, and had reigned but six months. J De Bohucz says that when
deposed by the Porte he was granted a pension of one thousand aspras
(i.e., 2| ducats) per day.§ No coins of Gazi Girai are apparently known.

SAADET GIRAI KHAN.

Saadet Girai nominated his nephew Devlet Girai as his kalga, and
proceeded to offer his alliance to the Grand Prince Vasili. " Your

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 3G2 and 365. t Elau, op. cit., 62, 63.

I Noav. Journ. .Asiat., xii. 362-364. Karamzin, vii. 159. § Op. cit,, 370

478 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

father,"" he wroic, ■" made a rampart of mine, whose sword he employed
to cut off the heads of his enemies. We ought therefore to be friends.
I have a powerful army, and am protected by the Sultan. Hussein, tzar
of Astrakhan is my friend, he of Kazan is my brother. The Nogais,
Circassians, and Tumians obey my laws, the Vlakhs act as guides, and
also as shepherds to my flocks. I would live at peace with you. Do not
disturb my relative at Kazan. Forget the past, and we will not leave
any peace to the Lithuanians.'"* He also asked for sixty thousand altins
from Vasili, urging that friends ought not to think anything of such
trifles. It was known at Moscow that the Crimea had been reduced to a
terrible condition by the recent war, and that Saadet Girai could not
command more than twelve thousand men. Vasili, nevertheless, deter-
mined to make a treaty with him, so as to protect his frontier from raids
from the Taurida, but he would not give him any money. As to the
Khan of Kazan, he said that sovereigns made war, but they did not kill
each other's envoys and peaceable merchants, and that he could not
have any peace with a felon.t The Russians w^ere already in fact
marching against Kazan, and we arc told that when he heard the news.
Sahib Girai, who was Khan there, retired to the Taurida, leaving his
nephew Safa Girai in command. J I have described the struggle which
followed at Kazan. §

Saadet Girai was much attached to Turkish customs, and thence he
became unpopular in the Krim. His nephew Islam, the brother of the
last Khan Gazi, became his rival. He had already driven him away twice,
and peace was only secured when he appointed Islam as his kalga. He
then made a raid upon Lithuania, and a demand for money from the
Grand Prince, who, we are told, continually decreased the value of his
presents as he thought Saadet's power was reaching its term. His
envoys were at Moscow when Vasili heard that the kalga, Islam, was'
marching towards Russia. || The Russian troops had advanced to the
Oka, and gone into autumn quarters in the various towns there, when the
Tartars suddenly appeared in the district of Riazan, and began to
devastate it. They also ventured to threaten Kolomna and Moscow,
but they were defeated by the Russians. Yanglitch-murza, the first
favourite of Islam Girai, was among the prisoners. Vasili, enraged at
the perfidy of the Tartars, ordered the Khan's envoys to be drowned, but
presently being ashamed of this unpardonable revenge, he sent word to
the Krim that they had been slaughtered by the people of Moscow. The
Khan did not seem surprised at the news, and threw the whole blame of
the recent raid on Russia on his nephew Islam. This campaign took
place in 1527. Notwithstanding his professed friendship for Vasili,
Saadet Girai did not f^iil to plunder the Russian ambassador, nor did he

* Karamzin, vii. iCo. ] Id., i6i. I Id., 163. h Ante, 3S6, &c.

1; Karamzin, vii. 186.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN. 479

restrain his troops from attacking the districts of Bielef and Tula.-*=- He
would seem to have had Httle hold on the people, and we are told that,
being convinced they preferred Islam Girai, he resigned the throne in
1532, and, with his kalga Devlet Girai, made his way to Constantinople,
where he was well received by the Sultan, and acquired considerable
fame in the Persian wars.t He lived there for seven years longer,
receiving a salary of three hundred thousand aspras, and an additional
crown demesne whose annual income was five hundred thousand aspras
per annum. He was buried in the mosque Eyub.J He had reigned for
nine years and three months, and was forty-six years old when he died.
Coins of Saadet Girai are described in Blau's cataIogue.§

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN.

Islam Girai was a usurper, and had not the sanction of the Sultan for
his throne. He named his brother Uzbeg Girai as kalga, but after a
reign of five months he resigned his authority into the hands of Suliman,
the Turkish Sultan, and asked him to nominate whom he hked in his
place. I know of no coins of Islam Girai.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN.

At this time Sahib Girai, the son of Mengli Girai, who had retired
from Kazan, as I have mentioned, || and had made a pilgrimage to
Mecca, was at Constantinople, where he had offered his services to
the Sultan. He had aided Suliman in his campaign in 1532 in Hungary.^
The latter now nominated him Khan of Krim. Sahib took with him
sixty pieces of artillery, one thousand janissaries, two hundred foot
soldiers, as many artillerymen, and the usual installation fee, known as
" the sekban akjesi {i.e., the dog-keeper's pay). He nominated Islam
Girai as kalga, and then proceeded, we are told, to build palaces, baths,
mosqflfes, and shops at Baghchiserai.

Safa Girai, the Khan of Kazan, had been driven away from the throne
in 1 531. He now appealed to his uncle, the Krim Khan, for assistance.
We accordingly read that in the autumn of 1533, at the season when the
Russian court was in the habit of going to Volok Lamski to hunt, the
Krim Tartars marched towards Kazan. The Russians were informed of
this by the kalga Islam, who tried to counteract the designs of Safa
Girai. The invaders burnt the environs of Riazan, but a number of
them were defeated near Zaraisk by the Russian troops, who captured

♦ Karamzin, vii. 186, 187. t De Guignes, iii. 403. Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 364.

I Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 50. § Op. cit., 63. i^«/e, 388. •[ Krim Khans, 52

480 IIlSlul<\ oi illE MONGOLS.

many prisoners. The Tartar guard was also defeated, and many of them
were drowned in the Osseter. The enemy then withdrew, but they
carried off a great many prisoners. Sahib Girai boasted that the
Russians lost one hundred thousand men in this campaign. He wrote,
however, to Vasili to say that the invasion had been without his sanction,
and had been the work of the tzarevitches alone, and that he had ordered
them to fight the Lithuanians and not the Russians. Nevertheless he told
him he must be on his guard, for his princes were constantly saying, " What
advantage do we derive from our friendly intercourse with Russia? hardly
a sable skin a year, while war would secure us thousands." " This," he
said "shuts my mouth. You may choose what you will, but if we are to
remain friends your presents must equal in value at least three or four
hundred prisoners." He demanded money and falcons ; he also asked
for a baker and a cook to be sent to him. Meanwhile the kalga wrote
Vasili a friendly letter, while Safa Girai sent one containing truculent
language. " I was once your son," he said, " but you did not care for my
friendship. This is the reason why misfortune has come upon you,
and that your country has been pillaged. You may, however, regain my
friendship. If you neglect it I promise you an unceasing war so long as
my uncle the tzar and the kalga live. I will ally myself with all your
enemies and exact a terrible vengeance."* But Vasili was rapidly
passing beyond the reach of these puerile threats ; he fell ill, and at length
died on the 3rd of November, I533.t He was succeeded by his infant
son Ivan IV., and the affairs of State were confiolled by a council of
regency.!

The reign of Ivan IV. is one of the most tingic stories in European
history. He was a mere child, and his surroundings were anything but
promising. " The hideous scene," says the caustic historian Kelly,
" opened with the saturnalia of that court which the two preceding
autocrats had suddenly called into existence in the midst of coarse and
brutal ignorance. Its nobles were barbarians, cither upstarts or fallen
from their pristine state. A great number of them were of the blood of
Rurik. P'ormerly, the whole empire was the theatre of their ambition }
its partition into appanages their end ; civil war their means : but now
that all was concentrated in the prince, their sole arena was his court ;
their end, the precarious power derived from favouritism ; their means,
intrigue ; they were without rules, without manners accordant to their
situation. They knew no other restraint than an iron despotism, whose
rude and ponderous mass had fallen into the hands of a female of
blighted character, the mother of an infant who was only three years of
age."§ She and her uncle lylichael Glinski were Lithuanians and
foreigners, and the great nobles were exceedingly jealous of both. Almost
within a week of the young tzar's accession, his oldest uncle Yuri

' Karamzin, vii. 204. t Vide ante, 394, & ,' , po. ^ Op. cit;, i. 133.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN. . 481

Ivanovitch was charged with treason and was imprisoned, together with
his supposed abettor Prince Andrew Shuiski.* This was followed by the
imprisonment and execution of Michael Glinski, who had dared to
denounce the paramour of Helena, Prince Ivan Obolenski-Telennef.t
Yuri Ivanovitch died in prison on the 26th of August, 1536, and it was
reported that he was starved to death. This frightened his brother
Andrew, who issued a manifesto in which he appealed to the feudal
soldiery of Russia to rescue the country from the oligarchy which ruled
it, but he was inveigled into visiting Moscow under false promises, and
was in turn imprisoned and put to death. His supporters, we are told,
were hanged at intervals along the Novgorod road.j

While terrorism reigned at home the regent entered into a sixty years'
treaty of peace with Sweden, and one of seventeen years with the
Livonian knights. By the latter the Narowa was fixed as the boundary
between Russia and Livonia. On another side Moldavia, which had been
a faithful friend to Russia, was utterly ruined and devastated by the
Turks under Sultan Suliman, and although it secured the election of its
own hospodar by the payment of a large annual tribute, a privilege which
it retained for a century, it no longer figures as an important element in
European affairs. §

Sigismund of Poland deemed the minority of the Grand Prince a
favourable opportunity for recovering the towns which Vasili had taken
from him, and incited the Krim Khan to invade Russia. Sahib Girai
accordingly sent his troops to attack the district of Riazan. They were,
however, met and repelled by the princes Punkof and Gatef.[| This was
in the year 1534. Sigismund was not more fortunate. His Pohsh
subjects were loath to move in aid of Lithuania, and were besides broken
into many parties with petty jealousies, and the consequence was that
the borders of Lithuania were ravaged with terrible effect, and the
Russians even advanced close to Vilna. They then thought it prudent
to withdraw.^f

Meanwhile matters took a curious turn in the Krim. The kalga,
Islam Girai, who was a partisan of Russia, raised a revolt against
SigismtfSid's ally the Khan Sahib, who was driven from the throne and
sought refuge at Kirkor, relying on the Turks, his patrons, to support
him. This threw Islam still more into the arms of Russia, and he
despatched a force of twenty thousand men against Lithuania, entered
into a treaty with, and swore friendship for " his young brother Ivan:' As
a reward for his rejection of the ten thousand gold pieces and twenty
thousand pieces of cloth offered him by Sigismund, he asked for a
present of some artillery and fifty thousand dengas. He also informed
the Russian court that Prince Bulgak, one of Sahib Girai's generals, had

* Karamzin, vii. 297-300. t /rf., 302-304- t W., 308. § Af., 311, 312,

II /^., 316, 317- fW., 317-521.

2N

482 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

left Perekop at the head of a body of plunderers. He in fact allied
himself with the Cossacks, and made a raid upon the district of Seversk.*
During 1535 the Russians and Lithuanians mutually harried each other's
lands ; the latter, assisted by fifteen thousand Krim Tartars, appeared on
the Oka, and burnt several villages of Riazan. Islam, who pretended it
was all the doing of Sahib Girai, is accused by Russian historians of
having betrayed his allies for Polish gold, and his envoy was arrested
at Moscow.t The Lithuanians now captured Gomel, Starodub, and
Pochepa. On the other side, the Tartars of Kazan were incited to rebel
by Sahib Girai, but the good fortune of Russia speedily returned. Its
soldiers repelled with great slaughter a furious attack made upon a
fortress called Ivanogorod on the Sebeya, which they had planted within
the Lithuanian borders. They recovered Pochepa and Starodub, and
built two new towns {i.e., Zavolochia and Veliya) on the enemy's land.
This was followed by a five years' truce, based on the status quo.X
Meanwhile Islam Girai wrote to the Russian court informing it that the
Turkish Sultan had determined to make war upon Russia, and that he
had been incited to do so by Simeon Belski, a prince of Prussian origin,
who had been formerly in the Russian service, and had a bitter quarrel
with the authorities at Moscow. Messengers were sent to Islam Girai to
ask that he would either give up the traitor (who was then in the
Taurida) or put him to death, but Islam Girai had ceased to exist. He
had been killed in a sudden attack made upon him by a Nogai called
Baki Beg, in alliance with Belski. § Von Hammer tells us Baki's brother
was Sahib Girai's father-in-law, and that Islam Girai was frozen to death
in a barrel full of water. || This was done with the assistance of
Raki, who was eventually treated in the same way, and both of
them were buried in one tomb. Ali Beg, the brother of Baki Beg,
whose daughter Sahib Girai had married, raised a body of twelve
thousand men to revenge him, but his troops were surprised in a defile
and destroyed. H The Russians in vain tried to seduce the Tartars, by
money, &c., to surrender Belski.**

Sahib Girai soon showed his hand. He plundered the Russian envoy,
and then cynically wrote to inform the tzar of the death of Islam Girai.
He at the same time offered him his friendship on condition that peace
was made with Kazan, which he said belonged to him, and that Prince
Vasili Shuiski or the grand equerry, Helena's paramour, Telennef was sent
as an envoy. In case the Russians continued to molest Kazan, they
were threatened with his vengeance, and he said he would heap ruins
Upon ruins.tt The boyards replied to his note in more courteous terms
than usual. They reminded him that a country belongs to the one who
conquers it, and that by this right the Khan of Kazan was the vassal of

* Id.y 322-324. t U., 326. I Id,, 336. $ Id., 339. I Krim Khans, 53.

^ Von Hammer, Osm. Ges,, ii. 181. ♦• Karamzin, vii. 340. \\Id.,ii,\.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN. 483

Russia. They promised, however, to forget the ill-deeds of Safa Girai,
the Kazan Khan, and to send a distinguished person as envoy to the
Krim, but not either of the two named in the Khan's note, their services
being required at Moscow. That city now received a notable addition
by the enlargement of the Kremlin. A much larger area covered with
shops was enclosed by a new wall protected by four towers. This
fortification received the Tartar name of Kitai, which means the middle
{i.e., " party wall"). Other fortresses and towers were built and repaired
during the regency. A great number of Lithuanians were persuaded to
settle in Russia by the grant of lands, while large sums were contributed
by the clergy and monasteries for the ransom of Russians held in
bondage by the Tartars.*

The coin was also improved and a new type introduced. The
St. George on the new pieces bore a lance instead of a sword,
whence they were called kopecka, from kopec, a lance.t While the
general policy of the regency seems to have been wise and prudent,
the grandees grew more jealous of Helena and her surroundings. At
length she died suddenly on the 3rd of April, 1538, as was generally
supposed, by poison.f A few days after, her paramour was seized,
imprisoned, and starved to death. The chief authority in the State was
now seized by the family of the Shuiski. They were descended from the
old princes of Suzdal, who had been deprived of their heritage by the
sons of Dimitri Donski, and had long been treated as dangerous
enemies of the State. Their power was limited by the rival pretensions
of the Belski, already named. The rivalry of the grandees pro-
duced anarchy in Russia, and naturally encouraged its neighbours to
attack it. Kelly sums up the state of things in a few graphic words.
'* The youthful Ivan was spared no more than his subjects. His treasury
was plundered, his dominions encroached upon. The great boyards,
masters of his palace, seemed hardly to endure his presence there, it was
their delight to degrade him. Shuiski, in his clownish insolence, was
seen to loll on Ivan's bed, and burden the lap of the descendant of so
many sovereigns with the unworthy weight of his feet."§ Thus was
nurtured the young prince. What wonder that he turned out a tiger.

Let us now turn our view to the Krim for a short space. After the
death of Islam Girai, Ahmed Girai, son of Saadet Girai, was appointed
kalga in his place, but having opposed the Khan, he was in turn deposed
and put to death, and Sahib Girai nominated his own son Amin Girai in
his place. He then proceeded to organise his kingdom. Hitherto the Krim
Tartars had no fixed settlements, and chiefly led the life of nomades.
He caused the chariots on which they travelled to be broken, houses
and villages to be built, and assigned special lands to the Tartars for
cultivation. He enlarged the fortress of Ferhkerman and made the

*id.,z\z. tw., 346. \U■^l^^. 1 Op. cit.,i. 134.

^84

HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

canal of Or {i.e., Perekop). The deeds by which he granted lands were
written in the Turk language, and sealed with the red and green seals in
use among the Mongols.* Sahib Girai, with eight thousand horsemen
and all his Oghlans and sons, took part in Sultan Suliman's campaign in
Moldavia in i538.t

In 1539 we find him writing to the Grand Prince to tell him he had
arrested his envoy, who was on his way to the hospodar of Moldavia, his
enemy. This was in return for what Vasili and Helena had done in
slaughtering the envoys he had sent to Kazan. He also reminded him
that he was master of one hundred thousand warriors, and that if each
one should carry off but one prisoner, it would prove a terrible loss to
Russia. He asked where he wished to see him, at Moscow or on the
Oka, and reminded him he would be accompanied by the great Sultan
SuHman, who had conquered the world from the east to the west. He told
the tzar he (Ivan) could do him no harm nor plant a foot on his territory.
While the Krim Khan wrote in this truculent style, the Kazan Tartars
ravaged the Russian borders terribly, { and soon after Amin, the son of
Sahib, devastated the district of Koshir. He was, however, disavowed
by his father. §

Meanwhile the Shuiski were for a while displaced from the helm of
affairs, and matters began to look brighter under the control of John
Belski. In 1541 Alexander Kashin, the Grand Prince's envoy, was in
the Krim, and Tajaldi, the envoy of Sahib Girai, at Moscow. This
outward semblance of peace did not prevent the Tartars in the spring of
that year from invading Russia. The Khan left home with all his army,
leaving behind him only the women, children, and old men, and was
accompanied by a contingent of Turkish cavalry, by some artillery, and
by the various hordes of Nogais who encamped at Azof, Kaffa, and
Astrakhan. Simeon Belski acted as their guide. The Russians pre-
pared two armies to resist them ; one of which was posted at Kolomna
and the other at Vladimir. The Tartars crossed the Don and attacked
Zaraisk, which resisted bravely, and they failed to take it. \ Their forces,
however, pressed on and occupied the heights commanding the Oka,
which they attempted to cross on rafts under cover of the Turkish
artillery, but the Russians, although they had no missiles save arrows,
showed such a bold front that the enemy was constrained to withdraw
for the night, and the following day retired hastily, the Khan leading

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 366, 367.
t Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh., ii. 152. These Oghlans are thus enumerated by Jelalzade and
Ali; Maashuk Oghlan, son of Mest Khun Abdulla Oghlan, Murtazi Oghlan, Haji Khalel
Oghlan, the Shirinbeg beg Bababeg, Khoja Mamabeg, Hasan Puladbeg, Bipulushbeg, Morun-
beg, Haji Ali Beg, the beg of Kipchak, Kuchuk beg, the beg of Manfut Janiheg, Ak Babai
Mirza, Ko saat Mirza, Selimshah beg, Ahmed pasha beg, Ali Haji beg, Ibrahim beg, Taghalif
beg, Bcrdghazi beg, Kemalbeg, Nush Mirza, Ak Kuchukbeg (envoy of Kazan), Nukush beg, the
envoys of Abdulla Yakshi, Shidak beg, &c. {Id , French ed., v. 290. Note, xiii.)
I Karamzin, viii. io-i2. ^ /t/., 14. i /^., 22.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAN. 485

the way. They left some cannons behind them ; the first Ottoman
trophies which were captured by the Russians, says Karamzin.* The
Tartars lost some prisoners in their retreat, which led them towards
Pronsk, to which town they laid siege. The garrison defended it bravely,
the women assisting the men, and stones and cauldrons of boiling water
were brought into requisition. A Russian army, which had been sent to
the rescue, at length compelled the Tartars to raise the siege and to
withdraw, and their tzarevitch, who had lingered behind for pillage,
was defeated in the district of Odoef.t

Meanwhile matters went on badly at Moscow. Ivan Belski, whose
prudence and talent were conspicuous, was rudely thrust from power by
a faction of nobles, led by Ivan Shuiski, and imprisoned with the
metropolitan. He was soon after put to death. Shuiski had owed not
only liberty but also a dignified position to the generosity of his rival,
and his conduct gives point to the machiavelianism of the historian who
blames generosity on such occasions, and justifies the policy of leaving an
enemy no peace but that of the tomb.t Shuiski's heel was now once
more on the neck of the State.

In 1 542 Amin, Sahib Girai's son, apparently against his father's wish,
made a fresh attack on the provinces of Seversk and Riazan. He was
met and defeated on the famous plain of Kutikof, and driven to the river
Mecha.§ We now find Ivan sending some money to John Pitrovitch,
the hospodar of Moldavia, to enable him to pay the heavy contribution
laid on him by Sultan Suliman.

The Shuiski meanwhile behaved with intolerable arrogance. They
treated the young Grand Prince with indignity, and brutally slaughtered
a favourite of his, named Voronzof. Ivan's education was neglected,
and his worse tastes were fostered ; cruelty became with him an
amusement. Not only was he fond of the slaughter of wild animals,
but also of torturing tame ones ; and it was his amusement to
gallop about the streets with a troop of young friends knocking down
women and old men.|| When we read these stories and the terrible
harvest^ which followed such a seed-time, we are constrained to admit
the wisdom of that law of succession which generally prevails among
barbarous races, by which the sceptre can only pass to the grown man
who is strong enough to hold it. Ivan was now persuaded it was
time he exercised authority himself. A conspiracy arose against the
Shuiski, headed by the Glinski, uncles of Ivan. The former were over-
thrown, and their chief, Andrew, was torn in pieces by dogs in the open
street.^ The change was not a very happy one. It was followed by
executions, proscriptions, and forfeitures. " The Ghnski," says Kelly,
" pushed Ivan forward at their head, in the same path of blood and
plunder. They allowed him to misuse his recently acquired liberty. He

* Id., 29. t/^., 31. :/<V.,33. §7t^.4o. IIW.,45. %Id.,A7-

86 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

squandered it in roaming without a purpose through his provinces, which
were compelled to defray the charges ; they were ruined by his costly
presence and astonished by his caprices. There his unworthy kinsmen
prompted him to punish without cause, and to reward beyond measure ;
glutting some with what was confiscated from others. They taught him
not to think himself master, except when he was resisting and when he
was causing to be tortured before his eyes the suppliants by whose
entreaties he was wearied.''*

Ivan was crowned with great ceremony on the i6th of January, i547>
and from that time the Russian sovereigns have styled themselves tzar,t
a title consecrated by the usage of the Greek Emperors of Byzantium, of
whom the Russian Grand Princes claimed in a measure to be the heirs.
He was then seventeen years old, and afterwards proceeded to marry
Anastasia, the daughter of a boyard of Prussian descent, whose virtues
are as much lauded by the annalists as her beauty.J Her husband
continued to be the slave of his outrageous temper and low tastes. We
are told that a deputation of Pskofians having presented a complaint
against their governor, a favourite of the Ghnski, he ordered them to be
sprinkled with boiling spirits, and to have their hair and beards burnt.
He would probably have gone further, but was summoned away by the
news that the great bell of Moscow had fallen.§

This accident was like the knell of a coming disaster. It arrived
speedily enough, in the terrible fire of Moscow, which stands out in
its history like that of London in ours. Its thickly clustered wooden
houses were destroyed. Palaces, churches, kremhn, all were devastated,
and some of its greatest artistic treasures perished. It was followed by
a popular outbreak or outburst of wrath against the Glinski, during which
the uncle of the tzar and many of his supporters were put to death, while
a reign of terror reigned in the capital. || The next part of the story may
be told in the words of Kelly. " Amidst the universal disorder, Sylvester,
a monk, one of those inspired personages who then traversed Russia, and
who, like the Jewish prophets or the dervishes, dared to stand up, even
against their sovereigns, appeared in the presence of the young despot.
He approached him, the gospel in his hand, his eye full of menace, his
finger raised, and with a solemn voice he pointed out to him, in the
surrounding flames, and blood and furious cries, and the limbs of his
dismembered kinsfolk, the wrath of Heaven, which his passions had at
length aroused. To these terrific menaces he added the infallible effect
of certain appearances then deemed supernatural, and thus mastering the
mind of Ivan, he wrought a real miracle : the tiger was humanised.
Alexis Adashef seconded Sylvester. They encircled the young tyrant
with priests and able and prudent boyards."^ The anarchy which had

* Op. cit., i. 135. t Karamzin, viii. 61 and 63. J Id., 65. % Id., 69,

I Karamzin, viii. 70-75. % Op. cit., i. 136.

SAHTB GIRAI KHAN. . 487

SO long prevailed now ceased. Ivan summoned deputies from the
various towns of the empire, whom he addressed on the great square of
Moscow, confessing the iniquities of his youth and denouncing the
tyrannies and ill-deeds of his councillors, and promising that thenceforth
he would be the judge and defender of his people.* He issued an
amnesty, and ordered the poor to be relieved. He himself presided at
the council table, and the spirit which animated him seemed to pervade
the officials of the empire. Order and peace flourished everywhere. A
new code of laws was issued. At an assembly of the notables of the
empire he presented a charter by which the privilege of electing certain
assessors to act with the governor, which had been possessed by the
republics of Novgorod and Pskof, was extended to other cities. The
same council introduced great reforms, both of ritual and of morals, into
the church, which had become much demoralised; schools were also
founded at Moscow and other towns.t

But it is time we should revert again to the affairs of Krim. In 1543
Amin, Sahib Girai's son, was sent to join the Sultan in his campaign
against Hungary, where he took part in the siege of Stulhweissenburgh.f
The next year he ravaged the districts of Odoef and Bielef. In 1549 his
father conquered Astrakhan, as I have mentioned. § He also deemed
himself over-lord of the Nogais, and in a letter to Ivan he said that the
Kabardians and mountain Kaitaks paid him tribute. He now became
very arrogant, and wrote to the Russian tzar in this style : " As you are
approaching the age of reason, it would be well for you to declare frankly
what you want. Do you want my friendship or blood ? If the former,
then send me as presents, not miserable bagatelles but substantial gifts,
such as the king (z>., the Polish king) sends me." He said the latter
sent him fifteen thousand ducats annually. " If you decide on war," he
added, " I will march on Moscow and trample your lands under my
horses' hoofs." Ivan replied by arresting the Tartar envoy, who had
treated the Muscovite merchants in the Krim as his slaves. || This was
in 1549, and was followed by a struggle with Kazan, which I have
described elsewhere.

Sahil^ Girai, having heard in 1551 that AH Murza, one of the principal
chiefs of the Nogais, contemplated a descent on the Krim, marched
against and completely defeated him. Until this time the four tribes,
Shirin, Barin, Arghin, and Kipchak were known as Durt-Karaju, and
enjoyed the highest position in the horde. Sahib Girai promoted the
tribe Sijewit to equal rank, and to reward Baki beg, one of the chiefs
of the Mansur tribe, for having killed Islam Girai, he gave him the tribe
of Atai khoja and a rank above the other chiefs. About this time the
Khan was very handsomely entertained by one of his officers at Kaffa,

* Karamzin, viii. 79, 8oi t Id-, 80-gi. I Osm. Reich., ii. igt.

§ Ante, 353, 354. il Karamzin, viii. ^7, 98.

488 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

while on his way to Circassia. While seated in the garden there after
dinner, he summoned the Sipahis (/.<?., the Turkish mercenaries) and
found fault with them. They were irritated, and replied that the bread
which they ate they owed to the Sultan and not to him. This contre-
temps created an ill-feeling which led to Sahib Girai's ruin. While he
lived at Constantinople he had had many secret meetings with Sultan
Suliman, which had led to frequent changes in the office of Grand Vizier,
and had intrigued, but unsuccessfully, against Rustem Pasha, who now
occupied that post. The latter wrote to his friends at Kaffa to denounce
Sahib Girai. They accordingly perverted the incident about the Sipahis,
and declared he wanted to seize Kaffa, which belonged to the Porte.
Meanwhile Safa Girai, the Khan of Kazan, died. His two sons, Bulukh
and Mubarek Girai, were in the Krim at the time, and the Kazan envoys
went to offer the throne to the former. Sahib Girai, who had some
grievances with these princes, imprisoned them in the fort of Akkerman.*
At this time Devlet Girai, the son of Mubarek Girai, son of Mengli Girai,
was living at Constantinople as a hostage. His uncle deeming his
presence there dangerous, offered him the Khanate of Astrakhan. This
was seconded by the vizier Rustem, who secretly promised him in
addition the Khanate of Krim. Sahib Girai was ordered to march
against the Circassians, and especially against the rebellious tribe of
Shan.t Leaving Amin, his son, to guard Ferhkerman with twelve
thousand men, he himself marched against Yaya (? the Khan just
named). Devlet Girai duly arrived at Akkerman, and thence went by
boat to the port of Kozlof, and finally to Baghchi- Serai, and liberated the
two Kazan sultans. Amin marched against him, but was defeated on
the Alma (what a queer sound the name and the locality has for our
ears), and many of them went over to Devlet Girai. Amin retired to
Sultan-Bazar, which was the residence of the kalgas. When this news
reached Sahib Girai's camp his troops dispersed. He entered Temruk
accompanied by the janissaries. The governor showed him the Sultan's
firman appointing his nephew, and bade him leave the town. He
remained there, however, till the arrival of Bulukh Girai, who put him to
death. He was buried at Salajik, near Baghchi-Serai, in the toaib built
by his grandfather Haji Girai. His doctor Kaisunisade, who afterwards
became the physician of Sultans Suliman and Selim, described his tragic
death in verse.J Von Hammer dates this in 952 of the hej. (/>., i545),§
but this is clearly a mistake. It occurred in 1552.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN.

Devlet Girai was the son of Mubarek Girai, and the grandson of
Mengli Girai. He mounted the throne in the year 1551, and nominated

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 367-369. 1 Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 54.

I Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 370. Krim Khans, 54, 55. § Osm. Resch., ii. 181.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 489

Bulukh Girai sultan as his kalga. The latter having proved insub-
ordinate, was put to death, and Ahmed Girai, the son of Devlet, was
installed in his place. Having made a raid towards Astrakhan, Devlet
Girai was returning home laden with booty, when the famous Shermet
Oghlu planted himself on his path to cut off his retreat. A terrible
battle was the consequence, in which Ahmed Girai and his brother Haji
Girai, together with five other sultans, many chiefs, and soldiers perished.
The battle was virtually lost when Muhammed Girai, another son of the
Khan, arrived with reinforcements and turned the tide of victory. As a
reward for his services Muhammed was appointed kalga.*

At this time we find a new power rising on the Don, which became a
very effectual instrument in restraining the Krim Khans, namely, the
military confederacy of the Don Cossacks. It probably originated in
a nucleus of outlaws and other fugitives from Poland and Russia,
associated with Circassians, &c. They settled on the middle Don,
and having occupied the town of Akhas, gave it the new name of
Cherkask. Cherkas and Cossack, according to Karamzin, mean the
same thing.t

The new Khan of Krim, like his predecessors, was not satisfied to see
Kazan gradually crushed and pass under the yoke of Russia ; nor indeed
was his patron Sultan Suliman, who sent orders to the Nogais to
assist the Krim Khan, and told them he had made over Kazan and its
crown to the Girais.|

In 1552 the Tartars advanced upon Tula, which they attempted to
storm, but the attack failed, and having heard that a large Russian army
was going to the rescue, they withdrew during the night. The garrison
pursued them, captured some cannons, and killed many of their men,
among them being Kamberdi, the Khan's brother-in-law. Meanwhile a
body of fifteen thousand Russians, under Cheniatef and Kurbski, attacked
thirty thousand Tartars, who were marching to the assistance of their
brethren, and had devastated the neighbourhood of Tula. They defeated
them, and made them abandon a great quantity of prisoners, camels, and
baggage carts. From their prisoners the Russians learnt that the Khan's
intention/liad been to march straight upon Moscow, as he fancied the
tzar and his troops were at Kazan. § After his victory the tzar prosecuted
his campaign against the latter city, which he at length captured and
annexed. II He returned to Moscow amidst the rejoicings of his people,
and was met by a messenger from his wife Anastasia, announcing the
birth of a son, the tzarevitch Dimitri.^ These rejoicings were soon
tempered by the appearance of the plague, probably brought back with
them by the Russian soldiers. Twenty-five thousand victims were buiied
in the cemeteries of Pskof, besides those who were laid-by in the forests,

♦ Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 37x. t Op- "t., viii. laS. I Id., viii., 129, 130.

$ Id.^ 141. II Vide ante, 414, &c. H Karamzin, viii. 200.

20

490 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

&c. The Novgorodians expelled all the merchants from Pskof, and
threatened to burn them alive if they returned ; but such precautions did
not avail, and five thousand people perished there, among them being the
archbishop Serapion.*

Soon after Ivan fell ill, and was persuaded to declare his infant son
Dimitri his heir. He demanded that the principal boyards should swear
allegiance to him. This many refused to do, dreading apparently
another minority. They openly supported the claims of Ivan's cousin
Vladimir Andrewitch. His firmness, however, compelled at least an
outward conformity with his wishes, and they took the oath unwilHngly.t
Vladimir himself was constrained to follow their example. We may well
believe, however, that the memory of the outbreak rankled in the
mind of the young tzar, who must have felt, as he stood on the brink of
the grave, what a chaos would follow his death, and how little he could
rely on the hollow affection of his courtiers. For the present, however,
he dismissed his feelings and behaved with singular clemency. His
recovery was speedily followed by the death of his young son Dimitri.l
About this time Ivan had an interview with Vassian, ex-bishop of
Kolomna, who had been one of the victims of the cabal of boyards
during the minority of Ivan, and who, although old, nourished a great
resentment against them. He dexterously urged upon the young tzar
that if he wished to be absolute monarch he must have no other
counsellor than himself. He was always to command and never to obey,
and bade him remember that " the wisest counsellor of a prince always
ends by becoming his master." As Karamzin says, this kind of poison
found a ready welcome in Ivan's ears, and bore its bitter fruit later on.
Soon after Anastasia presented him with another son, named Ivan, and
this was followed by another famous conquest, namely, that of the
Khanate of Astrakhan. § These conquests in the popular eyes were due
to the vigour of Ivan, and, as Karamzin says, it was forgotten how much
of the success was to be attributed to the vastly increased strength of
Russia, which she owed to his immediate predecessors. || They, however,
produced their natural effect among the neighbouring powers. Merchants
went to the tzar from Shamakha, Derbend, the country of the Shamkal, of
Tumen, Khiva, and Seraichuk. The rulers of Khiva and Bokhara sent
envoys with presents.il In 1555 we are told the Circassian princes of the
Beshtau submitted with their whole country and all their subjects for
ever to the Russian sceptre.** It would seem they also asked Russian
aid against their former masters, the Tartars of the Taurida and the
Turks. Christianity was still flourishing among the highlanders of the
Caucasus, and several of the Caucasian princes sent] their sons to
Moscow to be educated. Thus, we are told, the princes Sibok and

• Id., 214. 1 Id., 226. I Id., 233- * Ante, 355, &c. || Op. cit., 250, 251.

*A Id., 253. '* Klaproth, Travels in the Caucasus, 173.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 49I

Temriukof, with the son of the Nogai Sumbeka learnt to read and write
in the palace of the KremUn.* Yadigar, prince of Siberia, sent to offer
tribute, and this enabled Ivan to add the style of ruler of Siberia to his
many titles.t A more interesting event for us at this time was the inter-
course which Russia began to have with England. In the year 1553,
during the reign of Edward VI., three ships set out from England, under
the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, to find
a north-east route to Cathay and the Indies. Two of the ships became
separated, and were wrecked on the coasts of Russian Lapland, near
Arsina, and Willoughby there perished of cold. Chancellor was more
fortunate, entered the White Sea, and on the 24th of August, 1553, landed
in the bay of the Dwina, where the monastery of Saint Nicholas was
situated, and where the town of Archangel was afterwards founded.
News of his having reached Ivan, Chancellor was invited to Moscow,
where he was much struck by the surroundings and magnificence of
the court. He presented a letter from Edward VI. It was written in
various languages, and addressed generally to all the sovereigns of the
North and East,t and asked for a kind reception for his mariners.
Ivan sent Edward a reply, promising his protection to such English
merchants as should make their way to Russia. When Chancellor
returned home Edward was dead, but the news was no less welcome
to Mary. An English company, "The Society for the Discovery of
Unknown Lands," was formed to trade with Russia, and Chancellor
set out again in 1555, with two ships and a courteous letter from Mary.
He was again well received, and it was decided that an exchange of
merchandise should take place at Kholmogory in autumn and winter,
and Ivan granted the merchants a diploma to trade wherever they
wished in Russia without paying any dues, to open shops and stores,
and to employ Russian servants. Criminals were to be handed over
to the Russian law, but disputes between the English were to be
remitted to an arbitrator chosen by themselves. The English imports
were chiefly differently coloured kerseys, broadcloth, pewter vessels, and
sugar. The English founded a large factory at the port of St. Nicholas,
and otifers at Kholmogory, while one of their captains named Burroughs,
still hankering after Cathay, made an adventurous voyage to Nova
Zembla and Waigatz.§ Chancellor was drowned on his return voyage
in 1556, but the Russian envoy who accompanied him reached England
safely, and was received with an ovation in London. He presented a
few sables, which had alone escaped the wreckers on the Scotch
coast, and returned to his master with rich tissues, expensive arms, and
also a lion and a lioness,Jj while the merchants of the English Company
gave him a gold chain of the value of ^100 and four costly cups. He
took back with him to Moscow artisans, and doctors, among whom we

■■ Karamzin, viii. 253. t A/-, 254. 7'^. 258. § Jd., 264. || Id., 266.

492 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

are told was the famous Dr. Standish. In the letters which Philip and
Mary wrote him, Ivan was styled the August Emperor. English mer-
chants were now specially patronised by the tzar, and earned his good
will by their skill and energy. Jenkinson, who arrived at the Dwina
in 1557, made his way to Archangel, while the footsteps of the Enghsh
were speedily followed by those of the merchants of Holland and
Brabant.* But it is time we returned to the Krim Khan.

The destruction of the Khanate of Kazan naturally produced great
excitement in the Krim, nevertheless the Khan postponed his hostile
intentions. In 1553 he sent a treaty to Moscow, in which he agreed to
be on friendly terms with Russia on condition of receiving thence some
rich presents. In this he gave the tzar his old title of Grand Prince.t
Ivan replied that the Russians did not buy anyone's friendship. He also
informed the Khan of the conquest of Astrakhan.! His boyards wished
him to complete the work he had so well begun, and to overwhelm the last
western fragment of Batu's empire ; but this was apparently deemed too
hazardous. Meanwhile Sultan Suliman sent Ivan a letter, written in
golden characters, in which he styled him " Fortunate tzar and wise
prince," and also some merchants to make purchases at Moscow. The
submission of the Circassians of Beshtau or Piatigorsk to the Russians,
as I have mentioned, was naturally very unwelcome to their former
suzerain, the Krim Khan, who marched against them. Ivan thereupon
despatched the voivode Cheremetief from Bielef, at the head of thirteen
thousand boyard-followers, strelitzes, and Cossacks, by way of Murafsk
towards Perekop. On learning this Devlet Girai turned aside, and
with sixty thousand men fell on the Russian frontiers towards Tula.
Cheremetief, who was encamped near " the sacred mountains " and those
of Dutza, prepared to attack him, while the tzar marched upon him from
Moscow, and he was thus threatened on two sides. Devlet Girai having
learnt the trap in which he was caught hastily withdrew, and Cheremetief
captured his baggage, sixty thousand horses, and one hundred and eighty
camels, and having sent this booty off to Mtzensk and Riazan, posted
himself with but seven thousand men near Tula. The retreating Jartars,
although in overwhelming numbers, were too much afraid to make a
stand, and in the combat which followed the Russians captured the
standard of the princes of Shirin, and passed the night on the battle-
field ; but the following day, the Tartars having extorted by torture from
a prisoner whom they had captured the truth about the Russian strength,
renewed the fight and reversed the issue of the previous day. In
this struggle Cheremetief was wounded. The Russians retired to Tula,
and the Tartars went back to the Taurida.g This was followed by a
struggle between Russia and Sweden, in which there was the usual
ravaging of the border districts. The Russians captured so many

♦ Id., 268. t Id. I Id., 269. § Id., 274.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN, 4

prisoners that we are told that a man was sold for a grivna and a girl for
five altins.* It ended in a truce being signed for forty years, on the
basis of the status quo ante.\

In 1557 Ivan was informed that the Krim Khan was massing his
troops near the waters of Konsk, and- was meditating a descent on Tula
and Kozelsk. Upon this the brave Riefski having assembled some three
hundred Cossacks, and been joined by the hetmans Nilinski and Yesko-
vitch, attacked Islam Kirman, a small town near Ochakof, belonging to
the Tartars. This diversion compelled Devlet Girai, to return to the
Taurida, which was at this time being devastated by pestilence.

Meanwhile the Lithuanian Prince Dimitri Vichnevetzki, a descendant
of St. Vladimir, who commanded the Cossacks of the Dnieper, offered
his services to the Russians. He built a fortress on the island of
Khortitza, and wrote to the tzar to say he did not want any troops but only
permission to shut up the Krim Khan in the Taurida " as in a cavern."
Having captured Islam Kirman, he removed the cannons he found there
to his fortress, where he successfully repelled the attacks of the Tartars,
which extended over twenty-four days. On another side the Circassian
princes Tasdurt and Dassibok conquered in the name of Russia the
towns of Temruk and Taman, on the sea of Azof, where was formerly
the principality of Tmutarakan.+ The Khan was in despair, and a very
little vigour would have overwhelmed the Krim.

The terrible winter of 1557 had greatly depopulated the Nogai steppes,
where many men and cattle perished from cold. This was aggravated
in the Taurida by the plague. The Khan had barely ten thousand men
left, fit to bear arms, and the Nogais had still fewer. Meanwhile
dissensions broke out among the murzas and the grandees. Some of the
latter conspired against Devlet Girai, and wished to put Toktamish, the
tzarevitch of Astrakhan, on the throne. This conspiracy having been
discovered, Toktamish fled to Russia, where he informed the tzar of the
state of things, but the opportunity was lost.

The Sultan sent troops to the assistance of \i\s protege ^ which captured
Khortit^ from the brave Cossack chief Vechnevetzki, who retired thence
to Cherkask and Kanef, where he was well received. These towns,
which belonged to Poland, he was persuaded by the tzar to hand over
again to Augustus, while he was granted as a fief the town of Bielef and
the neighbouring villages, " where he might be used as a menace both to
the Tartars and Poles."§ Devlet Girai now released the Russian envoy
Zagriatski, who had been kept in confinement for five years, and pro-
posed an alhance against Poland and Lithuania. As a proof of what he
would do, he sent his son to ravage Volhynia and Podoha. The
Russians did not reciprocate his advances, but rather drew nearer to

Id., 279, t ^^-t 282, 283. I Id., 287. Klaproth's Caucasus, 173,

% Karamzin, viii. 289,

494 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

their old rivals the Lithuanians, and urged upon them the adoption of a
common policy against their pestilent neighbour. This proposal, how-
ever, came to nothing. As usual, mutual jealousies soon overclouded the
horizon. This arose chiefly on account of Livonia. The Knights of
Livonia ruled the eastern seaboard of the Baltic, and persistently refused
to allow artisans or artists to penetrate into Russia, on the plea that that
empire was getting too powerful, and that it would end in the various
Anabaptists and other sectaries migrating from Germany, where they
were being persecuted, and thus adding to the resources and strength of
the rising empire. This selfish policy was naturally resented by Ivan, who
determined to assert his rights, and now demanded the payment of the
annual tribute which the Livonians had undertaken to pay by the treaty
of 1503. He also insisted that the Greek churches at Riga, Revel, and
Dorpat, destroyed by the Lithuanians, should be rebuilt, and cynically
remarked he was not hke the emperor and the pope who did not know
how to defend their churches.* The Order was governed by five bishops,
a grand master, the marshal of the order, eight commanders, and eight
baihffs. It had lost its ancient prowess. Wealth and luxury had
enervated its knights, who lived in their fine castles and devoted them-
selves to ease, and each one to his own interests ; the bishops were at
issue with one another, while the citizens of the towns had largely
embraced the reformed religion. It was in fact a mere hollow pretence,
and crumbled easily with but slight external pressure. Russia was mean-
while growing very powerful. She could command an army of three
hundred thousand men, and now had a permanent force called strelitzes,
who were armed with muskets. This was a great advance on a mere
feudal force, which had to be specially summoned when needed. It was
impossible under these conditions that Russia should submit much longer
to be shut out from the sea, and it was inevitable the young giant should
push down the rotten barrier which so much hampered it. A powerful
army was diligently prepared to accomplish the work, and we are
told that besides Russians there were mustered for the work Tartars,
Cheremisses, Mordvins, and Circassians from Piatigorsk.t The open
country was speedily overrun and terribly devastated. The crueKy of the
invaders towards the inoffensive peasants was sickening. This was
followed by the capture of Narva, which had been previously almost
destroyed by a bombardment from the neighbouring Russian fortress of
Ivanogorod. Two hundred and thirty pieces of cannon fell into the
hands of the victors, but, what was far more important, the victory
secured for the Russians, for the first time in their history, an accessible
port and outlet into the outer world. This capture was followed by those
of Neithlos, of Adeye, and Neuhaus, and thus the Russian frontiers were
permanently advanced as far as the Narowa. Amidst these disasters

Karamzin, viii. 295. t Id., 307.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 495

Furstenberg, the aged Grand Master of the Order, resigned, and was
replaced by the young Ketler, who made and persuaded others to make
great but unavailing sacrifices to save his country, and appealed in vain
to the powers of Europe. Charles V. had retired from the world. His
successor on the Imperial throne, Ferdinand, was at issue with the Pope
and in fear of the Turks, while other European sovereigns postponed
their interference until they could speak words of tempering mercy to the
tzar ; but mercy was not his aim, and his legions obeyed him well.
Dorpat, the famous capital of Livonia, defended itself bravely under its
bishop, who was more a soldier than a pastor. Although he only had
two thousand German soldiers with him besides the citizens, he prolonged
the defence for six days, and only agreed to surrender the town when
hard pressed by the voices of the citizens. The conditions offered by
the Russians were generous. The most important were, that the inhabi-
tants should not be transported without their consent to other parts of
Russia, that they should have their own magistrates and laws, should
have full right of trading, and that the confession of Augsburg should
continue to be their rule of faith.* Veissenberg, Pirkel, Lais, Oberpahlen,
Ringen or Tushin, and Atzel now submitted,t while other towns which
resisted had their environs wasted, and were eventually captured. As
the Grand Master and many of the knights still offered a stubborn
resistance, and several of the principal fortresses held out, the country
was again systematically ravaged ; the torch and the sword were
unsparingly used, and the people and their property transplanted. The
kings of Poland, Sweden, and Denmark appealed to the tzar to spare the
land. His reply to all three was haughty and unmistakable. Livonia
was formerly a province tributary to Russia, it had during Russia's
weakness shaken itself loose, but now it was again at her feet, and it was
no concern of theirs. A short respite was meanwhile granted to the
Order by a treaty made in November, 1559. This was owing to a
diversion made by the Tartars, before whom Ivan did not wish to divide
his forces.^ Devlet Girai having heard that Ivan's hands were full in the
north, summoned the Nogais to his help, collected, it is said, a force
of one iiundred thousand horsemen, and in December, 1558, ordered
his son Muhammed Girai to march upon Riazan, the oghlan Makhmet
on Tula, and the Nogais and princes of Shirin on Koshira. They had
not advanced far when they heard that the Russians were quite ready to
meet them, and seeing the preparations they had made, Muhammed
Girai hastily retreated, and lost many men and horses from fatigue. The
Russians pursued him as far as Oskol, finding the route strewn with corpses.
On another side the latter attacked the Nogais, who had abandoned
their own Khan, Islam (? Ismael), to join Devlet Girai, and captured
fifteen thousand horses near Perekop. In order to press his advantages,

* Id., 328. t Id., 332. I Id., 345.

496 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Ivan sent his favourite Daniel Adashef, at the head of a considerable
body of boyard-followers, Cossacks, and strelitzes, against the Krim.
That brave commander, having built a number of flat barges in the then
uninhabited district near Kremenchuk, descended the Dnieper to its
mouth with eight thousand men : then taking possession of two ships
which were at anchor off the shore, he proceeded to land in the
Taurida, The Tartars were panic-stricken and lost their heads, and we
are told that for fifteen days Adashef devastated without opposition the
western parts of the Krim, burnt the Tartar huts, captured their cattle,
and made many prisoners, whom he intended to exchange for the
Russians and Livonians kept in captivity by the Tartars.

He returned in triumph, and having found some Turks among the
prisoners, he sent them to the pashas of Ochakof, saying he had no cause
of quarrel with the Sultan. They made him presents and praised his
bravery. Devlet Girai having recovered his balance, went in pursuit and
followed him up the Dnieper, but failed to overtake him,* Adashef was
received with great rejoicings, and was rewarded with some medals by
the tzar.

Meanwhile the war broke out again with fresh fury in Livonia, and
Ivan contented himself with urging the Nogais and Don Cossacks to
continue harassing the Tartars. In 1559 the Prince of Tumen sent to
ask that he might be numbered among the vassals of the empire.!'
The Circassians also asked that Ivan would send them officers to
direct their operations against the Tartars, and clergy to convert them
to Christianity. This was complied with, and the tzar sent them the
brave Vishnevetzki, accompanied by a number of priests.}

After the truce which had been signed with Livonia the Grand Master
Ketler, who no doubt felt it was' a very hollow affair, went with some of
his chief dignitaries to Poland, where he persuaded Augustus, its king,
and his diet that the growing power of Russia was a menace to Poland.
A treaty of alliance was drawn up by which the Grand Master and the
archbishop of Riga surrendered to the king the fortresses of Marien-
hausen, Lauban, Acherat, DUneburg, Rosichen, and Lutzen as a gauge
of their fidelity, and undertook . to pay him seven hundred thousand
florins when the war was over. He meanwhile undertook to defend
Livonia, which he now added to his other dominions. We are told the
Duke of Mecklenburgh sent him some fresh troops raised in Germany.
The Imperial diet granted Ketler one hundred thousand ducats, the Duke
of Prussia and the magistrates of Revel also sent him considerable sums.
One merchant of Riga advanced thirty thousand marks on a simple
promissory note. Feding himself strong, Ketler broke the pact a month
before the truce terminated, and invaded the neighbourhood of Dorpat,
to which he laid siege. This he was obliged to raise on account of the

*/</., 349- t Klaproth's Caucasus, 174. J Karamzin. viii. 351.

DEVLET OIRAI KHAN. 497

tempestuous weather and discontent of the troops. Turning aside he
then attacked Lais, which, although only garrisoned with four hundred
men, gallantly foiled all efforts to capture it, and the too rash Ketler was
forced to withdraw. Augustus now wrote a letter asking the Tzar to
withdraw from Livonia, which had become the vassal of Lithuania, while
the Emperor Maximilian, the protector of "the Livonian Order," also
wrote asking him to cease his attacks. The Russians meanwhile
crowded over the frontiers, and ravaged the land as far as the gulf of
Riga, captured Marienburgh, one of the most beautiful of the Livonian
towns, and situated on an island on a lake. Large numbers of the
Livonians were found in the forests, and were carried off to be sold
as slaves, a grim proof of Muscovite policy at this period, while the skilful
Russian general Kurbski marched from one victory to another. One
of his battles was curious, as having commenced at midnight. The
issue was ever the same, and rested with the strongest battalions.*

Meanwhile and in the autumn of the year 1560 Ivan lost his wife
Anastasia, the good angel who had tempered his rough character so well.
" With the loss of his wife," says Karamzin, " Ivan lost the instinct of
virtue." The rest of his reign was a dismal carnival of death, and well
earned him the title of " Terrible," and marks him as one of the greatest
tyrants who have crushed the human race. His two chief councillors
hitherto had been Adashef and Sylvester. To them were due the vast
reforms in the empire. He now began to feel their good advice and
counsel irksome, and longed to be free from control. This feehng
was fanned by those about the court who had occasion to fear or respect
these two men, who had discountenanced the late war with Livonia, and
had urged Ivan to fight against the infidels and not the Christians. The
informers accused them of having caused the death of the tzarina by
their sorceries, and of having the secret power of the basiUsk. Such
tales were easily believed in the sixteenth century. They were tried in
their absence and found guilty. Sylvester was exiled to the monastery
of Solovetski on the White Sea, while Adashef was remitted to prison at
Dorpat, where he shortly after died.t The Tzar gave princely alms to the
clergy ol( the death of his wife, and within ten days we find some
of them, headed by the metropolitan, urging him to marry again.

The old ways were now changed. It was Charles II.'s reign, after
Cromwell's. Sobriety was jeered at, and decency and temperance were
ridiculed. Those who retained their dignity and looked askance at the
change had wine poured over their heads. A new class of courtiers was
naturally forthcoming, who were not all laics, and who were ready, as is
the wont of such, with easy answers to satisfy the conscientious scruples
of the monarch when they arose. Women and wine became the chief
deities of the court, and, as is usual in such cases, the libertine looked

* Ai-, 363, 364- t Id., ix. 1-16.

2 P

498 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

upon those whose manners were austere and correct, and who were
therefore silent monitors of himself, as enemies. The relatives and
friends of Adashef were slaughtered or exiled. Informers were ever ready,
as in the reign of terror in France, to report incautious words or looks
on the part of the grandees, and the penalty was death, however great
and noble the victim. Sheremetief, the hero of the Taurida, barely
escaped. Being imprisoned in a loathsome place, the tzar visited him,
and said, " Where are your treasures, you pass for a rich man ?" " My
treasures, sire," said the boyard, " I have sent to Jesus Christ, my Saviour,
by the hands of the poor."* He was obliged to retire to a monastery,
while his brother was killed. The horrors increased daily, and the future
seemed gloomier than the past; the Tzar became daily more suspicious
and more cruel, while to add to the revolting scene, he was not only a
devotee of religion like Louis XL, but he excused his doings with that
perverse sophistry which is so often the accompaniment of crime, and of
which the French revolution furnishes so many examples.

Meanwhile the war was continued in Livonia. A fresh army of ten
thousand men was sent there in 1560, with the same result. What could
a few hundred knights do against the legions of Russia ? The land-
marshal Bell, was captured. His brave and chivalric words attracted
j.he admiration of his captors, but being sent on to Moscow, he suffered
the fate of those who were frank there, and on telling the tzar that
Livonia detested slavery and fought for honour and liberty, and that the
Russians fought like barbarians steeped in blood, he was beheaded.t
The strong fortress of Fellin surrendered somewhat pusillanimously,
and the late Grand Master of the knights, the aged Furstemberg, fell
into the hands of the Russians, by whom he was well treated. With
Fellin a number of other fortresses came into the conqueror's hands.

The end of " the Order " was at hand. The Swedish king Eric took
possession of Esthonia. The Grand Master Ketler, the archbishop of
Riga, and the deputies of Livonia repaired to Vilna, where, in the
presence of the King of Poland and Lithuania, it was dissolved.
Sigismund Augustus was recognised as King of Livonia, and undertook
again to defend it against Russia, while Ketler was appointed hereditary
Duke of Courland. He publicly divested himself of his cross and mantle,
and gave up the official seal of the Order to Prince Radzivil, who was
nominated governor of Livonia. Thus passed away one of the most
romantic communities in Europe, whose special story might surely tempt
a fitting historian. Founded by crusading knights among the heathen
Esthonians and Liefs, the conquerors were but a small garrison, and
their prowess and valour, great as it was, was overmatched by the
tremendous power of Russia. Their descendants still hold the lands,
the names and the language of their crusading ancestors, and still form

* iii.,2z. t/</, 25-30.

DEVLEt GIRAI KHAN. 499

the chief leaven in the governing caste of the country. They have
furnished the brains and the vigour which have made the later
Russia what it is, while Dorpat, their capital, is a household word
wherever culture is known. This was a fitting revenge ; and although
we may cling fondly to the romantic memories which surround the quaint
old castles of the knights, we must not forget that the state of things in
Livonia had become an anomaly. The grand old tree was, to use a
simile of Karamzin, rotten and dried up in its branches, and when the
gale came it inevitably collapsed into ruin, Narva, Dorpat, AUentaken,
and several districts in the provinces of Erven and Virlandia were in the
hands of Russia ; Sweden secured Harria, Revel, and half of Virlandia ;
Magnus, the brother of the King of Denmark, had the island of Oesel ;
Ketler had Courland and Semigallia, while the Poles took Southern
Livonia.* Ivan now made overtures for a union in marriage with one of
the sisters of Sigismund. These, however, fell through, as the Polish
king insisted upon reconquering the part of Livonia held by the
Russians.

Ivan then married the daughter of the Circassian prince of Temruk,
who had been baptised with the name of Maria. This was on the 21st
of August, 1 56 1. The next year the Krim Khan made a demonstration
against Southern Russia, but speedily retired again,t and Ivan determined
to press the war against Lithuania. His army numbered two hundred
and eighty thousand men, with eighty thousand nine hundred camp-
followers, and two hundred pieces of artillery. He speedily captured
Polotsk, the capital of White Russia, and famous for its wealth and
prosperity, transported many of its chief inhabitants, destroyed the Latin
churches, and caused the Jews to be baptised. He took the title of
Grand Prince of Polotsk, and incorporated the heritage of the famous
Gorislava with the Muscovite dominions.^ Having put the town in a
state of defence and granted a six months' truce to the Lithuanians, Ivan
again retired to Moscow. He wrote to inform Devlet Girai of his victory.
His letter was couched in somewhat arrogant terms ; reminded the
Khan of t^e constant failure of the Tartar attacks on Russia ; told him
of the Christian churches he had built at Kazan and Astrakhan, and
praised the faithfulness of the Nogais and Circassians. He also
released some of the Tartar prisoners who had been for some years in
prison, but in the letter he no longer addressed the Khan as his brother,
nor spoke of supplicating him as formerly, but used the word salutation.
Nevertheless the presents of the Tzar and the. skill of the envoy so
won over the Khan that a peace of two years was agreed upon between
them, and he also disclosed a secret of some moment. This was the
project Sultan Suliman had formed to counteract the recent Russian
successes. He proposed to join the Don and the Volga by a canal, to

• Karamzin, 35. f Id., 43- 1 1 A., 46.

SOO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

build a fortress on the Perevoloka, where the two rivers approach nearest
to one another, a second one on the Volga, near the modern Tzaritzin,
and another near the Caspian, and to retake Kazan and Astrakhan.
Fortunately for Russia, the Khan was as jealous of the Sultan as he was
of the Tzar, and while he urged the impossibility of the scheme to the
former he informed the latter about it *

In the year 1563 died the metropolitan Macarius, an inoffensive person.
Under his auspices printing was first introduced into Russia. The first
work which came from the Russian press was " The Acts and Epistles of
the Apostles." It aroused the opposition of an army of scribes and
copyists, and also the superstitious opposition of the people. The
printers had to escape, and fled to Constantine of Volhynia, under whose
patronage the Bible was printed at Ostrog in 1581. Macarius was
succeeded by Athanasius.t

We now find Ivan again at issue with the Poles. One of the
grievances was that the Polish king refused him the title of Tzar. In one
of his letters he asserts that everybody knew his dynasty was descended
from Caesar Augustus.^ The first encounter was unfortunate for the
Russians, who were surprised, and Prince Shuiski was ki]led.§

The terrible cruelties and fickleness of Ivan were producing another
result. Several of the most distinguished Russians abandoned him and
went into exile. Among these were the Cossack leader Dimitri Vishne-
vetski, and the two brothers Cherkaski,!! but a more important exile was
the brave Andrew Kurbski, to whose prowess the Russian arms had owed
so much. Ivan suspected him of having designs upon the principality of
Yaroslavl, and he accordingly fled to Lithuania. Karamzin has given
us the letters which passed between him and the tzar, which were
marked by bitter sneers and scoffing on either side, and on that of Ivan
by arrogant and superciHous language mingled with abundant phrases
from holy writ, well befitting the Caligula of Russian history, who
deemed his right to trample on men to be divine, who recalled the evils
that had befallen the emperors of Byzantium when they forsook the
dictates of their conscience for those of their counsellors. Its sharp and
bitter phrases were probably not all his own. They only embittered
Kurbski, who now openly joined Sigismund, and was granted the
valuable fief of Kovel. He also headed an army of seventy thousand
Poles, Lithuanians, Prussians, Germans, Hungarians, and Wallachians,
who marched upon Polotsk ; while Devlet Girai, with sixty thousand of
his Tartars, attacked Riazan.*[ The tzar had disbanded the army of the
Ukraine, but the brave citizens of Riazan repelled the invaders without
his assistance. Three thousand of them were killed in a struggle outside
its walls, and Mamai, one of the principal Tartars, with five hundred

»/ar.,5i. 1 Id., 60. I/d.,64. Ud.,66. Ud.,eg.

n U., 82.

\

DF.VLET GIRAI KHAN. ^ ^ S^I'

followers, who had stayed behind to plunder Pronsk,'wa*^^^P^^^^^* The
Russian arms were not less successful against the Lithuani^;?^ ^^^ ^^^^^^
new friend Kurbski, who compared his conduct in invading "KyUssia to
that of David, who, when persecuted by Saul, attacked Israel. His'i'iSids
caused useless misery to the frontier districts, while they inflamed the'
dark broodings of Ivan, who began to suspect those about him still more,
and longed for proofs of their guilt, which seemed never to come. He
seemed, in the words of Kelly, to have constantly before his mental vision
a vast and perpetual conspiracy of the nobles against his power. He
now followed more closely in the steps of Louis XI. of France, and
retired to Alexandrofski, a fortress encompassed by a gloomy forest, the
fit haunt of tyranny. He thence denounced by letter to the clergy and
people the crimes of which the grandees had been guilty during his
minority, and the new projects which his frenzy attributed to them
against his own life and that of his son, and ended by declaring that his
wounded heart resigned the government of a State which was so thronged
with traitors. On hearing this read, the people, who had been won
by the flatteries of the crafty despot were astonished and aghast,
and thought themselves lost. Who thenceforth would defend them?
The priests and nobles, either in consequence of the fear with which the
people inspired them, or of the universal spirit of servihty, exclaimed
" That their Tzar had over them an indescribable right of life and death,
that he might therefore punish them at his pleasure ; but that the State
could not exist without a master ; that Ivan was their legitimate
sovereign whom God had given them, the head of the church ; without
him, who could preserve the purity of religion, who could save millions
of souls from eternal perdition ?"* He agreed to come back on condition
that he might exercise his vengeance against whom he pleased without
being called to account, and the clergy thereupon timidly surrendered their
greatest privilege, that of suing for mercy for the innocent. His appear-
ance was much changed by the demon that possessed him. " His large
robust body, his ample chest and broad shoulders had shrunk ; his head,
which had been shaded with thick locks, was become bald ; the thin and
scatterid remains of a beard, which was lately the ornament of his face,
now disfigured it. His eyes were dull, and his features, marked with a
ravenous ferocity, were deformed."t

He deserted the old Kremlin, the palace of his fathers, and built him-
self a new fortress at Moscow. He formed a new body guard for him-
self, consisting of one thousand chosen companions, called oprichniks,
for whom he found quarters in the streets adjoining his palace, whence
he drove the inhabitants. To these satellites he soon after gave twelve
thousand of the estates nearest the capital, of which in the depth of
winter he deprived their rightful possessors. + He now proceeded with

* Kelly, op. cit.i., 140, 141. t /</.. 141. lid.

5^2 HISTORY OP THE MONGOLS.

another series^f^f proscriptions, the brave Prince Shuiski leading the
processioii^^fif victims. Meanwhile his new praetorians, spies, informers,
and a^^^jassins carrying at their saddle-bows a dog's head and a broom,
t^.e former to show they were prepared to worry the Tzar's enemies, and
the latter that they would sweep them from the earth, committed hideous
atrocities. One of their tricks was certainly ingenious. They would
send one of their servants to hide a rich article in the house of some
merchant or grandee, and on its being found there would charge him
with intention to steal it, and levy black mail accordingly.*

Like Louis XL, Ivan was in mortal dread of being murdered, and
surrounded his retreat at Alexandrofski with all kinds of precautions.
Like him, he also devoted much time to religious exercises. He adopted
a monastic life, and styled himself abbot, while three hundred of his
companions became his monks, and wore black gowns over their
garments of golden tissue bordered with sable. Their life was strictly
ruled. They rose at three and went to service, which lasted till six or
seven, the Tzar weeping, praying, and reading with extraordinary fervour.
At eight mass was said. At ten they had breakfast together. While the
Tzar read, wine and hydromel overflowed at the table, and each day
was a festival. Afterwards he talked with his favourites, or went to the
cells to superintend and watch the torture applied to his prisoners, from
which diabolical sight he generally returned with a brighter face and
more vigorous step. At eight vespers were said ; at ten he went to
bed, while three blind men soothed him to sleep by telling him stories.
At midnight he rose to pray. Often important affairs of State were
settled in church, and most sanguinary orders were given at mass. This
strange life was varied by occasional bear hunts and journeys, in which
the Tzar inspected the fortresses and the monasteries.t He patronised
the Germans who settled in Russia, and allowed them to have a Lutheran
church at Moscow : but he continued his insane jealousy of the old
boyards, doubtless incited largely by the dastards who formed the
oprichnina. In order to implicate them, false letters were written as if
signed by Sigismund of Poland, enticing them to rebellion, and when
this did not avail, they were charged with wishing to put an old man,
almost in his dotage, named Feodorof, who was master of the horse, on
the throne. He was dressed in Royal robes, a crown put on his head, and
a sceptre in his hand, Ivan then feigned to salute him, and ran a
poniard into his heart. His body was thrown to the dogs. His death
was followed by that of other suspected persons, among others Dimitri
Riapolofski, who had fought so bravely against the Krim Tartars, and
whose head when taken to the Tzar was brutally kicked by him.f Others
perished by torture and otherwise. The metropolitan Philip, a brave
and godly man, who had dared to reprove the monster, was deposed and

* Karamzin, ix. 104, 105. t Id., I07-109. J Id., 124.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 503

imprisoned. Hitherto, says Karamsin, Ivan had been content to
destroy individuals, he now proceeded to exterminate whole towns. The
people of Torjek having opposed the oprichniks, a riot ensued, and they
were punished with torture and thrown into the river. Similar scenes
took place at Kolomna.*

The horrors of the time were enhanced by new inroads of the plague,
which came this time from Sweden and Esthonia; by a failure of the
crops and an invasion of rats, which ate up what there was in the
granaries. t But meanwhile the external politics of Russia were as bright
as her internal condition was gloomy. We are told that Prince Spat, Yam-
gurchi Azi, and the oghlan Akhmet, refugees from Kazan, persuaded the
Krim Khan that Ivan's intentions towards him were treacherous, and as he
also received a timely present of 30,000 ducats from Sigismund, he wrote
the Tzar a letter bidding him give up his conquests at Kazan and Astra-
khan to him. In September, 1565, the Khan crossed the Donetz, carrying
his artillery on carts, and besieged Bolkhof,but, as on previous occasions,
he deemed it prudent to withdraw on the approach of the Russian army.
Ivan was well represented in the Taurida by his envoy Nagai, who
informed him of the intrigues of the Kazan Tartars, the Cheremisses,
and Mordvins with the Krim Khan, and who bravely refused to leave his
post where his office as spy was naturally not grateful to the Tartars.
Devlet Girai was tolerably impartial, for in 1 567 we find him making a raid
on Poland, his excuse being that the tribute had not been duly paid.+
After a chronic strife, which had lasted for some years, Ivan made peace
in 1569 with Sigismund of Poland.§

About this time we find the Turkish Sultan Selim, at the instigation of
the Nogai, Khivan, and Bukharian Princes, and the Polish envoys at
Constantinople, determining to carry out the plan of his predecessor
SuHman, for the recovery of Astrakhan. Devlet Girai in vain urged that
the plan was impracticable in winter because of the cold, and in summer
because of the drought, and that it would be much easier to attack the
Ukraine. The Sultan would not heed this advice, and sent fifteen
thousand spahis and two thousand janissaries to Kaffa in the spring of
1569, and ordered Kasim, the pasha of that town, to go to Pere-
volok and to dig a canal between the Don and the Volga. The pasha
set out on the 31st of May, and was soon joined by the Khan with fifty
thousand men on the plain of Kachalinsk, where they awaited the boats
that came up the Don from Azof. These boats, which had the heavy
cannon on board, and also a large quantity of gold, only carried five
hundred soldiers, besides two thousand five hundred rowers, who
were chiefly Christian galley-slaves. In the shallows the guns had to be
disembarked and dragged along with immense labour. The Cossacks of
the Don meanwhile left their haunts and retired. The pasha soon

♦ Id., 133. t Id., T35. I Id., 138, s Id., 149, 150.

504 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

discovered the impracticability of making the proposed canal, and,
having sent his heavy artillery back to Azof, marched with twelve guns
towards Astrakhan. The Tzar had meanwhile sent an army to protect
the latter town, and had also sent presents to gain over the pasha of
Kaffa ; these were accepted, and the envoys, after a princely welcome,
were remitted to prison.

On the 26th of September the Turks and Tartars encamped near
Astrakhan, and were there met by the Nogais and such of the Astrakhan
people as sided with them, and proceeded to plant a wooden fortress
there, but the Khan's men were discontented, and on the approach of a
Russian force he burnt the buildings he had erected and retreated hastily.
Devlet Girai, who had a motive in doing so, conducted his allies by a
terrible road, where neither food nor water could be had, and where
many of them perished, and others were captured by the Circassians.
After a month's march, Kasim returned with but a handful of men to
Azof, where the powder magazine soon after blew up, and the town was
burnt down, together with the ships in the harbour. The Krim Khan, in
a letter to the Russian envoy, took credit for having misled the Turks
and caused the ruin of the enterprise.* Elsewhere we read how
the Russians in 1 568 founded a fortress on the Terek, to consoUdate
their dominions among the Circassians, and to support Temruk, Ivan's
father-in-law, who was apparently pressed by his neighbours.! We also
find the Shah of Persia and the chiefs of Shamakhi, Bokhara, and
Samarcand sending embassies to Moscow to secure Ivan's alliance and
the privilege of trading with Kazan and Astrakhan. The Hanseatic
merchants frequented the port of Narva, while the English Company was
especially active in pushing its trade. Its representative at this time
was Anthony Jenkinson.

The English were granted permission to trade with Persia, and to
found a colony on the Vuichegda. They were allowed to manufacture
iron on paying a denga for every pound exported to England, &c. A
more curious event, however, was a secret mission which Ivan sent to
Elizabeth, asking her if in case of need he might find refuge in England.
The answer sent by the Queen is still extant in the Russian -jtrchives.
It was written in the presence of the Chancellor Bacon, of Lords Parr
Northampton, Russell, Arundel, &c., and promised the Tzar a refuge in
England, with the right of travelling where he wanted, of practising the
Greek faith. Sect In 1569 Ivan lost his second wife Maria. Again it
was hinted that the tzarina had been poisoned, and a most sickening
and brutal series of murders followed. Ivan suspected his cousin
Vladimir of conspiracy against him. A perjured servant swore he
intended poisoning the Tzar, and the cup of poison, which had been duly

* Karamzin, ix. 155-164. t Klaproth's Caucasus, 174. Karamzin, ix. 165.

I Karamzin, ix. 167-171.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 505

prepared as evidence, was drunk by the wretched prince, by his wife
Eudoxia and his children. The female attendants of the princess, we
are told, bearded the inhuman tyrant, and when he offered them pardon
denounced him to his face, and bade him do his worst. They were
undressed and shot.* Vladimir's mother, then a'nun, having dared to
weep at the fate of her son, was drowned in the Sheksna. The famous
old city of Novgorod now passed under the harrow, on a forged charge
of complicity with the Poles, which had been made by a miscreant from
Volhynia named Peter. Ivan went thither at the head of his infernal
legion of praetorians. On the way they committed the most diabolical
outrages at Tuer, Mednoie, and Torjek, but Great Novgorod was the
scene of their most terrible orgies. The churches were overturned and
destroyed and their contents pillaged, the inhabitants were drowned in
families as in the noyades of Lyons ; they were coated with combustible
materials, burnt to death and tortured, the presiding genius being the
Nero of the North himself.t Kelly has summed up some of the events
of this bloody year. " Ivan," he says, " butchered with his own hand a
throng of the unfortunate inhabitants, whom he had heaped together in
a vast enclosure, and when at last his strength failed to second his fury,
he gave up the remainder to his select guard, to his slaves, to his dogs,
and to the opened ice of the Volkhof, in which for more than a month
these hapless beings were daily engulphed by hundreds. Then, declaring
that his justice' was satisfied, he retired, seriously recommending himself
to the prayers of the survivors, who took special care not to neglect
obedience to the orders of their terrestrial deity."|

It is said that sixty thousand men perished in this massacre at
Novgorod and the neighbourhood. The dead in great numbers had to
be thrown into a huge common grave. Novgorod was almost desert, and
one large quarter formerly thronged with merchants was made into an
open square. § Ivan had reserved the same fate for Pskof, but his moody
and wanton caprice was turned aside by seeing the people crowding to
the churches, asking for mercy from heaven, and by their humble
submission. We are told that a hermit had the temerity to offer
him for food some raw flesh in Lent. " How is this," he said, " I
am a Christian, and don't cat meat in Lent." " You are mistaken," said
the recluse, " you feed on human flesh and blood, forgetting not only
Lent but God himself," and he ended by pouring imprecations on his
head. The frightened Tzar hastened away.ll]

He returned to Moscow to search out accompHces in the sup-
posed plot at Novgorod. They were naturally forthcoming. A
supply of the richest and best could always be furnished by those who
pandered to his thirst for blood. On the 25th of July, 1570, the public
square of Moscow was strewn with red-hot braziers, enormous cauldrons

* Id., 177. t /d., 186, 187. I Id., i. 144, § Karamzin, ix. 189. || /cf., 192.

2 Q

5o6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of brass, and eighty gibbets. Five hundred of the most illustrious
nobles, already torn by tortures, were dragged thither ; some were
massacred amidst the joyful acclamations of his savage satelUtes, who
shouted " hoida, hoida" (the word used by the Tartars to encourage
their horses), but the major part of them expired under the protracted
agony of being slashed with knives by the courtiers of the Muscovite
monster. He hirnself transfixed an old man with a spear. Neither
were women spared any more than men, says Kelly. Ivan ordered them
to be hanged at their own doors, and he prohibited their husbands from
going out or in without passing under the corpses of their companions
till they rotted and dropped in pieces on them. Elsewhere husbands or
children were fastened dead to the places which they occupied at the
domestic table, and their wives or mothers were compelled to sit for days
opposite to the dear and lifeless remains.

To the dogs and bears which this raging madman delighted to let
loose upon the people was left the task of clearing the public square from
the mutilated bodies which encumbered it. . . . New modes of
punishment were daily invented. Very soon he required fratricides and
parricides. Basmanof was required to kill his father, Prozorofski his
brother. With confiscations, monopolies, taxes, and conquests he
accumulated in his palace the riches of the empire of the Tartars. To
these he joined those of the Livonians, whom he plundered, though he
could not conquer them.* While this ravaging was going on outside the
palace, buffoons and reckless riot was taking place inside, and yet not a
hand was raised to kill him. His divine right threw the people at the feet
of this fetish, who meanwhile proclaimed, " I am your god, as God is
mine ; my throne, like that of the omnipotent, is surrounded by
winged archangels, and like him I send forth armies of three hundred
thousand men and two hundred cannons against my enemies."t

Ivan continued his poUcy towards Livonia, which he was determined
to conquer. His intrigue won over Magnus, the brother of the Swedish
king, whom he nominated king of that province, but the people would
not have him, nor could the flattering words of Ivan's ministers reconcile
them in their own words, "to accept as their hberator he who was a
tyrant at home."| The only result of the campaign was another ravaging
of the open country. §

The foreign pohcy of the Tzar was a singularly selfish one. While the
rest of Europe, and especially the Empire, wished to take measures against
the advancing Turks, we find him sending an envoy to Constantinople with
courteous messages. This was in 1570. "My master," said the latter, "is
not an enemy of the faith of Islam. Many of his vassals profess it, and
worship in their own mosques, as the princes of Kasimof, Yurief, Surojik,

* Kelly, op. cit., 145. t ^d., 14a. Karamzin, ix. 192-210. J /</., 216.

§ Id., 216-222.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 507

and Romanof. At Kadom, in the province of Mechira, many of the
Tzar's functionaries profess Mifhammedanism, and if Simeon, the late
Khan of Kazan, and the tzarevitch Murtaza have been baptised, it was at
their own request."* But the Suhan was not to be won over by fair
words, he asked for the cession of Kazan and Astrakhan, and prepared
for war. The Khan was ready to assist him, and began by defeating the
Circassian Prince Temruk, Ivan's father-in-law, and killing his two sons,
Mamstruk and Bilberuk.t This was in 1570, and the same year Devlet
Girai built the fortress of Islam Kerman.f The next year he appeared
in Southern Russia with one hundred thousand men. They met some
fugitives who had fled from Ivan's brutality, and who encouraged them to
march on Moscow, disclosing to them the pitiful condition to which the
country had been reduced by its mad ruler. They evaded the Russians
posted on the Oka, and approached Serpukof, where the Tzar with his
praetorians were posted. The tyrant now proved himself a woful coward.
Afraid that his voivodes would surrender him to the enemy, he fled in all
haste to his retreat at Alexandrofski. Moscow was almost defenceless,
and the Khan was but thirty versts off. The generals from the Oka
approached it, however, by forced marches, but instead of offering battle
outside the city, they occupied the suburbs, and entangled their men
amidst the houses and streets. What then happened may be told in the
graphic phrases of Horsey. " The enemy," he says, " passed St. John's
church high steeple, at which instant happened a wonderful stormy wind,
through which all the churches, houses, and palaces within the city and
suburbs, thirty miles compass, built mostly of fir and oak timber, were set
on fire, and burnt within six hours' space, with infinite thousands of
men, women, and children, burnt to death in the fiery air ; and likewise
in the stone churches, monasteries, vaults, cellars, very few escaping
both without and within the three walled castles. The river and ditches
about Moscow were stopped and filled with the multitudes of people,
loaden with gold, silver, jewels, chains, ear-rings, and treasure. So many
thousands were there burnt and drowned that the river could not be
cleaned for twelve months afterwards, and many were occupied within a
great ci]^uit to search, dredge, fish, as it were, for rings, plate, bags of
gold and silver, by which many were enriched ever after."§

The gates of the Kremlin meanwhile had been firmly closed, and there
was no getting thither. It alone escaped. The rest of the city perished,
as did Ivan's palace at Arbath. Among the victims were twenty-three
English merchants. Devlet Girai was satisfied. He did not venture to
attack the Kremlin, but having surveyed from the hills of Vorobief a
space of thirty versts of burning ruins, he retired to the Taurida,
ravaging the country as he went, and carrying off more than one hundred

Id., 222, 223. t ^d. Klaproth's Caucasus, 174, J Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii, 372.

§ Op. cit., 165.

508 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

thousand prisoners. The dead bodies poisoned the rivers and wells, and
plague and famine hung their black banners about the fearful cemetery.

Ivan laid the blame of his disaster on his captains and officers, whom
he proceeded to torture and put to death suo 7nore. While so engaged
and busy with the plans for restoring Moscow an envoy came from the
Krim Khan. " He was attended," says Horsey, '' by many murzas, all
well horsed and clad in sheep-skin coats, with black caps of the same,
with bows and arrows and curious rich scimitars by their sides. Stinking
horse flesh and water," he says, " was their best food. The time was
come they must have audience ; much disgrace and base usage was offered
them ; they endured, puffed, and scorned it. The emperor {i,e., Ivan),
with his three crowns before him in his Royai estate, with^his nobles and
princes about him, commanded the envoy's sheep-skin coat and cap to be
taken off him and a golden robe and rich head-dress to be put on him. The
ambassador, well contented, entered his presence, while his followers were
kept back in a space by grates of iron, at which the ambassador chafed
with a hellish hollow voice, looking fierce and grimly, four captains of the
guard being near the emperor's seat. Himself a most ugly creature,
without reverence thundered out, that his master, the great emperor of
all the kingdoms and khans whom the sun shone upon, sent to him, Ivan
Vasilivitch, his vassal and Great Duke over all Russia by his permission,
to know how he did like the scourge of his displeasure by sword, fire,
and famine, and had sent him for remedy (pulling out a foul rusty knife) to
cut his throat withal.'" The attendants wished to cut him in pieces, but
the Tzar was too timid, and contented himself with sending the envoy
back with the message, " Tell the miscreant and unbeliever, thy master,
it is not he, it is for my sins and the sins of my people against my
God and Christ ; he it is that hath given him, who is a limb of Satan,
the power and opportunity to be the instrument of my rebuke, by whose
pleasure and grace I doubt not of revenge and to make him my vassal
before long." This story of Horse/s is told somewhat differently by
other authorities.

According to these the envoy reminded Ivan that brothers cmarrelled
and then made friends again, and offered, if he would surrender Kazan
and Astrakhan to him, to make war on his enemies. He also gave .him
a gold-mounted dagger, saying his master wore it in his girdle, and
desiring him to do the same. He would also have sent him a horse, but
they were all weary with the late campaign. The message was accom-
panied by a jeering letter in the following terms : " I have burnt and
ravaged Russia to revenge Kazan and Astrakhan, and not for riches,
which I look upon as dust. I have searched for you everywhere, at
Serpukhof, even at Moscow. I want your crown and your head, but you
have fled, and you boast of your grandeur, prince, without courage and

• Horsey, i6i afld 167.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 509

without shame. But I now know the road into your country. I will
return again if you do not release my ambassador, if you refuse my
request, and will not swear for yourself, your children, and descendants
to be faithful to me."

In reply to this truculent note the craven Tzar sent the Khan a
humble answer, offering to give up Astrakhan after the conclusion of a
peace, and entreating him not to molest Russia. He even consented (to
his eternal disgrace) to surrender an illustrious Tartar who had adopted
Christianity to the fate of almost certain martyrdom.* We now find him
marrying again, and collecting two thousand of the most beautiful women
in the country, who were gradually sifted until his choice fell upon Marfa
Sabakin, the daughter of a Novgorod merchant. Her relatives were
raised in rank, and were enriched by the confiscated property of his
victims. She soon fell ill, and charges were speedily made that she had
been bewitched. Another series of murders followed. On this occasion
poison was hberally employed. He now paid a visit to Novgorod, still
hung round with the pestilential vapours which rose from its slaughtered
citizens, and a golden dove was hung in the cathedral as a token of
peace ! ! ! Ivan now scandalised his people by marrying for the fourth
time, and on this occasion without a religious ceremony. He repented,
however, of this indecency, and his marriage was afterwards duly con-
firmed.t In 1572, a rumour having reached him that the Tartars were
again advancing, he sent off a caravan of four hundred and fifty carts
laden with treasures to Novgorod, where he sought shelter himself {

Sigismund, king of Poland and Lithuania, died on the i8th of July,
1572, and advised his grandees to offer the crown to the Russian Tzar,§
but the latter's hands were engaged elsewhere. The Krim Khan, elated
at his recent victory, determined to press matters home against Russia?
and in 1572 advanced with one of the largest armies the Tartars had
ever collected, and including janissaries, Nogais, and a large park of
artillery. He speedily reached the Oka, and, having deluded the
Russians, crossed it at a ford unawares, and was on the road to Moscov/.
The Tz^ was at Novgorod, employed in his favourite occupation of
drowning people in the Volkhof, but his troops were commanded by a
brave commander named Vorotinski. He attacked the Tartars, who
were one hundred and fifty thousand strong, near Molody, fifty versts
from Moscow. It was a terrible struggle ; the Tartars fought in effect to
recover Kazan and Astrakhan, and the Russians to defend their hearths,
when both sides were fatigued, Vorotinski succeeded in passing a body
of his troops round the enemy and attacking him in rear. This
decided the day. The Tartars fled, leaving their baggage and the
Khan's standard with the victors. Their chief men were slain, and their
great hero Divi-Murza, the scourge of the Christians, was captured. The

* Karamzin, ix. 23a. t /rf., 243. J /i., 250. §/^,, 251.

5IO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Khan returned home with about twenty thousand men, and some large
mounds between the Lapasnia and the Royai still show where the rest
were buried.*

Ivan now returned again to Moscow, and in his elation at the victory
and his conviction that he had trampled out every ember of disaffection
by his measures, he, to the great joy of his people, disbanded his
hated praetorians, the oprichniks.t He also wrote in a very different tone
to the Krim Khan. Nagoi, the Russian envoy in the Taurida, and
Yan Boldai, the Khan's ambassador, who had been detained seventeen
years in Russia, were now both released,! The famous Divi was,
however, detained, and died a prisoner at Novgorod. Meanwhile a
famine devastated the Krim, and the Cossacks of the Don and Dnieper
made raids upon the unfortunate land.§ On another side Ivan, who had
serious intentions of securing his own election to the throne of Poland,
addressed courteous and well measured phrases to its grandees, which
are reported by Karamzin.]]

The unfortunate province of Livonia again felt the Russian heel on
its throat. Ivan's troops were told to spare neither age nor sex. Its
o-entry were surprised in their castles and butchered, and the Tzar's chief
favourite Maluta Skuratof, the right-hand-man in his many cruel deeds,
having been killed ; a pile of German and Swedish prisoners was reared,
and they were burnt alive, a horrible holocaust to his memory. II The
horrors of the struggle remind one of those perpetrated in the Palatinate
in the miserable thirty years' war.** The Tartars of Kasimof, &c., were
largely employed in these campaigns,

A diet was at length held at Warsaw in the spring of 1573, for the
election of a king. The chief competitors were Ernest, son of the
Emperor Maximilian; the Duke of Anjou, brother of Charles IX. of
France, too well known as the author of the massacre of St. Bartholomew;
the King of Sweden, his son Sigismund, and Ivan of Russia. The
Litter's chances were, however, very slight ; he belonged to the Greek
faith, he lived too far off, he was too powerful, and his cruel disposition
was well known. The diet ended by electing Henry of Anjou, an election
which at once drew together the Emperor and the Tzar, and the latter
wrote to his brother Emperor to denounce the inhuman cruelty of the
authors of the famous massacres in France, thus acting throughout an
ever consistent part. Henry of Anjou was soon tired of his new dignity ;
he loved amusement and pleasure, and cared little for State affairs, and
on the death of his brother Charles IX., he hastened back to France to
mount its throne. That of Poland was thus again vacant. Sultan Sehm
conveyed to the diet his wish that their choice should fall on neither the
son of the Emperor nor the Russian T/ar, and su.uQested they should

*/^., 255. t/d., 259- lid.,z.^. >-.'.,-

% Id., 273. ** hi; 273-285.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN. 511

give the crown to the most virtuous of the Polish grandees, or, still better,
to the illustrious Stephen Batory, Prince of Transylvania, w^ho was a friend
to Turkey.* He was in the vigour of his age, being forty-two years old,
and owed his position entirely to his great qualities, which had led the
Transylvanians to elect him as their chief. He was accordingly elected.
This was in the year 1576.

Ivan soon saw that the new King of Poland was a formidable
antagonist, whose brave words when he first addressed the Polish
notables, and promised them to recover the lost provinces of Lithuania,
probably reached his ears. However this was, he determined to forestal
events, and to invade Livonia, and first despatched fifty thousand men
to Revel, which, as I have said, belonged to the Swedes. There they
were sharply met and had to withdraw, after sustaining heavy losses,
including the death of their commander Sheremetief ; but this was only
the advance guard of the Russians. The main body, consisting ■ of
Russians, Circassians, Nogais, Mordvins, Tartars, &c., were assembled
under the Tzar at Novgorod, with whom was Sain Bulat, ex-Tzar of
Kasimof, who styled himself Grand Duke of Tuer. This army, however,
instead of marching on Revel, went into Southern Livonia, which was
subject to Poland, overran the country, and mercilessly impaled its
prisoners or sold them to the Tartars. Few in number, the Germans
behaved heroically. At Venden, rather than surrender the castle they
fired the powder magazines and blew it into the air while they were
inside.t This act was rewarded by Ivan by a most fiendish revenge on
the inhabitants of the town, male and female, and torture, murder, and
licence of all kinds were dominant. 'In two months the Russians
captured twenty-seven towns. Ivan after his victories cantoned his
troops in the conquered country, and returned again to Alexandrofski,
where he indulged in another of his mad campaigns against decency,
and, like an angel of destruction, again bathed his hands in blood. This
outburst is referred to as the sixth period of the murders, and in it the
most distinguished Russian commander, to whom he owed much of his
success, was accused of indulging in magic and of bewitching the Tzar.+
This ^as Prince Vorotinski, who was descended from Michael of
Chernigof. The white-haired hero was bound down to a wooden trestle
and placed between two red-hot braziers, and roasted to death, the
infernal Tzar himself stirring the embers with his staff. This murder
was followed by many others, in which virtue and sanctity were
certain passports to the slaughter-house. Meanwhile the voivodes con-
tinued their struggles for pre-eminence among one another, while, to the
astonishment of foreigners, the more cruel the Tzar became the more
willingly did they place their necks under the wheels of Juggernaut.
However inhuman, he was rather a divinity than a sovereign to them.

*/(/., 307,308. t /rf., 327. 328- I/<^v 335.

512 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

In our survey of the great colossus which overshadowed Eastern
Europe we have overlooked the Krim for some time. We are told that
Devlet Girai, having ravaged Moldavia (which it would seem had been
devised to Ivan by the hospodar Bogdan, who died at Moscow), died of
the plague at Baghchiserai.* This was on the 25th of June, 1577, after a
reign of twenty-six years, and when the Khan was sixty-six years old.t

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN II.

Devlet Girai was succeeded by his son Muhammed, called Semis or
the Fat, who nominated his brother Adil Girai as his kalga. By the
advice of his grandees, who urged that he should mark his accession by an
attack on his neighbours, he proceeded to ravage Volhynia and the
border districts of Lithuania. This policy was grateful enough to the
Tzar, who sent him Prince Mossalski as his envoy, bearing the richest
presents which had hitherto been sent to the Taurida. The envoy was
ordered to show the Tartars great cordiality, and to promise the Khan
annual presents if he would accord Ivan the title of Tzar. " If they
recall to you," said Ivan, " the old days of Uzbeg Khan and KaHta,"
reply, " I have no knowledge of the past, which is known only to the
good God and you gentlemen." Muhammed, as the price of his
friendship, asked for the surrender of Astrakhan, and pmmised to make
over Lithuania and Poland to Russia as an equivalent ! ! ! He also
demanded that the Cossacks of the Don and Dnieper should be trans-
planted elsewhere. To this the Tzar replied, that the Cossacks of the
Dnieper were subjects of vStephen Batory, while those of the Don were
outlaws, who were punished with death whenever found on Russian
territory ; Astrakhan, he said, was then partially occupied by Christians,
and there were Christian churches and monasteries there, and he could
not surrender it. Muhammed replied, he would guarantee the safety
of the roads, so that even helpless widows and orphans might
travel there richly robed, without danger. He also asked for a present
of four thousand roubles. Ivan sent him one thousand roubles, tand rich
presents for his grandees and the women of his court.J

Ivan's reign had hitherto been a succession of brilliant conquests.
Fortune had smiled on him everywhere. He was now going to feel how
fickle that patroness is. The Swedes and Poles were about to have their
revenge. Batory, having subdued the Teutonic Knights of Prussia and
become master of Dantzic, had his hands free. A terrible war followed,
whose details are most revolting, cruelty was answered by cruelty. The
murderous policy of Ivan was now repaid on his own people, and neither
age nor sex was spared in the common slaughter. The vigour and skill of

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 373, t Id. Karamzin, ix. 351, I Id., 353.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN II. 513

Batory animated the Polish nobles with fresh spirit, both of sacrifice and
of valour. The Pope sent him a sword which had been blessed, the Elector
of Brandenburg some pieces of cannon, his old Transylvanian subjects
sent him some regiments, and the Khan's goodwill was bought.* Batory's
army probably did not number more than fifty thousand men, while the
Russians, who once more collected together at Novgorod, were doubtless
much more numerous, and were assisted by contingents of Circassians,
Kumuks, Mordvins, Nogais, and by the murzas and princes of the former
Golden Horde, and of the hordes of Kazan and Astrakhan.! " Like the
army of Hannibal," says Karamzin, "that of Batory was composed of
men who did not understand each other's language, Germans, Hungarians,
Poles, Malo-Russians, and Lithuanians." Like the Austrians of our day,
their one bond of union was a devoted allegiance to the person of their
ruler. Instead of marching into Livonia, he proceeded to besiege
Polotsk, the capital of White Russia, and the key of Lithuania, which the
Russians had captured some years before. This was stormed after a
gallant defence, and remained in the hands of the Poles till the days of
Catherine II. J The fate of Polotsk was followed by that of Sokol and
other towns. It is curious that, at Polotsk, &c., the principal means of
attack employed was setting fire to the ramparts and stockades, which
were made of wood. Meanwhile the craven Tzar remained quietly
encamped at Pskof, where he received a jeering letter from Prince
Kurbski, who was in Batory's service, and who reminded him that the
genius and the worth of Russia were in the tomb, whither he had sent
them, and that he himself was a poltroon. Ivan bore these reproaches
without answer, like most cowards when bearded; made humble advances
to Batory to secure a treaty of peace, and even humbled himself
so far as to ask for aid from the Emperor and the Pope. Batory
was not slow to utihse his opportunity, and, as before, to attack where
attack was least expected. He determined to march straight upon
Novgorod through marsh and forest, a terrible route which had not been
followed since Vitut used it in 1428. He attacked, Veliki Luki, the key
of Novgorod, and as usual fired its wooden walls, and captured it,
with othe^ minor positions. He also took Kholm and burnt Staraia
Russa, and carried off a rich booty. On the other side, the Swedes
marched from one success to another. The Tzar continued his course of
indecision and feebleness, and now proceeded to solemnise his own
seventh marriage, and that of his son Feodor with Irene, the sister of
Boris Godunof, a famous person, who became a thorn in Russia's side in
after days. Karamzin says that at the marriage feast, under the garb of
courtiers, there were hidden two future Tzars and a miserable traitor,
namely, Godunof, Prince Basil Shuiski, and Michael Soltikof.§ Ivan
became more humble every day before the bold front showed by Batory,

> Id., 366, 367. t Id., 368, I Id., 380. 5 Id., 402, 40^.

514 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

although he had three hundred thousand men under arms, a tremendous
force in the sixteenth century, and larger than any seen in Europe since
the days of the first Tartar invasion.* The army of Batory, which pro-
ceeded to lay siege to Pskof, was about one hundred thousand strong.t
The siege of Pskof is one of the most famous in history, and the citizens
behaved with great intrepidity. After a terrible assault, which was
repelled, Batory wrote a summons to the inhabitants to surrender, which
he shot into the town. They replied that they were not Jews, and would
not sell Christ, or the Tzar, or their country, and bade him come and
conquer them.J The siege had eventually to be raised. But meanwhile
the Swedes were more successful. They captured Narva, which for
more than twenty years had been the great entrepot of Russian trade
with Denmark, Germany, and Holland, and was consequently well stored
with merchandise, and then proceeded to secure the Russian towns of
Ivan Gorod, Yama, and Koporia.

Ivan became very uneasy at these conquests, and at a council of his
boyards it was resolved to submit to Batory's terms and to surrender
Russian Livonia to the Poles. § On the basis of this surrender and that
of Polotsk and Velige a treaty was accordingly signed, and Livonia did
not again pass under the Russian sceptre till the days of Peter the
Great. II

Ivan's craven heart was not shared by his eldest son, whom he
made the associate of his crimes and debaucheries ; and that young
prince having expressed a wish to march against the Poles, his father
struck him down with a mace and killed him, and then spent many
dreary weeks in remorse. He had his crown and sceptre put away, he
dressed in robes of mourning, and sent a large sum of money to the
patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem,
bidding them pray for the repose of his murdered son,^ while he con-
tinued at home that brutal cruelty towards his officers which was his
second nature. It is curious to read, amidst the sickening details of the
massacres, his discussion with the Pope's envoy, the Jesuit Possevin, on
the subject of the reunion of the Russian church with Rome. To Ivan's
reproaches that the Pope did not walk on his feet, but was carried about
on men's shoulders in a throne, as if a cloud borne by angels, and that
he presented his slipper, on which was the sign of the cross, to be kissed,
while he ought to be humble and meek ; the Jesuit retorted that the
Russians bathed their eyes in the water in which the metropolitan
washed his hands. The Tzar had in fact no intention of carrying out
the decrees of the council of Florence, and would only promise tolerance
for Roman CathoHcs and Lutherans within his dominions so long as they
abstained from proselytising. We now reach a period when Russia

' li., 412. t li; 418. I Id., 426. % Id., 434. I Id., 440-446.

1I«.,45i-

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN 11. 515

made another great acquisition of territory by the conquest of Siberia.
This will occupy us in another chapter. Meanwhile let us turn to the
Krim Khan.

For some time he had not molested his northern and western
neighbours. This was because, at the instance of the Porte, he had
been engaged in a serious struggle with Persia. The contingent of
troops supplied was commanded by the kalga Adil Gazi Girai, Saadet
Girai, and Mubarek Girai. The Ottoman troops under Osman Pasha
had been engaged for four days against Ares Khan, of Shirvan, when the
Tartar contingent arrived. They turned the tide of the struggle and
captured Ares Khan, who was put to death by the Pasha. Artugdi Khan
and several sultans escaped, and retired with the debris of the army and
with their families beyond the Kur to the country of the Helo, where
they entrenched themselves, and were guarded by the picked cavalry of
the Persians, called kizil-bashis or red-heads, a name which was after-
wards applied generally to the Persians by the Turks. Osman Pasha
sent Adil Girai against them, who captured the treasures, harem, and
natural son of Ares Khan, together with two thousand laden camels and
many herds, while a large number of the kizil-bashis were killed. These
successes were followed by a reverse elsewhere, for we next read that
Osman Pasha was besieged at Shamakhi by an army of thirty or forty
thousand Persians. They beleagured the town for ten days, and on
retiring were waylaid near Mahmudabad by the Tartars, who had been
summoned from their pursuit of Artugdi by Osman. The action was
apparently indecisive, and the Persians continued their retreat, while the
Tartars went to Timur capu or the iron gate {i.e., the Bab ul abwab of the
Arabs, well known to us under the name of Derbend), where they were
joined by Osman. The Persians again advanced, and entered the
provinces of Kara bagh and Moghan, and when Adil Girai marched
against them they surrounded and captured him, and then put him to
death. The remaining Tartars returned again to the Krim.*

Muhammed Girai now nominated Alp Sultan, Adil Girai's son, to the
dignity of kalga. He also created a new dignity, that of second heir to
the thro^, to which he nominated Saadet Girai. As his atalik or
governor was called Nur ed din Mirza, the name of Nur ed din, which
means the light of the faith, was thenceforth attached to the new
dignity.t

The war with Persia still continued, and the Khan again went to the
assistance of his suzerain. He sent his son Murad Girai with a con-
tingent, and himself set out in 1579, giving Muhammed the sanjak of
Azof the command of an advance guard of ten thousand men. The
latter reached Osman Pasha after a march of seventy-four days, and was
soon joined by the Khan in person, whose Tartars severely defeated the

- • NouY. Journ. Asiat., xii. 373-375 • t Id. Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 59.

5l6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Persians who were attacking Shamakhi. The Khan's son also exacted
punishment from the inhabitants of Baku and its neighbourhood, and the
adjoining Persian provinces. Thinking he had done enough, and not
wishing to winter in Shirvan, he left his son Gazi Girai behind, and
himself went back to the Krim. This exasperated the Sultan against
him, and a correspondence seems to have ensued ; when the latter
issued an order he refused to obey it, saying he was not one of the
Sultan's begs but an independent prince. The people of Kaffa also
turned against him, and Osman Pasha, who was then there, was ordered
to punish the contumacious Khan. The latter, who lived at Eski Krim,
invited the Pasha to go and see him, and on his neglecting to do so he
besieged the town of Kaffa, but he was abandoned by the kalga Alp
Girai. After the siege had lasted for forty days, there arrived from
Constantinople Kilij Ali Pasha, with authority to nominate Islam,
Muhammed's brother to the throne. When the Ottoman fleet arrived in
the port, Alibeg, of the Mansur tribe, went over to the new Khan*
Muhammed now determined to escape to the Nogais of the Volga, by
way of Ferhkerman, and went accordingly to Fekeljik, where he was
overtaken by the late kalga Alp Girai, who put him and his son Safa
Girai to death. This was in the year 992 {i.e., 1584). He was
then fifty-two years old, and had reigned seven years and three
months.*

In order to complete and round off my story, I must diverge for a while
to describe the end of Muhammed's great contemporary Ivan the
Terrible. I shall not relate here the conquest of Siberia, which will
occupy us later, but pass on to the other events of his life. In 1 583 the
Cheremisses rose in rebellion, apparently incited by the Krim Khan.
This rebellion lasted until the close of Ivan's reign, and was marked by
considerable barbarity, probably by way of reprisal for Russian cruelty.
Ivan kept up a friendly communication with the Shah of Persia, the
chiefs of Bokhara and Khiva, and the Sultan. The subjects of the latter
freely repaired to Moscow to interchange the eastern tissues of gold for
sables, &c.,t but it was with the English that his communiQtions were
the most frequent and friendly, and the English merchants reaped a
golden harvest in consequence. He wished for an English wife, and
his ambassador received orders to report on the graces and looks of
Mary Hastings, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, who had been
named to him as a suitable partner. His envoy, with the consent of the
young lady, was permitted to have a full view of her, and his report
seems to confirm the opinion of Elizabeth, that she was remarkable
rather for her moral qualities than her beauty. Envoys on either side
were received with becoming dignity, but neither the marriage nor the
alliance which Ivan wished to make against Poland progressed, nor did

* Karam^in, ix. 530.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN II. 517

the English claims for exclusive right of trading in the Arctic ports of
Russia succeed either. But Nero was reaching the term of his days.
" He died," says Karamzin, " as he had lived, exterminating his people."
A comet which appeared in the year 1584, and whose tail was in the
shape of a cross, was pointed out by the Tzar himself as the presage of
his death.* Being attacked with a loathsome internal complaint, he
summoned astrologers from various parts, who told him he had but a
few days to live, whereupon he threatened to burn them alive if they
disclosed the fact. Sensuous to the last, his own daughter-in-law, who
had gone to see how he was, was forced to fly from his deathbed, terrified
by his lasciviousness.t He died somewhat suddenly on the i8th of
March, 1584. His courtiers seemed afraid of publishing the news for
fear the corpse itself should turn upon them, while the people who
attended the funeral wept tears, whose singular flow makes the wondering
Russian historian question whether love, fear, or mere caprice drew them
forth. For twenty-four years had his subjects sought refuge in prayer and
patience from the iron mace which this Avatar of destruction wielded.
He was clever, had a good memory, and a facile rhetoric, and like Louis
XI. he combined religion and gross behaviour in a curious compound.
He was perfectly impartial in striking down all of whom he was jealous
or suspicious, and we are told that even an elephant, which the Shah of
Persia sent him, was hacked in pieces because in refusing to kneel it
offended his dignity4 While thus capricious, his external policy was
often sagacious, and he insisted upon a certain purity of justice in his
courts of law. He patronised learning and the arts, and was tolerant in
religious matters, save to the Jews. It is not strange, perhaps, that in
popular tradition the crimes of Ivan were for the most part forgotten, as
their records were buried in the archives of the State, while the popular
instinct retained the great fact in its memory that Kazan, Astrakhan, and
Siberia were added to the Russian crown by the keen sword of John the
Terrible. If, on the other hand, we view his reign apart from the morals
of individuals as a mere tableau in human history, we shall confess,
perhaps, that when a disintegrated State becomes consolidated, by one
means or another, oftener by foul means than fair, it seems inevitable
that the taller poppies, which have been almost the rivals of the throne, and
which do not easily bend to altered circumstances, have to be decapitated.
In England the Wars of the Roses did the work, in France Louis XI.
did one portion of it and Richelieu another, and in Russia it was the
merciless hand of Ivan. Where there was no one to do it, as in Poland,
and consequently an oligarchy of rival families controlled the helm of
State, it was inevitable that it should sail upon the breakers, and
that perpetual anarchy should have invited the interference of interested
and in some respects justified neighbours. As a fire on the moorside is

Id., 55I' tW.,554- iI<i;5S9-

Sl8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

necessary sometimes, to allow the young heath to grow, as the tornado
which overturns the forest gives breathing room to the undergrowth of
timber, so perhaps Ivan and his like have their appointed work in
history.

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN.

In the preceding pages we have tried to unfold the story typified so
well in the famous allegorical picture painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds
for Catherine II., in which the young Hercules Russia is seen tearing
off the serpents which hold him in their grip. The remaining part of
our work will not carry us so far a-field. Russia was no longer a protege
of the Tartar Khans. It had a substantive history of its own, while
Krim became more and more dependent on Constantinople, until it was
gradually overwhelmed by its former dependent the ruler of Moscow.
There is another good reason why we should now limit our view, and
that is that the history of Russia for many succeeding decades is
dreary and uninteresting in the extreme. We can follow with patience
the gradual development of the giant, but we turn away with disgust
from the constant internal broils and revolutions which form the second
stage in his history. Ivan the Terrible was the last of the conquering
Tzars, and until the time of Peter the Great the condition of Russia was
largely that of stagnation, and even of decay. Its bounds were scarcely
enlarged at all, save among the useless deserts of Eastern Siberia. The
Tartars in the south, and the Swedes in the north, held the outlets of its
trade, and shut it off from communion with the outside world, and thus
kept the country in a state of feudal barbarism from which the rest
of Europe escaped centuries before. Strong to strike, it was the rude
strength of a young community, where the people was backward and
rude and required a centralised despotism in its government which
would have been unendurable anywhere else.

The reasons why it was so are well summarised by Kelly. " Extension
and want of population," he says, " are hostile to the compactness of the
mass ; in conjunction with the climate they hinder large and continuous
assemblages, they render men conscious of the weakness caused by
being insulated, they perpetuate blind and credulous ignorance, by
cutting off the communication of ideas ; they confine observation within
narrow limits, and thus the judgment cannot be exercised for want of
objects of comparison, and the result is the existence of only a scanty
number of ideas, which, however, have a stronger hold on the mind from
the habit of constant recurrence to them. Thus the Russians of that
period having none of those connections which enlighten, were unable
to form for themselves a public opinion, they were obliged to take it from

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN. 519

the court of the Grand Prince. There was their oracle, their despot."*
The bounds of Russia at this time on the south were still the same as of
old, the Oka formed the limit between them and the Tartars ; but while
the whole course of the Volga was theirs they had also begun to plant their
foot on the Terek, and what was more important, the Dnieper and the Don
had become the haunts of two predatory associations of Cossacks. The
former an out-post of Poland, and for the most part of Polish origin ; the
latter formed of outlaws and fugitives from Russia. Semi-nomadic and
with an organisation based on mihtary principles, they formed a very
useful buttress to Russia, as they were a perpetual menace to the Tartars,
whose independence again was but nominal, and who were in fact but an
out-post of the Ottoman empire.

The death of Ivan allowed the Russians to breathe more freely. As
Tacitus says, the most happy times for a people are those which
immediately succeed the death of a tyrant, and to cease to suffer is one
of the sweetest pleasures of life. A cruel reign, however, is generally
the preparation for a weak one. Feodor, Ivan's successor, was a
singular contrast to his father. '' Feeble and sickly in body, pliant*
timid, and superstitiously devout, he would have been a sexton, not a
sovereign, had he been free to follow his natural bent, for his greatest
pleasure was to haunt the churches and ring the bells."t Ivan, who
knew his character, left the government in the hands of a council of five,
but this was speedily superseded by the strongest and ablest of its
members, Feodor's brother-in-law Boris Godunof, who became " the
mayor of the palace " to this roi faineant. " Active, indefatigable, more
enlightened than any of his countrymen, versed in affairs and knowledge
of men, he possessed all the qualities requisite to constitute a great
minister.''^ Karamzin and other historians re-echo his praises, and
the external and internal condition of the country greatly improved
under his hands.

We will now continue our story. Islam Girai was introduced with his
brother Dervish to the Divan, and was presented by the Sultan with a
sword, a horse, and a red banner with an inscription in golden letters
on it. On the day of Khisr or St. George, the patron of Osmanli sailors,
the vizier accompanied the Khan and his companion the Capitan
Pasha as far as the tomb of Shaireddin (Barbarossa) on the Bosphorus,
where a banquet was given, after which at midnight they set sail. The
eagerness and desire of the people of Krim to see their new Khan was
so great that they rushed out into the sea on horseback to meet him.
This was in 1584. Islam Girai was the son of Devlet Girai. He
nominated Alp Girai as kalga and Mubarek Girai as nureddin. Four
months after his accession Saadet Girai, the son of Muhammed Girai,
marched against him at the head of the Nogais, and captured Baghchi-

Op. cit., i. 147. t Kelly, i. 156. J /rf.

520 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Serai. The Krim Khan took refuge at Kaffa, and sent to inform his
patron the Sultan. Osman Pasha, who was then Grand Vizier, was
ordered to march to his relief. Ten thousand janissaries, six thousand
spahis, and one thousand chuashis were sent to Sinope, and wintered
there and at Kastermuni, en route for the Krim.* But meanwhile Islam
Girai, with the assistance of the begs of Kaffa and the greater part of the
people of Krim, fought against the invader in the plains of Andal. Esni
beg and some other chiefs of the Nogais were killed, and Saadet Girai
took flight.t Thereupon the Ottoman troops who had assembled to aid
him marched against Persia. As the Nogais had also plundered
Bessarabia and Moldavia, Islam Girai was ordered to go there and try
and recover the booty they had carried off.f

On his accession Islam wrote to the Tzar Feodor, reminding him that
Ivan had sent the late Khan presents of furs and also ten thousand
roubles to secure peace. He asked for a renewal of these presents, and
promised in concert with the Turks, the Nogais, and the Russians them-
selves to overwhelm the Lithuanians. Meanwhile his people and those
of Azof, with the Nogais, plundered the border districts of Bielef, Koselsk,
Vorotinsk, Meschofsk, and Massalsk. The marauders were defeated on
the Oka by Michael Besnin, who recovered the plunder they had taken.
But they twice again invaded the Ukraine with bodies of thirty or forty
thousand men. In June, 1^87, they captured Krapivna. Although
growing weaker daily, the Krim was still a perpetual menace to Russia,
and Karamzin compares it to a pestilent reptile which, even when
dying, shoots out venom at its enemies. §

P'letcher describes the tactics of the Krim Tartars on these occasions.
He says that being very numerous, they made feints in various directions,
pushing their attack where the land was left without defence, and adds
that they did not use firearms, but each man had a bow, a sheaf of
arrows, and a falchion sword, after the Turkish fashion. Expert horse-
men, they could shoot as well backwards as forwards. Some of the
horsemen carried a lance like a boar spear. The common soldiers had
no armour but their dress, which consisted of a black sheep's skin, worn
with the wool outside in the daytime and inside at night, with a cap of
the same. The murzas were dressed like the Turks. In crossing rivers
with their army, they tied three or four horses together, and taking long
poles or pieces of wood, bound them fast to the tails of their horses, and
sitting on them drove the horses over.|| He says they were well versed
in stratagems. In besieging a town they were very lavish in promises to
the garrison, but having gained their end, behaved afterwards with great
cruelty. His description of their pertinacity in fighting is very like that
given by Herberstein. He adds that the chief booty they sought was

» Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 64, 65. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 379.

I Krim Khans, 65 ♦ Op. cit., x. ^^. \ Fletcher's Russe Commonwealth, 87, 88.

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN. 52 1

prisoners, especially young boys and girls, whom they sold to the Turks
and their neighbours. " For which purpose they provided great baskets
made like bakers' panniers to carry them tenderly, and when any of
them happened to tire or get sick on the way, they dashed them against
the ground or some tree, and thus left them for dead." The people on
the Russian frontier, who were accustomed to their raids, kept few other
cattle than swine, which as good Mussulmans the Tartars would not
touch.* Let us now revert to our history.

Saadet Girai had not been crushed by his former reverse, but again
called in the Nogais and the Don Cossacks. The Krim Khan sent an
army against him, and in the battle which ensued Mubarek, the brother
of Saadet, with several Nogai chiefs, fell. Saadet himself went to live
with the Nogais,t while his brother Murad went to Russia, where he was
well received by Feodor, who sent him, accompanied by two voivodes, to
Astrakhan. There he was welcomed as a sovereign prince, amidst the
rattling of drums and blowing of trumpets. Miirad affected a Royal
splendour in his surroundings, and holding Feodor's diploma with its
golden seal in his hand, he received the neighbouring princes and their
envoys in that great mart of eastern trade. He styled himself the ruler
of the four rivers, the Yaik, the Volga, the Don, and the Terek, as well
as of all the independent tribes, and of the Cossacks ; and boasted how
he would triumph over Islam Girai and humble the Sultan, that he would
be Tzar of Astrakhan and his brother of Krim.J Meanwhile the Russians
kept a sharp eye upon him ; he was not allowed to see anyone without
witnesses being present, and the strelitzes formed a guard of honour
when he went to the mosque. On his part he conciliated the Nogais,
and prepared with their assistance and those of the Cossacks and the
Circassians to make a descent on the Krim. He awaited the Tzar's
commands, and also the cannon and a body of ten thousand strelitzes
he had promised him, but Feodor temporised. He feared to have the
Krim Khan and the King of Poland on his hands together. In 1587 he
wrote to Murad bidding him march towards Vilna, and there await the
Russians, for he intended first to crush the PoHsh king, and then he
wrote to ^Iklam Girai telling him how he was being urged on by his
relatives, and informing hiro, if he wanted to have his countenance, he
must also march against Poland, and bade him attack Kief by way of
Putivle, where he could join the troops of Seversk.§ This had its
proper effect. Islam repudiated the recent raids on Russia as the work
of certain wanton murzas, who had been punished, and he promised to
enter into a treaty, while he told his own people it was better they
should make raids on Poland than on Russia. ||

Feodor kept up his father's formal intercourse with the Sultan, and his

* Id., 89, 90, t Nouv. Journ. Asiat.j xii, 380. J Karamain, x. 78, 79.

§ Id,, 81. B Id., 83.

2S

522 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

envoy was honoured with the present of a State kaftan. The Sultan,
who styled the Tzar " King of Moscow," complained of the inroads of
the Cossacks on his territory, and of the treatment of Muhammedans in
Russia, and the Tzar rephed by courteous phrases. A step which
Feodor took about this time brought the two powers more face to face.
Georgia, a Christian kingdom on the borders of two Muhammedan
powers, Persia and Turkey, had always had a critical history. It was
now divided between Alexander, who ruled in Kakheti, and his relative
Simeon, who ruled in Karthli. The latter was dependent on the Turks.
Afraid of his position, Alexander in 1586 offered to put himself under the
Russian sceptre, and Feodor accepting the offer, took the title of Ruler
of Georgia, a country to which he did not even know the way.* Fealty
was duly sworn by the Georgian sovereign and his three sons, and they
promised to send annually to Russia fifty pieces of golden tissue and ten
embroidered in gold or silver, in exchange for the Tzar's protection.t An
army was sent to subdue the Shamkhal or sovereign of the Kumuks, and
an officer to receive the submission of the princes of Kabarda and
Circassia. Feodor sent priests to restore the orthodox faith among
the somewhat lax Georgians, and also pictures for their churches.
Among the presents he sent to Alexander were forty sable skins, two
black fox skins, one thousand ermines, ten narwhal's teeth, a coat of
mail, a cuirass, and a helmet. J From this time Feodor styled himself
ruler of Iberia, of the Tzars of Georgia and Kabarda, and of the
Circassian princes.§ The internal progress of Russia was also well
marked. In 1584 was founded the city of Archangel on the Dwina,
Astrakhan was protected by a wall, and a new town built on the Yaik
called Uralsk. We also find the Cossacks of the Volga sending off
swarms from the parent hive, one of which settled on the Terek and
another on the Ural. Boris Godunof concentrated more and more power
in his own hands. This caused much discontent, and a powerful
conspiracy, headed by the brave and famous Prince Shuisky and the
metropolitan, was formed against him. He defeated its machinations,
and the leaders of the plot were exiled or put to death, Shuisky himself
being among the latter. Meanwhile Feodor divided his time between
religious exercises and childish amusements. He was apparently more
than half imbecile. ||

Stephen Batory, King of Poland and Lithuania, and one of the most
distinguished men in Europe, died on the 12th December, 1586, and his
death was the signal for fresh intrigues at the Polish diet, where his
successor was elected. The Tzar Feodor was a candidate for the vacant
throne, as his father had been. But the Poles insisted upon impossible
conditions, Russia was to become a province of Poland, the Tzar was to
adopt the Roman Catholic faith, to be crowned in a Latin church at

•/</., 88, 89. Wd.,90. I Id., 396. Note, 59. $/rf., 94- 'i Id., €,9-114.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. * 523

Cracow by the Archbishop of Gniesen, and to put the title of King of
Poland before that of Tzar of Moscow. These terms were of course
inadmissible, and the answer of the Russian boyards to one of them is
interesting. "The crown of Yagellon must be put below that of
Monomachos, and Feodor will style himself Tzar and Grand Duke of
all Russia, of Vladimir, and Moscow, King of Poland, and Grand Duke
of Lithuania. In case the Old and the New Rome, in case Byzatittmn
shall become subject to us, the Tzar will put its names alone above that
of Russia."* Negotiations were continued for a while, but at length the
diet elected Sigismund III. Vasa (the son of the King of Sweden, whose
mother was descended from Yagellon),t much to the chagrin of the Tzar
and the Emperor of Germany. This was in 1587.

Let us turn once more to the Krim. We read how Islam Girai under-
took an expedition against Circassia, whence he returned . laden with
booty. Afterwards, hearing that the voivode of Moldavia had maligned
him, he entered his territory without the Sultan's permission and ravaged
it. He was ordered by the latter to make restitution, which he did, and
shortly after died.t This was in the year 996 {i.e., 1588). He was buried
in the great mosque at Akkerman.

He is described as goodnatured, intelligent, and tractable. Under his
rule a notable change was made in the feudal relations of the Khan to
the Sultan. Hitherto the name of the Khan, as that of the ruler of the
land, had been recited first in the Friday prayer, and afterwards that of the
suzerain the Sultan ; but towards the end of Islam's reign, by an order
of the Porte, this was reversed, and the Sultan's name thenceforward
preceded that of the Khan in the Khutbe,§

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II.

Islam Girai was succeeded by his brother Gazi Girai, who nominated
Feth Girai as kalga, and Bakht Girai, the son of Adil Girai, as nureddin.||
Gazi Girai hkd been taken prisoner in the Persian war, had escaped to
Erzerum, and thence to Constantinople, where he was now nominated to
the throne of Krim, to the prejudice of the kalga Alp Girai.^ Persia
was then to Turkey what Athens was to Greece, the home of culture and
letters, and we accordingly find that Gazi's imprisonment there had its
fruits. He is described as the best of the Krim Khans. His bravery
won for him the soubriquet of Bora, which both in Turkish and Italian
means the North wind. He also won his title of Gazi from his zeal as a
warrior of Islam. His seven years' imprisonment in Persia he spent in

♦ Id., X. 129. t ^d-i 138. Leiewel Histoire dc Pologne, i. 146*

I Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 380. § Voa Hammer, Krim Khans, 67.

II Nouv. Journ, Asiat., xii. 428. f Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 67.

524 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the Strong fortress of Kahkaha, which was built in 1383. Soon after his
accession Alp Girai and Muhammed Girai, Islam Girai's second son,
seem to have rebelled. The former submitted at the instance of the
Sultan, and repaired with a following of one hundred and sixty people to
Constantinople, and ended his days at Yamboh, near Adrianople ; the
latter fled to Circassia. Gazi Girai introduced a new official into the
Krim, namely, the khanaga, who on his installation was styled Bashaga
{i.e., the chief of the agas), and filled the post of chief law adviser to the
crown.* On his accession he wrote to the Tzar to tell him he had
persuaded the Sultan to renounce his claims on Astrakhan, and asking
for an alliance with Russia.t He also made an incursion into Poland,
and ravaged the chief towns of Lithuania and Galicia, The Poles
bought peace by the payment of a number of sable skins.}

Fletcher tells us that in these wars every man went with two horses
at least, the one to ride on, the other to kill when it came to his turn to
have his horse eaten, " for their chief victuals," he says, " is horseflesh,
which they eat without bread or any other thing with it. So that if a
Tartar be captured by a Russian he will be sure to find a horse leg or
some other part of him at his saddle bow." He also adds that when he
was at Moscow a nephew of the Krim Khan arrived there with three
hundred attendants, and that they were entertained " in very good sort
after the Russe manner, two very large and fat horses, ready flayed,
being sent them on a sledge for their supper. They preferred horseflesh
to beef, mutton, &c., deeming it stronger ; and yet, although this was
their chief food, they annually sent thirty or forty thousand horses to be
bartered at Moscow. They also bred a large number of cattle and black
sheep, chiefly for their skins and milk. They ate also occasionally rice,
figs, and other fruit, and drank milk and warm blood, which they some-
times mixed together, and sometimes when travelling would open a
horse's vein and drink the blood warm as it came from the body."§

Let us turn once more to Russia. The growing power of Godunof was
not sufficient for his ambition. The feeble Tzar had no children, and his
death was clearly not far off. There only remained his brother Dimitri, who
was but a child, for Godunof had secured the assistance of th^L* clergy by
his submission to them, and had exiled or put away all other rivals. He
determined to put Dimitri away also. "A Russian chronicler," says
Kelly, " who was certainly not acquainted with the legends of Scotland,
depicts Godunof as another Macbeth, urged to crime by the predictions
of soothsayers. He assembled several soothsayers or astrologers in the
dead of night, and desired them to cast his horoscope. Their answer
to him was, * The crown is thy destiny.' But then they \vere suddenly
mute, as if dismayed with what they foresaw besides. Boris insisted on

* /4., 75. t Karamzin, x. 144* I Id, Nouv. Journ. Aiiat., xii. 42S.

§ Op. cit., 9i> 92t

GAZl GIRAl KHAN II. 5-5

their completing their prediction, and they told him he should reign, but
only for seven years. He embraced them in a transport of joy,
exclaiming, * Though it be but for seven days, no matter so I reign.' "*
He tried to arouse odium against the young prince by reporting that he
was cruel like his father, and although but ten years old, was in the habit
of making manikins to represent various grandees about the court, which
he hacked with his sword, saying it was thus he would act when he was
Tzar. At length, on the 15th of May, 1591, the boy being but ten years
old and playing in the court-yard of the palace cutting wood with a
knife, he was seen suddenly writhing with a cut in his throat. A
packed court was assembled to hold an inquest, which decided that the
boy had stabbed himself in a fit of apoplexy, a verdict supported by the
decision of the clergy; but the popular voice came to another conclusion,
namely, that he had been murdered by Godunof's creatures. They
wreaked their wrath on several of them, and thenceforth he was looked
upon by the people as the assassin of their sacred prince, and they would
see nothing but crimes in his most laudable acts.t

The public attention was meanwhile diverted by another invasion of
the Tartars. The Khan was aggrieved that the Russians should have
informed the Lithuanians of his intention to attack them, and he entered
into an alUance with the Swedish King John against them. Murad
Girai, who continued to live at Astrakhan, now died suddenly. It was
supposed by poison administered by some agent of the Krim Khan, who
however, accused the Russians of the act, and swore to avenge him.
He was also urged by his murzas that it was necessary for a good Khan,
at least once in his life, to advance as far as the Oka. They wanted in
fact an excuse for plundering. The spies which Russia kept in the
Taurida informed the authorities of the Khan's preparations for war,
which were ostensibly made, however, against the Poles. The various
clans of Krim were mustered, and were joined by the Nogais and by
Ottoman troops from Azof and Bielogorod with artillery, and on the 26th
of June, 1 591, news arrived that the steppe was covered with Tartars,
and that more than one hundred and fifty thousand of them were
marching .^irectly on Tula, without stopping to take the fortresses on the
way. Godunof showed great vigour ; orders were issued for the border
commanders to muster at Serpukhof, and to meet the Khan in the open
country, but unfortunately the principal Russian forces were then at
Novgorod and Pskof watching the Swedish king. The rapid advance of
the enemy compelled a change of plan. The troops were ordered to
withdraw from the Oka towards Moscow, and the popular clamour was
stilled by the Fabian move being explained as intended to draw the
Tartars into a net. The camp was fixed at two versts from Moscow, on
the route to Kaluga and Tula. A wooden fortress on wheels and a

Op. cit., i. 157. t Id., I58-I§2.

526 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

moveable church were placed there, and the monasteries and other large
buildings were fortified. The Tartar army meanwhile advanced rapidly,
and swept away a small detachment which had been left on the Oka.
Feodor displayed no fear, and devoted himself to religious duties, while
he handed over his body guard to Godunof, who inspected the troops
and animated them with a portion of his own courage.

The Tartars proceeded to attack the camp, and were met by a
murderous fire. Karamzin tells us they were more skilled than the
Russians with their swords, but the latter had the advantage in being
armed with portable arquebuses. The fight took place within view of
the town, where no one seemed calm but the impassive Tzar, who reUed
on God's help, and prophesied that the following day the Khan would be
gone. The issue was indecisive, and the elite of the troops on either
side were not engaged ; but the Tartars had lost many men, Bachi
Girai and several murzas being among the wounded, while many chiefs
had been made prisoners. The Khan and his council began to lose
heart, and determined to retire before daybreak. The Tartar army, hke
that of most nomades, was not skilled in retreat, and this speedily became
a stampede. Baggage and munitions were abandoned, many of the
fugitives were drowned in the Oka, and a number of prisoners were
captured in a fight near Tula. The Khan reached Bagchi Serai on the
2nd of August in the night, riding in a cart, with one arm wounded and
in a sling, while but a third of his army reached home in a starving
condition. Feodor gave Godunof a Russian pelisse with gold buttons of
the value of five thousand roubles of our money ; he also gave him the
gold chain he usually wore, the gold cup of Mamai, which had been
captured in the battle of KuUkof, and three towns in the district of Vaga;
he also conferred on him the title of " Servant," an honour which had
only been thrice given during the century. Other grandees were pre-
sented with "Portugueses" (/.<?., gold dobras), and others again with
Hungarian ducats.* Feodor's gratitude to Godunof was not shared in
by the people, who accused him of " calling in the Tartars ' to order ' that
the country's danger might make them forget the death of Dimitri."
They were duly punished, and many populous places in tht"*'Ukraine
became desert. Presently the tzarina Irene bore a daughter, and Boris
was suspected of having substituted a female child for a male, which his
sister had borne, and when the infant died in a few days, it was said he
had poisoned it.t

It is thus that a Nemesis seems to follow closely on the steps of public
crimes. Meanwhile Godunof prosecuted a successful war against
Sweden. We are told the Krim Khan sent the Circassian Anthony as
an envoy to Sweden, asking for gold in recompense of his recent attack
on Russia. " Gold is ready for the victor," said John. " The Khan has

* Kuramzin, x. 195-213. t /<^., 212-219. Kelly, i. 162.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. 527

indeed seen Moscow, but he has not saved our country from the sword
of Russia.'-'* John died in the autumn of 1592, and was succeeded
by his son Sigismund, who thus united the crowns of Poland and
Sweden,t and this was followed by a treaty by which Kexholm was
ceded to Russia.

We now find the Krim Khan sending an envoy to Feodor with a
curious message. The Sultan, it seems, was discontented with the result
of his campaign against Moscow, and had the intention of deposing him.
He therefore wrote to say he intended to transport all his hordes from
the Krim, which he meant to devastate, and then to found a new
kingdom on the banks of the Dnieper, where he would form a buttress
for Russia against the Turks. He asked Feodor for money to enable
him to build a fortress near the ford of Koshkin, and undertook to ravage
Lithuania. The Tzar's reply was courteous, and with characteristic dupli-
city, although at peace with Poland, he encouraged the Khan's notion of
invading Lithuania.^ But before his envoy arrived the Tartars under
the tzarevitches kalga Feth Girai and nureddin Bakhta overran the
districts of Riazan, Kashir, and Tula with fire and sword, and carried off
a crowd of distinguished prisoners- The envoy was asked sarcastically by
the Khan what had become of the Russian armies since the tzarevitches
had not drawn their swords from their scabbards nor their arrows from
their quivers, and yet had driven a crowd of prisoners before them with a
whip, while the voivodes were hiding away in the forests. He neverthe-
less disavowed the invasion, and told him it rested with the Russians to
secure peace by paying for it in money and furs. §

Envoys also passed between Moscow and Constantinople, by whom
the Sultan demanded the restoration of Kazan and Astrakhan, the
destruction of the fortresses on the Terek, and the suppression of the
raids of the Don Cossacks. The Tzar made similar demands in regard
to the turbulent Tartars, but the negotiations came to nothing. Feodor
encouraged the Cossacks by presents of lead and saltpetre, and he
proceeded to build a line of fortresses from the Donetz to the Oka, such
as Bielogorod, Oskol, Valuika, &c., to protect his frontiers. They were
peopled yith soldiers, strelitzes, and Cossacks, and thus with the sword
in one hand and money in the other, he made the issue very plain
to the Khan. At length a durable peace was entered into between the
two neighbours. Ahmed Pasha on behalf of Gazi Girai, and Prince
Feodor Khuarostinin and Bogdan Belski on the part of the Russians,
met on the banks of the Sosna, the then frontier of " inhabited Russia."
South of which were the steppes. The first conference was held on a
bridge, and afterwards Ishi Makhmet went to Moscow and Mercurius
Stcherbatof to the Taurida to ratify the arrangement. The widow of
Murad, who had died at Astrakhan, was allowed to return to the Krim,

• KarjiinziD, x. 225. t /rf. I Id., 232. § Id., 233.

528 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and the Tzar sent the Khan a present of ten thousand roubles, besides
pelisses and rich stuffs, and promised to repeat the present annually.
Gazi Girai promised to be a faithful friend to Russia, to restrain his
people from attacking it, to restore the booty or prisoners they should
make, to protect the Russian envoys and merchants, and those strangers
who should wish to go to Moscow.* For the next three years the Tartars
were too busy elsewhere to molest Russia. We will follow their fortunes.

The Sultan was at this time engaged in a fierce war with the Emperor
Rudolph. The latter, as the sovereign of Austria, was the chief bulwark
of Christianity against the impending flood of Islam ; he even secured the
sympathy of the Russian Tzar, who, although he would not furnish him
with any troops, sent him a lordly present to pay for some of the
expenses of the war, consisting of 40,360 sable skins, 20,760 marten skins,
120 black foxes, 337,235 squirrels, and 3,000 beavers, of the value of
44,000 roubles of the money of that day.t

In this war the Krim Khan was invited by the Sultan to take a part.
Gazi Girai marched at the head of forty thousand men, and was
welcomed with much pomp by the Ottoman commanders. The Grand
Vizier presented him with golden cups and dishes, with a fine charger, a
jewelled sabre and mace, and a sum of fifteen thousand ducats,J and he
took part in the various struggles in the year I594.§

The voivode of Moldavia having rebelled against the Sultan, he
reduced him once more to obedience. || The Grand Vizier's position was
a very uncertain one. We now find it filled by the Genoese renegade
Cicala, one of whose acts was to quarrel with the Krim Khan, who
retired to the Krim, and when he received fresh orders to march against
Hungary, instead of going himself, he sent his brother, the kalga Feth
Girai, in his place. The Grand Vizier thereupon displaced Gazi Girai
from the Khanate, and put Feth Girai in his place. Basht Girai was
made kalga and his brother Selamet Girai nureddin. When he heard
of this Gazi Girai set sail for Constantinople, but was driven by contrary
winds to Sinope.^i"

FETH GIRAI KHAN.

The vizier Cicala was soon displaced by Ibrahim Pasha, who fearing
that the displacement of Gazi Girai would cause a revolution in the Krim,
had two diplomas of investiture made ready, and intrusted them to
Cherkes Khendan aga, with orders to instal as Khan the favourite of the
Tartars. En route to the Krim he encountered contrary winds, which
drove him to Sinope, where he met Gazi Girai, who was a friend of his.

* Id., 242. t KaraiBzin, x. 248, 249. I Id., bo. S Id., 77-79.

11 Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 428. •; Id., 429. Kiim Khans, 81.

GAZl GIRAI KHAN II. 529

and to whom he handed over one of the diplomas. With this firman
Gazi returned to the Krim, where Feth Girai produced a second one
in the Sultan's writing. The Tartars were divided into two parties, and
would have come to blows, but it was determined to appeal to the
law, and the mufti of Kaffa, Abd ur-rizzak Effendi, issued a fetva
stating that only the diploma marked with the toghra (? temgha) was
valid. Thereupon Feth Girai's supporters went over to his rival. He
himself went to Nakishdan to bid good-bye to the Khan and to kiss the
fringe of his robe, when he was killed by one of the chiefs of the
Mansur tribe called Kormerdash, who had received corresponding
orders. Nine of his children and his kalga Bakht Girai were also put
to death. He had only reigned three months.*

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. (Restored).

On his reaccession Gazi Girai nominated Selamet Girai as kalga and
Devlet Girai as nureddin, but the latter having shown signs of insub-
ordination, the Khan replaced him by his own son Toktamish Girai.
Shahin, brother of Devlet, fled to Circassia, and Muhammed, another
brother, to Anatolia. Soon after the kalga Selamet also fled. Toktamish
was given his post, and Sefer Girai was made nureddin. Gazi Girai drew
an annual tribute of twelve sheep (per head .'') for his kitchen, and money
to equip five hundred soldiers from the people of Krim.t The war between
the Turks and the Empire was still in progress, and in 1599 we find Gazi
Girai joining the Ottoman army and receiving costly presents from the
Turks. He was assigned Zombor as winter quarters, while his army
wintered at Szegedin. Soon after this a truce was made with Germany,
the plenipotentiaries meeting on the island of St. Andrew, near Gran.
At this meeting, which was held in June, 1599, the Khan was represented
by a Greek named Alexander Palseologos.! On the conclusion of peace
Gazi Girai asked permission to return home, and all the entreaties of the
vizier Ibrahim for him to stay another year were fruitless.

He mistrusted the vizier, and would not enter his tent or meet him
unless mounted. Although braye, we are told he preferred peace to war,
and the Emperor sent Johannes Bernhardfi to him with a present of
ten thousand ducats to win him over.§ Gazi Girai did not take part in
the Turkish campaigns of 1601 and 1602, but as his brothers Selamet,
Muhammed, and Shahin had settled in Rumelia and Anatolia, he began
to fear that if he stayed longer away one of them would be placed on the
throne in his stead. He therefore set out with his Tartars in the autumn
of 1602, and was well received by the vizier, who quartered his troops for

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 429-431. t Id., 431.

I Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 88. Gesh. Osra. Reich., ii. 631. § Id. Krim Khans, 90.

2 T

530 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the winter in the districts of Szigeth, Koppany, and Mohacz, while the
Khan spent that season in Transylvania, and there composed a poem on
the strife between coffee and wine, in rivalry with the similar production
of the poet Tusuli on the rivalry of opium and wine.* He soon after
returned again to the Krim. Let us now take a short glance at what
was taking place in Russia.

In 1593-4 a social revolution was initiated there, whose consequences
have been very widely felt. Russia was very different in its political
organisation to Western Europe. In the latter the feudal nobles
were scattered about the country in their own castles, and tyrannised
over the peasants in their neighbourhood, and the towns were the chief
refuge where the oppressed could find shelter. In Russia, on the other
hand, the towns were granted as appanages to the various grandees.
These towns, besides being under feudal rulers, were too scattered to
support one another. The country also was so flat that, in the words of
Kelly, " it afforded few of those positions of difficult access in which
liberty delights, while their ramparts of earth and resinous timber were
not very secure defences." The miUtary class, the traders, and citizens
of these towns were the owners of the country round, which the peasants
tilled as their tenants or paid servants. The latter could move to and
fro on paying a certain licence tax. Latterly, however, the superior
attractions of the southern districts, their greater fertihty and advantages
had led to a large migration in that direction. The recent troubled times
had also caused many to leave their domiciles and to wander forth, thus
increasing the class of vagrants and poor. This evil was growing fast,
and large districts and towns were getting depopulated. To restrain
it, Godunof had a law passed in 1592 or 1593 which forbade the
peasants to change their domicile, and made them perpetual serfs to
their masters. The law was naturally very distasteful to the peasants.
It was equally so to the great proprietors, who found it impossible to get
emigrants to till the large part of their heritage, which was waste, and it
was pleasing only to the small and generally tyrannical landholders. A
register of serfs was also opened, by which the number owned by each
proprietor could be ascertained.! Thus was bondage to the soil intro-
duced into Russia, and in a very short time there were no longer even
hired servants ; commerce fell into the hands of the slaves of the nobles,
and the cities were filled with serfs.}

In 1597, the Tzar Feodor died, thus removing the chief obstacle to
Boris Godunofs further ambitious views, for Feodor was the last of the
male line of the house of Rurik. The tzarina Irene, Godunofs sister,
received the homage of the grandees, but nine days later she took the
veil, and there was only one possible candidate for the throne.

The deputies of Russia were assembled. " The election begins ; the

* Ge»h. Osra. Reich., ii. 654, 655. t Karamzln, x. 280-X83. I Kelly, i. 154.

i

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. 531

people look up to the nobles, the nobles to the grandees, the grandees to
the patriarch ; he speaks, he names Boris, and instantaneously, and as
one man, all re-echo that formidable name."

Godunof on his side grasped with so firm a hand all links of power,
that he felt a pleasure in obstinately refusing a sceptre he so ardently
desired, . . . This political farce which others of his kind have hardly
been able to play for a few minutes, he ventured to keep up for more than
a month. He knew that a simple breath of his would suffice to impel
the multitude as he pleased . . . nor did he yield till for six weeks he
had kept all Russia in suspense on its knees in tears (a cynical chronicler
says those who had no tears at their command, wetted their eyes with
spittle), and with clasped hands holding forth to him the relics of the
saints, the image of the Redeemer to whom it compared him and that
antique crown, which during fourteen years he had coveted.* Kelly
speaks of his many crimes, but Karamzin and others seem to denounce
but one, that a mere subject should have dared to seize the throne.
Putting aside the death of Dimitri, and the decree about the serfs,
which seemed at the time the only means of restoring order and stability
to a community which was undergoing desintegration, it is difficult to
speak of Boris, at this time, without admiration. Listen to the words of
his scornful critic as to what he did for Russia. Smolensk was fortified ;
Archangel built ; the Tartars defeated for the last time under the walls
of Moscow, were chased back into their deserts, and even confined in
them by strong places constructed around their haunts. Other fortresses
arose under the shadow of the Caucasus ; Siberia was finally conquered
by Russian manners, arts, and arms. The Swedes were driven into
Narva, and a diplomatic intercourse was opened with the European
powers. Lithuania and Poland itself is said to have momentarily
consented to submit to the sceptre which was swayed by Godunof."t

The accession of Boris seems to have been generally grateful to the
clergy and the grandees of the empire, but he wished to distract atten-
tion from himself, and an opportune rumour soon arrived that Gazi Girai
was preparing to attack Russia with his Tartars and a contingent of
7,000 Turks.| A general levy was made to repel this rumoured attack,
and the troops were sent to the frontier. Boris went to join them,
accompanied by a pompous retinue. The frontier towns of Tula, Oskol,
Livny, Yeletz, Kursk, and Voronej were put in a state of defence, and
abattis were erected in the defiles near Pereimisl, Lishvin, Bielef, Tula,
Borosk, and Riazan,§ while a flotilla was established on the Oka. A
general enthusiasm pervaded the nation ; but the Tartars came not, and
the whole matter is described by Karamzin as a ruse on the part of Boris
to secure for himself the attachment and regard of the army. The
ruse had a double effect ; it created in Russia the impression that the

* Id., 164. t Id., 163. I Karamzin, xi. 11. § Id., 13, 14.

532 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Tartars had been frightened by the preparations, while the Khan's
envoys, the chief of whom was Murza Ali, who saw everywhere on their
route preparations for war, and heard the clash of scimitars and pikes
and the roll of musketry were duly impressed. They were received in
the camp amidst salvoes of artillery, and passed through files of soldiers.
Boris was in his tent, which was richly furnished, and wore a golden helmet
on his head ; otherwise he was modestly attired. They offered the
Khan's friendship and alliance, which was accepted, and returned home
accompanied by envoys from Boris.* The latter returned in triumph to
Moscow, where he was solemnly crowned.

The Khan delayed the signature of the treaty he had entered into, and
we are told that in the year 1600 the Tartars had advanced as far as
Kursk, but were driven back by the voivode of Orel, the Prince Boris
Tatief; Cheli Beg who seems to have been made prisoner on this
occasion remained at Moscow till the days of the False Dimitri. On
the other hand, the Don Cossacks made constant raids on the
Krim. At length, in June, 1602, after receiving presents from the
Russians to the value of 14,000 roubles, the Khan remitted the draft of
the treaty, but at the same time made a demand for a further sum of
30,000 roubles, and complained of the towns which the Russians had
built on the steppe, which he said looked as if the Russians meant to
enclose him with walls.t At the request of his envoy, Boris under-
took to be a faithful friend to Gazi Girai, but the book on which he
swore, says the casuistical historian, was not the Bible, nor would he
lower the cross.J Thus the policy of Harold's oath to William was
again repeated with the unctuous approval of a great historian. Boris
sent the Khan some small presents, but relied on his army for safety.
In 1603 the latter dismissed the Russian envoy. Prince Bariatinski,
because the Russians had not restrained the Don Cossacks, § but he was
afterwards conciliated. Boris ruled at home exemplarily, and seems to
have been very popular. The foreign intercourse of Russia was credit-
able to its diplomacy, while at home he became the patron of letters,
and endeavoured to restrain the national vices of drunkenness, &c. He
was sober, industrious and an enemy of frivolous amusen'Sints, a good
husband and father. His efforts to import western culture into Russia
were much opposed by the clergy, who feared the influence of the
Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, and this limited the visits of
scientific men thither chiefly to those professors of medicine who have
a cosmopolitan licence and welcome ; but the good days of Boris were
reaching their term. He was followed, according to Karamzin, by a
Nemesis, in the shade of the murdered Dimitri. He began to grow
suspicious, and then to imitate the policy of Ivan III. Prince Belski
was the first victim of his doubts. || His goods were sequestrated and

* li., 18, 19. t U., 32. I Id., 33- * ^^-^ 34- i ^d., 125.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. 533

his magnificent beard was dragged out hair by hair, a Scotch doctor
named Gabriel being the instrument employed for the work. He then
turned against the Romanofs, who were related to the late Imperial
family, and were apparently deemed by the populace as its heirs. In-
formers were employed to entrap and denounce the illustrious family. A
plot was made by which some poisonous roots were secreted in their
house and then produced as evidence of their intentions towards himself.
The grandees, says Karamzin, like the Roman senators in the time of
Tiberius and Nero, turned furiously against the accused.

The heads of the house with their supporters were confined at
Bielogorod. Feodor Romanof was compelled to take orders and under
the name of Philaret to enter the convent of St. Anthony, and his wife
became a nun ; other victims speedily followed, while the peasants were
persecuted by a fresh act to restrain them from migrating. " The
Russian nation," says Kelly, " was no longer anything but a hierarchy of
slaves. Henceforth there was no intercourse ; none of those public
meetings, in which the youthful part of society at least orally acquired
knowledge ; no compacts to protect the weak, no asylums for them.
Russia became sad and sullen ; the minstrels who had been wont to
traverse the country now disappeared ; their songs of war and the chase,
and even of love were heard no longer."* A terrible famine and
pestilence, lasting for three years, commenced in 1601. Boris distributed
relief with a lavish hand at Moscow. This only drew more mouths there
to be fed. At last the. State treasury was exhausted, while the famine was
still unabated. It is said that half a million of people died in Moscow.
The dead lay by thousands in the streets and highways, many with their
mouths full of hay, straw, or the filthiest offal, which they had endea-
voured to eat. Moscow was become a city of cannibals. In many
houses the fattest person was killed to serve as food for the rest. Parents
devoured their own children, children their own parents or sold them for
bread. Petreius saw a woman in the open street tearing with her teeth
the flesh of a living child she carried in her arms ; aind Margaret relates
that four women, having decoyed a peasant into their house under
pretence J&f buying wood from him, killed him and his horse, and dragged
the two carcases into their ice pit to serve as food.t Meanwhile, the court
indulged in great extravagance and pomp, as usualj With the populace
this affliction was said to have been sent from heaven as a punishment
for the murder of Dimitri ; the distress it caused, and the various re-
strictive laws, led to a great migration of peasants to the Ukraine, where,
under the lead of a chief named Klopko, they organised a kind of
Jacquerie, which was put down with a merciless hand. Manners were
more brutal and violent than ever ; honour and truth became almost
unknown among the Russians, and cruelty and debauchery were

* Op. cit., i. 166. t Id., 167. I Karamzin, xi. 148.

534 HISTORY OFT HE MONGOLS.

chronic* Miracles, prodigies, and gross superstitions also revived.
Amidst this terrible confusion, a rumour spread that Dimitri was not
dead— that he still lived. A wandering monk, the son of a poor gentle-
man of Galitch claimed to be that prince, and under the name of the
False Dimitri played an extraordinary part in Russian history. He prac-
tised war among the Cossacks of the Dnieper, he learnt Pohshand Latin,
and at length declared himself in Lithuania, and produced some precious
jewels and some marks on his body as the proofs of his identity. He was
acknowledged by the Polish grandees, by Sigismund of Poland, and by
the Papal Nuncio, to whom he promised to bring over Russia to the Latin
Church, and openly joined that communion, while the Pohsh king
determined to take up arms in his favour. The details of this most
strange drama form no part of our subject. How one town and
fortress after another opened its gates to him, nor how the annalists
explain the spread of the delusion by the statement that "people
no longer liked Boris," Dimitri won a great victory which was
followed by as serious a defeat, but his prestige still survived, and
the sympathies of the greater part of the populace were no doubt with
him. He acted his part admirably, was courageous and chivalrous, and
also dignified and patronising. He wrote to Boris offering him his
pardon, if he would abandon the throne, and retire to a monastery,
meanwhile Boris died. An impalpable force, says Kelly, had neutralised
all the efforts of his strong will and subtle genius, all the resources of
his absolute authority, and like a magician undone by his own familiars,
he fell himself the victim of the universal perfidy he had spread around
him ... In this awful conflict with destiny, he however won the last
prize in his career of ambition, to die as he wistied to die as he had lived,
a monarch."! He died on the i6th of April 1605, some supposed from
poison, but others, doubtless, more probably from apoplexy.

Boris was succeeded by his son Feodor, a boy of sixteen. His reign
was a very short one. He had been barely six weeks on the throne,
when he was betrayed by prince Basmanof, the commander of the army,
who with the princes Galitzin and Soltikof, went over to the False
Dimitri. The latter's road was now clear. He speedily became the
master of Moscow, and the young Feodor and his mother were strangled.
He entered the capital, however, amidst evil omens.J And although he
was welcomed by the people, they were not pleased that he should have
introduced a number of pagans {i.e., those not belonging to the Greek
cult) into their churches.

He began his rule by acts of clemency, and inter alia he softened the
effects of Boris' law about the peasants, and made the lord's right of
ownership of the serf inseparable from the latter's right to maintenance ;
he enfranchised all peasants who had been abandoned by their lords in

* /^., 156. t Op. cit., i. 179. J Kelly, op. cit., i. 180-182. Karamzjn, xi. 239-270.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN II. . 535

the recent famine, and enacted that in future the right of ownership in
serfs should be authenticated by enrolment.

Dimitri, like a worthy successor of our day, gained over his putative
mother, the widow of Ivan, who after due preparation publicly acknow-
ledged him, and he treated her with every courtesy and consideration.*
But presently the impostor's imprudence began to undo him. He jeered
at the boyards for their ignorance, adopted Polish manners, and even
boasted of the superiority of the Poles.

He was seen to have other anti-national tendencies, leaped on his horse's
back, which was a spirited charger, like a Cossack, instead of being lifted
into the saddle, and riding slowly and gravely. He neglected to salute
the sacred images, ate veal which was unclean, rose from table without
washing his hands, had music at meals, did not indulge in the siesta.
Spoke to the clergy of the Greek faith " as their religion, their ritual,"
&c., and generally shocked those petty prejudices which so often hedge
round the loyalty of an ignorant race.

He surrounded himself with objects of luxury. On placing a bronze
figure of Cerberus at his gate, the annalists report that he merely presaged
the home he would occupy in the other world, namely, hell.t

Murmurs began to spread that he was an impostor, and those who
had known him in former days began to divulge their knowledge, and
were duly executed ; he surrounded himself with a German guard, and
distributed largess freely. He allowed the boyards to choose their own
wives, and to marry as they wished, which was a new privilege to them.
Meanwhile he engaged himself to the daughter of a Polish gentleman
who was a Roman Catholic, and he drew nearer his ties with Rome and
with the Jesuits. A feeling of hatred towards the foreigners about the
Court began to spread, while by his persecution of the Russian clergy he
set against himself the strongest social influence in the country.

The priests began to call him Julian the Apostate, " and all the truly
royal virtues they could not but recognise in him, they turned to his
vilification as so many points of resemblance to the persecutor of the
Christians." t He sustained the honour of Russia abroad, and we are
told he carried on a peaceable intercourse with Gazi Girai of Krim.§

Dimitri's engagement was followed by his marriage with Marina, the
hated Polish lady who still retained her old faith, and belonged to a race
especially hated in Russia. The gathering storm now came to a
head. A conspiracy was started headed by prince Schuisky. The army
turned against him having been gained over by Schuisky. Moscow was
speedily aroused. " The great bell was rung and was answered by the
3,000 bells of Moscow. The whole populace flocked with axes and clubs to
the Kremlin, or to the houses marked with chalk, as to those of the Poles

* Kelly, i. 185, 18S. Karamzin, ix. 270-290. t Karamzin, xi. 397- I Kelly, i. 189.

§ Karamzin, xi. 335.

536 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

where breaking down the doors they began to massacre the sleeping
inmates."* The rest of the story has been condensed from Karamzin, in
graphic language, by Kelly. It is so picturesque in its tragic details that
I am tempted to extract it.

" When he found that resistance was hopeless, Dimitri threw down his
sword and ran to a room in that part of the palace which was farthest
from that assailed by the rebels. He opened a window which looked out
on the site of the palace of Boris, which he had caused to be demolished.
The window was thirty feet from the ground, but there was no one in
sight, and he leaped down. In his fall he broke his leg, and fainted with
the pain. His groans were heard by some strelitz who were there on
guard and were not in the plot. They gave him water to drink, and laid
him on one of the foundation-stones of the ruined palace, and when he
revived a little and spoke they swore they would defend him with their
lives: The first rebels who came^to claim their prey were answered with
volleys of musketry, but the news that Dimitri was found brought multi-
tudes to the spot ; the strelitz were surrounded, and, being threatened
that unless they gave up the impostor their wives and children should be
all massacred by the mob, they laid down their arms and abandoned the
victim to the fury of the rebels who dragged him away to his sacked
palace. As he passed the spot where his guards were held captive, he
stretched out his hand to them in silence in token of adieu ; one of them,
a Livonian gentleman named Furstenburgh, though unarmed, rushed
forward to shield his gallant master with his own body from the blows of
his ruffianly captors, but the faithful servant was instantly massacred.
Dimitri's agony was prolonged by the ingenious malice of his assassins.
They tore off his royal garments, dressed him in a pastrycoolc's, and
hurried him into a room in the palace to undergo the mockery of a trial.
'Bastard dog,' said a Russian nobleman, 'tell us who thou art, and
whence thou art come.' Exerting all the strength left him to raise his
voice, Dimitri replied, ' You all know that I am your Tzar, the legitimate
son of Ivan Vassihvitch. Ask my mother. If you desire my death, give
me time to collect my senses.' Thereupon, a Russian gentleman named
Valuief, forcing his way through the crowd, cried out, * What os the use of
so much talk with the heretic dog ? This is the way I confess this Polish
fifer.' And shooting Dimitri through the breast he put an end to his
agony. The mob then w-reaked their fury on the lifeless corpse, and,
after hacking it and slashing it with axes and sabres, rolled it down the
palace steps, and threw it on that of Basmanof. ' You were friends in
life ; go along to hell together,' cried the murderers in their savage exulta-
tion. The bodies were afterwards dragged to the place of execution, where
that of Dimitri was exposed on a table, and that of Basmanof on a bench
below, so that the Czar's feet rested on his favourite's breast. A gentle-

Kelly, i. 196.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN 11.

537

man threw on Dimitri's body a masque which he said he had found in
the heretic's bedchamber, in the place reserved in Russian houses for the
images of the saints. Another threw a set of bag-pipes on his breast and
thrust the pipes into his mouth, saying ' You played upoji us long enough,
now play/t'rus.' Others lashed the corpse with their whips, crying
' Look at the Tzar ! the hero of the Germans.' The women surpassed
the men in their obscene fury, for in scenes of mob violence, the weakest
are invariably the most inhuman."

Thus terminated a most extraordinary chapter in Russian history, one
having an exceedingly epic character and well deserving of a detailed
history, but we must on with our story. Shuiski was rewarded for his
recent acts by being placed on the vacant throne, which he speedily had
to defend against fresh impostors, who claimed that Dimitri had not in
fact been killed, but that another had been mistaken for him on the
night when the slaughter took place. These impostors were encouraged
by the crafty Poles. The story of these pretenders is interesting in its
way, but it was a dismal time for the Russians, who saw their land
traversed by hostile armies on various sides, while the Krim Tartars
naturally fished in the troubled waters, crossed the Oka, and under
pretence of encouraging Shuiski plundered the villages, and carried off
many captives. A terrible defeat sustained at the hands of the Poles
led to the deposition of Shuiski, and he was forced to turn monk ; was
handed over to Sigismund, of Poland, and ended his days in a Polish
prison. This was in the year 1610. Meanwhile other events had hap-
pened in the Krim, to which we must turn.

We are told that Gazi Girai having been summoned by the Sultan to
take part in a new expedition, excused himself, and to escape punish-
ment desired to retire to the fortress of Gazikerman, which he had
built in Circassia, but he died en route of the plague at Tembug, and
was buried at Baghchi Serai. Von Hammer dates his death in Novem-
ber, 1607,* but Abdullah ben Rizvan and Abdul Ghaffar in the year 1017
of the hej. (z>,, i6o8-9).t He was the greatest of the Krim Khans, and
renowned both for his learning and his powers ; and his death followed
quickly on the peace of Situatorok, which marked the acme of Turkish
fortunes in Europe.^

During the latter portion of Gazi's reign there was peace with Russia,
save the raids of Cossacks upon the lands of the Tartars, and the corre-
sponding raids of the disorderly Nogais, &c., in the country of Bielogorod.§
These led to some recriminations, as did the building of certain forts in
the steppes by the Russians. The false Dimitri seems to have carried on
an amicable intercourse with the Tartars, and to have sent them the usual
presents. || Here we part with the great Russian historian Karamzin, whose

* Krim Khans, 93. t Langles, 411. : Krim Khans, 93.

S Karamzin, xi. 33. H Id>^ 335.

2 U

538 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS. *

work concludes so abruptly, and for the future are dependent on the
history of the Krim Khans, and on the notices in Von Hammer's history
of the Turks. The loss is perhaps not so much to be regretted, as the
days of the martial supremacy of the Tartars over the Russians
were rapidly passing away, and the Khans became more and more
dependent on Constantinople, and little more than satraps to the
Sultan.

SELAMET GIRAI KHAN.

Gazi Girai had long asked from the Sultan that the Khanate should
remain in his family, and Sultan Murad had promised that this should be
so. On his death, the people of Krim put his eldest son, Toktamish,
who had been kalga, on the throne, and sent to Constantinople to obtain
a confirmation of the election ; but Sultan Murad had long been dead,
and the court of Constantinople, which seems to have treated his election
merely as a usurpation, refused to confirm it. Toktamish, who heard of
this, determined to go and plead his cause in person, and set out on his
journey overland. While he was on the way, Selamet Girai, the son of
Devlet Girai, who was a favourite of the Kapitan Pasha, Hafiz Ahmed,
was nominated as Khan, his brother Muhammed as kalga, and another
brother, Shahin, as nureddin. All three had formerly been rebellious
against the Porte. Selamet went to the Krim in his own ship by sea, while
Muhammed marched overland. The latter encountered Toktamish and
his brother, Sefer Girai, near Aksu, and killed them. The following year,
1608, Muhammed and his brother, Shahin Girai, revolted. They were
defeated in several fights, and fled to Circassia. Selamet Girai then
made Janibeg Girai his kalga, and Devlet Girai, nureddin, but he
shortly after died. This was in the year 10 19 (/.<?., 16 10), after a reign of
a year and four months, and at the age of fifty-four.*

JANIBEG GIRAI KHAN. ^

Janibeg, according to Von Hammer, was the son of Mubarek Girai, t
Blau makes him the son of Muhammed Girai.j Langles makes him the
brother of Selamet, which is improbable. He had been his kalga, and
now became ruler of the Krim. He nominated his brother Devlet as
kalga, and Azemet, the son of Selamet Girai, as nureddin.§ Shahin and
Muhammed Girai above named felt aggrieved at his elevation, and having
assembled a body of troops besieged Janibeg, first at Subak Baghri, and

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 43a, 433. Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 94-96.
t Krim Khans, 95. Osm. Gcsh., ii. 723)724- IOp.cit.,65. J Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 96.

J AMI BEG GIRAI KHAN. 539

then at Baghchi Serai, but, being deserted by some of their men, Shahin
fled to Persia and Muhammed to Constantinople.* We are told that
one day when Sultan Ahmed was out hawking, in the neighbourhood of
Adrianople, he had let fly his falcon, when another one fell upon it and
robbed it of its prey. On asking whose this bird was, they found it be-
longed to Muhammed Girai, who with a party of Circassians had gone to
Adrianople, at the instance of the Grand Vizier, Nahsuh, to try and
secure the khanate for himself ; but some of the courtiers who hated the
vizier reported to the Sultan that the latter's real object was to put a
descendant of Jingis Khan on the throne of the Osmanli. This sug-
gestion, as Von Hammer says, proves what a potent name that of Jingis
was in Asia. The Sultan accordingly imprisoned Muhammed Girai in
the fortress of the Seven Towers, whence he escaped three years later at
the accession of Sultan Osman.t

According to another authority Muhammed lived as a prisoner of the
Sultan, at Gallipoli.| Soon after his accession and in the year 1618, we
find Janibeg taking part in the Turkish campaign against Persia. He
sailed from Kaffa and landed at Trebizond with 30,000 Tartars. He
ravaged the country of Nakhshivan, in Armenia, and captured 15,000
prisoners and a quantity of cattle, and other booty, and then rejoined the
Ottoman army in the plains of Chulbek, but he was afterwards badly
beaten by the governor of Tebris, in a struggle at Sarav, where the begler
begs of Rumelia, Diarbeker, and Van and many others fell. The Khan's
kadiasker and mufti fell at his side, and his life was only saved by the
bravery of the janissaries. §

In 162 1, the Khan took part in Sultan Osman's campaign against
Poland, where although the combined forces were beaten at Khotin, on
the Dniester, he gained much renown by his actions. In this war the
Nogay chief Khan Kantemir Mursa, also distinguished himself, and was
rewarded with the government of Otchakof.|( The next year Janibeg was
deposed without any apparent motive, and was given the Sanjak of
Chermen, in Rhodes, as an appanage.^

Meanwhile let us turn shortly to Russia ; on the deposition of Shuiski,
the land vvart the scene of terrible anarchy. If the Poles whose feet were
on its neck had behaved with prudence, they might probably have
appropriated the country, but the}' were tyrannical and bigoted, and
presently there arose a popular movement which spreading from Nijni
Novgorod overwhelmed them and the various impostors whom they had
supported. A great assembly was then summoned in the Kremlin. The
solemn meeting took place in Lent, 1613, and led to the election of
Michael Romanof, a boy of sixteen, the son of an ecclesiastic, the Philaret.

Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 434. 1 Krim Khans, 98. J Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 434.

§ Id. Von Hammer, Gesh. Osm. Reich., &c., ii. 772. Krim Khans, 98.
^ Von Hammer, Osm. Reich., &c., 791. *[ Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 435.

540 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

already named, wlio afterwards became patriarch, and by his mother
Anastasia a grandson of Ivan the Terrible.* The young Tzar swore to
protect religion, to pardon and forget what had been done to his father, to
make no new laws nor alter old ones, unless absolutely necessar>', &c.
The state of Russia was indeed deplorable. Ustrialof thus describes it,
" The strongholds on the frontiers which should have served to defend
liis dominions, were in the hands of external or internal enemies. The
Swedes possessed Kexholm, Oreshek, Koporie, and even Novgorod. The
Poles ruled in Smolensk, Dorogobuye, Putivli, and Chernigof. The
country around Pskof was in the hands of the Lisofskis. Raisin, Kashira,
and Tula struggled feebly against the Tartars of the Crimea and the
Nogais. Zarnoki was established at Astrakhan. Kazan was in open
revolt. At home, bands of Cossacks from the Don and the Zaporogue,
and whole divisions of Poles and Tartars ravaged the villages and
the convents that were still entire ; when there were hopes of finding
booty. The country was wasted, soldiers were dying of hunger, the land-
tax was no longer collected, and not a kopeck was in the treasury. The
State jewels, crowns of great price, sceptres, precious stones, vases, all
had been plundered and carried into Poland."t It was surely a good
opportunity for the Tartars to recover their domains, but fortunately,
their hands were full elsewhere.

De Bohucz has preserved a curious incident of the reign of Janibeg.
He tells us that in 1612, he sent a Genoese of Kaffa as an envoy to
Poland. At Kamenetz he met some Jesuits, and described to them the
low state of Christianity in the Krim. Father Zgoda offered his services
to go and revive matters. He had first to get the permission of the Porte,
and we are told he ingratiated himself with the authorities at Con-
stantinople, and followed the Prince of Wallachia, as his almoner. By
a treaty with the Porte, no Christian priest was allowed in the Krim,
unless sent by the Turks, or unless he had been taken prisoner. Zgoda
contrived to be captured in a skirmish, made his way to his Genoese
friend,' lodged in a house at Kaffa, and installed himself as cure.:|:

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN III.

Janibeg was supplanted by Muhammed, the brother of the Khan
Selamet Girai, who had been imprisoned in the Seven Towers, as I
have mentioned, and who nominated as kalga his brother Shahin Girai.
Shahin was then a refugee at the court of Shah Abbas. Ahmed Girai
was appointed nureddin. The latter was a notable character. We are
told that Feth Girai, the kalga of Gazi Girai, having received as a present
the daughter of a PoUsh grandee, whom Von Hammer identifies with
Maria Potoska, intrusted her to an old man named Haji Ahmed, to

* Wahl's Land of the Tzars, 2S2. t Kelly, op. cit., i. .214, 215. I De Bohucz, op. cit., 377

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN III. • 541

restore her to her father. One evening a friend of Feth Girai told him
that the Polish captive had had a son, and congratulated him on its
birth in an ironical phrase. He paid for his untimely joke with a blood \
mouth, for Feth Girai struck him with his slipper on the face, and then
sent orders that the slave, the boy, and its father should be put to death.
They, however, fled, and the boy was brought up in obscurity as a herds-
man, and named Mustapha. When he had grown up, Aluhammed and
Shahin Girai, who were childless, adopted him ; gave him the name of
Ahmed Girai, and nominated him as nureddin, which aroused great
opposition among the other members of the Royal family, who naturally
looked upon him as illegitimate. He was the founder of a new line of
the Girais, who were known as the Choban Girais or Girai herdsmen.*
One of the first events of the new Khan's reign was an attack made on
two Russian envoys who were returning home from Constantinople by
way of the Krim with presents, and who were killed by Shahin Girai, and
the gifts appropriated. According to Von Hammer,t it was the alleged
intention of the brothers to invade the Turkish empire. An astrologer
had foretold that the empire of the world would fall to a man whose
name was that of a bird. Shahin means falcon ; the prophecy
was accordingly interpreted, as referring to Shahin Girai, and the two
brothers prepared to march upon Adrianople, and collected a laro-e
army. The Porte thereupon decreed the deposition of Muhammed
Girai, and reappointed Janibeg in his place. He was escorted to Kafifa by
four galleys. The Kapitan Pasha and other Ottoman grandees wrote to
acquaint the two brothers with the decision of the Sultan, demanded
their departure, and also their acceptance of the government of the
Morea and of the Herzegovina. Shahin Girai thus replied to this sum-
mons, " What is the reason that when we have hardly occupied the throne
for five days it is taken from us and given to Janibeg, and that thousands
of poor people are to be trampled under the hoofs of horses. Think
what will happen. All the people have their waggons ready, and are
prepared to emigrate. Is it right to drive us from the land which our
fathers conquered, into the wilderness. When we have left, and the
Krim is occupied by the unbelievers, do you think Kaffa and the other
fortresses will remain in your power. We hope you will not destroy the
mosques, and that you will reinstate us." Rejeb, the Kapitan Pasha,
replied that he must obey his orders.:^ War thereupon broke out between
the Porte and its vassals. The two brothers marched against Kaffa.
Hardly had the siege lasted two months when the Kapitan Pasha began
to dread a want of water, and was compelled to bring matters to an
issue. He found himself opposed by more than 100,000 Nogais and 800
Cossacks, and being terribly outnumbered, his people sustained a severe

Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 101-103. t Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh., ^-j.

\ Krim Khans, 105.

542 HISTORY OK THE iMONGOLS.

defeat. They would have erected barricades during the night, but had
neither axes nor spades, and the only escape from the situation was by
the Kapitan Pasha granting a diploma to Muhammed, constituting him
Khan. This was sent to him with a State kaftan, and Janibeg Girai and
his brother Devlet returned to Kafifa, and thence to take charge again of
the Sanjak of Chermen.

When the news of what had happened reached the camp of the Nogais,
they were far from satisfied. They again attacked the Turks, who were
completely beaten, the Tartars being spurred on especially by the wish to
avenge Choban Girai, who had fallen in the fight. A great number of
the Turks were killed. Others, including a thousand sailors, were cap-
tured, together with a large booty and seventeen pieces of artillery.* The
Tartars now rushed into Kaffa, and Shahin Girai put up at the house of
the magistrate All. The inhabitants were ordered to clear out in three
days, and during that time a stream of them poured towards the fleet.
Presently the Kapitan Pasha sent a subashi to treat for the restoration of
Kaffa. To him Muhammed disclosed his grievances against the Porte,
and he sent an answer by the Egyptian Kislaraga, who had twice received
100,000 piastres from Janibeg. " My pasha," he said to the khan on his
return, " you are again Khan, and Shahin is again kalga. Be at peace
once more with the Osmanli, restore the cannons, and order the Cossacks
and Tartars to quit Kaffa." Shahin insisted that the begs of the Nogais
must be summoned, and thereupon followed an uncommon sight, Nogay
begs and Tartar mursas sitting together in solemn divan. The mes-
sengers went to and fro, and took State kaftans for Muhammed, Shahin,
and the mursas. The diploma was conferred with State, and eight days
later the Tartars left Kaffa, and the Kapitan Pasha sailed for Constanti-
nople.t This was the first struggle between the Porte and its vassal, and
we may believe how grateful it must have been to the neighbouring
powers. At all events, it probably saved Russia from being molested
during the period of its prostrate fortunes. The two brothers, or rather
Shahin Girai, now behaved in a very tyrannical way. Kiafa, a renowned
chief of the Nogais, was killed because he was found in possession of a
letter from Janibeg. The whole family of his enemy, Kajitemir, a
powerful mursa of the Nogai tribe, Mansur, who were living in the Krim,
were put to death in a most cruel manner, inter alia, his pregnant wife
was roasted over a slow fire on a spit so that her womb burnt open, and
the unborn child was ejected into the flames. Kantemir and his
people apparently occupied Bessarabia. Shahin Girai accordingly
ravaged the districts of Akkerman, Kiha, Ismail, and Guirgevo. He
wished also to capture Babadagh, but was attacked by Kantemir with
thirty thousand Tartars from the Dobruja, and so badly beaten that the
Danube ran red with the blood of his men. The Porte made the best of

* U., 107, 108. t Id., 10:, no.

INAYET GIRAI KHAX. 543

a bad business, for it could not dispense with the aid of the Tartars in its
Polish struggle. The khan and his kalga were accordingly presented
with a kaftan and sword of honour, and were ordered to invade Poland.
This was in 1628. They were overtaken by a storm in crossing the
Dniester while eti route, and we are told lost more than forty thousand
men. Muhammed Girai and his brother protested by an envoy against
being included in the peace with Poland, and claimed an annual sum of
40,000 thalers, which the Poles would not submit to pay.*

In the year 1627, Kantemir, who had a grievous personal wrong to
revenge, as I have shown, with his cousin Selman Murza, laid siege to
Baghchi Serai. Muhammed Girai kept a body of stipendiary Cossacks, to
pay whom he made many exactions on his people, while he allowed them
the right to pillage.t The people were, doubtless, weary of him, yet
Kantemir was obliged to withdraw from Baghchi Serai, after a siege of
twenty days, and had to seek refuge at Kaffa, where he recruited his
forces. A second venture was as unfortunate as the first, and he lost
2,000 men. But the Porte had decreed the deposition of Muhammed, and
nominated Janibeg once more to the throne ; on the approach of the
Turkish fleet he retired to the Don, where he persuaded the Cossacks to
side with him, and told them the people of Krim would support him.
The following year he marched with the Cossacks to Ferhkerman.
Janibeg met him there, and defeated him. The Cossacks were very
indignant with Muhammed for having deceived them, and shot him.+
Shahin fled to Circassia and thence to Constantinople, to seek pardon,
but he was exiled to Rhodes. § The head of the hetman of the Cossacks,
who was killed in the struggle, was exposed on the battlements of Kaffa.

JANIBEG KHAN (Restored).

Janibeg nominated his brother Devlet as kalga, and Azamet Girai
as nureddin. Having made peace with the beg of the tribe Mansur, he
sent Devlet and Islam Girai to ravage Poland. His people were
defeated, and Islam captured. Janibeg was afterwards deposed, and
sent to Rhodes, which was the place of exile chiefly used by the Turks
for their poHtical prisoners. One author says he was eighty years old,
and had become childish. Ii This was in 1635. H

INAYET GIRAI KHAN.

Janibeg was succeeded by Inayet, the eldest son of Gazi Girai, who
appointed his brother Hassan, kalga, and Saadet Girai, nureddin. After

*/^., 111-113. t De Bohucz, 380. I Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii, 436, 437.

§ Yon Hammer, Krim Khans, 115. \ Langles, 412, 413. ^ Nouv. journ. Asiat., xii., 437, 438.

544 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

his arrival in the Krim he was ordered by the Sultan to march against
Persia. He was joined by Kantemir, chief of the Nogais, but when
they arrived at Sutud, the latter abandoned him and returned with his
suite and baggage to Akkerman. The Khan was very angry and deter-
mined to punish him. We are told he transported the tribe Orak (Orak
Oghlu) with its herds, from the Don, and thus increased his forces. At
the same time he put to death the begler beg Bejagji zado, Ibrahim
Pasha, governor of Kaffa, and the kadhi Hamid Effendi, on account of a
difference they had with the people of Kaffa. He then marched towards
Akkerman.* Opposed to the Beni Mansur or tribe of Mansur, were the
Shirin begs who were related to the Khan, and who disposed of from
20,000 to 30,000 men, they allied themselves with the Inayet Girai.t
Khan Timur repaired to Constantinople to complain of the Krim Khan,
and the latter taking advantage of his absence, ordered the kalga and
nureddin to seize his harem and treasuries, which he had left behind at
Kili, while having a suspicion that he was about himself to be displaced,
he prepared vigorously to oppose his successor. The two princes
endeavoured to acquit themselves of their task, but two of the Mansur
begs named Devlet Shah and Suleiman Shah won over the murza of the
Orak Oghlu and thereupon captured the kalga and nureddin, and put
them to death with all their famihes. This was in 1636. J The Nogais
then besieged Kaffa, put to death the begler beg Bejagje, and the
magistrate Hamid Effendi, and plundered the town. They then entered
the Krim where they planted themselves, and announced that in future
they meant to obey only the Khan. He unwisely tried to insist on the
surrender of Kantemir, and the withdrawal of the Ottoman troops,
and was accordingly deposed. § He went to the coast, while his brothers
Kalga Hassan Girai and Saadct Girai planted themselves near Otchakof,
to oppose the landing of the new Khan. They were attacked by
Suliman and Orak, the brothers of Kantemir, with 7,000 or 8,000
Nogais, who killed them both, and made a great massacre. Inayet
repaired to Constantinople where he and Kantemir set out their com-
plaints at great length before Murad IV., who after listening to the former
for some time, ordered him to be strangled. This decree was in distinct
contravention of the famous treaty made by his ancestor with Menghi
Girai. The corpse was accompanied to its resting place by the viziers
and kadiaskers. As Kantemir's son soon after killed a man when drunk
he was put to death, and his body was sent to his father, and directly
after orders were given that the latter should be executed also, as a
dangerous spirit. This caused great grief to the Nogais who once
more submitted to the Krim Khan. The confusion then reigning
in the Krim, tempted the Cossacks to make an important conquest,

* Id>, 438. t Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 116, 117.

Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 439- ^ Krim Khans, ii'a.

BEHADUR GIRA[ KHAN. 543

6,000 Zaporogucs who were on their way to offer their services to the Shah
of Persia, met 2,000 Don Cossacks on the Don. The latter persuaded
them to stay and endeavour to capture Azof or Azak. Although they
had neither money, victuals, cannons nor powder, and it was garrisoned
with 3,000 or 4,000 Turks, they determined to blockade it. The Russian
Tzar Michael deemed it a good opportunity to make war furtively, and
without incurring the resentment of the Porte, and accordingly sent them
some munitions, and a German engineer who understood the art of
making mines. He was very successful. A mine he made was sprung
under the wall and caused a breach through which the Cossacks rushed
and after a terrible struggle with the Turks on the ramparts, the latter
were beaten ; some fled to the steppes, others to the towers on the walls,
the town was pillaged and their wives and children became the prey of
the conquerors. The Cossacks now spread over the borders of the Black
Sea, causing great terror, while Sultan Murad had to postpone his
vengeance till he had concluded his Persian war.*

BEHADUR GIRAI KHAN.

Behadur Girai was the son of Selamet Girai Khan. He nominated his
elder brother, Islam Girai, as kalga, and the younger one, Safa Girai, as
nureddin. On his accession, like hjs two predecessors, he sent envoys to
announce the fact to the Emperor Ferdinand H., to the King of Poland,
and the Tzar of Russia. t As usual, the accession of the new khan was
marked by an invasion of the southern provinces of Russia, which was
followed by the subjection of the Mansur tribe of Nogais. The following
year, namely in 1639, the Khan sent his younger brother, Krim Girai, also
called the Little Sultan, with a contingent of troops to assist the Turks
in their campaign against Baghdad ; afterwards he was sent to ravage
Poland. On the return from Poland, the Tartar army crossed the
Dniester on the ice, which proved treacherous and broke in, and many
soldiers were drowned, while the pursuing Poles attacked the remainder,
and secured^much of the booty. J

The Cossacks had now been for some time in possession of Azof, and
the Turks naturally felt much aggrieved that a fortress which was deemed
the key of the Black Sea should be in the hands of a body of vagabondf.
They sent off a force of 20,000 janissaries, and ordered 50,000 Krim
Tartars and 10,000 Circassians to join them under the walls of the town.
This was in 1641. It had now a considerable population, partially con-
sisting of its old inhabitants and partly of Cossacks, and was well sup-
plied with provisions and munitions of war. Besides its male defenders,
it also boasted a force of eight hundred amazons. It resisted all the

* Lesur, Hist, des Kosaques, i. 315- t Krim Khans, 122.

I Nouv. Joura. Asiat., xii. 440.

2 W

546 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

efforts of the Turks, who suffered from hunger and pestilence, while a
portion of their fleet was wrecked on the shoals at the mouth of the Don,
where they fell a prey to the enemy. The rest of the besiegers took
to their ships and returned home.* The Turks lost a thousand janissaries,
besides eight hundred other soldiers, without reckoning the Vlakhs,
Moldavians and Tartars.t The Khan Behadur died in the year 1642,
soon after his return from the siege of Azof. Like Gazi Girai he was a
poet, as is proved by several extant examples of his skill, j

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN IV.

Behadur Girai was succeeded by his brother Muhammed, who nomi-
nated Feth Girai as kalga, and Gazi Girai as nureddin. At this time the
truculent Shahin Girai, who had been for some time a prisoner in
Rhodes, was executed by order of the Sultan. The latter also sent the
Krim Khan a subsidy of 12,000 ducats, in return for which the Krim
Khan furnished a large contingent of men for the expedition which was
sent in 1642 to retrieve the previous year's disaster at Azof. The arma-
ment sent by the Turks was put under the command of the Egyptian
Sultan. The Cossacks, who had been severely tried in the former cam-
paign, now abandoned the town after partially flooding and partially
burning it, and carried off its treasures. The Egyptian Pasha was
accompanied by the greatest of Turkish travellers, named Evlia, who
has left us a list of the Tartar and Circassian tribes. After rebuilding
the town the Turks garrisoned it with twenty regiments of janissaries,
six of cannoniers, ten of artillery, and seven thousand Tartars, in all
twenty-six thousand men.§ Muhammed had an elder brother, Islam,
who had been kalga in Behadur's reign, and was now living at Sultania,
on the European shore of the Dardanelles. He urged his superior claims
at the Imperial court. On the other hand the Krim was threatened by
the Kalmuks, who now began to molest the Eastern frontiers of Europe.
This was in 1644. They were attacked and defeated by Alaik, the chief
of the Kabardians. The Krim Khan sent Selanash Murza with a con-
tingent to the assistance of the latter, but he was killed in the fight. At
this time there was a struggle for the chieftainship of the Circassians
between two brothers named Hakashmak beg and Anton ak beg, whose
strife had broken out in the days of Behadur Girai Khan. The Krim
Khan supported the latter, and Hakash took refuge with the governor
of Azof, Siawush Pasha, whence he went to Constantinople, where he
obtained the renewal of the diploma of Sultan Ahmed, constituting him
Prince of the Circassians.

* Lesur, op. cit., 315, 316. f Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 123. I Krim Khans, 123-125 .

§ Von Hammer, Gesh. Osm. Reich., iji. 224. Krim Khans, 127.

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN III. 547

Islam Pasha, the Governor of Kaffa, complained that Muhammed
Girai had ravaged the country of the Circassians (doubtless in support
of Antonak), and without due excuse he was deposed, and his brother
Islam Girai was made Khan. This was in 1644.*

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN III.

When Islam went to Constantinople to have his audience with the
Sultan, he found him on the banks of a stream, without his turban, and
dressed in a sweating costume. The Khan kissed the earth, and then
remained standing for a while. Ibrahim, the Sultan, then addressed
him : " Islam, I have made thee Khan. Henceforth be thou the friend of
my friends, and the enemy of my enemies." The Khan kissed the ground
and answered that he hoped God would preserve the padishah from all
dangers ; " so that God wills it, I will do nought to hinder the wishes of
my emperor and king," &c. The Sultan was much pleased with him,
and had him girded with a robe of golden tissue, bordered with sables,
and a jewelled sabre. He was then forty years old.f On taking leave of
the vizier, he seems to have addressed him in somewhat arrogant terms,
and bade him not to interfere in the government of Krim, which he knew
very well how to manage, nor to prevent him from wreaking his vengeance
on the neighbouring Christians. On his way home he put to death the
governor of Gosleve. He also supported Antonak, the Circassian
prince, against his brother, whom he put to death, and bestowed the
government of the Circassians on his protege. He nominated Krim
Girai as kalga, and confirmed Gazi Girai as nureddin. The soul of all
his undertakings, however, was Seferaga, who was nominated bashaga
or commander of the troops. On the death of Krim Girai, Gazi Girai
was promoted to the rank of kalga. +

Islam Girai's reign was a prosperous one for the Krim. We are told
he was at war all his life with the Poles. He had been a prisoner for
seven year? in Poland, in his young days. The ostensible cause of the
war was ttfe ill-treatment which the famous hetman of the Cossacks,
Sinovi Bogdan Kmielnitski, had received from the Poles. He had been
a slave among the Tartars when young, and had been released in 1622,
through the influence of the Polish king, who made him an officer of his
guard.§ He now settled on a small property called Subotof. Czaplinski,
Podstarosti of Chigrin, envying his good fortune, declared that a Cossack
should not hold land, and proceeded to dispossess him, outraged his
wife, beat his son and cast him into prison. Vowing vengeance, he ap-
pealed to the Polish Diet, which awarded him a compensation of fifty

* Von Hammer, Gesh. Osm. Reich, iii, 245. t Vod Hammer, Krim Khans, 129, 130.

I Gesh. Osm. Reich., iii. 346. $ Scherer, Annalcs de la Petite Russie, ii. 16.

548 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

florins. Furious at this insult, he repaired to the Dnieper, where he was
well known, and having stated his grievances he was elected hetman of
the Zaporogran Cossacks, and proceeded to kill all the Poles within the
setsche or encampment.* He demanded assistance also from the Don
Cossacks, and from the Krim Khan, whose annual subsidy, Vladislaf, the
Pohsh king, had recently failed to pay, and issued a proclamation to the
Cossacks of the Ukraine, inviting them to defend their rights, and to the
peasants to break the bonds of their servitude. The Poles marched
against him, but the advance guard of their army, consisting of a
detachment of Cossacks went over to the enemy. The rest, a small
body of fifteen hundred men, was surrounded on the banks of the Sheskoi,
near Sheldawoda, by the combined Cossacks and Tartars. After a brave
resistance of some days, they were overpowered. Those who were not
killed were carried off as slaves to the Krim, while a vast booty in gold,
silver, and jewels fell to the victors.

Kmielnitski determined to push matters home at once, and having a
contingent of 6,000 Tartars with him he marched against the main anny
of the Poles. This consisted of 5,000 men and was surrounded in a
marshy position by the Tartars, and compelled to surrender.t

Overtures were now made for peace on either side, but they came to
nothing, and the Cossacks and Tartars again overran the Polish borders.
They suddenly appeared at Poliaska (where one of the greatest of the
Polish noblemen was being married), surprised the town and captured all
the works of art which had been collected there. Khmielnitski marched
from one success to another, and his vast army is said to have comprised
300,000 Tartars, Cossacks, and peasants, he captured Lemberg and the
fortress of Barasa, and levied heavy contributions on other towns. He
then repaired to Kief where he received the homage of a great crowd of
notables, and was styled the liberator of the Ukraine, and the " hetman
generalissimo" of the Cossacks. The hands of Poland were now paralysed
by an interregnum, Vladislaf having died. Presently the Diet elected
in his place the famous John Casimir who had passed through a strange
apprenticeship, having been successively a diplomatist, a French prisoner,
a Jesuit, and a Cardinal, and now became king of Poland. On his acces-
sion he sent an envoy to try and arrange matters with the Cofisacks, and
presented Khmielnitski with a pelisse of fur, an official baion^ a standard
made of a horse's tail, an official seal, &c., being the insigna of his office
as hetman.t Meanwhile we read that the Russians and the Poles
complained at Constantinople of the ravages made by the Tartars.
Michael Romanof after a long reign in which he healed many of the
wounds caused by the terrible internal disturbances of the empire, had
died in 1646, and been succeeded by his son Alexis. The Sultan sent an
envoy to congratulate the young Tzar, and to bid him restrain the depreda-

• /rf., 14. 35. Lcsur, op. cit., i. 322- t Lesur, op. cit., 38«-3a6. I Scherer, op. cit, ii. 32.

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN III. 549

tions of the Cossacks of Azof, and to continue to pay the Khan the tribute
the Russian princes were accustomed to pay. He also sent the Chaush
Jemshid to the Krim Khan, ordering him to forward the 8,000 prisoners
he had captured (who were apparently chiefly Russians) to Constantinople,
where he meant to release them. To this the Khan repHed, " We are
the servants of the padishah ; the Russians only desire peace when they
are hard pressed, when fortune turns they will march with their Chaiks
against the borders of Anatolia. They have occupied two empty
fortresses which we have urged should have been garrisoned by ourselves,
and have fortified more than twenty outposts. If we had remained quiet
this year, they would have captured Akkerman, and become masters of
Moldavia; they have also burnt 3,000 Cossacks' boats, and have declared
war against us, we have as allies 40,000 Cossacks, and if God wills it, I
mean to make the Tzar, like the ruler of Moldavia, a subject of the
Porte."*

While the Sultan was exchanging envoys with the Russians, he was
apparently encouraging the Cossack revolt. We are told that Khmielnitski,
having received envoys from the hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia,
and the Nogais of Bessarabia, received one also from the Sultan, who
presented him with a kaftan or pelisse, a sword, and a baton, and ordered
the Pasha of Silistria and the Krim Khan to assist him.t The latter,
accordingly, marched in 1649, with 100,000 troops, and was joined by a
formidable army of 200,000 Cossacks and peasants. The allies proceeded
to beleaguer Zbaras, and fought a battle with an uncertain issue, against
the Poles. The town held out bravely, but matters were growing serious
and the Poles endeavoured to negotiate with the Khan, and persuade him
to desert his allies. At length after some further manoeuvring, all three
parties to the struggle agreed to a truce. A separate treaty was made
with the Krim Khan and his family. The Poles styled him the Khan of
the great hordes of the Circassian, Nogai, Petiorian, Perekopian, and
Crimean Tartars, +

By this treaty the Polish king undertook to pay the Tartars an annual
subsidy, and also a fixed sum of 300,000 florins, of which 100,000 was to
be paid down at once. He also promised to grant an amnesty to the
Cossacks, arvi to restore them all their privileges. The Khan undertook
to defend the Polish king against his enemies, and from the depredations
of his own people, and to retire at once from Poland. It is a curious
proof of the robber-like training of the Tartars that they demanded per-
mission to ravage the country through which they were to retire.§ The
Cossacks secured the free exercise of the Greek faith, and the promise
that no one should be nominated palatine of Kief who did not belong to
the same religion. Their metropolitan was to have. the ninth place in the

* Von Hammer, Krim Khans, 134. Gesh. Osm. Reich., iii. 308, 309. t Schercr, ii. 33.

I Id., ii. 232. § Lesur, op. cit., i. 350.

5 so HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Polish diet. They were permitted to elect their own hetman, to make
brandy for their own use, to register 40,000 " Cossacks," i.e., soldiers, and
lastly, the Pohsh king granted to each Cossack an annual present of ten
florins, besides cloth for their uniforms.*

The Poles released from their danger were not disposed to carry out
the terms of this treaty, and we now find the Cossacks having recourse
again to the Tartars. They had sent a contingent to assist their Khan
in a war in Circassia. The latter having returned successful had a
grievance against Russia, and asked for aid from the Cossacks. Their
hetman assented, but when he had collected an army, and joined 4,000
Tartars to it, he turned it against the Hospodar of Moldavia, who had
refused to ally himself by marriage with him, and against whom he had
other grievances. He forced him to accept his terms, and to give 20,000
ducats to the Tartars. This aroused the jealousy of the Poles, who always
deemed the Cossacks subjects, and Casimir prepared a large army to
punish them. He was joined by contingents sent by his feudatory, the
Duke of Courland, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, and found him-
self at the head of 300,000 men, with whom he marched towards Berestez
on the Stira.t The united Cossacks and Tartars, also mustered an im-
mense force, which we are told amounted to 300,000 men. Their army
when in battle-array, had at intervals bodies of janissaries and spahis.
The famous Cossack " tabort," composed of several rows of carts, and
defended by their picked troops, was in the centre, while the flanks
were guarded by numerous Tartars. The two armies faced one another
for a while, and then joined issue. The struggle was terrible, and ended
in the defeat of the allies. The Khan and Khmielnitski took to flight,
and one of the principal Tartars was killed. The greater part of thei r
arms and baggage, their carts, the Khan's tent and standard, and the
little silver drum with which he used to summon his immediate attendants,
were captured. Many of the Polish prisoners he had made, escaped,
while the Tartar dead and wounded were abandoned to the Christians, an
usual circumstance, which was deemed a special infamy among Mussul"
mans4 The hetman, who had fought very bravely, seeing the rout
of the Tartars, went after them to try and bring them b?ck to their
duty, but the Khan covered him with reproaches for having deceived
him as to the strength of the Polish army. He even threatened to
detain him and to send him to the King of Poland in exchange for the
Tartar murzas the latter had captured.

Meanwhile the Cossacks and their peasant allies gathered round " the
tabort," where they were protected by marshes, by a deep ditch, and by
forty cannons. There they were besieged by the Poles, but the absence
of Khmielnitski disheartened them, and they were constrained to offer
their submission to the king. Pardon was offiered them on condition

Id., 351. t Scherer, op. cit., ii. 42-44. I Lesur, op. cit., i. 374.

ISLAM GIRAI KHAN Til. 55 1

that they surrendered twelve of their chief men as hostages, gave up the
standards they had captured, and especially their great standard, reduced
the number of their warriors to twelve thousand, and otherwise had their
privileges curtailed. The Cossacks refused these terms, and broke away
in a large body, leaving but two thousand of their companions behind,
who were destroyed to a man. A large booty, including thirty thousand
rix-thalers, meant for the Tartars, was captured in the Cossack camp,
and the Poles on their return had the grim satisfaction of marching
among deserted fields and smouldering villages, and of having crushed
the rebellion of their vassals. The result was not quite, however, what
they expected.* Khmielnitski, having paid the Khan a handsome
ransom, returned to the Ukraine, where he soon regained his influence,
and where the scattered Cossacks once more assembled, and he soon
extorted a fresh treaty from Poland, by which the Cossacks were to be ,
allowed an army of twenty thousand, and were to have the palatinates of
Kief, Braklaf, and Chemigof for camping grounds. The Cossacks were
to be allowed to retain their Greek faith, Jews were to be tolerated, &c.,
while the Tartars were to be sent home.

The recent war had caused a large migration of Cossacks into the
steppes east of the Dnieper, which, although uninhabited since the
Tartar conquest, were claimed by the Russians as theirs. These
colonists pushed on as far as the Donetz, retaining meanwhile their
military organisation, and in 1652 there were formed out of them the five
Slobodian regiments known as Aktirka, Karkof, Izium, Sumi, and
Ostrogoisk.

The peace between Poland and the Cossacks was really but an armed
truce. Matters at length came once more to an issue, and the Polish
king, having ventured upon a battle near Schwanez, was defeated, and
only escaped captivity by paying a large ransom to the Tartar Khan,
who, as formerly, was in alliance with the Cossacks.t

These events are otherwise described by Von Hammer. He says that
in 1653 Islam Cxirai, having heard that the King of Poland was encamped
at Bar with a large and threatening army, in which there were twenty
thousand Germans, determined to march into his country. In five days
after leaving his capital Baghchi Serai he reached the frontier of the
Khanate at Frengkerman, he crossed the Dnieper (called the water of
Usu or the river of the Uzes by the Tartars), and marched to the Bug.
There he was invested by Bekiraga, the Sultan's deputy, with a sword of
honour and a kaftan. His Tartars spread over and ravaged the country
as far as Bar and Kaminetz. Several skirmishes took place with various
success, and at length winter put an end to the fighting. The Khan sent
his atalik or vizier to offer terms. A conference took place between the
envoy and several of the Polish grandees near Kaminetz. Peace was

Id., 374-382. t Id., 393. Scherer, i. 197.

552 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

ratified on the payment of a considerable sum to the Tartars (De Bohucz
says 100,000 ducats), and the giving of two hostages, who were to be
renewed annually. The son of the Polish general was one of the first
hostages. It is related that the Krim Khan had the mortification of
seeing the treaty broken before his eyes by his unruly subjects, who were
dissatisfied that their expedition should have brought them no plunder,
and who turned aside and sacked the town of Constantinof, and laid
waste the country from the Dniester to the Sireth.*

The Polish authorities describe this invasion of Lithuania, and tell us
how the Tartars carried off more than five thousand prisoners of both
sexes, among them being a whole wedding party, relatives, friends, and
even musicians, whom they surprised during their festivities, and how in
retiring they ravaged the lands of their former allies the Cossacks. It would
seem that one of the conditions of the pact between the Pohsh King and
the Khan was that they should make war upon Russia ; that the former
should assist the latter to recover possession of Astrakhan, while the
Khan undertook to ravage the land of the Slobodian regiments, those
fugitive Cossacks who had taken shelter under Russian protection. The
alHance was a great menace to Khmielnitski and his people, and he
determined to throw himself into the arms of the Russians, who, like the
Cossacks, belonged to the Greek faith.. He had little difficulty in per-
suading his people to adopt his policy. An envoy was sent to Russia,
where he was well received by the Tzar Alexis, who sent Butturlin, one
of his confidential officers, to receive the homage of the Cossacks, and
by a treaty signed at Pereislavl on the 6th of January, 1654, they trans-
ferred their allegiance, and the Tzar undertook to preserve their
privileges, and that the patriarch of Moscow should not exercise authority
among them. They were to have free permission to traffic in beer,
brandy, and hydromel ; they were to have the right of electing their own
hetman, who was, however, to receive his baton, banner, and confirmation
from the Tzar. He was to have the town and regiment of Chigrin for
his maintenance, as well as a sum of one thousand ducats, and he under-
took not to receive from or send embassies to other powers, or to have
communications with the Krim Khan. The Cossacks also undertook
not to give an asylum to fugitive Russians. They promised to furnish
a contingent of sixty thousand men to the Tzar, who when on service
were to receive three roubles for each foot-soldier and six for each horse-
man.t

Some months after this important treaty, namely, in July, 1654, Islam
Girai sickened and died, and was buried with his fathers.^

* Von Hammer, Osm. Gcsh., iii. 421. t Lesur, op. cit., i, 39S-400.

I Krim Khans, :36.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN lY. 553

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN IV. (Restored).

On the death of Islam Girai, his brother Muhammed, who was once
more brought from Rhodes, received his appointment as Khan from the
Sultan, and was obliged to go to the Krim overland, to avoid being waylaid
by the Cossacks, whose boats were on the outlook to intercept him.* He
retained the kalga, Gazi Girai, and the nureddin, Adil Girai, in their
posts. This did not apparently give satisfaction, and led to a civil strife,
in which the important tribe of Mansur was on one side and that of
Shirin on the other. The death of Adil Girai, who was killed by a fall
from his horse, and the appointment of Murad Girai as nureddin seems
to have restored peace. The new Khan sent an envoy to the Emperor
to apprise him of his accession.t The Poles and Cossacks also sent to
congratulate him. The formers' envoys were well received, but th^
latters' had their noses and ears cut off, and were thus sent home.t

Poland was at this time being hard pressed. She was at war with the
Prussians and Swedes, as well as the Muscovites; the latter of whom, in
alliance with the Cossacks, captured Smolensk and made a cruel raid
into Lithuania, where they burned Vilna, captured Vitebsk, and
devastated two hundred other towns. § The Tzar now took the title of
Tzar and Autocrat of Great, Little, and White Russia.

The same year the Polish King sent one hundred thousand florins to
the Krim Khan, to induce him to invade the Ukraine, which he
accordingly did, and killed Tomilenka, the vice-hetman of the Cossacks
there, ii The Polish army, under the Grand-general Potocki, with a large
contingent of Tartars, now proceeded to attack Ulman or Human, a
fortress surrounded by three ditches, and deemed the stronghold of the
Cossacks, Khmielnitski went to the rescue with thirty thousand Cossacks
and eighty thousand Russians. A fierce struggle ensued in the plains of
Drischipol, in which the Cossacks were defeated, and forced to take
refuge behind their barricades of waggons and dead bodies.^ The
Cossack chief now tried the seductive effects of gold, and remembering
that he had been on intimate terms with Ahmed mursa, the Krim Khan's
nephew, whan a boy, he invited him to a conference at night, and offered
him ten thousand ducats if he would go over to him, It is probable
the nephew also gained over the uncle, for we find that the Tartars
returned to the Krim laden with booty.** The Cossacks then made a
raid into Poland, advancing as far as Lublin, which they captured. On
returning home Khmielnitski found the Krim Khan encamped on the
river Oserna. After a doubtful struggle, the latter invited the hetman to a
conference, where there were mutual recriminations, the Khan charging

* Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh., ii. 428. t Id., iii, 485, &c.

I De Bohucz, Histoire de la Tauride, &c., 382. $ Scherer, ii. 66. U Id.

H Id., 66-69. •* De Bohuez, op. cit., 383.

2X

554 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the Cossacks with allying themselves with Russia, while they retorted
that the Tartars had undertaken to ravage Little Russia at the instance
of the Polish King. The Cossacks were alternately courted by the
Russians, the Swedes, and the Tartars, and their position was a difficult
one. At length, in the year 1656, Khmielnitski was poisoned by an
emissary of the Turkish Sultan soon after he had made peace with the
Poles. During the next few years we find the Tartars busy further west.
They sent envoys with presents to attend the coronation of Leopold as
King of Hungary and Bohemia, and two years later, on the death of
the Emperor Ferdinand IIL, to the coronation of Leopold as his
successor. With this envoy they sent a note to ask the Emperor to give
no asylum to Rakoczy, the prince of Transylvania, who in alliance with
the voivodes'of Moldavia and Wallachia and the hetman of the Cossacks,
was at war with the Turks, and had desolated Poland. The messenger
also took a present of fifteen thousand rix-thalers, with a gold chain
and silver ornaments of the value of two thousand and sixty guldens.
The Khan of Krim marched with an army of two hundred thousand
horsemen against the confederates led by Rakoczy. His forces numbered
sixty thousand. In the battle that followed the Christians had twent)-
thousand of their number killed, and as many more taken prisoners^
among whom were seven hundred noblemen of Transylvania. Several
thousand carts were laden with booty, among which were one hundred
and fifty cannons, while the ransom of Rakoczy's nearest felatives
amounted to three hundred thousand piastres. The voivodes of Mol-
davia and Wallachia were deposed and others put in their places. The
Khan was given a handsome present, and received orders to post himself
at Akkerman with twenty thousand men, while Fasli Pasha made a
diversion and attacked Ruschuk, the chief town of Wallachia. The
latter delayed and gave Bessaraba, the deposed voivode, time to burn
Tergovitch and to escape to Transylvania, which gave rise to a violent
quarrel between him and the kalga commanding the troops of the
Krim Khan.

The following year the war Was prosecuted with vigour, Alba Julia
(Weissenburgh), the capital of Rakoczy, was taken and sacked.
Two hundred thousand Tartars overran and devastated the country, and
fifty thousand victims were made, of whom two-thirds were killed and
the other third reduced to slavery. A new ruler was appointed over
Transylvania, and a peace upon harsh terms was concluded.*

Khmielnitski had been succeeded as hetman of the Cossacks by his son
of the same name, who, however, speedily gave place to Vigofski. The
latter deemed it prudent to ally himself with the Poles, and a peace was
concluded by which inter alia the Cossacks were made absolutely inde-
pendent of the Polish church ; the metropolitan of Kief was given a

♦ Von Hammer, Osm. Ge»h., ii. 485-487.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN IV. 555

seat in the diet next to the archbishop of Gnesne ; the number of
registered Cossacks was raised to sixty thousand men; they were to
have the right of choosing their own hetman from among their own
people ; to have their own schools, printing press, and chancellary
and to elect their own priests ; in time of war they were to be allowed to
decide whether they would be neutral or not ; all the Ukraine was to obey
the hetman ; he was to have the right of coining money ; and a canal
was to be cut from their country to the Black Sea.* These terms were
very favourable to the Cossacks. It would seem that the Slobodian
regiments under Pushkar, the colonel of Pultawa, would not accept the
Polish alliance, and remained faithful to Russia, and they seized
Vigofski's envoys to the Krim Khan and drowned them under the ice of
the Dnieper. Some fresh envoys went in 1658, and Muhammed sent a
contingent back with them.t In a first engagement Vigofski was
defeated and lost his baton, but the united Poles and Tartars retrieved
matters, Pushkar was killed, and Pultawa captured and pillaged. The
towns of Liutenka, Sorotschinza, Baranofka, Oburshof, Bogatschka,
Ustiviza, Yaresk, Weprik, &c., were taken and ravaged by the Tartars.^

The Tzar of Russia now sent an army to the assistance of his proteges,
which in turn plundered the towns of the opposing faction of the
Cossacks. In 1559, the Russians under Prince Trubezkoi besieged the
town of Konotop.§ Vigofski went to the rescue with his Cossacks and
Tartars. The Russians, who numbered forty thousand besides ten
thousand friendly Cossacks, were encamped at the confluence of the
rivers Desna and Sem, were savagely attacked, and the greater part of
them were either killed or drowned. The victors then crossed the Dnieper,
and spared neither age nor sex in revenging themselves on the opposing
faction. II Meanwhile the Krim Khan, Vigofski's ally, seems to have won
a great victory over the Russians. He also sent fifteen thousand Tartars
and five thousand Cossacks, under the command of Firash, against the
fort of Maichli. The Khan also sent a large contingent. The following
day this army encountered a large Russian force, which after a three
days struggle defeated it, and the five thousand Cossacks were destroyed.
When the Khan Jheard the news he halted his force, collected the
prisoners he had captured, and having harangued them, he had them
put to death. Some fugitives now came in and said that fifteen thousand
Russians were besieging Maichli, and that a similar force was stationed
at the ford of the Volga, to prevent the Tartars and Cossacks from
crossing. It was determined to attack the latter first. The Khan posted
himself (m a height to overlook the fight. The result was decisive ;
not a man of the fifteen thousand escaped alive.

The value of the ransom of the prisoners in the hands of the Tartars

■ Schcror, ii. Sg. 90. t De Bohucz, 384- I Scherer, ii. 97, 92.

§ 14., 93. 11 De Bohucz, 384.

550 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

was put at one hundred thousand ducats^ but at a council of the Tartar
elders it was decided that it would not be prudent to keep them alive,
and with a creditable regard for their descent from the arch-slaughterer
Jingis, a hecatomb was ordered. The officers were first decapitated,
then the rest, to the number of thirty thousand. This was in June, 1660,
The Tartars then marched against the fortress, and a battle of three
days' duration ensued. On the fourth the Russians fled, were pursued,
and most of them destroyed. Having halted a day to tend to the
wounded, the Tartars continued their march, and attacked the fortress
of Rumnia, which surrendered. Notwithstanding this, the commander
and five hundred of the garrison were brought before the Khan
and killed. The surrounding fortresses fell one by one into the
hands of the confederates, and from the sand hills of Poschon far
into Russia, the country for fifteen days' journey was laid waste. The
loss of the Russians in the war is placed at one hundred and
twenty thousand men, besides fifteen thousand prisoners. Messengers
were sent to Constantinople with the news, who carried with them a
trophy of three hundred heads. At the same time news reached there
of the successes of the Turks in Bosnia. The intelligence caused great
rejoicings at the Sultan's court, a great feast of seven days was ordained,
and for seven days the streets were illuminated.*

Muhammed, the Krim Khan, now made overtures to Charles XII., the
king of Sweden and the enemy of Russia, in the hope of drawing some
money from, him ; but Charles complained of his detaining a number of
Swedes captured in the Polish war as prisoners, and the aUiance ended
in an exchange of presents. On news of this intrigue reaching him, the
Tzar at once made approaches to Vigofski, and also made a fresh
promise of a subsidy, and the payment of arrears for seven years to the
Tartar Khan.t .

In the year 1661 we find the Tartars once more engaged in Transyl-

'vania, supporting the claims of Apafy to that principality against those of

Kemeny. At the summons of the Sultan the Khan set out with twenty

thousand men towards Azof; the kalga remaining with forty thousand at

Perekop.

The Turkish commander of the expedition was Ahmed Pasha, the son
of Koprili. The allies wasted the valley of Hatzeg with fire and sword,
and laid the Saxon towns of Szasvaros and Szassebes in ashes. Kemeny
was driven from the banks of the Szamos to the foot of the mountain
Emberfo and to Negerfalva, while the Tartars pursued as far as Szathmar,
and collected several thousand prisoners and cattle at Domahida. His
rival Michael Apafy had been a prisoner for a long time among the
Tartars, and had acquired the pliability necessary to one who was to
bear the Turkish yoke easily. We now read how Ahmed Chaushbashi

* Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh., iii. 515, 516, t De Bohucz, 385.

MUHAMMED GIRAI KHAN IV. 557

was sent with the stipend of ten thousand ducats to the Khan, and a
sunimohs for him to march towards Hungary. Muhammed sent his son
Ahmed Girai with one hundred thousand men, and soon after another
son went at the head of twenty thousand Zaporogian Cossacks. The
former was decorated with a sword and dagger, a quiver and sable
robe ; aud his brother with a kaftan of golden tissue, a red kontush, and
a sable cap.* The Tartars fought with great ferocity. In 1663 they
appeared twice in Moravia and Silesia. In August of that year we read
how six thousand of them devastated the country of Tirnau, Friestadtl,
and St. Georgen. They ravished the women, while the children were
thrown from the walls' and hacked asunder with swords, or smothered in
heaps in sacks ; men and women were coupled together like dogs, and
driven over the March and the Weissenberg to Moravia towards Landshut,
the route being pointed out by the hussars, who acted as frontier guards
for the Hungarians. In September the Tartars returned and plundered
Nikolsburg, Rabensburg, and Brunn, and within three miles of Olmutz,
The possessions of the princes of Dietrichstein and Liechtenstein were
devastated, and thirty-two villages belonging to the latter were laid waste.
The Tartars dragged twelve thousand prisoners to the slave mart at
Neuhausel. Again they advanced against Presburgh, burnt St. Georgen
and Geiersdorf, crossed the Waag, and fell by the pass of Rosincko, upon
the circle of Hradish. Fourteen thousand Tartars, janissaries and
hussars, swept by way of Brunau to Kloback, and returned with two
thousand prisoners and four huge waggons laden with women into
Hungary.! Thus were the scenes of Batu's campaigns in Central
Europe re-enacted even so Lite as the second half of the seventeenth
century.

Meanwhile the Tartars were almost continuously employed in the
struggles that took place on their frontiers between Russians, Poles, and
Cossacks. In 1660 we find them, in aUiance with the Poles, compelhng
a Russian force under Sheremetof to surrender. They plundered their
prisoners and kept Sheremetof a prisoner of war for several years.

In 1661 the Poles and Tartars, with some of the Cossacks, were again
in the Ukraine, and ravaged the towns of Starodub, Mhlin, &c. This
faction of the Cossacks was commanded by Khmielnitski, the son of the
famous hetman of the same name. The following year they were
defeated by the rival faction under Samko. These mutual raids are very
dreary, and were presently comphcated by a fresh element in the shape
of the Kalmuks, who now began to take part in Cossack politics.+

In 1665 Muhammed Girai was deposed, on the ground that instead of
marching himself to the Hungarian war he had sent his son, and also
that he had attacked the Nogais of Bessarabia, who were proteges of the
Porte, and who had refused to obey him. The real reason was probably

Krira Khans, 145, 146. t /rf., i47-i49> J Scherer, ii. 11;.

558 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

.some palace intrigue. He thereupon retired to Komuk, where he died
in 1672. He had built some splendid baths at Baghchi Serai, and also
some palaces at Tula, not far off. His second reign was twelve years
and four months long, and he died at the age of sixty-six.*

ADIL GIRAI KHAN.

Muhammed Girai was succeeded by Adil Girai, who, according to Von
Hammer and Langles, was the son of Choban Girai, which is probably
right, although the notice translated by Kazimirski makes htm a son of
Devlet Girai Sultan.t Von Hammer says that, having been brought
back from banishment at Rhodes and placed on the throne, he set sail
from Constantinople with an escort of eleven galleys, while his kalga
Islam Girai went overland. It seems to have been the policy of the
Porte at this period to cut down the power of the Khans, for we are told
that the Crown lands on the Dniester, which had formerly been an
appanage of theirs, were now transferred to the Nogais, who had been
settled in Bessarabia for three years. Soon after his accession he sent
an embassy to Vienna.^ His envoy Kantemir mursa went with sixteen
attendants and thirty-five horses, with letters from the Khan, the vali, the
kalga, the nureddin, and the vizier Seferaga.§

By a treaty made in the early part of 1667, Russia and Poland, which
were both weary of and somewhat exhausted by their struggle, entered
into a truce for thirteen years, by which the Poles ceded to the Tzar all
Severia and that portion of the Ukraine east of the Dnieper, with the
Cossacks who lived there ; (the Western Cossacks or Zaporognes
remained subject to Poland) and a common alliance was entered into
against the Krim Khan.|| The Cossacks at this time were divided into
several factions ; one of these, under Doroshenko in alliance with the
Tartars, mustered a force of sixty thousand men, and enveloped and
defeated six thousand Poles, capturing their commander. IT Meanwhile
the Cossacks belonging to a rival faction, under Serko, entered the Krim
and compelled the Khan and his people to seek refuge in the mountains,
and then retired.** We now find a third hetman, who ruled over the
Russian Cossacks, abandoning his patrons and offering to put the
Ukraine under the protection of Turkey.tt His policy was apparently
distasteful to his people, who drove him away, and he was shortly after
killed, and Doroshenko became the hetman on both sides of the
Dnieper.JI

Afraid of his northern neighbours, who were now friends, he also
appealed to the Sultan, who gave him a contingent of six thousand men,

Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 442. t Id. \ Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh., 584, 585.

§ Krim Khans, 153. \ Lesur, ii. 21, 22. T Dc Bohucz, 385,

** Scherer, op. cit., ii. 118, tt l^-, 121. II Id., 123.

SELIAf GIRAI KHAN. • 559

and promised him the assistance of the Tartars.* Presently a new
faction arose against him, headed by Khanenko and other chiefs, who
it seems were supported by the Tartars. The latter, whose alUances
were dictated by their interests, did not scruple to ravage the villages of
Doroshenko, although he was the proteg'e of the Turkish Sultan, their
master. This brought about the deposition of the Krim Khan, who it
seems befriended his rival Khanenko, and was accordingly displaced.
This was in 1670. One author says he was deprived because he had
gone out of his mind, and that he retired to Rumeha.t He renewed the
treaty of peace with Poland made by the Khans Islam Girai and
Muhammed Girai.t Adil Girai was buried in the mosque at Karinabad.§
Although Adil in Arabic means just, says the author translated by
Langles, he had no virtue worthy of a throne, and was a tyrant.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN.

Adil Girai was succeeded by Selim Girai, the son of the Khan
Behadur Girai. He had lived in retirement at Cholmek, near Yam-
boli. It was near the latter town that the Krim Khans had their
appanages. The chief of them was Jingis Serai. The palace was
separated from the town by an esplanade, and all the streets radiated
from it. II A story is told of him that while he was at Cholmek, there
lived at the village of Jauli a pious dervish named Sheikh Ibrahim, who
it seems was devoted to worldly matters as well as spiritual. He let it
be known in the neighbourhood that he would dispose of the Khanate of
Krim for a thousand ducats, and that if anyone would send him the
money he would secure him the prize. No one was tempted with the
offer at Jauli, but when the news reached Cholmek Selim Girai sent the
money, and soon after became Khan. The explanation probably is,
that a large part of the money went to the vizier Kologli, by whose
influence with the dissipated Sultan Muhammed IV. Adil had been
deposed. He was presented with the insignia of his office, that is to
say, the sable-trimmed robe of honour, the diamond ornament, and the
jewel bedecked sword. He appointed his brother Selamet Girai kalga,
and his cousin Safa Girai nureddin.lf He at once set off for Circassia,
to settle that disturbed district, but had hardly taken up his winter
quarters in the Kabarda when he was summoned to attend his suzerain
the Sultan in a campaign against the Poles.

Doroshenko the Cossack continued his Ishmaelitish policy towards
his neighbours. He attacked the Cossacks under Russian rule, against
whose special hetman he secured the patriarch's excommunication -, this

♦ Id., ii. 128, 129. t Nouv. journ. A8iat.,xii.,442- I Krim Khans, 154.

% Id., 155. L' De Bohucz, 386. f Krim Khans, 157, 158,

560 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

was in 1670. The next year, the Poles having supported his rival
Khanenko, he asked assistance from the Pasha of Silistria, with whose
aid he punished both the Russian Cossacks and the partisans of
Khanenko. The latter having been duly installed as hetman, Doro-
shenko secured the personal co-operation of the Sultan, who declared
war against Poland, and in 1672 marched upon Kaminetz of Podolia.
Selim Girai and his two sons marched under the Turkish standard,
and contributed to the capture of that fortress ; afterwards to that of
Luof and other neighbouring villages. He ravaged Pocutia and Volhynia,
whence he carried off one thousand prisoners, but as he was crossing
the Dniester with an immense booty he was attacked by the Polish
King John Sobieski near Kaluz, and had to surrender his prisoners
and a large part of the booty.*

The result of the war with the Turks was the cession by the Poles of
the Ukraine, Podolia, and the town of Kaminetz, and we are told that
this treaty, the last by which the Turks secured fresh territory in Europe,
was chiefly due to the skill of Selim. The Polish diet refused to sanction
its terms, and the war having recommenced, Selim was forced to retire
to the Krim.t The Nogais living near Akkerman having revolted
against the Porte, rhe Khan was told to transport them to the Krim.
He did so, but they gradually made their way back again.+ During his
reign, and in the year 1672, the Venetians tried to recover their commerce
with the Krim. They had long solicited for the right of trading in the
Black Sea, and at length bought the concession from the officers of the
Porte, who, however, rendered it illusory, for when two vessels, furnished
with a firman and bearing rich cargoes, appeared at the custom-house at
Constantinople they were stopped. This act of insubordination against
the Sultan's firman would have been punished with death but that the
divan was in fact in league with the customs' officer, and the two ships
were not allowed to pass on.§

Meanwhile the strife continued in the north, in which the Tartars were
in close alliance with the hetman Doroshenko against the Russians. In
1674 the later captured the towns of Cherkask and Kanief, while the
Cossack chief was himself made prisoner by the hostile garrison of
Lisianka. Regaining his liberty, the indefatigable hetman led an army of
Cheremisses, .Turks and Tartars, which ravaged the Russian borders.
The old people were killed, and the women and children sold to the
Tartars. A fierce and indecisive battle followed, after which the Russians
proceeded to besiege Chigrin, when the Turks marched to the aid of
their protege. The Russian commanders thereupon retired, and a cruel
vengeance was exacted from the country east of the Dnieper. The town
of Uman having been captured, all its inhabitants were slaughtered under
the eye of Doroshenko ; the Christians found there, were burnt alive or

* De Bohucz, 387. t Id. \ Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 443. $ De Bohucz, 386, 387.

S£LIM GIRAI KHAN. 56 1

had their skins stuffed with straw, and were sent in hundreds to the
Sultan. The towns who submitted had to surrender all their children,
who were forthwith circumcised ; and in order to pay the Turks the sums
they demanded for their assistance, Doroshenko, whose coffers were
empty, made a raid upon Little Russia, whence he returned charged with
booty.* After this, this successful marauder was abandoned by most
of his Cossacks, and turned alternately for aid to Turkey and Russia.
The Russians, who knew his distressed condition, besieged him at
Chigrin, which they captured, and he was made prisoner. He recovered
his liberty at the price of surrendering his hetmanship, and thus ended a
long life of rapine. This was in 1675.

The Sultan, who had long kept the younger Khmielnitski prisoner, now
produced him and nominated him prince of Little Russia and hetman
of the Zaporogian Cossacks. He ordered Ibrahim Pasha and the Krim
Khan to advance with him into the Ukraine and to recapture Chigrin.
The various contingents arrived before that town in 1675. It was
garrisoned by sixty thousand Russians and Cossacks. The Turkish
commander Ibrahim had only forty thousand men with him. The
citadel was fortified on three sides by morasses, and was inaccessible on
the fourth, and the garrison had some boats on the river to aid in the
defence. The Pasha of Bosnia, who tried with sixteen thousand Tartars
to prevent the Russians crossing the Dnieper, was badly defeated, and
the Khan's son, eight murzas, and ten thousand men were left on the
field. The siege was at length raised, and the Turks retired in confusion,
and lost two thousand waggons of baggage and impedimenta.

The news caused tremendous excitement at Constantinople. A general
levy was ordered, the Sultan subscribed 2,000,000 of silver coin, and the
Grand Vizier undertook the casting of eight new cannons. Ibrahim
was received with indignation by his master, and sent off as a prisoner to
the Seven Castles at Constantinople. The Khan of Krim, to whom a
portion of the blame was assigned, was deposed. He stayed the winter
at Kaffa, and the following spring went to Constantinople, whence he
was transported to Rhodes. This was in 1677.

We ought to note in passing that in 1676 the Tzar Alexis, son of
Michael Romanof, died. His latter years were disturbed by the terrible
revolt of the Ural Cossacks under Stenko Razin. We are told that
Alexis established a mounted postal service, silk and linen manufactures,
encouraged iron and copper mining, and improved ship building. In his
reign Behring's Straits were discovered by the Cossack Deshnef. By
his first wife Maria he left two sons, Feodor and Ivan, and by his second
wife NataU Narizhkin a third son, Peter the Great. He was succeeded
by Feodor.t

* Scheref, ii. 144, I45. t Wahl, op. cit., 285, 286.

2Y

562 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

MURAD GIRAI KHAN.

Selim Girai was succeeded by Murad Girai, the son of Mubarak and
the grandson of Selamet Girai Khan. He was the last of the Krim
Khans who sent an annual embassy to the Imperial court at Vienna.
The last of -such embassies which reached Vienna was in 1680.'* The
Porte probably viewed them with suspicion. They were in themselves
a mere pretext for extorting presents, -but they might easily be con-
verted into sources of intrigue. The Turks proceeded with their
campaign in the Ukraine, and the Tartars meanwhile ravaged the
country from Roslaf to Pereislavl. The Turks, under the orders of
George Khmielnitski, proceeded to lay siege to Chigrin, defeated its
defenders in a pitched battle, and exploded several mines under its walls*
The garrison at length succeeded in cutting its way through and with-
drawing to the Don, and the place fell into the hands of the Turks on
the 2 1 St of August, 1678. They afterwards plundered Kanief and the
n eighbouring towns with terrible cruelty. Khmielnitski was proclaimed
prince of Little Russia and hetman of the Zaporogian Cossacks. The
next year Hanenko, another j[)roteg^ of the Turks, was nominated
hetman of the Ukraine. The Cossack country was the scene of dismal
raids and counter raids on the part of both Russians and Turks, and its
inhabitants fled largely to the forests for refuge.t

In 1680 the Tartars, under their Khan, ravaged all the Russian settle-
ments for thirty leagues along the river Merla, and the Turks refounded
the towns of Kizikerman and Taman, and restoi'ed the fortifications of
Chertkof.t

Feodor, Tzar of Russia, did much to introduce culture into the empire,
patronised schools, a superior church music, and the arts and sciences.
He put an end to the exorbitant pretensions of the nobility to the
hereditary succession to the higher Government offices by burning the
genealogical registers, by which act the talents of the lower classes
became available for the benefit of the country. He improved the
architecture of Russia, and tried to encourage the breeding of horses by
introducing better ones from Prussia. Having with the consent of the
grandees displaced his brother Ivan, who was an imbecile, from the
succession, he nominated his half-brother Peter as his heir. He died
in 1682, without issue.

In 1683 Murad Girai took part in the great Turkish campaign against
Austria, during which Vienna was besieged. John Sobieski, with an
army of Poles and Cossacks, at the same time aided the Emperor.
During the siege the Tartar Khan had a quarrel with the Grand Vizier,
who probably needed a scapegoat for his want of success. This was
followed by his deposition, which took place in October, 1683.

"* Von Hammer, Osm. Gesb., iii. 6g8. t Scherer, op. cit„ ii. 152. I /</.» I53<

^SELIM GIRAI KHAN. 563

The electors of Brandenburg were at this time enlarging their
frontiers rapidly. Some years before, during the general prostration of
Poland, they had annexed the province of Prussia and the districts of
Lauenburgh and Bytof, with the town of Elbing.*

We are told that Murad Khan was an eye-witness of the strange
feat of the Elector Frederick William, who conveyed his troops on
sledges against the Swedes who had attacked Prussia. This had such
an effect on the Khan and his suzerain that they entered into a treaty
with the Elector.t

On his deposition the Sultan gave Murad Girai a residence at Sirajeh,
near Yamboli, where he died in 1107 hej. (/.^., 1695). He had reigned
five years and six months.^ We are told that at this time some of their
envoys having been ill-used, the Russians ceased to have diplomatic*
intercourse with the Khans, and communicated in future directly with
Constantinople.§

HAJI GIRAI KHAN II.

Murad Girai was succeeded by Haji, the son of Krim Girai Khan,
who appointed Devlet Girai and Azemet Girai, the two sons of the
deposed Khan Selim, kalga and nureddin. Haji Girai distinguished
himself in the disastrous siege of Vienna. When the Turks abandoned
their colours and retired, he at the head of his Tartars rescued the
Ottoman standard. Later on, when the Poles wished to occupy
Bessarabia, the Khan marched against them and fought a battle with
them near Ismael. He also defeated the Zaporogian Cossacks in a five
days' struggle near the Pruth. He soon after accompanied the Sultan in
an expedition against Hungary. He was deposed, however, after having
only reigned a year.j| The cause of the deposition is not very clear, but
Von Hammer suggests that it might have something to do with the
intrigues of his own kalga and nureddin. At all events their father, the
deposed Khan Selim, was again reinstated.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN (Restored).

Von Hammer describes with some unction the ceremony with which
Selim was escorted when he landed at Constantinople on his return from
exile at Rhodes. How the vizier went to meet him with his head covered,
not with the kalevi (/.^., the great three-cornered gold-embroidered hat),
but in the great round high turban ; how they went to the audience
attended by a lordly escort, how the Khan stopped and sat down on the

* Scherer, ii. 84. t De Bohucz, 388. I Krim Khans, 163. Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 444.
§ Krim Khans, 163, || Nouv, Journ, Asiat,, xii, 444, Krim Khans, 162, 163.

564 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Stone where the Sultan alighted from his horse, how humbly he knelt in
the presence of his suzerain, and how one grandee put on him the
kapanidsha {i.e.^ the robe decked with fur down to the hips), another
gave him the jewelled sword, and a third put two diamond ornaments on
his head, signifying that the usual gift of one thousand ducats was in his
case raised to two thousand. On his departure for Babatagh he was
presented with a sword in a golden sheath, a suit of golden scaled
armour, a pearl embroidered quiver, and a palfrey.*

The Turks had reached the limit of their wonderful career of conquest,
and were now falling on evil times. In the west the Emperor Leopold
defeated them very severely, and captured Belgrade, while the Prince of
Transylvania put himself under his asgis. In the east their enemies,
Russians and Poles, had made a notable peace, by whieh all the Ukraine
and Smolensk were ceded to the former. The Poles had entered into an
obligation to pay the Porte tribute, and the Tartars insisted that the
Russians should furnish them with an annual sum of sixty thousand
roubles. To wipe out this disgrace, and at the same time to fulfil an
engagement with their new ally Poland, the Russians under Galitzin
advanced against the Krim. After a severe and harassing march across
the steppe, and fighting an unsuccessful battle at a place called Carayelg, in
which they lost thirteen cannons and one thousand prisoners, they retired
and proceeded to build a town on the Samara, to be their head-quarters
in a future campaign. This had to be deferred, however, for some time.
The Cossacks of the Ukraine were at this time governed by the famous
hetman Mazeppa, who was elected in 1687. In 1688 they plundered the
neighbourhood of Otchakof, and carried off many Tartar prisoners.

The next year Prince Galitzin, with a Russian army and attended by
Mazeppa, advanced as far as Perekop. The Tartars sued for peace.
This they bought with sacks made of goatskins, &c., filled with ducats,
many of which were false. The Cossacks were much disappointed at
not being allowed to plunder the place. The following year they again
ravaged the neighbourhood of Otchakof, while the Polish Cossacks made
similar raids, released many Christians who were in captivity, and
carried off much booty. These attacks took place apparently in the
absence of the Khan, who in 1688 had left Akkerman to join the
Ottoman army. He was sent against the Germans, who were then in
winter quarters. He met them at a place called Kapchak (Von Hammer
calls it Uskub), defeated them, and captured one of their chiefs called
Hersek. The Khan was summoned to the Ottoman camp, and as a
reward for his conduct and at his request, there was created a kind of
Praetorian force named Sekban, whose duty it was to attend on the.
person of the Khan. It was divided into banners of fifty men each, and
was paid by the Imperial treasury.

* Von Hammer, Osm. Gesh, iii. 759, 760,

SAFA GIRAI KHAN. 565

The next year Selim was ordered to accompany Kuprili Zade
Mustapha Pasha in his war, and assisted effectually in driving the
Germans from the country about Belgrade. He was once more bidden
to ask a favour, and prayed that the Khanate might not pass out of his
family. About this time he was greatly affected by the death of his son,
who had filled the office of nureddin, and determined to resign his power
and to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Permission to do this was granted,
and he wended his way by Egypt to the holy city. In memory of this
an annual sum called syra was paid by the Sultan's treasury to the
stations he visited in his pilgrimage. On his return he settled at an
estate called Kazikui, near Silivri.*

SAADET GIRAI KHAN II.

Selim was replaced by Saadet Girai, who is called his son by one
author,t Von Hammer| makes him a brother of the Khan Haji Girai. This
is confirmed by his coins, which show him to have been the son of Krim
Girai Khan.§ He nominated Selim's son Devlet Girai as kalga, and
Feth Girai as nureddin. He mounted the throne in 1691. The same
year he was ordered to march against the Germans, and traversed
Wallachia, which was terribly wasted by swarms of locusts, and he had
great difficulty in keeping his distressed troops under control. At the
same time the inhabitants of the Krim having represented to the Sultan
that he was not on good terms with his soldiers, and having failed to
arrive in time to assist the Ottoman forces, he was deposed and exiled,
first to Chagisgan, near Yamboli, and then to Rhodes, where he shortly
after died.

SAFA GIRAI KHAN.

Safa Girai, the successor of Saadet, was the son of Safa Girai Sultan,
and belonged to the stock of the Choban Girais. He nominated Devlet
Girai as kalga and Shahin Girai as nureddin. The new Khan was on
terms of intimate friendship with the King of Poland, a friendship which
arose out of the chivalrous treatment that a confidential friend of the
Khan's named Ali Aga, who had been captured by the Poles, received at
their hands. || He was ordered to assist the Turks in their western
campaign, and was, Hke his predecessor, unable to maintain discipline
among his Tartars, and being deserted by them near Berkuki, he was
also deposed after reigning a few months, and exiled to Kulagosli, near
Karinabad, where he some time after died, at the age of sixty-eight.

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 443 and 446. t Id., 446. J iii. 839.

§ Blau, op. cit., 67. II Von Hammer, iii. 854.

566 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN (Third Reign).

Selim Girai, now entitled El haj or the Pilgrim, was recalled from
Kasikoi, near Yamboli,* and in 1692 mounted the throne for the third
time. He made his eldest son Devlet Girai kalga, and Shahin Girai, the
son of his nephew Selamet Girai, nureddin. Soon after his accession he
was summoned to attend his suzerain in the war with Transylvania and
Hungary. The Imperial forces had laid siege to Belgrade, the Khan,
who was then at Akkerman, sent on an advance guard, which was shortly
followed by his main army and the Sultan's troops. Several combats
ensued, in which the balance of victory was divided, and after which the
Tartars ravaged much of the surrounding country .t In September, 1695,
he was again summoned to march westwards ; he contributed greatly to
the capture of the towns of Lugos, Nissa, and Behln, and took an active
part in the terrible struggle of Lippa, where the Imperial general
Frederick Veterani and so many of his men were killed. t

The strife between the Cossacks and the Tartars continued without
much intermission. In the spring of 1692 the latter made a raid on the
district of Domanchof. They retired on the approach of the Cossacks,
who proceeded in turn to ravage the district near Otchakof. The
following autumn we again find the Tartars plundering in the neighbour-
hood of Pultava, an expedition which they repeated in 1693, when they
were led by the Khan's son.§ In 1694, during the carnival season, they
desolated the environs of Pereislavl, and the Cossacks again ravaged the
district of Otchakof, and carried off three hundred prisoners. They also
made a raid near Perekop, and captured eight cannons ;|| but a more
potent enemy was at hand in the shape of the Tzar Peter, afterwards
known as Peter the Great, who was determined to gain a sea board for
his land-locked empire, to gain a footing in the Black Sea, and especially
to capture Azof, where he might plant an arsenal. Azof was well fortified,
had a garrison of six thousand men, and a free access to the sea. The
Russians advanced under Marshal Sheremetof, with a large army against
the town, which Peter himself joined as a volunteer, professing, and no
doubt honestly, that he was only a learner in the art of war. On the
other side was Murtasa Pasha, the beglerbeg of Kaffa, with the son of
the Khan Selim, and the various Tartars of Cherkes, Taman, Sudak,
and the Great Nogais. The eastern and western accounts differ some-
what in the causes, while both are agreed as to the main issue of the
campaign. According to the Turkish accounts, it was the prowess of
the Tartar forces under Kaplan Girai which stormed the Russian
entrenchments and compelled them to retreat. The Russian accounts
attribute their disaster to the desertion of one of their chiefs of artillery,

* Krim Khans, 172. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 448. J Id. Osm. Gesh., iii. 882.

$ Schercr, op. cit., ii. 162, 163. || Id., 164.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN. 567

a Dantziger called Jacob, who had been condemned to corporal punish-
ment, and in revenge spiked the cannon, turned Muhammedan, and
assisted in the defence of the town, which resisted effectually. The
Russians were compelled to raise the siege.* This was in the
autumn of 1695. But they were accustomed to defeat, and their new
Tzar Peter was not to be easily dispirited. The break down at
Azof was somewhat compensated by the successes of another corps of
Russians, assisted by Mazeppa and his Cossacks, who advanced further
down the Don, captured four Turkish towns, several pashas, and a body
of janissaries, and returned to Great Russia with a large booty and many
prisoners. They razed the towns of Kisikerman and Muberbek, and
only left standing a small fort on the island of Taman, where they
apparently planted a garrison.t The following year, to revenge this
disaster, the Khan despatched an army to Little Russia, which wasted
the country about Pultava and Mirgorod, but they were fiercely attacked
by the Cossacks and Russians, were defeated, and driven beyond the
Dnieper and the Vorshla, where many of them were drowned. In. their
rage they tore open the body of a prisoner named Wechurka, whose
heart they tore out while he was still alive, t

The same year {i.e., 1696) Peter the Great obtained engineers,
gunners, and seamen from the Emperor Leopold, the States General of
Holland, and the Elector of Brandenburg, and also took some Kalmuks
into his pay.§ Having constructed a small flotilla and assembled them
at Voronej, he sent them down the Don under the command of Admiral
Lefort, Peter again acting as a volunteer.il He ordered Mazeppa to
furnish fifteen thousand Cossacks, who were planted so as to intercept
communication with the Kuban. The Tartars having attacked these
Cossacks were badly beaten,T[ while the latter intercepted several Turkish
saiks which were going to Azof, and captured them. The Russian army
consisted of sixty-four thousand men, besides the contingents of Cossacks
and Kalmuks. The siege was carried on regularly though, says Kelly,
not entirely after our manner. The trenches were three times deeper
than ours, and the ramparts were as high as the walls. The attack
began on the 3rd of June, and on the 28th of July the garrison
surrendered without any of the honours of war, and were obliged to give
up the traitor Jacob to the besiegers.** The Turks with their wives and
children retired to Kaganhk. Peter distributed fifteen thousand ducats
among the soldiers and Cossacks, and five to each officer. He then pro-
ceeded to fortify his new conquest, and ordered a harbour to be dug to hold
large vessels, so that he might eventually command the Straits of KafFa.
He left thirty-two armed saiks before Azof, and commanded the building
of a fleet to consist of nine sixty-gun ships, and of forty-one carrying

* Kelly, i. 240. t Scherer, ii. 165. J Schercr, op. cit., i66. ^ Kelly, i. an.

BLesur, ii, 75,76. ^ Scherer, ii. 167. ** Kelly's Russia, i. 241,

568 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

from thirty to fifty cannons ; and also ordered the Cossacks to build a
flotilla of hght boats to harass the coasts of Krim. The estates of the
nobles, of the rich merchants, and even the clergy were called upon for
contributions. A few months later {i.e., nth of August, 1697) his troops
beat the Tartars near Azof.* To efface in some measure the disgrace of
this Christian victory, the Tartars now fell upon Poland, where the death
of Sobieski had left the country in confusion. They captured Sbaraz,
advanced as far as Lemberg, and broke into Stanislaf, where they
captured twenty-four nuns.t

Mazeppa and his Cossacks proceeded to fortify Kizikerman and
Taman, which commanded the entrance of the Don on either bank, and
although the Grand Vizier sent a fleet to repair the disaster at Azof, the
Turks only advanced as far as Asaam, and tried in vain to seduce the
Russian commanders by bribes. This poUcy seems to have been more
effectual with the officials at Constantinople, who, now that the Sultans
were becoming weak and dissolute, were more and more under the
influence of such creatures.

Sehm Girai in vain warned his master of what would follow, and even
repaired to Constantinople to have an interview with the Sultan. Weary
of governing, he for the third time laid down his authority, and having
been granted an annual stipend of eight hundred thousand aspers, retired
to Silivri, near Adrianople.l Another authority says he went to
Kazekui, near Scutari.§ This was in 1698.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN II.

Faithful to their pact with Selim, the Turks nominated his son Devlet
Girai as Khan, and he was installed with great pomp at the village of
Gul Baba, near Adrianople. |1 He appointed his brothers Shahbaz and
Gazi Girai respectively kalga and nureddin. The Russians continued to
win small successes. In August, 1697, they beat the Tartars near Azof,
and a few months later seized Perekop. They at length proposed peace
to the Porte, and supported their demand by planting one hundred
thousand men at Azof. This peace, which is known as the treaty of
Karlovitz, marks the terrible decadence of the Turks since when, but a
few years before, they threatened Vienna and appropriated Hungary.
They had now to cede all Hungary beyond the Save, with Transylvania
and Slavonia to the Emperor, while they only retained Temeswar and
Hungary south of the Save ; the Russians were granted Azof.

This peace, which was signed on the 13th of June, 1700, was to last
for thirteen years, and consisted of fourteen articles. Of these the second

* Kelly, op. ciU 248. t Von Hammer, Osm, Gesh., iii. 892.

I Krim Khans, 175. S Noav. Journ. Asiat., xii. 448. \ Krim Khans, 175.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN II. 569

provided for the demolition of the forts of Toghan, Gazi Kerman, Shahin
Kerman, and Nusret Kerman, some of which had been conquered by the
Russians in the late war ; the fifth created a march of devastated land
of five hours extent between Or (?>., Perekop) and Azof. In the district
between Perekop and the castle of Mejush both Russians and Tartars
were to have free liberty to hunt, fish, keep bees, cut wood, and obtain
salt. In the direction of the Kuban a space of ten hours from the
fortress of Azof was marked, where the Nogais and Circassians should
not molest the Russians and Cossacks. The eighth article provided
very minutely for the peaceful behaviour of the Krim Tartars, the ninth
for an exchange of prisoners, the tenth for free trade, the twelfth for a
free passage for pilgrims to Jerusalem, and the thirteenth for the
immunity of agents and interpreters.

The new Khan Devlet Girai appointed his brother Shahbaz,
a brave and skilful man (who had been much employed by the
Turks), his kalga. This created considerable jealousy among his other
brothers, who contrived to have Shahbaz poisoned. Afraid for his
safety, one of these named Gazi Girai fled, and, having collected the
Nogais of Akkerman, persuaded them to escape with him to Bessarabia.
The commanders of Otchakof and Kaffa, with the Khan, pursued them,
and the frightened murzas were obliged to submit and accept their terms.
Gazi Girai escaped to Adrianople, whence he was shortly after trans-
ported to Rhodes.

Kaplan Girai, another^brother, then marched against the Circassians ;
he wished to revenge himself upon them for what they had done to
Shahbaz.* Devlet Girai now nominated another brother named Saadet
as kalga, and his cousin Inayet as nureddin. The Porte sent the
usual sum of money for the pay of the segbans (/.<?., the regular troops),
namely, forty thousand piastres for the Khan and four thousand five
htfrndred for the kalga. Soon after Kaplan Girai and Haji Merdan All,
tlie Khan's vizier, plotted together at Kaffa. When the kalga attempted
to secure them, they had themselves enrolled as common janissaries
at Kaffa, and the other janissaries refused to surrender them. They fled,
however, to Constantinople. Kaplan Girai was imprisoned in the castle
of the Bosphorus, while Merdan Ali was transported to Lemnos.

The aged Selim was a terrible martyr to gout. For a while he lived at
the village of Funduklu, near Yamboli. To get a respite from his
complaint he moved to Jadirgan, and thence to the brook Karguna,
near Yamboli, where a great water-wheel irrigated three gardens and
turned a mill, and where he hoped the soft music of the gurgling water,
so dear to eastern ears, might bring him surcease. But getting no relief,
he moved again, and trying a fresh remedy, had himself dragged to the
top of the high mountain Islemije in a waggon drawn by fifty buffaloes.

* Krim Khans, 178,

57® HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

There he received a present of two thousand ducats from the Grand
Vizier Hussein Kuprili, and another thousand from the Sultan, together
with a sable cloak. While grateful for this, the Khan begged for the
release of his son Kaplan Girai, which was granted. The historian of
Krim, Muhammed Girai, visited him there, and spent four days with
him. He got no better, and returned again to Funduklu.*

The Krim Khan was apparently not satisfied with the late peace with
Russia, and, perhaps with the connivance of the Porte, he built a
fortress near Kertch, to bar the Bosphorus against the Russians. We
are told that for this fort iron was obtained from Samakof, builders
from Moldavia and Wallachia, wood from Circassia and Sinope, and the
other requisites from Constantinople. The Khan also complained to his
suzerain that the Russians were busy building ships and a fortress, but
the envoy of the latter at Adrianople explained that they had only twelve
war ships in the sea of Azof, while the fortress was forty leagues from
Perekop, and was meant to overawe the Cossacks. These explanations
were deemed satisfactory, the meddlesome Khan was displaced, and
his decrepit old father once more put on the throne. This was in
December, lyozA Devlet Girai did not submit, but sent troops to
occupy Akkerman and Ismael, and allied himself with the ever willing
Nogais. They held out for some time, and were apparently secretly
abetted by the Grand Vizier, who befriended them. When his support
failed they were forced to fly, and escaped to the Kuban and to the
Circassians.^

SELIM GIRAI KHAN (for the Fourth time).

We are told that when summoned by the Porte to occupy the throne
for the fourth time, Selim travelled from Adrianople in a cart, and was
duly installed with the robes and insignia of office at Constantinople.
He nominated his son Gazi as kalga, and the latter's brother Kaplan as
nureddin. This was in 1702. § De Bohucz says his son and predecessor
Devlet was captured in Circassia, and taken to the Krim to be executed,
but was pardoned by his father. || Selim only occupied the throne for a
short time, and died in 1705.

The only incident of interest in his fourth reign was the gradual
encroachment of the Russians, who made use of Azof as a focus for their
arms, and built forts at Taganrog and at Kamienska on the Dnieper.lf
He was perhaps the greatest of the Krim Khans, and occupied the
throne during the reigns of five Sultans, namely, Muhammed IV.,
Suliman II., Ahmed II., Mustapha II., and Ahmed III.,** and in a
firman of Mustapha, the Sultan styles him his father.tt His heroic

* Id., 180-182. t Von Hammer, Osm. Ges., iv. 47. J Krim Khans, 184.

5 /</., 183, 184. II Op. cit., 392. f Von Hammer, Osm. Ges. Reich., 75.

** Krim Khans, 185* ft Laogles, op. cit., 422.

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN. . 571

conduct at the battle of Kossovo and elsewhere, created a wide reputation
for him, and his name was commemorated by the construction of many
fountains and other useful works, both in the Krim and the neighbour-
hood of Constantinople. So great was his fame, that after his exploits
at the siege of Vienna the janissaries wished to put him on the
Ottoman throne, a position he declined. According to Peyssonel, this
incident gave rise to the tradition that on the failure of the Ottoman
Imperial house the reversion would fall to that of the Krim Khans.* He
was a statesman, a soldier, and an historian and (Uke his father, Behadur
Girai) a poet. We are told he also kept a large sheep farm at Kadikoi,
near Pyrgos, which with the mill there he devised to his son Kaplan
Girai.t He left ten sons and ten daughters.

GAZI GIRAI KHAN III.

Schm was now succeeded by his son Gazi Girai. He appointed
Kaplan as kalga and Maksud as nureddin.J We are told he was very
handsome and unlike a Tartar, so that it was considered that his mother
was a European, as many inmates of the seraglios then doubtless were.
He favoured ihe Christians and allowed the Jesuits to have services in
the Krim.§ Having given shelter to the Circassian tribe of the Haiduks,
who had killed his brother, and failed to restrain the raids of the Nogais
of Anapa, which gave rise to Russian complaints, he was deposed. This
was in 1707.II He died of the plague at Jingiz Serai or Karinabad,
near Constantinople.^

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN.

Gazi was succeeded by his brother Kaplan Girai. Mengli was
appointed kalga and Maksud nureddin, but the latter dying shortly after
was replaced by Sahib. The chiefs of the Circassians were nominees of
and subservient to the Krim Khans, but had recently been very rebellious.
The Kabardian tribe had some time before deserted its stronghold in the
Beshtau, and retired to the inaccessible mountains of Balkhanshan*
As it resisted the demand of the Khan that it should return, he now
marched against it with a large number of troops, including six
thousand Nogais from Bessarabia, fifteen thousand of his own segbans,
three thousand sipahis from Kaffa, and five thousand Circassians of
the tribe Kemurkoi, together with twenty thousand Nogais, known
as Yaman sadak. This expedition was very disastrous. Attacked
by the Circassians, he lost several of his chief officers, including the
Shirin beg and the begs of the tribes Jarik, Yurulshi, and Mansur, with

* Comm. de la mer Noire, ii. 230-233- ^ Krim Khins, i8§. t Nouv. Journ. Asitt., xii. 449
§ De BoIiuCiJ, 393. I Krim Khan», 187. f De Bohucz, loc. cit.

572 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

twenty-three ulemas and the greater portion of his troops. For this
misfortune and for having given asylum to a body of Cossacks who were
fleeing before Peter the Great,* he was deposed in December, 1707, and
was replaced by his brother Devlet Girai, who mounted the throne for
the second time. Kaplan Girai was exiled to Rhodes.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN II. (RESTORED).

Devlet Girai appointed Bakht Girai kalga and Safa Girai nureddin.t
De Bohucz has a confused account of him, and gives him a reign too
many. He describes him as an arrogant and self-important person, and
says that he patronised the Sultan, Having taken leave of the court
at Adrianople, he stopped in the presence of his suzerain, and with
one foot in the stirrup and another on the platform from which he
mounted, said he awaited the head of the Grand Vizier, whom he
could not pardon for the peace on the Pruth. It was sent to him, we
are told, as well as those of the reis effendi and the janissary aga, of
whom he had complained ; nor did he leave until he had secured
vengeance on his enemies.J He seems to have favoured the Christians.
The Jesuit father Ban obtained permission to build a chapel at Baghchi
Serai, and to have as coadjutor there the father Courbillon. To make
his position more sure, the French ambassador at the Porte secured the
appointment of Ban as consul in the Krim.§ For some years past Peter
the Great of Russia had been pursuing his famous war against Charles
XII. of Sweden, which was crowned by "the great victory of Pultava in
1 709. Charles took refuge in Turkey, and at once began intriguing with the
Turks, to whom he showed a copy of a letter from the Emperor Joseph I.
to Peter, in which he counselled him to transport the unruly Cossacks else-
where, to people the Ukraine with Germans and Swedish prisoners, and to
build a line of fortresses as far as the Black Sea, which would enable him
eventually to subdue the Krim.|| This and the various encroachments
of the Russians in the sea of Azof at length aroused the jealousy of the
Turks, who in November, 1710, declared war. Peter the Great wishing
to forestal their attack, advanced from the Dniester to the Pruth, and
took formal possession of Moldavia and Wallachia, whose hospodars
made pretence of favouring him, and he was received with some State at
Jassy.

The Turkish forces set out in imposing array, and their vast land
army was supplemented by a fleet which was to operate in the Sea of
Azof. The Khan of Krim also marched with a contingent of forty
thousand men.lF Another body of them with six thousand Cossacks
made a raid on the Ukraine.** Peter marched to assist his general

• Ki im Khans, 187*189. t Nouy. Journ. Asiat., xii. 450, I Op. cit., 400.

K Dc Bohucz, 394 1! Id., 396. '!, Nour. Journ. Asiat., xii. 450. ** De Bohucz, 396.

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN II. 573

Sheremetof,who was encamped inWallachia, but he was speedily hemmed
in between the Pruth and a morass, and we are told that the Krim
Khan assisted greatly in the blockade by intercepting convoys. Peter's
position was very critical. He was only saved by the vigour of his
newly married wife Catherine, who collected jewels and furs, and so
worked upon the cupidity of the Grand Vizier that negotiations for peace
commenced. This was at length concluded on very advantageous terms
for the Turks. Azof was to be restored, Kaminetz, Samara, and
Tanganrog razed, while the Russian artillery was surrendered to the
Turks.* Notwithstanding this, the peace was not well received by the
Porte. The Turkish commanders were accused, not perhaps unjustly, of
having sold their cause, and were put to death. Meanwhile Peter, having
placed his army in safety, evaded the terms of the treaty.

The Porte had determined to send Charles XII. home again, a
journey he was very unwiUing to perform. Devlet received orders to pay
him nine hundred purses and to escort him with a sufficient force by way
of the Ukraine and Poland as far as- Sweden. The sum was a large one
for the Krim Khan, but not enough to pay the king's debts, who accordingly
complained. "I will throw you into the Dniester," was the answer of the
discontented Khan. The fact was the latter, who saw small hopes of
plunder in the Ukraine now that it was in the strong hands of Peter, did
not like his duty. Charles, who was in a similar mood, and was skilled in
discovering or manufacturing intercepted letters, produced one, according
to which the Tartars were to abandon him on the preconcerted appear-
ance of the Russians. Of this he informed the Turkish authorities, who
saw through it, and threatened to send Charles round by Salonica and
Marseilles if he did not at once accept the Khan's escort. The king had
been abandoned by seven thousand Cossacks and Poles who had hitherto
faithfully followed him, and had only one thousand four hundred Swedes
with him, while the Turks and Tartars numbered fourteen thousand.
He nevertheless determined to resist them, and after a subsequent fight
was supported but by fifty companions. He was arrested by Devlet himself.
Meanwhile, however, an intercepted letter had reached the Sultan's ears,
and the mufti, the Grand Vizier, and the Khan were duly deposed.t
This was in 171 3. He was exiled to Rhodes.

After the battle of Pultava those Cossacks of the Dnieper who were
attached to the Swedish king retired to Bender, where they submitted to
the Krim Khan, who presented them with two commanders' batons and
suitable ornaments. They settled near Kamenka, but being pressed by
the Russians, took shelter in Aleshki, a small town on the Dnieper.
Although subjects of the Khan, they continued to be governed by their
own chiefs, and after their own fashion, and obeyed the orders of Mazeppa,
who remained with Charles at Bender. On the death of Mazeppa the

Kelly's History of Russia, i. ^95. t Dc Bohucz, 392-398,

574 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Sultan nominated Orlik as their hetman. We are told he turned Mussul-
man and married a Turkish woman. He was given the dues for the
passage of the Dnieper and the Bug at Kudak, Miketin, Kamenka, and
Kisikerman, which were much used by merchants going to the
Krim with goods, especially with salt. That of Merdva Woda, on the
route from Poland to Russia to Otchakof, was the most frequented.
These Cossacks were also allowed to levy dues on carriages and animals
at Otchakof, and to take salt from the lakes in the Tartar country for less
than the ordinary royalty. Having become very arbitrary and rapacious,
their privileges were cancelled, and they were forbidden to trade in the
Krim and at Otchakof. In return for the protection offered them they
were obliged to accompany the Khan to Sudak when he marched against
the Circassians, to furnish him two thousand men under their own chiefs,
and thirteen thousand to repair the lines of Perekop. While absent in
Circassia with the Khan, the Russian Cossacks, whose chief settlement
was on the Samara, invaded the borders of these Turkish Cossacks,
and cruelly ravaged their setche at Aleshki, a raid which was
cruelly punished in a counter attack. The latter also plundered
their patrons the Tartars, from whom they carried off many horses
cattle, and sheep. These robberies were severely punished by the Khan,
but went on notwithstanding. The chief grievance of the Cossacks was
that, as guardians of the Tartar frontier, they had to make reparation for
all Christian slaves who escaped through their borders. These unruly
plunderers also made raids on Poland, but the Khan compelled them to
restore the value of what they took thence. It is strange to read that
they retained the Greek faith, and prayed regularly for the Tzar, who
treated them as deserters and ordered that any of them when caught
should be hanged. The Tartars deprived them of their artillery, nor
would they allow them to build fortifications within their borders. They
also harassed them by sending murzas with large retinues, whose
expenses the Cossacks had to defray, and also to give them splendid
presents. At length weary of these exactions, they determined to submit
to Russia, and sent to ask the authorities to number them among the
faithful inhabitants of Little Russia, which the Empress Anne Ivanofna
agreed to do.* Let us now revert again to the Krim.

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN (SECOND Reign).

Devlet Girai's brother Kaplan, who had already occupied the throne,
was nominated his successor. He appointed Mengli Girai kalga and
Safa Girai nureddin. Two years later the Turks were engaged in
that war in Hungary in which they sustained such a terrible defeat at

• Schcrer.i. 231*343.

SAADET GIRAT KHAN III. 57-

Vardin. As usual, the defeat was followed by the deposition of those
upon whose shoulders blame could rightly or wrongly be thrust. The
Khan had not attended the war in person, but had sent a contingent
under his brother Selamet Girai. He was nevertheless deposed.* The
meekness with which these constant depositions were submitted to, is
explained by the fact that the grandees of the Krim were for the most
part in the pay of the Porte, and that the Sultan being the successor of
the Kbalifs had enormous influence among a devoted Mussulman
population like that of Krim. The deposition took place in 171 5.

KARA DEVLET GIRAI KHAN.

Kaplan was replaced by Kara Devlet, a son of Adil Girai, who was not
therefore descended from Selim the haj. The Sultan having heard that the
Shirin begs and murzas of the Tartars were dissatisfied with the appoint-
ment, and were wishful to be governed by some descendant of the
famous Pilgrim Khan, in whose family the right of succession
had been practically settled, the new Khan was deposed, after reigning
only four months. He died shortly after, and was succeeded by Saadet,
the son of Selim.

SAADET GIRAI KHAN III.

Saadet nominated Safa and Islam Girai as kalga and nureddin.
Though there was peace between the two great empires on the Neva and
the Bosphorus, the marauders who inhabited the border lands could not be
so easily restrained, and in August, 1 718, we hear of an embassy to the
Porte complaining of the raids of one Basht Girai, a son of Devlet
Girai, who had been a rebel and an outlaw, and whose exploits had
gained him the title of Deli Sultan or Mad Sultan.t In 1720 Saadet
went on an expedition to Circassia, in which he was taken prisoner.
On his return from captivity he was deposed. The cause of his deposi-
tion was his quarrel with the begs of the tribe Shirin, the most influential
in the Krim. The chief of these, named Haji Jan Timur, had received
but a scanty share of the booty in the recent expedition. Saadet had also
preferred his son-in-law to him, and banished three of the chief grandees
from the Krim. The Shirin begs accordingly met tumultuously at
Kialaralti (" under the rocks ")> and the Subhan Gazi wrote a letter to the
Porte asking for his deposition. His influence was negatived by that of
the Grand Vizier, who favoured the Khan. But having returned to the
Krim and assembled the chiefs of the tribe Shirin, they attacked him in
his palace and drove him away.

* Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii., 457. t Von Hammer, Osm. Ges. iv. 173.

576 HISTORY Of THE MONGOLS.

MENGLI GIRAI KHAN I]

Mengli Girai, the brother of Kaplan Girai, was now {i.e., in 1724)
nominated Khan. He appointed Safa Girai kalga and Selamet Girai
nureddin. We are told by Father Stephen in the third volume of the
Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses,* that Mengli was appointed by the
Sultan to circumvent the rebellious Shirin begs. He went to the Krim,
and, in accordance with his instructions, proceeded to sow discord among
the Shirin chiefs. He at length quarrelled openly with the principal beg
Jan Timur, whose influence he had previously undermined, forced him
to seek safety in flight, put several of his principal supporters to death,
and scattered others in the more desert parts of the Krim, and thus
finally sapped the power of the Shirin tribe, which now lost its political
importance.t In 1725 the Khan sent a contingent of ten thousand men
to assist in the war with Persia. They marched round the eastern
coast of the Black Sea, thus avoiding the journey by Constantinople,
and joined the Turkish army at Begkof. The kalga received a present
of five thousand piastres, the nureddin four thousand, and Toktamish,
the Khan's son, five thousand, together with richly caparisoned horses.

Soon after the kalga was displaced, and Adil Girai, the son of Selim,
was appointed in his place. He was in turn speedily displaced, and
Selamet, the nureddin, given the dignity of kalga. Adil then repaired
to the Nogais in Bessarabia, whom he incited to return to their old
quarters in Moldavia, and to set up Kaplan Girai as Khan. This
rebellion was speedily quelled, and the Turkish governors of Otchakof,
Bender, Ismail, Kili, and Akkerman joined with the voivodes of
Moldavia and Wallachia in opposing the Nogais. The Khan and the
governor of Otchakof met at Ismail to regulate their affairs. They
had an interview with the murzas of the Nogais, Kowais, and of
the tribe Karachalk, and the strip of land between the Dniester and the
Pruth was once more made over to them. They promised to be peaceful,
and undertook to pay the Porte one thousand purses. Hardly were the
Bessarabian Nogais settled, when disturbances broke out among those
of the Kuban. The latter were incited by Jan Timur, the Shirin beg,
and Basht Girai. The Khan set out with his army and the tributary |
Cossacks under Polkuls from Perekop, while the kalga went at the head
of the Bessarabian Tartars. § Basht Girai ravaged the country as far as
Azof. We are told that the Nogais of the tribes Yedisan and Yambolik,
who were hard pressed by the Kalmuks, and were on bad terms with the
Kasai (?) and Circassians, asked permission to settle in the Krim, which
was granted them. They were shortly followed by the Katai-Kipchak,
The Mad Sultan obtained pardon on a promise not to molest the Nogais

196-206. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 452. ; Vide supra.

$ Krim Khans, 196, 197.

KAP1,AX OIKAI KIIAX. ' 577

and Circassians.* Mengli was allowed a triumphant entry into Con-
stantinople on the 26th of April, lyzg.t We are told that, after arousing
much ill-will by the severity he exercised towards his old friends,
he tried to win some popularity by remitting the tax of a sheep,
payable by each household^ but he was deposed. This was in November,
1730, The deposition of Sultan Ahmed by the janissaries the same year
had probably something to do with it. We are told Mengli built a new
palace in the quarter called Selajik at Baghchi Serai. §

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN (Third Reign).

Kaplan Girai was now appointed Khan for the third time. He
nominated Adil Girai kalgall and Haji Girai nureddin.t This was in
1730. By the peace of Adrianople, signed in 1713, the Circassians and
Kabardians had been acknowledged as subjects of the Krim Khans, who
drew thence a valuable tribute in fair maidens and young boys. The
Russians were uneasy at this suzerainty, and even invented an extra-
ordinary ethnological paradox to push their views, namely, that the
Circassians were a, colony of Cossacks, who, it will be remembered, were
also called Cherkes or Circassians. These counter claims gave rise to
much soreness.

The issue between Russia and Turkey, between the cross and the
crescent, was in fact beginning to be fought out in that battlefield which
has been sown with so much Russian blood, and where the Russians
have won so many costly victories, namely, the Caucasus. The many
independent tribes there first leaned on one power and then on the other,
the balance being considerably in favour of the Turks, who were
co-religionists of most of the mountaineers. Persia, which had been their
suzerain for some time, was terribly shattered and in a state of anarchy,
and in 1732 we find the Khan Kaplan Girai using considerable diplo-
matic and other means to strengthen the Turkish influence. Thus he
gave the chief of the Kumuks, the most potent of the tribes of
Daghestan, who are descended from the mediaeval Comans, and are
of Turkish race, the title of vizier, and his son Muhammed that of
beglerbeg. A large force of Krim Tartars, Nogais, and Circassians,
under their own begs, marched with the kalga, Feth Girai, to enforce the
authority of the Porte. On the Kuban they received the submission of
the Kalmuks, and in Kabarda of the Circassians. The Russians
viewed this expedition with great displeasure; protests poured in upon
the Khan and his kalga, but the latter continued his march, stating that

Krim Khans, TgS. t Langles, 421. I De Bohucz, 402

4 Noav. Journ. Asiat.. xii. 452. li Von Hammer says Feth Girai.

•' Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 455.

3A

578 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

he had the orders of the Sultan and the Khan. At Tatartop, the former
chief town of the Tartars in these parts * he received the submission of
the princes of the Little Kabarda, At Islaf on the Sunja that of the
prince of the Chechents, who took him two thousand horsemen. After
crossing four other streams, the prince of the Kumuks went to him, and
the prince of the tribe Enderi kissed, his stirrup. At Tartargaf the
sons of the Usmei of the Kaitaks, and of the Surkhai of the Kaziku-
muks, submitted to him. Eight leagues from Derbend he was joined by
the kadhis of the Akushes and the magnates of the Kubetshis. When the
Russians saw he was determined, and that he was being joined by the
various tribes of Uaghestan, they attempted to prevent his advance with
a small force of Cossacks planted at the entrance of the pass, but they
were badly beaten, and lost fifty-five in killed and eight hundred
wounded.t The Tartars continued their march past Derbend as far as
the Samur and Eski Khodad, and only returned on being ordered to
do so by a message from the PortcJ This was in June, 1733. This
expedition brought matters to a crisis. Angry letters began to pass
between Constantinople and Moscow, in which rival claims to the
allegiance of the tribes of the Caucasus were set out, and mutual com-
plaints of aggressions on the part of the frontier tribes were made. The
Russians commenced the aggression. They had long been preparing
for war to avenge the defeat of Peter the Great on the Pruth, and
opportunity had alone been lacking. In 1 735 a body of Russians marched
into the territory of the Krim Khan, killed some Tartars, and ravaged a
portion of the country, but were forced to retreat by the hardness of the
campaign, with a loss of ten thousand men.§ The following year they
resumed the attack with greater vigour. Twelve regiments of dragoons,
fifteen thousand infantry, ten thousand landwehr, ten squadrons of
hussars, five thousand Don Cossacks, four thousand Cossacks of the
Ukraine, and three thousand Zaporogues or Cossacks of the Dnieper,
in all 54,000 men, with eight thousand provision and other carts,
assembled on the Dnieper, under the command of Count Munich. On
the 26th of May this army found itself before the celebrated fines of
Perekop, probably the oldest fortification in the world which has
remained in permanent use, for there can be little doubt that this
rampart and ditch follow nearly the same course as the lines mentioned
by Herodotus. These lines, upon which the Tartars confidently relied,
were stormed. Two days after Perekop (the Or of the Tartars) was
captuxed. Thence a body of troops was despatched to Kilburn, while
the main army proceeded to plunder the richest trade mart in the Krim.
namely, Gosleve (Koslof). Within a month of storming the fines of
Perekop the Russians appeared before Baghchi Serai, the capital o(
the Krim. This was captured, and two thousand houses and the

Krim Khans, 202. t A/., 204. J /J. j Kelly's Russia, i. 41^

lETH ClRAl KHAN IF. * 579

spacious palace of the Khan were burnt. There also perished the rich
library which Selim Girai had founded, and also that of the J esuits.* From
here the Russians turned to Akmejid {i.e., the white mosque, now known
as Simpheropol), the residence of the kalga and chief murzas, where one
thousand eight hundred houses were burnt. Munich would have
attacked Kaffa, but was obliged by the breaking out of sickness to retire,
after laying waste the greater portion of the Krim, and paying back (no
doubt with ample interest) the accumulated wrongs the Russians had
suffered at the hands of their troublesome neighbours. The barbarities
and cruelties they practised on this occasion are made the subject of
comment by Kelly. The unfortunate Khan was made the scapegoat of
the misfortune, and was deposed. This was in 1736. One of the
beautiful fountains at Baghchi Serai bears an inscription showing that
he was its builder.

FETH GIRAI KHAN II.

Feth Girai, the son of Devlet Girai, now became Khan. Arslan Girai
was appointed kalga and Mahmud Girai nureddin. "While the Crimea
was being devastated the Turkish arms received a severe defeat at Azof,
where the Russians captured the two forts of Paschet and the fort of the
janissaries. They seem to have then withdrawn into the Ukraine, in
company with the larger force under Munich, which had ravaged the
Krim. Although successful, the recent expedition has cost the Russians
very dear. Thirty thousand men had perished, the greater number no
doubt harassed by the difficulties of the terrible deserts of the Nogais,
which proved so full of peril for the Russians in the Crimean war of
1854. But this campaign completely broke the prestige of the Tartars,
who had so long been a terror to their neighbours. The new Khan Feth
Girai fixed his residence at Kara-su, now called Kara-su-bazar. He
signalised his accession by a fortunate raid upon Russia. This was
supplemented by the Turks, whose Sultan sent a large force into the
Ukraine to revenge the disaster of the spring. They devastated the
country and retired with thirty thousand prisoners. Prince Galitzin
meanwhile entered the Krim, and passing by Uchula ravaged the land
as far as Kara-su, carrying off many prisoners.t The next year the
Russians prepared another great expedition. Some idea of its character,
says Kelly, may be formed from the fact that more than ninety thousand
waggons were employed to transport the provisions and stores.| Their
army numbered from sixty to seventy thousand men, with six hundred
pieces of artillery. They proceeded along the river Bug to Otchakof, to
which they laid siege. After a severe cannonade, in which the town was

* Von Hammer, Osm. Ges., iv. 3 ;2, 3:^3. De Bohiicz, 403.
t Xouv. Journ. Asiat . Tfii. 451- Langles, 421. J Kelly, op. cit., i. 413.

580 JI1J5TOKY OF THE MONGOLS.

fired by the bombs, and the powder magazine blew up, and in which
the garrison suffered great loss, Otchakof was captured, and its fall was
the signal for the deposition of the Grand Vizier and the Krim Khan.
The latter had only reigned about ten months.

AIENGLI GIRAI KHAN JI. (RESTORED).

Feth Girai was deposed in July, 1737, and was succeeded by Mengli
Girai, the son of Selim, who had already been Khan once, and was
brought back, like many of his predecessors, from exile in Rhodes. He
nominated Selamet Girai as kalga and Saleh Girai as nureddin. While
the siege of Otchakof was progressing, the Russian general Lascy
advanced against the Krim. The Khan awaited the Russians at
Perekop, whose fortifications had been restored, but Lascy cleverly turned
the position, by throwing a bridge across the strait of Yenichi, which
connects the Sivash or putrid sea with that of Azof. He marched by the
narrow tongue which separates those seas, and arrived before Arabat.
The Khan by forced marches succeeded in throwing a garrison into the
fortress, and planted his men so that it was thought he had effectually
cut off the retreat of the Russians, an opinion shared by several officers in
Lascy's army. These he had allowed to return home; so confident was he
of the success of his plans. One day he launched all the empty tubs and
chevaux de frise he could lay hands upon, on the Sivash, made rafts of
them, and on them crossed that putrid sea to Karas Bazar. Mengli
Girai having attacked his camp was defeated, and the town was captured
and burnt, as well as many villages that had escaped the year before
from not being on the line of niarch. Lascy now retired, but not by the
way he came as the Khan expected, and where he was preparing a hot
reception for him, but by the Shungar, which divides the Sivash in two.
The Tartars only overtook him when he had reached the steppe beyond
the Krim, where they were beaten. The Russians now withdrew to winter
quarters in the Ukraine, and the Tartars to the Krim. In the spring
Mengli Girai tried to invade the Ukraine, but was foiled, and Lascy once
more entered the Krim, this time crossing over the Sivash, which had
been partially laid dry by the heat and by a heavy wind. He crossed
without losing a man, and only lost some provision carts. He had been
ordered to take Kaffa, but the devastations of the previous year greatly
impeded his march. Like the Palatinate in the Thirty Years' War, the
Krim had been converted from a garden into a desert, and a ship laden
with provisions having been lost, Lascy was obliged to retire, destroying
the fortifications of Perekop on his way.* Von Hammer says that in
Lascy's campaign Baghchi Serai, Simpheropol, &c., were captured, six

* De Bohucz, 404-40C.

SELIM GlRAl KHAN II. . 581

thousand houses thirty-eight mosques, two churches, and iifty mills were
burnt. After this terrible ravage the Russians retired from the Krim, and
went into winter quarters again in the Ukraine * Munich also withdrew his
forces from Otchakof, leaving only a small garrison there. This resisted
the attacks of forty thousand Turks and Tartars during the winter. They
were at length compelled to raise the siege after losing twenty thousand
men before its walls, half of whom died of disease. Thus the war
ended gloriously for the Russians.t But such glories are often inter-
mittent and sometimes misinterpreted, and we find the Khan INIengli
Girai writing to the Porte in August, 1738, that he had beaten the army
of Lascy, who had tried to break through the lines of Perekop, and had
lost nearly all his forces. A wild boast which, soberly translated, meant
that after beating the Khan, Lascy had prudently retired for some good
reason into the Ukraine.^

The Cossacks of the Dnieper assisted the Russians greatly in their
campaign against the Tartars and Turks, and we are specially told that
their flotilla harried the coast from Otchakof to Kizirkerman.§ By the
treaty of Belgrade, which was signed in 1739, the Russians agreed to
evacuate Khotzim and Otchakof. The fortifications of the latter town,
however, and of Perekop were to be razed. Azof was retained by the
Russians, and a boundary line favourable to them was drawn. || Mengli
Girai died after a reign of two years {i.e., in 1739). Like other Khans of
Krim, he was a poet, and some stanzas are cjuoted by Von Hammer as
specimens of his skill in this art. II

SELAMET GIRAI KHAN 11.

!Mengh Girai was succeeded by Selamet Girai, the late kalga, who
nominated Azemet Girai as kalga and Toktamish Girai as nureddin.**
Azemet was succeeded as kalga by Selim Girai in 1742.1! He rebuilt at
Baghchi Serai the palace and mosque ruined by the Russians, both of
which works were completed in 1739. Selamet was deposed on the 2olh
December, i743,J{ apparently in consequence of the complaints of the
Russians about his negligence in releasing prisoners,§§ and was replaced
by Sclim Girai.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN II.

Selim nominated Shahin Girai as kalga and Behadur Girai as
nureddin. Two years later we find Selim taking part in the Turkish war
against Nadir Shah. He left Balaklava, and proceeding by sea, invaded

* Von Hammer, Osm. Ges., iv. 334. Krim Khans, 206. t Von Hammer, iv. 335.

I Id., iv. 348. S Scherer, op. cit., i. 254. 1; Kelly, op. cit., i. 415.

Krim KhanF, 207. ** Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 454. 1t Langles, 431. ] J Id., 430,
5J O&m. Ges., iv. 399,

582 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Persia at the head of ten thousand Tartars. Another ten thousand went by
a different route under the kalga and nureddin. For his services in this
campaign he seems to have been handsomely rewarded both with money
and presents.* Langles tells us that from the beginning of his reign he
carried on a fierce struggle with his kalga Shahin Girai, who had
rebelled. The young prince Haji Girai, a son of Mahmud Girai and
nephew of Arslan Girai Khan, who was only twenty, defeated the rebel,
challenged him to single combat, and forced him to take refuge in
Poland. We shall hear of Haji Girai again.

In 1743 there was a great famine at Constantinople. Selim hastened
to send succour. Corn was also very dear at Trebizond, and the customs'
officer at Gozleve, Osa, having tried to make profit out of the circum-
stance, the Khan had him beheaded. Although Circassia was subject to
the Krim Khans, they did not draw a regular revenue thence. The
chiefs were accustomed to present the Khan with three hundred slaves
on his accession. Selim Girai obtained seven hundred instead, by
a curious stratagem. The begs of the various tribes having gone to
salute him, he received them graciously and gave them presents. Some
time after he again summoned them together. They gladly went to meet
him, but were all arrested, nor were they released till they had furnished
the contingent of slaves he needed.t It had become the prarctice for the
Krim Khans to repair at least once in their reigns to Constantinople,
Selim Girai went there in the beginning of 1747, and his arrival caused
great rejoicings, which are described at some length by Von Hammer,
Intel' alia his suzerain the Sultan presented him with a sable-decorated
robe, a dagger set with diamonds, a jewelled watch, two purses of ducats,
a golden casket worth fifteen thousand piastres, in which were contained
two tensus {i.e., sweet-scented pastiles), and a golden bracelet, in which,
was set a bezoar stone.:|: Selim Girai died on the 29th of May, 1748.

ARSLAN GIRAI KHAN.

Selim was succeeded by Arslan Girai, the son of Devlet Girai, who
nominated Selim Girai as kalga and Krim Girai as nureddin. He duly
received the diploma conferring upon him the title of Ilkhan and Khan,
formerly reserved for very different potentates, and subsidising him with
the usual salary of a million aspers. He was also decorated with the
six insignia of the Khanship, the sable robe (the mark of a kapidan
pasha), the sable kaftan, the double diamond aigrette, the sword, and the
bow and quiver. § He rebuilt the fortifications of Arabat, and built up the
ramparts and ditches of Uchuba, Junkar, and Juvash, called Zabash in

Von Hammer, Osm. Ges., iv. 40S, 409. 1 Langles, 432.

\ Osm. Ges., iv. 420,. 5 ^<i-i 442.

HAKIM GIRAI KHAN. 583

the Russian maps. He established a school at Baghchi Serai and
fountains at Koslef and Akmesjid, and added a western wing to the
palace at the capital, but, like many of his predecessors, he was
deposed. Langles says this was because of his energy in repressing
evil-doers, and because of the very frank way in which he addressed the
Porte.* The deposition took place on the 12th of August, 1755, 2ind he
was exiled to Chios, Hakim Girai (called Halim by Von Hammer and
M. Langles) then mounted the throne.

HAKIM GIRAI KHAN.

Hakim appointed Devlet Girai as his kalga and Muhammed Girai as
nureddin.t He aroused the opposition of the Nogais by increasing the
tax which they were accustomed to pay to the Krim Khans. Of the
four great Bessarabian hordes of Nogais two were always governed by
seraskiers or generals of the family of Girai. These offices were filled
at this time by two of his brothers, for whom the Nogais had a great affec-
tion, but when one of them died in 1757, the Khan ventured to give the
appointment to one of his own sons, to the exclusion of another brother,
against the laws of succession of the Tartars. This caused great
discontent, and the Nogais] of Jenjen broke out into several revolts,
which the young prince was ordered to repress. The way in which he
did his work alienated them still more. He had several of the murzas
manacled without discrimination, put some to death, allowed others
to die in prison, and their families to be plundered by his people ;
and on pretence of damages due to the Russians made great exactions.
The proceeds, we are told, were divided with the Grand Vizier, and
Hakim was praised at the Porte while he was hated by the Nogais.

Meanwhile a famine having occurred at Constantinople, provisions
were demanded from the Khan, who applied to the Nogais. Although
they had plenty of grain, his former exactions made them resent this
request. Krim Girai, a relative of the Khan, also incited them to
refuse. Two tribes broke out into revolt, and the young seraskier was
obUged to seek shelter with his father at Baghchi Serai. Complaints
were also sent to the Porte, but as the Khan sent the much-needed grain,
the Grand Vizier, his patron, was able to checkmate them. Hakim had
also unjustly appointed his eldest son seraskier of the Kuban and of
Circassia. His exactions and tyranny, like those of his brother, aroused
the murzas against him, and when he opposed them he was defeated;
Hakim thereupon seized a ship coming from Abkhazia, and imprisoned
both the crew and the innocent passengers, several of whom were Turks.
These abuses gave the Nogais of Bessarabia, of the Kuban, and

Op, cit,, 433. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xli. 455.

584 JilSL()K\ ()!• Jill'; .MOM.OI.S.

Circassia a common ground of hatred against him. He might have kept
matters quiet if he had displaced his sons and appointed more expe-
rienced rulers in their places, as was advised by his more faithful
followers, but he was largely controlled by his wife, who had been
originally a Russian slave, who was now fifty years old, and notwith-
standing her low extraction had considerable spirit. She was much
attached to her two stepsons, the seraskiers, and was accused of magic
by the people.

Meanwhile the discontent among the Nogais was fomented by Krim
Girai, who was a brother of the late Sultan Arslan Girai. The Nogais
of the Bujiak or Bessarabia again revolted. That district was the
granary of Constantinople, and the Khan appealed to the Turks for aid.
Krim Girai, having put himself at the head of the insurgents, was joined
by thousands of Turks from Rumelia, and had collected an army of fift\'
thousand men, when the Grand Vizier recognised that the most
efficacious remedy for the evil was the deposition of Hakim Khan, an
order for which arrived on the 21st of October, 1758, and we are told he
immediatelv left for Rumelia.*

KRIM GIRAI KHAN.

Hakim Girai was replaced by Krim Girai, who appointed Haji Girai
kalga and Ahmed Girai nureddin.t His accession was in spite of the
goodwill of the Porte, who had recalled his brother Arslan Girai from
exile, and had nominated him Khan on the 18th of October, 1758; but
the choice of the Tartars and the pressure of the neighbouring powers,
who it would seem dreaded the energy of Arslan, prevailed with the
Porte, and Arslan had only just reached the Dardanelles on his way to
the Krim when he was sent back again to Rumelia.:}; Although con-
firmed by the Porte, Krim Girai knew he was not a favourite there, and
he did not leave Bessarabia during the first year of his Khanate. To
regain the favour of his suzerain he persuaded the Nogais to restore the
booty they had captured from the Turks, and he himself sent back
twenty thousand slaves. His lot fell on unlucky times, and he
had to struggle against the intrigues of his brother Arslan. A body
of Cossacks also attacked the Krim in December, 1760. He marched in
person against them, but hardly were they driven away when the plague
devastated his territory. He was very energetic and skilful. While he
defended his frontiers against the Russians he carried on an active
correspondence with Prussia, and notwithstanding the opposition of the
I'orte, he promised assistance to Frederick the Great,§ Tlie Prussian

Dc Bohucz, 407. Langle:., 4j4-4j,. t Nouv. Journ. Asiai.

I Langles, 43S. § Ic/., 438, 439.

MAKSUD GIRAI KHAN. 585

writer Theodore Mundt describes him as having a majestic and intelli-
gent countenance and a heroic build, and yet as not wanting in grace and
courtesy, and tells us the warrior and the man of the world were
combined in him. The famous fountain he built at Baghchi Serai, was
called Selsebil {i.e., the Springs of Paradise).*

Having received a summons to attend at the Porte to consult on various
matters, he knew it boded no good to him, and the murzas urged him not
to go, but on a more pressing invitation, he set out in September,
1764, and a month later was duly deposed.t

SELIM GIRAI KHAN HI.

Krim Girai was succeeded by Selim, the son of Feth Girai, who has
been confused with the former Khan Selim, the son of Kaplan Girai, by
Von Hammer. Selim nominated Muhammed Girai as kalga and Krim
Girai as nureddin.t He was not on good terms with the Russians,
resented their recent policy towards the Krim, and wished to send
their consul away from Baghchi Serai, but they conciliated him with
presents of splendid furs and roubles. In 1765 he was summoned to the
Porte to take the usual oaths and to concert measures with the Divan.
He entered Constantinople in great pomp on the 27th of June, 1765, and
was well received by the Grand Signior. He tried hard to persuade the
Turks to insist upon the Russian forts in the Kabarda being demolished.
This policy apparently led to his deposition, which took place in
March, I767.§

ARSLAN GIRAI KHAN (Second Reign).

Selim Girai was succeeded by Arslan Girai, the son of Devlet Girai,
who had been Khan twelve years before. He was recalled from exile at
Chios, and nominated his son Devlet Girai as kalga, but died two days
after at Kaushan, before he was installed at Baghchi Serai. || This was
on the 30th May, 1767 .IF

MAKSUD GIRAI KHAN.

We are told the Tartars now wished to have Bakht Girai, the son of
Krim Girai, as Khan, but the Porte nominated Maksud Girai, the son of
Selamet Girai, to the post. This was in June, 1767. He appointed
Bakht Girai or Islam Girai as kalga** and Muhammed Girai as nureddin.
He received at Shumna the insignia of office and a present of fifteen

* Krim Khans, 211. t Langles, 440. I Nouv. Journ. Asiat,, xii. 456.

f Langles, 441, 442. || Krim Khans, 214. Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 456. If Langlcs, 442.

** Krim Khans, 215- Nouv. Journ. Asiat,, xii., 456.

3B

586 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

thousand piastres, while thirty-five thousand piastres were given him for
division among his medley of Tartars. They were so little satisfied that
they plundered the neighbouring villages.

It was during his reign that Baron de Tott, who has left us some
interesting notices of the Tartars, visited the Krim. He was appointed
resident at the Krim court by the French foreign minister Choiseul,*
and travelled thither through Germany, Poland, Moldavia, and the Nogai
steppe. He tells us the Nogais were discontented with the Khan, who
had transferred to the Porte the tax on corn called Ishetirach, paid by
the two hordes Yedisan and Jambulek.t At Kishela in Bessarabia he
visited the Khan's son, who filled the office of seraskier among the
Nogais. He was eighteen or twenty years old, had polished manners,
and was surrounded by a small court of murzas. Hawking and greyhound
coursing were the chief amusements of the people, the hunting parties
going out in great state and remaining away several days. He tells us
that only the seraskier "s house had glass in the windows, the other houses
merely had paper stretched on frames in winter, which was removed in
summer.J Thence he went on with an escort of forty Tartars. Twelve
of them preceded the carriage two hundred paces distant ; four rode on
each side, two waggons then followed, then a rear guard of eight men
two hundred yards behind, while two little platoons of six men each kept
watch six hundred paces distant. This shows how vigilant the inhabi-:
tants of the steppe were obliged to be. Our traveller passed through
Otchakof, then crossing the Dniester, went along the Black Sea to Orkapi
or Perekop, and thence to Baghchi Serai. His arrival was immediately
announced to the Khan's vizier, who sent him tain {J.,e., a gift of necessary
provisions). He complains of the want of vegetables, and also of butter,
and tells us he introduced seeds for the former from Constantinople.
At length he was summoned to an audience, at which he was attended
by his own people and a body of Tartars as an escort. " We alighted,"
he says, " in the last court, and the vizier, who was waiting for me in the
vestibule of the palace, conducted me into the audience chamber, where
we found the Khan seated on the corner of a sofa. A chair was placed
opposite him, where I seated myself, after paying my compliments to the
prince and delivering my credentials." After receiving an invitation
from the Khan to visit him frequently, he was conducted back to his
house.§

He was admitted to the Khan's private parties, composed of the
Sultan nureddin his nephew; a murza of the Shirins, called Kaia Murza,
who was the husband of a sultana, cousin to the Khan, of the Kadhi
Asker, and some other murzas. The prince "received" after the prayer at
sunset, and the guests stayed till midnight. The Khan took some interest
in literature, while the nureddin, who had been brought up in Circassia,

* De Tott's Memoirs, i. 279. t W., 322. I Id., 324, 325. § Id., 365.

MAKSUD GlRAl KHAN. 587

Spoke little, and only talked of the Circassians. The Kadhi Asker was
loquacious, Kaia Murza supplied all the news of the day, and the Baron
that of Europe. The Sultans sat in the Khan's presence, except his children,
who stood. The heads of the law, the ministers of the Divan, and foreign
ministers also did so. The rest of the courtiers stood at the foot of the
sofa, and withdrew at supper time. This was served on two round tables,
one for the Khan, who generally fed alone, and the other for the rest.
To amuse the Khan De Tott let off some fireworks, and also engaged
in controversy with the judge.* He also greatly astonished the Tartars
and Circassians by showing them some experiments in electricity. His
feats were deemed miraculous, or rather due to magical influence. He
reserved the rudest shocks of the battery, he tells us, for the Circassians,
and adds, " they gave a laugh of satisfaction in suffering martyrdom."
He accompanied the Khan in his hawking and coursing parties,
which were. held frequently, and in which Maksud was attended by five
or six hundred horsemen. He was very intimate, he says, with Kaia
Murza of the family of Shirin. The latter had married a princess of
the blood, who filled the post of ulukhani {i.e., governess of the
harem). She sent him by the intendant of her household a present of a
richly embroidered night shirt, and everything belonging to the mos^
complete and magnificent dishabile. The mystery with which this
mission was accompanied was somewhat embarrassing, although the
princess was seventy years old. It was explained by the fact that the
sultanas generally only gave presents of this kind to their relatives,!
and as proof that prudence was necessary, we are told that the governor
of Balta, accused of being one of the princess's favourites, was stripped
of his wealth and cast into prison. He only saved his head by the prayers
of the Baron, seconded by some of the Khan's ministers. Although
avaricious, we are told that the Khan was just. The following anecdote
is reported of him. The slave of a Jew murdered his master in his
vineyard. The relatives having complained, the criminal was arrested.
Before his trial some of the people persuaded him to turn Mussulman.
Now it was a Tartar law that the criminal must perish by the hand of
the injured person or his heirs, and it was urged that a Mussulman
could not be handed over to the Jews. " I would deliver up my brother
to them if he were guilty," said the Khan. " I leave providence to
reward his conversion if it be sincere ; it is my duty to do justice." By
the intrigues of his friends the execution was now delayed till the Friday.
The penalty of death by the law must be paid in twenty-four hours,
and the Jewish law compelled them to shut themselves up for their
Sabbath at sunset. He was thereupon led out in chains to the place of
ekecution, and although a crier was sent round the town among the most
wretched, no Jew could be found to defile his hands with human blood.

* Id' , 370, 371. t /^., 378 and 380.

588 MtStORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The Khan was not to be foiled, and allowed the Jews to put hun to death
according to their law, namely, by stoning ;* one of the Khan's officers
carrying a silver axe preceded the criminal. We are told that the
executioner did not do his work until the money offered by the criminal
had been refused. Sometimes a wife among the Turks was known
to sell her husband's blood. Not so with the Tartars, among whom the
wife who had to plunge the knife with her own hand into the criminal never
suffered herself to be tempted by any offer, and the law which committed
her vengeance to herself rendered her inaccessible to every other senti-
ment! De Tott says very few crimes were committed in the Krim, the
means of escape being so small ; and that there were no police in the
capital except the Khan's guards. |

Maksud Girai was apparently deposed in view of the war which the
Porte contemplated against Russia, and which needed that the Krim
Khan should be a man of vigour. The date of his deposition was in
1768.

KRIM GIRAI KHAN (Restored).

Krim Girai nominated Maksud Girai as kalga and Kaplan Girai as
nureddin. The inauguration was fixed to take place at Kaushan in
Bessarabia, where Baron de Tott hastened, and where he received a
friendly message from the coming Khan, bidding him prepare him a
supper for the night of his arrival in the Krim. Having learnt the
Khan's taste, he ordered the best fish of the Dniester to be drowned
in excellent wine. He arrived attended by a large cavalcade, and
the Baron went out to meet him. He tells us he was about sixty,
had a noble carriage, easy manners, a majestic countenance, a lively
look, and could command the appearance of severity and affability at
will. He was accompanied by several Sultans, some of them being his
sons. His second son was famous for his strength, and could bend two
bows at once. A story was told of him that when barely nine his father,
wishing to pique his vanity, told him in a contemptuous tone that " a
distaff suited a poltroon like him better than a bow." " Poltroon," replied
the child, turning pale. " I fear nothing, not even you," and thereupon he let
fly an arrow, which fortunately struck only a basket of wooden ware, into
which the iron tip of the arrow went two fingers deep.§ Before entering
his capital the Khan dismounted and prepared himself in a tent put up
for the purpose. In his cap were two aigrettes of diamonds, and his
bow and quiver were slung across his body. He was preceded by his
guard, and several led-horses with feathers in their head-stalls. Followed
by the Standard of the Prophet, and accompanied by all his court he went
to the Divan, where, seated on his throne, he received the homage of his

*/(/., 381, 382. t/d.,383. ♦/<«., 384. $/</., 420.

KkiM GlRAl KHAN. ^ 589

dependants. Besides good living he liked other amusements. He kept
a troop of comedians and buffoons. In discussing Moliere's plays with
the Baron he confessed that every nation has its Tartuffes or pretenders,
even the Tartars, and asked him to translate the play for him.

Kaushan was now the centre of Tartar life, and people flocked there
from all parts. Among them was an envoy from the confederates of
the Poles to concert common measures against the Russians. The Baron,
with a Tartar companion, were sent back to arrange the details, and
the former has described the adventures they had on the way, during
which they were almost drowned in the Pruth. They found Moldavia
terribly ravaged by the Turkish soldiery, who were on the march to join
the Tartar Khan, the villages being deserted and the terrified inhabitants
suffering great want. The Sipahis, according to de Tott, did little else
than devastate their own country.* The condition of the land, which
made it so precarious a base for the Turkish operations, was duly
reported to the Khan, who seems to have laid the blame on the Grand
Vizier, a person of low origin named Amin Pasha, who had raised himself
by various ignoble means to his then position. An expedition into New
Servia (in Russia), which had been determined upon at Constantinople,
was agreed to in a meeting of the great vassals of Tartary, and the tribute
of military service was demanded. Three horsemen were summoned
from every eight families. Three armies were thus got ready. That of
the Khan, numbering one hundred thousand strong, was to march into
New Servia ; the kalga, with sixty thousand, along the Dniester as far as
Orel; and that of the nureddin, forty thousand strong, towards the
Donetz. Tombashar was appointed the rendezvous of the main army,
to which were attached the Nogai tribes of Yedissan and Bujiak.t The
Baron accompanied the Khan, and was presented by him with a
superb pelisse made of the neck of the Lapland wolf, lined with light
grey fur. On thanking him, the Khan replied laughing, " It is a Tartar
house I give you. I have such a one myself, and I wish us to wear the
same uniform.":}: He was also supplied with ten hardy Circassian horses,
and advised to leave his more tender Arabs at home. He also had three
dromedaries provided with two of the well-known Tartar yurts made of
leather work and felt.§ The Khan's tent was of the same kind, but large
enough to hold sixty persons sitting round the fire. It was decorated
inside with crimson stuff, and furnished with a circular carpet and some
cushions ; twelve smaller tents were planted round it for his officers and
pages, and all were contained in an enclosure of felt five feet high.|| The
Khan set out from Kaushan on the 7th of January, 1769. The Dniester
Was crossed on rafts. To the further side came the brother of the ruler
of Lesghistan offering on his behalf a contingent of thirty thousand men
and his homage. The offer of troops was declined, as the Khan

♦/d„438. t rf., 442. I/</., 443. $ /<f., 444, 445. II /<^., 445, 446.

S90 HISTORY O^ THE MONGOLS.

was afraid of leaving the borders of the Caspian defenceless, but the
envoy and his retinue, who are described as very fine men, were allowed
to go with the army. The Baron spent much time with his patron, and
tells us how the Khan discoursed on pohtics and social matters with the
acumen of a Montesquieu. The troops marched to the frontier town of
Balta, which was partly in Poland and partly in Tartary. Ten thousand
Turkish sipahis had preceded the Tartars, and although it belonged
to their ally, these ill-clothed and disorderly arnauts, the very pink
of ruffianism, recruited from the renegade population of European
Turkey, and most of them speaking Albanian or Greek, ravaged the
town and burned the neighbouring villages.* Leaving Balta the army
went on to Olmar, which, although dependent on the Tartars, had been
similarly wasted by the sipahis under the Khan's eyes. The cold was
very severe and trying, and the horses had to scrape the snow with their
feet, in true Tartar fashion, to get at their forage. The Baron describes
his own meals as set out on a round trencher of Russian leather, about
two feet in diameter, and as consisting of excellent biscuit with smoked
horses' rib, partridges, and caviare ; two forms of salted fish-roe was
their dessert, while Hungarian wine in a golden goblet made it palatable.
Crossing the Bug on the ice, they entered the land of the Zaporogian
Cossacks. An Arab horse which the Baron still had with him now gave
in from exhaustion. As he was dying he was given to the Nogais, who
speedily ate him, deeming a white horse a delicacy.f The cold
increased, and they clung to the reeds in the " Dead water," a river of
New Servia, for shelter and fuel. The Turkish troops, unused to these
severities, soon suffered severely, and became more tractable.

The Baron describes how, as they marched across the plain, the army,
at the Khan's orders, ranged itself in battle array. " I could not help
remarking," he says, " that without any fixed order it had thrown itself
naturally into twenty files deep, and in lines tolerably well formed. Each
Sultan seraskier with his little court formed an advanced guard before his
division. The centre of the line occupied by the sovereign formed of
itself a pretty considerable advanced corps, the arrangement of which
was a picture no less military than agreeable. Forty companies, each
composed of forty horsemen, four abreast, led the van in two columns,
and made an avenue lined on each side with twenty pairs of colours.
The Grand Equery, followed by twelve horses and a covered sledge,
marched immediately after, and preceded the body of horse which
surrounded the Khan. The Standard of the Prophet, borne by an emir,
as well as the two pair of green colours which accompany it, came next,
and were seen blended with the Standard of the Cross, belonging to a
troop of Inat Cossacks (so called from Ignatius, the leader under whom
they had fled from Russia and settled in the Kuban), attached to the

•/</., 450, 451 • t/d.,455.

KRIM GIRAI KHAN. 591

prince's body guard which closed the march." These Cossacks retained
little Christianity except their attachment to the cross on their banner and
their love for pork/ a quarter of which each carried on his shoulders
like a portmanteau. The rest of the soldiers each had eight or ten
pounds of millet, roasted, pounded, and pressed together in a little
bag of leather. The horses foraged for themselves. The Khan was
a very active person, and slept but for three hours. His army now
advanced to the Great Ingul, on the borders of New Servia. A
division was told off to cross the river, and then to scatter itself over
the country and to lay it waste, carrying off the inhabitants and cattle ;
the booty was to be shared by all the army. The neutrality of the
Zaporogian Cossacks had been meanwhile secured by the kalga.t A
thaw had set in. The Tartars, who were accustomed to cross rivers on
broken ice, passed safely, but many of the Turks perished. One of them
had a large purse in his pocket, which a Cossack undertook to recover
for two sequins. He undressed on the spot, dived through the hole in
the ice, and recovered the prize. A terrible frost succeeded the thaw, in
which most of the sipahis died. The Khan, who said he could not
make the weather better, but could inspire his men with courage, rode
without any head covering, as did his retinue of Sultans. The losses,
however, were terrible. " We met with nothing," says the Baron, " but
frozen flocks, and twenty columns of smoke in the horizon completed the
horrors of the picture, by proclaiming to us the fires which were already
ravaging New Servia." In one day three thousand men and thirty
thousand horses perished from cold.j: News now arrived that the other
expedition, was doing its work ruthlessly. One thousand two hundred
villagers having taken refuge in a monastery and refused to submit, it was
fired by brimstone matches fastened to arrows, and all perished. The
arnauts particularly distinguished themselves by their cruelty. They were
in the habit of carrying the heads of their slain enemies at their saddle bows
to give to their general, a custom loathsome to the Tartars and their
Khan, who said he would kill any of his people who thus presented him-
self before him in the garb of an executioner. § The army now approached
the fortress of Saint Elizabeth. It was in a terrible plight, and a deter-
mined sortie of two or three thousand men, according to the Baron, would
have cut it in pieces. A small band of three hundred, the only part
of the force whose energy was equal to the task, was immediately sent
to threaten the place, so as to make-believe that vigour reigned outside.
This was successful ; a day or two's rest and the abundant supply of
cattle driven in by the foragers soon restored spirits and strength to the
Tartars. The Baron enlarges on the care, attention, patience, and
extreme agility of the Tartars in keeping the booty they captured. " Five
or six slaves of different ages, sixty sheep, and twenty oxen, the prize

* /^M 457. 458' ^ Id. ,467. I /<i., 468, 469. ^ Id., 470.

592 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of a single man, do not embarrass him. The children with their
heads peeping out of a sack hanging by the pummel of the saddle, a
young girl sitting before leaning on her left hand, the mother behind on
the crupper, the father on a led horse, the son on another, sheep and
oxen before them ; nothing goes astray under his vigilant eyes. To
collect, to conduct them, to provide for their subsistence, to go on foot to
ease his slaves, no trouble is too great for him." The Tartars of each
horde and troop had a watchword to which their comrades answered.
That of "Ak Serai" (White Palace) was peculiar to the Khan's household.*
One hundred and fifty villages were burnt in the raid, extending a cloud
of cinders for twenty leagues into Poland, a grim harbinger of the Tartar
army. Amidst this smoke a body of Nogais fled with their booty, to avoid
surrendering the tithe of it which was due to the Khan. The army went
on to Krasnikof, where the Turks proved themselves as cowardly as they
were cruel, while the Cossacks of Inat showed conspicuous bravery in a
fight with the garrison.t In the general plundering httle attention was
often paid to the boundary which separated the Polish Ukraine from
New Servia, which belonged to the Russians. Twenty thousand
prisoners were carried off and cattle innumerable. The army marched in
seven columns, and had to regulate its advance by that of the cattle
which it escorted. As they neared the Polish frontier the orders against
marauding became more stringent, and to strike an example a Nogai
who was caught offending was ordered to be tied to a horse's tail and
dragged until he was dead. The Nogai offered neither excuse nor
resistance. As no cord was to be found and a bow-string was too short,
his head was passed through his bow when bent. After a while
he fell out of this, when the prince told him to hold the bow with his
hands. Crossing his arms the criminal did so, and thus the prisoner
became his own executioner. As Baron de Tott says, this extraordinary
submission surpasses all the strange stories told of the blind obedience
to the orders of the old Man of the Mountain.^ A Nogai convicted of
mutilating a sacred picture was bastinadoed, with the curious judicial
comment, " We must teach the Tartars to respect the fine arts and the
prophets." They now went on to Savran in the Palatinate of Bruklaf in
Poland, where the booty was divided, and the different hordes, except
the troops of Bessarabia, were dismissed. The Khan's share was two
thousand slaves. Theselhe distributed freely. On the Baron saying he
would soon exhaust them in this way, the Khan repUed, " There will
always be enough left for me, my friend ; the age of desire is past ;
but I have not forgotten you : far from your harem, marching over
deserts, and braving the rigour of the climate with us, it is but just that
you should have your share. I design for you six beautiful young boys,
such in short as I should make choice for myself." The Baron thought

* Id., 474, 475. t I J., 480-482. I Id., 489,

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN III. 593

he had escaped the embarrassment by saying he could not accept six
Russians, since his master was at peace with Russia. The accom-
modating Khan substituted six Georgians. He then urged his reUgion,
and added that all his scruples might be overcome perhaps if girls were
substituted for boys. " I too have my religion," replied the Khan,
" which allows me to give male slaves to Christians, but enjoins me to
keep X}s\Q females to make proselytes of."* On the Baron twitting him with
this distinction, he replied, with some reason and philosophy, " That a
man is by nature independent, and even in a state of slavery hardly
restrainable by fear, and is governed by his moral sense : God alone,"
he said, " can influence his mind ; in your country, in mine he may be
equally enlightened ; the conversion of man is at all times a miracle ;
that of a woman, on the contrary, is the most natural and the most
simple affair in the world : women are always of the religion of their
lovers. Yes, my friend, love is the great missionary, when he appears,
there is an end to every dispute."t The army now returned towards
Bender, much encumbered with its plunder. Krim Girai entered the
fortress under a salute of artillery.

The Khan was very subject to attacks of hypochondria, to relieve
which he had recourse to an empiric, a Greek from Corfu, who was
physician to the Prince of Wallachia, and was named Siropolo.

Baron de Tott, who suspected this man, in vain tried to dissuade
him from taking the draught he had prepared. It momentarily revived
the Khan, who was directly after, however, more prostrate than ever, a
condition Siropolo described as a salutary crisis. He never issued from
his harem again. The Baron visited him there, and found several of his
women, whose grief and the general panic had made them neglect to
withdraw. The Khan pointed to some despatches he had finished, and
said, " My last work ; and my last moments I have reserved for you."
When he saw how dejected De Tott was, he bade him withdraw, lest he
should melt him ; and as he wished to sleep more gaily, he summoned
six musicians to his bedside to play for him. An hour later the Khan
died, and Siropolo found means in the confusion to withdraw to
Wallachia. Symptoms of poison were very visible when the body was
embalmed. It was taken to the Krim in a coach hung with mourning,
drawn by six horses caparisoned with black cloth. Fifty horsemen, a
number of murzas, and a Sultan, who formed the escort, were also in
mourning ; a custom, says De Tott, nowhere in use in the East except
among the Tartars.+ The death of Krim Girai took place in February,

T770-§

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN III.
Krim Girai was succeeded by Devlet Girai, the son of his brother
Arslan Girai. He nominated Shahbaz Girai as kalga and Mubarek

* Id., 494. t /<^, 495. I Op- cit., 504-505- § Langles, 446.

3c

594 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Girai as nureddin. Shahbaz was the father of Halim Girai, the author
of the poetical history of the Krim Khans, known as " The Rose Path
of the Krim Khans." While the Khan, en route for the Krim, went to
Moldowanji, the residence of the Grand Vizier, the kalga was sent on to
the Krim.* He was granted a war subsidy of eighty-six thousand
piastres. On the death of his friend Krim Girai, the Baron de Tott set
out for Constantinople. He passed through Bessarabia and went on to
Ismael ; then by the Dobruja and through the Balkans. As he was
passing the latter mountains he met the kalga of the new Khan on his
way to the Krim, who persuaded him to turn aside out of his way
to pay Devlet Girai, who was at Serai in Rumelia, a visit. The Baron
determined to go there. "No sooner," he says, "had I reached the
patrimony of the Jingis Khan princes {i.e.^ of the Girais) than I was
struck with an appearance as rich as it was different from the rest of the
Turkish empire. Variegated productions in great plenty, and well taken
care of country houses, gardens beautifully situated, a number of villages,
in each of which was to be distinguished the mansion of its lord and his
plantations running up to the very summit of the hills, diversified the
face of the earth, and formed a general landscape in the European style,
the particular beauty of which redoubled my astonishment." He visited
Serai and the Khan's palace, which had a long avenue in front of the
buildings ; several streets, terminating like the radii of a circle, were
prolonged into the plain by plantations, and formed a star, of which the
first court of the palace was the centre. This was succeeded by a
second, where they alighted. He first visited the Selictar in his apart-
ments, who, after giving him some coffee, went to tell his master, and
soon returned to conduct him to an audience. He found the new Khan
surrounded by his courtiers, and says he was more taken up with the
growth of his beard (which he was obliged to let grow from the moment
of his elevation to the throne) than with the arduous situation he was
about to fill. The Baron says the young prince had no other ambition
than to devote himself entirely to the views of the Grand Vizier. From
the Selictar he learnt that this appanage of the Krim Khans was divided
into separate territories, which secured to each member of the family
hereditary possessions independent of the Porte, and in which the right
of asylum was inviolable. The latter had grown into a great abuse, and
there was not a rascal in the Ottoman empire, says the Baron, who did
find impunity there, if he had only enough money to bribe the Sultan.
These windfalls, which were frequent, added to the tenths, the poll-tax,
and other domainal rights, together with the profits of the various
employments it held in the Krim, made up a very considerable
income for the family of Girai, and gave it exceptional importance in
Turkey .t Having failed to relieve Khotin, as was expected, Devlet Girai

*Krim Khans, 222, 223. t De Tott, i, 525-527.

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN II. 595

was deposed, after a reign of only a year.* One author describes him as
a mere imbecile, spending a good deal of time before the looking-glass,
and says he was in the habit of asking a thousand questions without
waiting for a reply. He was naturally surrounded by a number of
flatterers, who took care to laugh and sing, in unison with their feeble
master.t

KAPLAN GIRAI KHAN II.

Devlet Girai was succeeded by Kaplan Girai, the son of Selim Girai,
who appointed Islam Girai as kalga and Bakht Girai as nureddin.J He
then marched towards Yassy to join the Turkish army,which was fighting
*^with the Russians. § Kaplan commanded eighty thousand men, whom
he posted in an entrenched position on the Pruth, which seemed
impregnable. The Russian general Rumanzof planted his men opposite
to him, and tried in vain for twenty-five days to tempt him from his
vantage, but he was too good a soldier, and distrusted the disciphne of his
men. Rumanzof now had recourse to a ruse. He spread a rumour that
his men were in want of provisions, and that he was about to raise the
siege. This tempted the Tartars to attack him. His men were ready
and repelled the assault. They afterwards attacked the entrenched
position of the Tartars, and notwithstanding the courageous conduct of
the Khan, who animated his men with a like virtue, they were beaten
from one position to another. The Grand Vizier meanwhile had
crossed the Danube with one hundred and fifty thousand men, upon
whom the fugitive Tartars fell back. While the pursuing victors were
taken aback, the Tartars rallied and threw themselves on the Russian
left, and Rumanzof found himself hemmed in between the two hostile
armies, the Pruth, and the Danube. His enemies were three times as
numerous as his own people. Both sides entrenched themselves, the
Turks with a triple rampart. It was a repetition of what had occurred
almost on the same ground to Peter the Great. The Turks now made a
terrible assault, which was not successful, and being attacked in turn,
their unwieldy army gave way, and was utterly defeated, with a loss of
forty thousand men, one hundred and forty cannons, and a great quantity
of munitions and provisions. The victory led also to the submission of
the fortresses of Bender, Ismael, and Akkerman.

The author I have followed in this account greatly praises the sagacity
and military skill of the Krim Khan.|| Langles, on the other hand, says
he was very old and a mere tool in other peoples' hands. He was
accused of holding communications with the enemy, and was deposed in
February, 1771.II

Krim Khans, 223 Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 457- f Hist, de la Nouv. Russie, ii. 118, ng.

I Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 457- § Langles, 447- II Hist, dela Nouv. Russie. ii, 121-125.

^ Langles, loc. cit.

596 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

SELIM GIRAI KHAN III. (Second Reign).

Selim Girai, the son of Feth Girai, now re-mounted the throne. He
appointed Muhammed Girai his kalga and Krim Girai his nureddin.*
Von Hammer says his nureddin was the son of Halim Girai, called
Kashikbash.t He at once hastened to the winter quarters of the
Turkish army at Babatagh. The Russians in 1771 sent two armies
against the Turks, both of which gained laurels. One went to Moldavia
under Count Rumanzof, already named, the other against the Krim under
Prince Basil Dolgoruki, afterwards called "the Crimean." The latter
having separated his army into two divisions, forced with one the lines
of Perekop, defended by Selim Girai, while with the other he crossed the
Strait of Yeinitshi, and captured the fortress of Arabat.

In the same campaign the Turks lost also KafTa, Kertch, and Yenikaleh,
while Gosleve, Balaklava, and Balbek in the Krim, and Taman Avere also
captured by the Russians, together with the Turkish seraskier Ibrahim.
After this Selim consented to submit to the Empress Catherine, and to
send his two sons as hostages to St. Petersburg, but having failed to do so,
his residence was surrounded by the Russian troops, and he barely found
means to escape with his family to Constantinople.^ He lived ten years
longer, until he was seventy-three years old, and was buried in the
mosque of Ayas Pasha. None of his predecessors enjoyed the same
ease after their retirement, for we are told besides his yearly pension of
twenty thousand piastres, he had an extraordinary monthly salary of five
hundred piastres, three thousand piastres as a gift at Ramazan, one
thousand measures of flour, and one thousand sheep. His court was
surrounded by Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Tartars. He was fond of
hunting and of arms, and is remembered as the builder of two bridges,
one at Kanlijik, the other near the village of Karaborajik.§

MAKSUD GIRAI KHAN.

After the flight of Selim Girai it was some time before a new Khan
was definitely appointed. Some of the Tartars supported Bakht Girai,
the son of Krim Girai, but the Porte at length nominated Maksud Girai
to the post, with Bakht Girai as kalga, and his brother Muhammed Girai
as nureddin. This was on the 14th of November, 1771. Meanwhile the
Russians continued to hold possession of the Krim and the isle of
Taman. II Maksud Girai went to the Turkish winter quarters at Batatagh,
where he was duly installed, and where he and his four sons received
some rich presents. Maksud Girai seems never to have set foot in the

♦ Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 457, t Krim Khans, 224.

i De Bohucz, 416, 417. § Krim Khans, 224, 225. J Langles, 448, 449.

SAHIB GIRAI KHAX II. . 597

Krim, nor is he enumerated among the Khans in the hst pubhshed by
the "Journal Asiatique," so often quoted, nor by De Bohucz. Having
incurred the displeasure of the Sultan, he was banished to Samakof, and
thence retired to his private patrimony at FUndiiklii.*

SAHIJ^ GIRAI KHAN II.

In March, 1772, a general Kuriltai of Tartars was summoned, which
refused to recognise Maksud, and decided that Selim having withdrawn
and not having been recognised by the Russians, should be declared
deposed. Sahib Girai, the son of Ahmed Girai Sultan, the son of Devlet
Girai, the son of Selim Girai Khan, was appointed Khan, who nominated
his brother Shahin as kalga, and Behadur Girai, the son of Maksud, as
nureddin. Sahib had been brought up in Circassia, and afterwards figured
in the Krim as a warrior.t De Bohucz says the Krim was now declared
independent of the Porte, as it had been before the time of Muhammed
II., while the Khan put himself under the protection of Russia, and
ceded to the Empress the towns of Kertch, Yenikaleh, and Kilburn on the
Dnieper.l The Turkish Sultan Mustapha III. intrigued to detach
Sahib Girai from his Russian alliance. In this he was successful, and
the Russians accordingly began to patronise his brother Devlet Girii.
The Porte was not successful in its diplomacy. Having removed the
Nogais from the neighbourhood of the island of Taman, they sought to
regain their influence in the Krim by the distribution of liberal largess,
but ineffectively. At length the strife between Russia and Turkey was
concluded by the famous peace of Kainarji. By this treaty the Khan
was virtually made independent of the Porte, save in his spiritual
allegiance to the successor of the Khalifs and in the fact of the Sultan
having to confirm his appointment. We find the Empress Catherine
ceding to him all her conquests in the Krim except the places which the
Khan had made over to her, as above mentioned, while the pohtic
Sultan sent him a present of a kaftan and a turban. The sabre, Avhich
was the third mark of sovereignty, says Langles, was omitted. The
Sultan's name continued to be used in the pubhc prayers, the Kadhiasker
of Constantinople continued to appoint the judges, and the coinage of
the Krim was assimilated to that of Turkey. We now find Sahib
deposing his brother from the post of kalga and putting Bakht Girai in
his place. The Krim Khan was at this time little better than a puppet,
tossed to and fro by the rival powers of Turkey and Russia, who each
supported a candidate in the persons of Sahib Girai and Devlet Girai.
In the beginning of 1775 Sahib Girai was forced to fly by a sudden
outbreak of the Tartars. He went on board a small boat and sailed for

Krim Khans, 228. t A/., 229. J Op. cit., 417.

598 HISTORY OF THE .MONGOLS.

Constantinople, which he reached in forty-eight hours. There he was
granted a pension of three thousand piastres and the privilege of
choosing a fief for himself.* He went to Chatalche, where he lived for
many years, and was buried in the mosque of Ferhad Pasha. We are
told he spoke neither Turkish, Tartar, nor Circassian, but a mixture
of all three. t

DEVLET GIRAI KHAN III. (Restored).

Dcvlet Girai now mounted the throne. He named Shahbaz Girai
kalga and Mubarek Girai nureddin. The deposed kalga Shahin
assembled the Nogais to attack him, and he collected his own people
to resist. While they stood facing each other, in May, 1776, the Kapitan-
pasha arrived with the symbols of investiture for Devlet Girai. Shahin,
assisted by a Russian regiment, posted himself at Tanlan, while Devlet
was assisted by troops furtively sent to him by the Turks. Both parties
thus secretly broke the famous treaty of Kainarji. Shahin wrote a letter
to Devlet, bidding him descend from the throne if he did not wish
to be torn thence by force. This frightened some of the murzas, who
abandoned him. A severe battle ensued in November, 1776, in which
Shahin was victorious, and advanced into the Krim, notwithstanding the
ice, with forty thousand Tartars and a body of Circassians, who had been
attracted by his success. It was suspected he had become a Christian
and joined the Greek church, and the Russians now openly supported
him and occupied Perekop. Shahin advanced on Baghchi Serai,
accompanied by Russian troops and officers. He marched from Taman
by way of Kaffa, and had thirty-five or forty thousand men with him.
From Ak Mejid, six leagues from Baghchi Serai, he despatched two
bodies of Russian troops, one towards the Khan's palace, the other
towards Gosleve. Devlet was informed he would have time given him
to communicate with Constantinople, and a message came telling
him to repair to Sinope. On the nth of May, 1777, he reached the
neighbourhood of Constantinople, and was received with great dis-
tinction.t

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN.

Shahin Girai was proclaimed Khan at Baghchi Serai on the 4th of
March, 1777, and at once sent envoys to the Porte acknowledging
his dependence and asking for investiture. He sent others to St.
Petersburg. He had lived long in Russia, and held the commission of
a captain in the Imperial Guards, This led him to patronise European
customs. He sat at meals, yet disdained the use of spoons or forks, and

Langlcs, 455. t Krim Khans, 230. J Langles, 455 and 460.

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. • 599

his footmen wore turbans. He rode about in a gilt carriage, and
although he did not shave he hid the end of his beard in a wide cravat.*
He determined to civilise his Tartars, and to introduce European
discipline among his^ troops, and began by abolishing many of the old
forms of government. He levied new troops and assigned them regular
pay, making the murzas commanders. Before him there was no stationary
army in the Krim. Every Tartar was a soldier. He diminished the
dues paid by the cultivators to the murzas, and in lieu paid those who
entered his service a salary. Although a Mussulman, he was charged
with too great affection for Russian and Christian manners. He over-
spent his income, and introduced a new coinage ; an operation confided
tp a German. This again cost more money, and in consequence his tax-
collecting was performed with a rigour hitherto unknown, and increased
the general discontent. Of this he took no heed, and projected a corps of
artillery and a marine. But most of his projects failed. He had no
means, and the Ottomans grew jealous of him, and fancied he aimed at
independence. Emissaries, some adroit, others fanatical, were sent from
Constantinople to fan the discontent. The Khan grew afraid, and in
1777 asked aid from Russia, which was readily granted. Russian
detachments traversed the Krim, and were given command of its
fortresses. The Turks did not wait to be asked, but also sent troops
there. Before the arrival of the Russians the Turks were already
installed at Gosleve, where they beheaded one of the Khan's com-
manders. In October, 1777, the Tartars, incited by the Turks,
attacked the Russians, who were dispersed in the Krim and Kuban,
and killed many of them. The Khan, after receiving two wounds, took
refuge with his patrons, and the Porte nominated a new Khan, namely,
Bakht Girai.t

Bakht Girai was sent to Sebastopol with five ships of war. In
December, 1777, a Russian army entered the Krim to assist Shahin
Gira, and with their aid he subdued the Tartars. The Russians are
accused of great cruelties on this occasion. They captured Kaffa
Balaklava, and Gosleve, and Shahin Girai was once more installed in
his capital. In January, 1778, Selim Girai, Shahin's great enemy,
penetrated into the Krim and gained some advantages, and in March he
was granted a firman by the Porte, and was also given the distinctive
insignia of sovereignty. But Shahin Girai, at the head of eight thou-
sand of his Russian allies, broke an armistice of twenty-one days,
which had been concluded with him, defeated, and compelled him to
embark on the Turkish vessels then at Balaklava, for Sinope. Selim
made another venture in September, 1778, but was again defeated. The
Russians now caused all the Armenian and Greek families in the Krim
to migrate to Russia. They were sent for the most part to Ekaterinoslaf,

♦ De Bohucz, 419. Hist, de la Nouv. Russie, ii., 130. t Langles, 461, &c.

6oo HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

the former Azof, and were replaced by some Russian families. This was
very displeasing to the Khan as well as to the emigrants, whose consent
was not asked. Messrs. Storch and Tooke say it was voluntary, but it
is unlikely that seventy-five thousand people, men and women, should
abandon their old land and possessions and settle in the steppe
abandoned by the Nogais, and where they perished of cold.* The
Tartars became alarmed at this movement, and many of them migrated
to Circassia and Turkey. It was carried out successfully by Prince
Prosorofski and Suwarof Rimniski. The Khan continued his military
measures, equipped a body of three thousand Cossacks (dressed in the
Pohsh way and wearing hussar caps), and duly exercised his cannoniers,
who were so well trained that they could fire eight times a minute. The
Russians had given him two hundred cannons to defend Baghchi
Serai. He also struck money in his own name. On one side
was the name of the mint-place, Baghchi Serai or Kaffa, and on the
other " Khan Shahin Girai ben Ahmed Girai Sultan."t By a treaty
between Russia and Turkey, signed on the 5th of July, 1779, the
Russians undertook to evacuate the Krim, and agreed that the Khan,
after being duly elected by the Tartars, should receive confirmation from
the Sultan,! and after some delay investiture was granted to Shahin in
November of that year, in tents erected for the purpose near Kaffa, but
the Porte was not really reconciled. In October, 1780, Shahin heard
from his kaimakhan at Taman that the Divan had sent one SuHman
Agha to Sudak to arouse an insurrection among the Nogais, and to
impress on the latter and the Circassians that they were not dependent
on the Krim but immediately subject to Turkey. This was doubtless to
prevent Russia from laying claim in any way to rule those peoples. He
was ordered to offer an asylum in Rumelia to all who wished to migrate,
and we are told that an aul of one hundred and thirty families, com-
manded by Suliman Oghlu murza, of the Nogai tribe Kazak, took advan-
tage of the offer. The Abkhassians, on the other hand, attacked Sudak
and burnt the magazines there. Suliman's emissaries also persuaded the
Kuban Tartars to rise. Two Russian frigates were sent against them,
and they were vigorously repelled.

The migration of the Christians had caused much land in the Krim to
go out of cultivation, while the exactions of the Khan increased the
distress of the people who were left behind. The German whom he had
employed to coin his money went to Constantinople and reported that
he owed him more than forty thousand roubles. The Khan, instead of
courting the alliance of the Sultan, had accepted the rank of captain in
the Russian regiment Preobaginski, in which he had formerly been
lieutenant. There were not more than one hundred thousand people left
in the Krim, and sixty thousand in the Kuban, the rest had either been

* Id., 467, 468. t Id., 467. Id., 470.

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. 6oJ

transported to Russia or retired to Turkey. This was in 1781. Next
year {i.e., 1782) the people of Krim were reduced to fifty thousand souls,
of whom four hundred and fifty were at Kaffa. It is remavkable that in
1777 the Tartar contingent which fought with the Russians had been
forty thousand strong, well armed and mounted.

Meanwhile the new town of Cherson, built under the treaty of
Kainarji grew very fast. Great magazines were built there, and a
new town was projected at Ghibaka.* The Khan's revenue, never-
theless, did not decrease, he still drew 8900,000= ^112,500 sterling?
or 2,786,ooof, from the Krim, without counting the Russian dole.
The Porte continued to intrigue against him, and now .incited two
of his elder brothers, Behadur Girai, who was kalga in the Kuban,
and Arslan, who was charged to regulate various matters with the
garrison of Sudak, against him. ;The latter, after [several pre-
tended or real grievances, rebelled and joined his brother. Some
troops trained in the Russian fashion marched against them and
were beaten. Behadur marched on to Kaffa, and the Khan retired to
Yenikale to join the Russian commander. The principal Tartars
informed Behadur, who set up claims to the throne, that he could not
mount it unless he would discharge Shahin's debts. They also advised
the latter to summon the chiefs of the nation to proceed to elect a
sovereign. He remained at Kertch, which belonged to the Russians, and
did not reply. They then sent some adz-mazar or petitions, signed by
all the chiefs of the hordes, to Constantinople and St. Petersburg. This
. was in September, 1782. All the Crimean ports were now blockaded by
the Russians, whose operations were supposed to be directed by the
Khan. During this confusion Bakht Girai again set up pretensions to
the throne. He went to Karasu to await the confirmation which he
had asked from the Porte. Shahin Girai also re-entered the Krim at
the head of the Russian troops. The people were clearly cowed, and we
are told that a single discharge, which killed five or six, dispersed the
most mutinous. Kelly, who does not name his authority, says that
Prince Paul Potemkin caused above thirty thousand Tartars, of every
age and sex, to be massacred in cold blood, and thus gained for his
cousin the easily won title of the Taurian, and the post of Grand
Admiral of the Black Sea and Governor-General of Tauris.t Shahin
made a show of being reconciled with his brothers, but the Porte stood
aloof. He was reproached with his friendship for the infidels, and was
suspected of having secretly abjured the faith. These continual troubles,
which were largely fomented no doubt by Russian intrigues, at length
determined the Empress to definitely appropriate the Krim, and her
favourite Potemkin made large preparations for carrying out her wishes,
and collected three considerable armies ; but force was unnecessary.

*W.,4/4. t Op. cit , ii. 85.

6o2 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

By a new treaty made with Turkey, which was ratified on the 21st of
September, 1783, the Krim, with the island of Taman and the district of
Kuban, were definitely ceded to Russia, and the Dardanelles were thrown
open to her for a limited number of war ships, and all merchant vessels
except those engaged in carrying timber.* Shahin Girai resigned the
throne and retired, first to Voronetz and then to Kaluga, where he
was to have had a pension of one hundred thousand roubles, and to
have been treated as a sovereign prince.t According to Kelly, the Khan
Girai never received this salary, which was appropriated by Potemkin,
and he seems to have been in actual want.+ He at length determined
to set out for Constantinople, where he was received with distinction,
but was afterwards exiled to Rhodes. One day as he was leaving his
bath he was strangled by the emissaries of the Porte, and his head was
sent to Constantinople. §

Shahin Girai was a man of good figure, with a piercing eye and
very fair understanding. He was very pale, and constantly wore a
black silk handkerchief on his head, which was carried up on each
side of his face from under his chin, and tied above his turban. His
laundress, we are told, discovered by the little circles which it left on his
shirts that he always wore a coat of mail under his clothes. He was
personally brave, and a story was told of him that on one occasion,
having taken shelter from his subjects with the Russians, an army of
thirty thousand insurgents marched against his defenders, whereupon he
stole away from the small Russian army in the night, and rode right into
the midst of the rebels, and asked what their grievances were. This so
disconcerted them that they confessed that they had no personal enmity
towards him, but had been led away by certain murzas. The latter were
in turn summoned, and not having any real grievance, the Khan
ordered the soldiers to hang them up, which they accordingly did, where-
upon he rejoined his Russian friends.

His mode of life was very simple. He never had more than one dish
at table, consisting of boiled rice and mutton in the Tartar style, with
water for his drink. After which he took some coffee, and seldom
smoked except when alone. His State chamber when in Russia had only
a low Turkish sofa in it, and at night a high silver candlestick stood in
the middle of the room, on the floor, with one candle in it. He generally
wore gloves, as he had a custom of throwing a six-pound cannon ball
from one hand to another, while he sat conversing. He was very fond
of hawking and hunting, and the archbishop of Voronetz having given
up to him his country house, he presented him in turn with a large rich
cross set with diamonds, such as Russian archbishops wear on their
breasts suspended from the neck by a blue ribbon. He put up several

Esaai am !a I,' luv. Ilussie, ii. 162. t Langles, 479. t Op. cit.,

i LanRles, 479.

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. 603

Chinese kiosks in the garden, where the neighbouring gentry visited him
and generally received some present. He was very generous, and on
one occasion sent a diamond ring worth two thousand roubles to a much-
respected minister at St. Petersburg. The court prevented its delivery,
and bade the messenger tell his master that a present to a Russian minister
was improper. The Khan replied with ironical severity, "that the
Russians did not hold these opinions while he had ministers." Catherine
having sent him a ribbon of St. Andrew with a diamond crescent, instead
of the cross and saint hanging to it as usual, he rem.arked that if the
usual insignia had been appended to it his religion would have forbidden
him to wear it, and without them it was only a piece of ribbon with a
trinket which he dechned accepting.-^

On its absorption by Russia, the Krim was united with the eastern
portion of the land of the Nogais, and constituted the province of
Taurida, which was administered by a governor-general, and divided
into the seven districts or circles of Simpheropol, Levcopol, Eupatoria,
Perekop, Dneprovsk, Melitopol, and Tanagoria.t Thus passed away
the last fragment of the vast empire which had been founded by Jingis
Khan, and which had subsisted so long.

It will not be inappropriate to conclude this chapter with a con-
densed notice of the form of Government which subsisted in the
Krim. This was rather a limited monarchy than such a despotism
as is generally met with in the East. The Khan received no tax
from the people, nor could he curtail the privileges of the nobles, nor
punish one of their order without the concurrence of the begs, and
Mengli Girai in vain tried to subordinate the heads of the great houses
to his vizier. The Khans were treated with great deference at Constan-
tinople. When one of them went there he was received as a king, the
vizier and grandees went out to meet him and to escort him into the city
and he sat and took coffee with the Sultan himself. Like him, he wore an
aigrette and received the homage of the heads of the janissaries. When-
ever he visited a town the pasha or aga of the janissaries would attend
him, and walk at his horse's head till he told them to mount.j His
army was at one time very considerable, and he could put in the field from
one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand men. In this
army each grandee went with his retainers, and each soldier provided
himself with three months' provisions. His revenue consisted of fifty
thousand piastres from the salt-dues and customs of Gosleve, thirty
thousand from similar receipts at Orkapi or Perekop, eight thousand
from the hetman or governor of Dubossar (a small town on the Dniester),
fifteen thousand from the Government pf Yali in the Bujiak, four thousand
eight hundred from the Government of Kavshan, twelve thousand from
the Bui Aktshesi or honey dues paid by the princes of Moldavia and

Guthrie, Tour in the Taurida, 80-82. * Langles, 479. 1 PeyssoneJ, ii. 235-239.

6o4 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS,

Wallachia (eight thousand by the former and four thousand by the latter),
two thousand five hundred from the customs at Kaffa, and six thousand
from the appanages in Turkey ; altogether only one hundred and twenty-
eight thousand three hundred piastres or four hundred thousand ducats ;
and out of this he had to pay various sums to different officers and towards
the expense of the postal revenue.* The Khan also received a certain
income from the estates of those who left no relatives nearer than the
eighth degree, and thg taxes from the villages of the Chelebis. Each of
the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia sent the Khan on his accession a
carriage drawn by six horses. The former also sent him two thousand
sequins, and the latter one thousand. They were also constrained to
make continual presents. Presents were also frequently sent him by the
Turkish grandees and by foreign princes. In his intercourse with the
latter the Khan styled himself Emperor of the Tartars, Circassians, and
of Daghestan, but he wrote more modestly to the Porte. All the Royal
princes were styled Sultan. They lived partly in the Krim and in
Circassia, and partly on their appanages in Rumelia. The Ottoman
Sultan had not the power of decreeing their execution for any cause
whatever.! Each of the Sultans had a suite of a certain number o'
murzas belonging to the principal families, who were fed and clothed by
him. When a Sultan became impecunious he would send off a murza to
some pasha with a polite note and a present of a Tartar knife, a pair of
pistols, &c. This was a hint that he wanted money, which was duly sent
him, for such a Sultan might some day become a Khan ; and there is a
Turkish and Tartar proverb, " That one should fear a Sultan, even if no
bigger than the handle of a whip."+ The wives of the Khans and
other princes of the Krim were always slaves, and generally Circassians.
They did not marry among their own people. The princesses were not
looked upon as such, but merely as instruments for producing Sultans,
and were sometimes treated very badly by their sons, who occasionally
even put them to death. Their devotion to the Sultans, on the other
hand, was just as marked. On the Khan's death they joined the harem
of his sons, who did not admit them, however, to their table. They
stood while their sons ate, and only sat at table on their invitation.§ As
soon as the boys left their mother's knee they were put under charge of
governors, and the majority of the Khans did honour to their training.
Generosity was a cardinal virtue with them, and they would give every-
thing they had, even their clothes. When bidden to be prudent, they
asked if a prince of their house was ever known to die of hunger. The
chief part of the Khan's income was spent in providing for the poorer
gentry in his suite. Most of the Royal princes were brought up in
Circassia, among the tributary begs, who were proud of being the ataliks
or tutors of the Sultans, and of teaching them the arts of war.

*/</., 239-242. De Bohucz,42i, 422. t Peyssonel, ii. 242-244. lid., 245. ^ Id., 246,247 •

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. 605

The princesses of the Royal house generally lived in the harems of
their nearest relatives. They were only married to murzas of the Shirin
tribe or to those of the other leading clans, and occasionally to Turks
of eminent position. The hand of a princess was generally conferred
upon a poor gentleman, and her dower became his fortune ; besides the
money of which this consisted there was also the dokus dokusleme or
the " nine times nine," i.e.^ eighty-one pelisses, eighty-one kaftans, eighty-
one chemisses, eighty-one mattresses of tissue of gold, silver, and silk,
eighty-one rich coverlets, and eighty-one sheets. If the Khan could not
afford these presents the princess was not married, and one of the first
duties of a Sultan on mounting the throne was to provide handsomely
for his female relatives. The husbands of the princesses were often the
subjects of much jealousy and ill-will. Peyssonel mentions that a Shirin
beg named Haji Chil, who married a daughter of Devlet Girai Khan,
had to fly and to be a vagabond to escape from his enraged wife. When-
ever a murza went to bed with a princess he had to get into the bed at
the foot, to wash her feet, and to ask her permission to enter.*

The six chief officers of the court were the kalga, the nureddin, the orbeg,
and three seraskiers or generals, besides two dignitaries for the princesses,
the anabeg and the ulughkhani. On these officials I shall have a note at
the end of this chapter. Besides these there were several great officers
of State, as the mufti or chief judge, who had precedence at the Divan
next to the Sultans and the Shirin beg. His fetvas or decisions guided
the kadhis or inferior judges. In the Krim he was the custodian of the
vakufs or "ecclesiastical property, as the mosques, hospitals, colleges,
khans, and public fountains. His orders were carried out by the
mutevellis or directors.

The Vizier or prime minister differed from the Ottoman Vizier, in that
he never commanded the army, and did not read the decrees of the Divan,
which were duties of the Khan himself. In the latter's absence from the
Krim, however, he was appointed kaimakam or deputy. His income
consisted of five thousand piastres from the dues at Gosleve, one thousand
five hundred from the Khan, five hundred from the honey-dues of
Moldavia, one thousand from the hetman of Dubossar, two thousand
from the voivode of Yali, and two thousand four hundred from the
Subashi of Kavshan ; also the revenues of six villages in the Krim, whose
Christian inhabitants had to find him twenty-four purses of besheliks or
one thousand five hundred piastres, and when he went on a campaign a
certain number of horses and carts and a state tent. The Kadi asker was
the Provost Marshal, and also decided causes among the nobles. He had
the nomination of a number of kadiliks. The Khasnadar Bashi or grand
treasurer had charge of the exchequer. The Defterdar was a kind of
controller-general, and kept the State documents and accounts. On the

* op. git., 251.

6o6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Khan's death he sealed his goods, and they remained sealed for three
days. The Ashtagi Beg or grand equerry attended the Khan's person,
and held the stirrup for him to mount ; the Kilerji Bashi or chief of the
household managed his palace ; the Kusheji Bashi or grand falconer, a
post always filled by a Nogai nobleman, handed the Khan his falcon and
received it from him again ; the Divan Effendi or secretary of State
controlled the correspondence of the Khan and the foreign affairs of the
Khanate; the Kapiji Bashi or chamberlain introduced ambassadors,
added the Khan's seal to documents, and was present at the Divan with
a silver wand ; the Kapiji Kiaiassi, whose stave was ornamented with
silver, was the grand usher of the Divan. Except the posts of mufti, of
Kadi asker, and Divan Effendi, the offices of State were monopolised by
the murzas. Among the body officers of the Khan we find the Selictar or
sword-bearer, the Kutler agassi, who punished the murzas when culpable ;
the little Kasnadar or Khan's private treasurer, the Bashi Chiokadar or
first foot-servant, the Aghir Kiaiassi or superintendent of the stables,
the Serachi Bashi or superintendent of the carriages, the Kasne
Kiatibi or clerk of the treasury, the Muassebe Kiatibi or secretary
of accounts, the Kiatibs or secretaries of the Divan Effendi, the
Sherbechi or cup-bearer, the Chesheniguier (who dressed the Khan's
table and tasted the meats before him), the Aschi Bashi or chief cook,
forty pages under the orders of the SeHctar, twelve Circassian pages
under the Sherbechi, eight cooks, four officers, twenty-four footmen,
twelve palfrey-men, twenty-four men in charge of the falcons, and six in
charge of the dogs. There was also a Mehter Bashi or chief of
musicians, who drew a revenue from the gipseys in the Khan's dominions.

In the harem there were two Kislar agas and four eunuchs. The
Khan's sons each had his own establishment.*

The people of Krim were divided into freemen, freedmen (called
Terkhans), and slaves. The freemen consisted of nobles and plebeians;
the slaves consisted entirely of foreigners {i.e.^ of captives, Circassians,
Abkhasians, Georgians, Kalmuks or Europeans, and their descendants.
The Tartar polity was a very aristocratic one, and the nobles were held
in high esteem. The murzas considered it derogatory to trade, and
married only with their own class ; their children by concubines, how-
ever, were held legitimate, as the Mussulman code provides.

The murzas were of two classes, those descended from the ancient
conquerors of Krim and the Kapikulis who became noble by their
ancestors having filled some important office in the State. The former
class consists of five families, divided into a great number of branches.
Each of these families had its own beg, who was always the oldest of its
leaders. Each member bore the family name together with that he
acquired at his circumcision. Details of these families will be found in

* Peyssonel, ii. 265-267.

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. 607

a note at the end of this chapter. The utmost etiquette and formality
were observed in the intercourse of the nobles ; a prescribed order of
precedence ruled their several positions, which was broken through,
however, by young men of a superior family giving place to old men of
an inferior one. Drinking was permitted for three days at marriage
feasts. Sultans always ate apart, and when several were present, apart
from one another. They were waited on by their host with his cap under
his arm. On drinking each other's healths, they saluted by uncovering
themselves in the European fashion. Quarrels were exceedingly rare
among them, and domestic virtue seems to have been at a high standard.
The land in the Krim was divided into fiefs, which were held by the
nobles. A certain number of fiefs and villages formed a Kadilik, of
which there were forty-eight in the Krim, and of these, those of Yeni-
kale, Kaffa, Sudak, and Mankup belonged to the Turkish Sultan-
These fiefs were hereditary and independent. The Khan drew no
revenue from them, but whenever he went to war each Kadilik supphed
one thousand beshehks, and a cart drawn by two horses, and loaded
with biscuit or millet. At first the Khans received a tribute of a sheep
from each house. This was remitted by Mengli Girai. One of his
successors exacted a sheep from each mosque, but even this was after-
wards abolished. The estates of the nobles were tilled by their slaves,
and they had power to sell or subinfeudate them, the mesne tenant paying
a rent of grain or honey, and five per cent, on his sheep, while his cattle
were free. Besides this they also received a tax of twenty-five beshehks
or ten French sous a head from each Jew and Christian. They also had
the right to a certain quantity of labour annually, and became the heirs
of any of their vassals leaving no relatives nearer than the eighth degree.
The murzas of the five great families in each Kadilik elected the local
judges. Certain fiefs in the Krim were devoted to the support of
certain official posts. Another kind of tenure was created when the
Khan assigned some uncultivated land to some rich peasants, in order
to cultivate it and plant villages there. These people were called
Chelebis. These tenants depended directly on the Khan, who received
their rents. The Chelebis had no rights over their cultivators. The only
regular troops in the Krim were the segbans or, as Peyssonel calls them,
the seimans, who acted as the Khan's body guards, and were paid by the
Porte. They were divided into bairaks or companies of thirty men, which
were commanded by bulukbashis or captains, under a colonel-in-chief
called Bashi-bulukbashi. In time of peace the segbans • consisted of
twenty bairaks and of forty in time of war. The council before each war
was attended by the begs of the five chief tribes or their proxies and
other grandees, and it decided how many men each fief should furnish,
according to the reports of the kadhis.

Every free vassal was liable to serve, and those who remained behind
had to equip and mount those who went to the war. Each man served

6o8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

in the squad formed by his seignior, and each squad made a bairak
distinguished by a differently coloured pennon. The oldest noble com-
manded the bairak, and the other murzas of the same name marched
under his orders. In large families each branch formed a separate bairak.
Besides the captain there was a bairakdar or ensign in each squad. The
Chelebis from different quarters formed one corps under one banner,
generally commanded by the Khan's selictar. Peyssonel praises the
sobriety of the Tartar soldiers. When a war was undertaken on the
Khan's own account, as in the case of some Circassian campaigns, the
Khan defrayed the cost. If it was undertaken on behalf of the Porte the
latter paid. Marauding in a friendly country was punishable with the
bastinado. In regard to looting, each soldier brought his share into
hotch-pot^ which was duly divided, the seraskier or general getting
one-tenth.*

Justice among the Tartars was much more pure than among the Turks.
The Kadhis or judges of Baghchi Serai, Akmejid, Gosleve, and Orkapi,
and among the Nogais, were appointed by the Khan himself. In other
places by the Kadi asker, or by the Porte. The first class had juris-
diction in all cases, criminal and civil, not involving capital punishment.
There was an appeal from them to the Divan. The tribunal of the
Kadi asker supervised the disputes, &c., among the murzas. The Divan
or Grand Council of the Khan was presided over by the latter, assisted
by the sultans, the kalga, nureddin, orbeg, the seraskiers of Bujiak,
Yedisan, and the Kuban, the Shirin beg, the mufti, the vizier, kaki asker,
the khasnadar bashi, the defterdar, the ashtaji beg, the kilerji bashi,
the Divan effendi, the naib or lieutenant of the kazi lesker, the sheir
kadissi or judge of the town, the kullar agassi, the kapiji bashi, the
kapijilar, and the kiaiassi, and the bashi-bulukbashi or colonel of the
guards generally acted as chamberlain to the assembly, but had no vote.
The decision of the Divan was proclaimed by the kazi lesker.

In the case of public crimes, as robberies and assassinations on the
highways, issuing false money, and generally where the Khan's official
was the prosecutor, he had the dehnquent executed himself; but when
the prosecutor was a private person, or when some relative of the victim
demanded the punishment of the murderer, the latter was handed over
to him when found guilty, and he either executed him himself or
employed some one to do it. Such executions took place on a bridge
opposite the seraglio. The prosecutor could remit the punishment if he
liked, or accept a fine. Peyssonel reports that in 1753 a young girl,
having in her hands the life of her brother's murderer, refused to accept
a fine and herself cut off his head with a sword.t

Beside its judicial functions, the Divan also had control of the general
administration of the kingdom, except in questions of war, in matters

• Id., 283-288. t Op. cit., 292.

SHAHIN GIRAI KHAN. 609

relating to the Porte and to the khan himself. These matters were
settled by the Khan's privy council, consisting of the kalga, the nureddin,
the orbeg, the seraskiers, the vizier, the kadi asker, the five chief begs,
and the deputies of the various branches of the five chief noble families.
When the Khan was on a campaign all matters were controlled by the
council of war. The kalga and the seraskiers of the Nogais had their
special divans. The Khan, like the Sultan, put his seal at the head of
State documents. He had a great seal for State documents, and a small
seal on his ring. The latter was used when he wrote on very urgent
business and " meant to have his way."*

The only coins in use in the Krim were made of base silver, having a
large alloy of copper. These coins were called besheliks {i.e., pieces of
five) since they were worth five Crimean aspres. Twenty besheliks made
a Crimean piastre, which was merely a money of account. The profits of
the mint were held conjointly with those of the salt-pans of Orkapi, and
were generally farmed by Armenians or Jews. The farmer was decorated
with a kaftan, like the other officials. The proportion of silver to alloy
when Peyssonel wrote was 15 to 85, and it took one hundred drachms of
this mixture to make four hundred and eighty-five besheliks. From the
time of Haji Selim Girai Khan to those of Selim Girai Khan the money
had been much finer, and contained about one-half of silver.t

The dues received from the grain of the Nogais of Yambolik were
devoted to defraying the cost of the posting in the Krim. This was
quite free when an order from the Khan had been obtained, which alone
authorised travelling in this way. The post stations were at Uloklu -
karam, Orkapi, Kajanbak,Gosleve,Baghchi Serai, Akmejid, Karasu, Kafifa,
Kertch, Yenikale, Taman, and Kaplu. They did not extend outside the
Krim beyond Otchakof. At each post station there were sixty horses.J

The Tartars were rigid Sunni Muhammedans, like the Turks of Constan-
tinople, Rumelia, and Asia Minor. They were well educated, there being
colleges in all the towns. The Nogais, on the other hand, were, like the
modern Kazaks, very indifferent Mussulmans, which gave rise to a happy
answer by an Armenian coachman of Selamet Girai Khan. Being pressed
to become a Mussulman, he replied he would not, but to oblige his master
he did not mind becoming a Nogai. There were many Jews in the
Krim, who belonged to the Karait sect, and who claimed to have
originally come from Bukhara. They had several privileges not enjoyed
by the Greeks and Armenians, which were obtained for them by a Jew
doctor, who cured a sister of Haji Selim Girai Khan of some disease.
The Tartars were very tolerant, and Christians of different denominations
abounded in the Krim, the Armenians being the most numerous. The
population of the Krim once amounted to at least half a million. Its first
serious diminution took place in 1778, when, as I have mentioned, a large

*W., 292-294. tM, 294-299' 1^,299,300,

3E

6lO HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

number of its Christian inhabitants were transported to Russia. A still
larger movement took place in 1785 to 1788, soon after the Russians
took possession of the countr}-. Many Tartars then migrated to
Anatolia and Rumelia, where almost all the survivors of the Girai family
and many nobles also retired. When a census was taken in 1793 there
were in the Taurida only 85,805 males and 71,328 females, together
157,125 persons of all ages.* This number afterwards increased, but the
Tartars have ever since then been more or less migrating to Turkey, and
large numbers of them have settled in the Dobruja.

Note I. — The highest dignitary in the Krim, next to the Khan, was the kalga.
According to the Turkish author Jevdct, the word is derived from kalgai,the
Tartar form of the Turkish kalsun or kala. Kalgai means " he remains,"
and the origin of the title is said to have been that when the Sultan on one
occasion sent to ask who would remain in the Krim in Mengli Girai's absence,
the latter replied, '• My son Muhammed remains^'' whence the Khan's alter ego
or vicar came to be called kalga.t M. Vel. Zernof, however, contends that it
is not a mere institution of the Krim but existed elsewhere, as among the
Sheibanids.j On the Khan's death the kalga had authority during the inter-
regnum, and in the Khan's absence he commanded the army. His official
residence was at Akmejid, five leagues from Baghchi Serai. Like the Khan,
he had his own vizier, defterdar, his divan effendi, his kadhi, &c. His Divan
sat daily, and had cognisance of crimes and disputes within the kalga's own
district. Although he could try capital offences he could not pronounce
sentence, but his verdict or ilham in such cases was sent on to the greater
Divan, to which also there was an appeal from his court. His special
jurisdiction extended from Akmejid to Kaffa. His income consisted of one
thousand piastres from the customs at Karasu, five thousand from the salt-
pans of Kers, three thousand from the customs of Kaffa, two thousand five
hundred from the honey dues of Moldavia, and one thousand from Wallachia,
which those two provinces paid in addition to what they furnished to the Khan.
The kalga could not, like the Khan, make general kadiliks or perquisitions when
setting out on a campaign, but was limited in doing so to the Christians, from
whom he received a certain number of horses, carts, and provisions.§ The kalga's
appointment had to be confirmed by the Porte, which thereupon sent him a
pelisse of Samur and two thousand sequins. I| Next to the kalga was the nureddin,
the origin of whose name and dignity in the Krim I have already described.^
M. Vel. Zernof shows that the title had beeh previously in use among the
Nogais, who apparently took it from Nureddin the son of Idiku. It occurs
among the Nogais as early as 1555.** The nureddin was the vicar of the
kalga, and in the absence of the latter and the Khan took their place. He
also had his vizier, defterdar, divan effendi, and kadhi, but neither an ulughani

* Krim Khans, 38, 39. t History of the Khans of Kasimof, ii. 416. J Pallas, ii. 343.

$ Peyssond, op. cit., 251*255. \Id.^2'i<i, %AnU,^i^, •* Op. cit., 416.

NOTES. 6ll

nor an anabeg. He had no Divan, and his kadhi had no jurisdiction except
when he was in command of the army, when the kadhi became the kadi asker
or army judge. His official residence was at Baghchi Serai ; his income con-
sisted of four thousand piastres from the dues at Orkapi, one thousand five
hundred from the salt-pans at the same place, one thousand from the mint,
five thousand from the Khan's honey-dues of Moldavia, five hundred from
Wallachia, and certain black mail paid by the Christians.*

The orbeg was the governor of Orkapi, and was the third dignitary of the
State. The office was in some cases conferred on murzas of the Shirin tribe
who had distinguished themselves. He received five thousand piastres from
the dues at Orkapi, three hundred from the honey-dues of Moldavia, and one
hundred and fifty from Wallachia. He could also claim three sheep from each
herd that pastured in the steppe of Orkapi. t

. After the three dignitaries just named came the seraskiers or generals of the
three Nogai hordes of Bujiak, Yedisan, and Kuban, who acted as viceroys in
those districts and commanded their contingents of troops. They had their
officials and divan like the Khan, and could even try capital offences among
the peasants and the murzas. The latter could appeal in civil causes only, to
the Khan's Divan. The seraskier of the horde of Bujiak received a piastre
from each house and a sheep from each village, and the horde was obliged to
give him five hundred head of cattle when entering on his duties. That of
Yedisan received a piastre from each house, a sheep from each murza, head of
an aul, or from a hamlet, and three hundred cattle on installation. The
seraskier of the Kuban received annually a tithe of grain from his horde, and a
sheep from each tent, and eight hundred cattle were paid him upon entering
upon his duties. He generally lived a nomadic life, but his official residence
was at the village of Kaplu on the Kuban. The horde of Yambolik had no
seraskier, but was controlled by a kaimakan appointed by the Khan. Besides
these six [dignitaries there were two female officials ; the anabeg, generally
held by the Khan's mother, step-mother, or one of his wives ; and the ulukhani,
generally conferred on the eldest of his sisters or daughters. The latter office
had attached to it the revenues of five villages, and a portion of the poll-tax
paid by the Christians of Baghchi Serai and of the Jews of the fortress. The
former also had a similar revenue. These princesses had a civil jurisdiction
in the districts under them. Their kiaias administered justice for them. They
held their court at Chukurkapi, the gate of the seraglio leading to the harem.
The kasnadar bikeshi or lady treasurer of the harem was another officer. This
post was generally held by one of the Khan's wives.

Note 2. — I have postponed to this note a notice of the five chief families or
clans of Krim. These were (i) the Shirins. Peyssonel argues that the.
founder of the house was one of Jingis Khan's generals,J but this is utterly
improbable, as no such name occurs among his chieftains. On the other
hand, we find Mir Shirin and Mir Barin specially named as two of the
principal leaders of the Krim Tartars, who invited Ulugh Muhammed to
mount the throne, and who were apparently chiefly instrumental in placing

• Id., 255, 256. T U,-, 256, 257, X Op. cit., li. 269,

6l2 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Haji Girai on the throne.* I have little doubt that the Shirin and Barin clans
took their names from these two chiefs, and that we must thus explain the
predominance of those families. The eldest chief of the Shirins was called
the Shirin beg, and was generally looked upon as a kind of tribune to defend
the laws of Krim and the liberties of its people from the encroachments of the
Khan. Although inferior in dignity to the kalga and nureddin, he had the first
place in the Divan after the sultans. Like the Khan, the Shirin beg had his
kalga and nureddin, who succeeded to his position in turn. He was often very
powerful. One of them named Haji Shirin beg, as I have shown, was instru-
mental in deposing the Khan Saadet Girai. The latter's successor Muhammed
Girai was also not popular with the Shirin beg and his supporters, and at length
Mengli Girai was appointed Khan for the purpose of suppressing the turbulent
family. Peyssonel says that on Mengli's arrival he summoned a Divan, which
was attended by the Shirin beg. Everything was prepared for the latter's execu-
tion, but being warned he had a sudden bleeding at the nose, under cover of
which he fled, first to Circassia, and eventually reached his home again, where
it was not thought prudent to pursue him. The Khan and his relatives
generally married some member of the Shirin family. When a Shirin was
tried the Shirin beg sat as joint assessor with the Khan's officer. The Shirin
beg was irremovable, and thus contrasted singularly with his suzerain.! The
Shirin beg and his kalga both wore beards, in which they differed from the
Royal family, in which the Khan alone had a beard. In the four other
families the principal beg alone had this ornament.:J: For some years after
the Russians conquered the Krim they granted the Shirin beg a pension of two
thousand roubles.§ 2. The second family was that of Mansur oghlu, which I
believe to have been of Nogai descent, and to have received its name from
Mansur, the son of Idiku, the famous Nogai chief. Peyssonel says in effect
that a branch of the Mansurs named Karacha lived with the Nogais and
intermarried with the Khan's family. This tribe of Mansur was afterwards
definitely called Mangut. 3. The third tribe was that of Sijewit. It was
not originally one of the principal Krim tribes, but apparently acquired this
position in the reign of Sahib Girai. To reward the Mansur chief Baki beg,
who had sided with him against Islam Girai, he gave him the clans of
Sijewit and Altai Khoja, and raised him above the other chiefs.|| Pallas says
there only remained in his day one youth of this tribe, who lived east of
Karasu bazar. 4. The Barin tribe was apparently so named from the Mir
Barin, who assisted in putting Haji Girai on the throne, or it may be derived
from Baraghon, meaning the right hand or right wing. This family was not
divided into branches like the others, and the succession of its chiefs was
apparently purely hereditary, and not from brother to brother, as in the East.
Its head was called the Barin beg, and his son and heir the Barin murza.
The Barins chiefly lived about Karasu bazar.^ 5. The fifth family
was that of the Arghins. The Barins and Arghins did not intermarry with
the Khan's family. The Arghins lived between Akmejid- and Karasu bazar.

* Langles, 391, 392. t Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii.33. Note.

J Peyssonel, ii. 269-272. ^ Pallas, ii. 352. |) Nouv. Journ. Asiat., xii. 367-368.

f Pallas, ii. 352,

NOTES. . 613

This enumeration is that of Peyssonel, but in the history of the Krim, translated
by Kazimirski, we are told that the four original tribes of Krim, called Durt
Karju, were the Shirins, Barins, Arghins, and Kipchaks, to which Sahib Girai
added the Sijewits.

The gentry belonging to the five families disdained all employment except
that of arms, and were noted for their chivalry and hospitality. Next to them
were the Kapikulis or gentry descended from great officials. They did not
intermarry with the Royal family nor with that of the higher nobility. The
Kapikuli families were very numerous. Some of them, as those of Avian,
Uzic, Kaia, and Sobla, gave the title of beg to their chief elder, but these begs
had no voice in the Government, nor were they clad in the kaftan by the Khan
like those of the other clans. The senior beg of Yashelof, who was always
the oldest elder of the clan Kudalak, alone had a certain precedence. He
derived his style from^ having an official residence at the village of Yashelof.
He acted as marshal of the wedding when one of the Khan's daughters was
married, and had the absolute control of the important ceremonial. The
chief houses among the Kapikulis, according to Peyssonel, were those of
Kudalak, Avian, Kemal, El, Uzic, Kaia, Sobla, &c. All the gentry of one
name formed a kabile or family.*

Pallas mentions the Dairs as another important family who had a beg.
They had large estates near Perekop, as well as between the Salgir and the
Suya.t He says that besides the seven principal families of the Shirins, the
Barins, the Mansurs, the Sijewits, Arghins, Yashelofs, and Dairs, there
were those of Kipchak, Uirad, Merkit, Ablan, Burultsha, Bitak-Bulgak,
Subanghazi oglu, and Yedei oglu. The two last of which were properly
/Nogais, and chiefly lived near Perekop. These families he distinguishes from
the Kapikulis.

Note 3. — I will now condense an account of the chief towns of the peninsula
of Krim during the Tartar domination, reserving those outside the peninsula
for the chapter on the Nogais. Perekop (in Tartar Orkapi) was the first
inhabited place in the Krim. It was governed by the orbeg, and garrisoned
by about one thousand two hundred janissaries under an aga.J Perekop
is a Russian word meaning an entrenchment, and the name refers to the famous
rampart which protects the Crimea on the north. This rampart dates from
primaeval times, and formerly consisted of a wall strengthened by towers,
whence its Greek name Neon Teikhos or the New Wall. At present, says
Pallas, there still remains a strong rampart, erected by the Turks, and
extending from the Black Sea to the Sivash. It is accompanied by a deep
trench, which is still in good condition, being defended by double walls built
of freestone. When it is considered, he adds, that the stones for erecting
these fortifications could not be obtained from a nearer place than Saribulat-
Pristan, which is more than fifty versts distant, the magnitude of the under-
taking justly demands our admiration. The fosse is about twelve fathoms
wide and twenty-five feet deep, but the height of the rampart has been some-
what reduced by the effects of time.§

* Peyssonel, ii. 275, 276. t Op. cit., ii. 352. I Peyssonel, i. 17.

§ Pallas, Travels in the Southern Provinces of Russia, ii. 4, 5-

6l4 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

The Tartar name of Perekop is Orkapi, meaning the gate of the line or
fortification, and in fact the only entrance to the Krim by land is over a
bridge and through an arched stone gate, both erected at the side of the
fortress. Contiguous to the gate on the east, and within the precincts of the
fosse, is situated the fortress of Perekop, a model of irregular fortification,
built wholly of freestone, and guarded on three sides by an additional fosse,
and at intervals by bastions of different shapes, hexagonal, pentagonal, and
square. Over the principal gateway Pallas says he observed " the figure of
an owl, hewn in stone, being the peculiar coat of arms of Jin^is Khan III which
likewise appears to have originally belonged to the princes who reigned in the
Krim !!!" Within the fortress were still remaining a sort of castle built of stone,
several barracks of brickwork, but in a ruinous state, and a mosque or mesjid.
There was also a well in the castle and another ia the outworks.*

The old town of Perekop is situated some five vefsts from the lines. It
consists of some hundreds of houses of one storey, without order or
symmetry, in the midst of an open burning plain, the houses being built of
clay mixed with seaweed.t

The town of Perekop is mentioned several times by Herberstein, who also
calls the Krim Tartars *' Precopskii." Muller says that on one Turkish map the
lines of Perekop are called Or boghazi, i.e., the opened breach ; on another
Khad Boghaz, z>., the thorny breach; and in a map published at Constan-
tinople in 1724 they are styled Or kapu si, i.e.y the opened gate, and the
fortress Or kalash si, Le., the fort of Or.J

The town of Eupatoria, which was so famous in the Crimean war of 1854-5,
was called Gosleve by the Tartars, a name derived, according to Pallas, from gus
or gos, an eye, and ov, a hut, i.e., a hut with a round window.§ This name was
corrupted by the Russians into Koslof. The greater part of it was built in the
Tartar fashion, in narrow, crooked streets, with the houses concealed behind
the high walls of the court-yards. When Pallas wrote it contained thirteen
Tartar mosques and seven medrisses or schools. The great mosque was,
after that of Kaffa (on whose model it was built) the largest in the Krim. Its
dome was eighteen Russian ells in diameter. On each side of it, it had three
cupolas, and two more at the corners of the anterior facade. It was more
ornamented than the one at Kaffa, and had two minarets. One of which,
according to Pallas, had long before, and the other but recently, been thrown
down by violent gusts of wind. There were also two vaulted baths, eleven
khans or mercantile inns or halls in private hands, and six belonging to the
Crown. II

Mrs. Guthrie describes a kind of felt carpets which were made there by the
Tartars. She also visited the mosque, where she witnessed one of the holy
wheels made by whirling dervishes; in the centre of which, she says, an aged
dervish spun round like a top, muttering meanwhile the following verse from
the Koran : — " This life is precarious, but it is here [turning to the earth] that
we must take our abode." She also tells us a naive story about the Tartars of
Gosleve, who were so charmed with a beautiful Greek lady, the wife of a

* Id. t Guthrie's Tour, 58. I Saml., &c., ii. 56. Note.

§ Op. cit., ii. 489. Ij Pallas, ii. 489 490.

NOTES. . 615

Russian general who spoke Turkish, that they were convinced she was a
Muhammedan kept in bondage by the Christians by the right of war,
and secretly opened a subscription for her redemption, one Tartar gentleman
offering one thousand ducats as his share, •' to open once more the door of
paradise to this lovely houri, possibly by way of commending himself to her
favour at an after period in the regions above."*

Peyssonel tells us the Town of Gosleve was formerly fortified to protect it
from the Cossacks. There were many Christians and Karait Jews among its
inhabitants, and it had a large trade with Russia and Turkey .t

Akmejid was the Tartar name of the town now called Simpheropol, which is
a revival of its old Greek name. It is beautifully situated on some rising
ground on the banks of the Salgir. " The old city of Akmejid," says Pallas, " is
built in the manner of all Tartar towns ; it exhibits throughout narrow streets
crossing each other at irregular angles, being unpaved and extremely filthy. As
all the courts or premises are encompassed with high walls, and the dwellings
built within these courts are very low on the ground, little of such habita-
tions can be perceived, and a stranger is apt to imagine that he is wandering
among half-ruined walls raised with rough limestone. The houses are
uniformly built of a white calcareous fossil resembling marl, which is very
common in the country; it cannot be split into flags, but breaks up into
irregular masses. This is used for the walls, the door and window posts and
corners being of a different stone. In all the Tartar towns of the peninsula
the mortar is made of clay, more or less mixed with lime and sand ; out-
buildings or offices are generally made of plastered wickerwork, but the roofs
are covered with light hollow tiles, disposed on a stratum of interwoven osiers,
^nd placed upon clay. Formerly there were five mosques at this place ; three
only remained when Pallas wrote. Akmejid was the residence of the kalga.
He lived in a handsome palace, situated above the town on the left bank of
the Salgir, but it was entirely demolished when the Krim was conquered.
Close by is a small sheet of water where the kalga kept sonie pleasure boats."|
We will now turn to the famous capital of the Krim Tartars, Baghchi Serai.

Baghchi Serai means the palace in the garden. It is situated on the Juruk
{i.£., the fetid water), a stream whose name points to its being the common
sewer of the place. The streets, Pallas says, are built on a gradual ascent
above each ether, very crooked, narrow, mean, irregular, and in a most filthy
state, but they are interspersed with orchards. These are ornamented with
Lombardy poplars, which together with the numerous turrets of the mosques
and the handsome chimneys of the otherwise mean-looking houses, offer a
beautiful prospect.!

" The number of fountains at Baghchi Serai is so great," says Dr. Clarke,
" that they arc seen in all parts of the city, water flowing from them day and
night, cold as ice and clear as crystal." One of them had not less than ten
spouts, whence the purest streams fell on slabs of marble. ||

The streets, says Mrs. Guthrie, are only calculated for a man on horseback,
or at most a small one-horse vehicle, formed of a common board about a foot

* Tour Through the Taurida, 65, 66. t Op. cit., i. 16.

I Pallas, op. cit., ii. 16-19. § Op. cit., i7. B Clarke's Travels, 1. 474.

6l6 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

and a half broad and six feet long, mounted on four wheels, the old carriage
of the Tartars, from whom the Russians probably derived it in its primitive
form of rospusky, and converted it into the more decent modern form of a
droshka, by suspending the board on springs and covering it with a long
cushion for the ease of the drivers.* Mr. Seymour says the town has com-
pletely retained its Oriental character, and in passing down the long street,
nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, the little open shops of the tailors,
the shoemakers, the bakers, the locksmiths, and the kalpak makers are seen,
with their proprietors sitting cross-legged, in eastern fashion, and working and
selling at the same time. He also speaks of its fountains, of which he says
there are no less than one hundred and nineteen.! When Pallas wrote
there were thirty-one mosques in the town, most of them well built with stone,
surmounted by lofty minarets; a Greek and an Armenian church, three
synagogues, and three Muhammedan schools. There were also baths, khans,
and taverns ; seventeen Tartar coffee-houses, and several mills turned by the
steam, Of the 517 shops, 121 sold silk, stuffs, and other commodities by the
yard ; forty-one dealt in saddles and leather work, 135 in provisions, twenty-
four were shoemakers, twenty-three sold large and small Tartar knives and
other cutlery, five were braziers, ten barbers, nineteen tailors, six silversmiths,
five gunstock makers, three dealers in ready-made shoes, nine timber-yards,
five manufactories of rope, cordage, and hair lines ; eight coopers, seven felt
and felt cloak dealers, four earthenware dealers, five makers of tubes and
mouthpieces for tobacco pipes, twenty bakers, thirteen tanners and morocco
leather manufacturers, six blacksmiths, thirteen shops for the sale of busa (a
Tartar drink brewed from millet, the origin of the Russian quas), thirteen
tallow chandlers, and seven sculptors.J This interesting enumeration enables
us to picture very fairly the commerce of a Tartar town, for when Pallas wrote
the ukaze of Catherine was still in force, by which no Russian was allowed to
live in the town. Baghchi Serai was for the greater part of their history the
only mint of the Krim Tartars. Its first undoubted occurrence on coins was
apparently in the reign of Islam Girai II., 1584-1588. §

The most interesting building at Baghchi Serai is the palace of the Khans.
It has been picturesquely described by Madame de Hell in a passage which I
will now abstract.

«• It is no easy task to describe the charm of this mysterious and splendid
abode, in which the voluptuous Khans forgot all the cares of life 1 it is not to
be done, as in the case of one of our palaces, by analysing the style, arrange-
ment, and details of the rich architecture, and reading the artist's thought in
the regularity, grace, and noble simplicity of the edifice : all this is easy to
understand and to describe : such beauties are more or less appreciable by
everyone. But one must be something of a poet to appreciate a Turkish
palace ; its charms must be sought, not in what one sees, but in what one
feels. I have heard persons speak very contemptuously of Baghchi Serai.
* How,' said they, • can anyone apply the name of palace to that assemblage
of wooden houses, daubed with coarse paintings, and furnished only with

• Op. cit., 72. t Russia on the Black Sea, 38, J Pallas, op. cit., ii. 28, 29,

§ Blau, op. cit,, 64.

NOTES. 617

divans and carpets?' And these people were right in their way. The
positive cast of their minds disabling them from seeing beauty in anything but
rich materials, virell-defined forms, and highly-finished workmanship, Baghchi
Serai must be to them only a group of shabby houses adorned with paltry
ornaments, and fit only for the habitation of miserable Tartars. Situated in
the centre of the town, in a valley enclosed between hills of unequal heights,
the palace (Serai) covers a considerable space, and is enclosed within walls and
a small stream deeply entrenched. The bridge, which affords admission into the
principal court, is guarded by a post of Russian veterans. The spacious court
is planted with poplars and lilacs, and adorned with a beautiful Turkish
fountain, shaded by willows ; its melancholy murmur harmonises well with
the loneliness of the place. To the right as you enter are some buildings, one
of which is set apart for the use of those travellers who are fortunate enough
to gain admittance into the palace. To the left are the mosque, the stables,
and the trees of the cemetery, which is divided from the court by a wall. We
first visited the palace, properly so called. Its exterior displays the usual
irregularity of Eastern dwellings; but its want of symmetry is more than
compensated for by its wide galleries, its bright decorations, its pavilions, so
lightly fashioned that they seem scarcely attached to the body of the building,
and by a profusion of large trees that shade it on all sides. These all invest
it with a charm that, in my opinion, greatly surpasses the systematic regularity
of our princely abodes. The interior is an embodied page out of the ' Arabian
Nights'.' The first hall we entered contains the celebrated Fountain of Tears,
the theme of Pushkin's beautiful verses. It derives its melancholy name from
the sweet, sad murmur of its slender jets as they fall on the marble of the
basin. The sombre and mysterious aspect of the hall further augments the
tendency of the spectator's mind to forget reality for the dreams of the imagi-
nation. The foot falls noiselessly on fine Egyptian mats ; the walls are inscribed
with sentences from the Koran, written in gold on a black ground in those
odd-looking Turkish characters, that seem more the caprices of an idle fancy
than vehicles of thought. From the hall we entered a large reception-room,
with a double row of windows of stained glass, representing all sorts of rural
scenes. The ceiling and doors are richly gilded, and the workmanship of the
latter is very fine. Broad divans covered with crimson velvet run all round
the room. In the middle there is a fountain playing in a large porphyry
basin. Everything is magnificent in the room, except the whimsical manner
in which the walls are painted. All that the most fertile imagination could
conceive in the shape of isles, villages, harbours, fabulous castles, and so forth,
is huddled together promiscuously on the walls, without any more regard for
perspective than for geography. Nor is this all : there are niches over the
doors in which are collected all sorts of children's toys, such as wooden houses
a few inches high, fruit trees, models of ships, little figures of men twisted
into a thousand contortions, &c. Such childishness, common among the
Orientals, would lead us to form a very unfavourable opinion of their intelli-
gence, if it was not redeemed by their instinctive love of beauty, and the
poetic feeling which they possess in a high degree. For my part I heartily
forgave the Khans for having painted their walls so queerly, in consideration

6l8 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

of the charming fountain that plashed on the marble, and the little garden
filled with rare flowers adjoining the saloon. The hall of the divan is of royal
magnificence ; the mouldings of the ceiling, in particular, are of exquisite
delicacy. We passed through other rooms adorned with fountains and
glowing colours, but that which most interested us was the apartment of the
beautiful Countess Potocki. It was her strange fortune to inspire with a
violent passion one of the last Khans of the Crimea, who carried her off and
made her absolute mistress of his palace, in which she lived ten years, her
heart divided between her love for an infidel, and the remorse that brought her
prematurely to the grave. The thought of her romantic fate gave a magic
charm to everything we beheld. The Russian officer who acted as our cicerone
pointed out to us a cross carved on the chimney of the bedroom. The mystic
symbol, placed above a crescent, eloquently interpreted the emotions of a life
of love and grief. What tears, what inward struggles, and bitter recollections
had it not witnessed. We passed through I know not how many gardens and
inner yards, surrounded with high walls, to visit the various pavilions, kiosks,
and buildings of all sorts comprised within the limits of the palace. The part
occupied by the harem contains such a profusion of rose-trees and fountains
as to merit the pleasing name of The Little Valley of Roses. Nothing can be
more charming than this Tartar building, surrounded by blossoming trees; I
felt a secret pleasure in pressing the divans on which had rested the fair forms
of Mussulman beauties, as they breathed the fresh air from the fountains in
voluptuous repose. No sound from without can reach this enchanted retreat,
where nothing is heard but the rippling of the waters, and the song of the
nightingale. We counted more than twenty fountains in the courts and
gardens ; they all derive their supply from the mountains, and the water is of
extreme coolness. A tower of considerable height, with a terrace fronted with
gratings that can be raised or lowered at pleasure, overlooks the principal
court. It was erected to enable the Khan's wives to witness unseen the
martial exercises practised in the court. The prospect from the terrace is
admirable ; immediately below it you have a bird's-eye view of the labyrinth
of buildings, gardens, and other enclosures. Further on the town of Baghchi
Serai rises gradually on a sloping amphitheatre of hills. The sounds of the
whole town, concentrated and reverberated within the narrow space, reach you
distinctly. The panorama is peculiarly pleasing at the close of the day, when
the voice of the muezzins calling to prayer from the minarets mingles with
the bleating of the flocks returning from pasture and the cries of the shep-
herds. After seeing the palace we repaired to the mosque and to the cemetery
in which are the tombs of all the Khans who have reigned in the Crimea.
There, as at Constantinople, I admired the wonderful art with which the
Orientals disguise the gloomy idea of death under fresh and gladsome images.
Who can yield to dismal thoughts as he breathes a perfumed air, listens to the
waters of a sparkling fountain, and follows the little paths edged with violets,
that lead to lilac groves bending their fragrant blossoms over tombs adorned
with rich carpets and gorgeous inscriptions ? The Tartar who had charge of
this smiling abode of death, prompted by the poetic feeling that is lodged in
the bosom of every Oriental, brought me a nosegay plucked from the tomb of

NOTES. ^ 619

a Georgian, the beloved wife of the last Khan.* Was it not a touching thing
for this humble guardian of the cemetery to comprehend instinctively that
flowers, associated with the memory of a young woman, could not be
indifferent to another of her sex and age ? Some isolated pavilions contain
the tombs of Khans of most eminent renown. They are much more ornate
than the others, and the care with which tjiey are kept up testifies to the pious
veneration of the Tartars. Carpets, cashmeres, lamps burning continually,
and inscriptions in letters of gold, combine to give grandeur to these monu-
ments, which yet are intended to commemorate only names almost for-
gotten."t

Pallas describes the mosque adjoining the palace as being very elegant. He
bays that in the interior there was a superstructure or box furnished with
windows, formerly appropriated to the Khan's family, and the ascent to which
was from without by a separate staircase.J In the cemetery, he says, were
buried the Khan and his family, the principal murzas and priests. The tomb-
stones bearing a turban were placed over males. Near this are two vaults
filled with the coffins of former Khans, deposited on the ground and covered
with black and green stuffs. One of these vaults was built by Haji Girai. A
little further upward is the romantic tomb of Mengli Girai. It is surrounded
with arches of brickwork, and beneath these it is shaded with vines and other
foliage. The tomb of Krim Girai is in the shape of a sarcophagus, that of his
Georgian wife in the form of a cupola, with a gilded ball at the top.§

Pallas thus enumerates the epitaphs of the Khans, &c., buried there.

IN THE FIRST VAULT.

Behadur or Batyr Girai, who died in 1051 hejira.
Islam Girai, „ 1066 „

Muhammed or Makhmed Girai, ,, 1075 >»

IN THE SECOND MAUSOLEUM.

Adil Girai, who died in 1082 „

Murad Girai, „ 1093 ,,

Safa Girai, „ 1104 „

Haji Selim Girai, ,, 1117 „

Devlet Girai, „ 1125 „

Saadet Girai, „ 1137 ,,

Kaplan Girai, „ 1149 „

Mengli Girai, „ 1154 „

Selamet Girai, ,, 1156 „

Beside the vaulted tombs are buried :

Selim Girai, „ 1161 „

Arslan Girai, „ 11 80 „

Krim Girai, „ 1183 „

It will be noticed that several of these dates are inconsistent with the state-
ments of the historians of Krim, which I have followed in my narrative.

* Really of Dilara Bikeh, the wife of Krim Girai. t De Hell's Travels, 360-363,

I Op. cit., ii. 31^ $ Pallas, op. cit., ii. 31, 3?,

620 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

Not far from BAghchi Serai is a place called Chufut Kaleh, or the Jews'
Citadel, which seems to be the Phulli of the ancients.* Near it is a
cemetery which is shaded with beautiful trees, and contains, says Pallas, very
decent tombstones disposed in rows, most of them hewn in the shape of a
sarcophagus with raised stone tablets at the extremities, in shape not unlike the
gables of houses. Some of them are inscribed in Hebrew characters. This
little valley of Jehoshaphat was so highly valued by the Jews, that whenever the
ancient Khans wished to extort from them a present, or to raise a voluntary
contribution, it was sufficient to threaten them with the extermination of these
trees, under the plausible pretence of wanting fuel or timber. It is enclosed
partly by walls and also by stone buildings. There are two outer gates, which
are locked in the night. The streets are crooked, narrow, and have the rocky
bottom for their foundation, except the principal street, which is paved with
flags. In the centre of the town is a third gate, near which is a mausoleum
which, according to tradition, was erected for the daughter of Toktamish
Khan. It consists of two sepulchral vaults, raised one above another, with
an ornamented arched portico on the west side. The princess is said to have
been artfully seduced by a murza, who fled with her to the fortress, then in the
hands of the Genoese. The Tartars had many houses and a mosque there.

The synagogue is a fine edifice, embellished with a small garden for the
celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. All the court-yards are in ihe Tartar
fashion, encompassed with high walls, and the whole is built of raw limestone
plastered with clay. The population did not, in Pallas's day, exceed one
thousand two hundred persons. They were exclusively Karaite, or, as they call
themselves, Karaim. Their dress was like that of the aged Tartars, whose
language they also adopted.t The curious tombstones of these Karaits, with
their mediaeval legends and Tartar names, have lately exercised the ingenuity
of Firkovitch, Chwolson, and Harkavy. The last of these authors, in a very
learned memoir, has reduced to just proportions the extravagant claims for an
early date which were once made for these tombstones. It is curious that
there is one in the British Museum, which was brought home during the
Crimean war. The Karaits employ numerous asses for riding and carrying
water and provisions. The Khans would not let them use horses, and the
Mosaic law forbade them rearing mules. In near proximity to Chufut Kaleh,
between the Juruk su and the neighbouring heights, Pallas describes the
ancient sepulchral vaults of the Tartars called Eski Yurt or the old habitation,
and he mentions how several of them had crumbled to ruin in recent times.
The latest and most beautiful of these tombs is vaulted in the form of a
cupola. Its doors and windows were once uniformly framed with white marble
veined with grey, but most of them had been pillaged and converted into
chimney-pieces. Among the vaults were tombstones ornamented with foliage
in relief. These remains are all clearly of Tartar origin.J The name Chufut,
according to Pallas, is a corruption of Cifutti, a term of reproach applied by the
Genoese to the Jews.§ The place, he says, is generally identified with the Kirk
or Kirkor of the older writers, which, according to Dubois de Montperreaux,

• Guthrie, 83. t Pallas, op. cit., ii. 34-37. J /d., ii, 38, 39.

$ Seymour, op', cit., 46. Note, o.

notes'. 62 1

was the capital of Krim until its removal to Baghchi Serai, but I fancy Kirkor
was really Eski Krim. In 1396 we are told of the Khan of Kirkor fighting
against Vitut of Lithuania.* The name Kirk first occurs as a mint on a coin
of Gazi Girai Khan, the son of Devlet Girai, under the form of Kirker.t

The famous city of Sebastopol was in Tartar times the site of a village
called Akhtiar, which was but of secondary importance. Much more famous
was the mountain fortress of Mankup, not far off, which was perched on an
isolated and almost inaccessible rock. A Jewish cemetery, with many
bicornous tombstones, shows that it also was a stronghold of the Karaits.
Considerable ruins of the massive walls remain, as well as of dwelling-houses,
Christian chapels, and a mosque. Once the stronghold of the Genoese, it was
afterwards occupied by Tartars and Jews. Pallas describes its uninteresting
ruins in some detail,*

Mankup was the Tabane of Ptolemy, and the Castron Gothias or Goths'
citadel of the middle ages. It was apparently the chief stronghold of the
Genoese in the peninsula. " In its acropolis," says Mr. Seymour, "there are
the remains of a fine palace of two stories high, resting on a terrace, with a
handsome flight of steps.§ On the first floor of the palace are placed in
symmetrical order and richly decorated, four windows ; three head ornaments
surround the two fn the middle, which terminate in a flat arch, those at the
end being richly charged with ornaments and of larger dimensions. The
workmanship of the arabesques, of the roses, the fillets, and the wreaths are
in the Eastern style, very like Armenian." This is doubtless a relic of the
Genoese occupation. I have described above how Mankup was in 1475 captured
by the Turks ; eighteen years after which it was almost utterly destroyed by a
sudden fire. " Nothing of importance was saved," says Bronovius, " except
' the acropolis, in which there was a fine gateway and a high palace in stone."
It was there the Khans several times imprisoned the Muscovite ambassadors. ||

Another site in the Krim famous in Genoese times was Balaklava. It was
called Symbolon, or the Fort of the Symbols, by the Greeks, which was corrupted
by the Genoese, who captured it from the Greek dukes in 1365, into Cembalu.
In 1475 it fell into the hands of the Turks, who gave it up to the Tartars.
Its name of Balaklava is derived by some from the Greek castle of Pallakium,
and by others from the beautiful port '• Bella clava." It is mentioned by
Nicholas Barti, who travelled in the Krim in 1632-39, and whose journal is
still in MS., as Baluchlacca, and was then inhabited by Turks, Greeks, and
Armenians. When Dr. Clarke visited it the Genoese arms still remained on
its walls.^ It seems to occur as a mint place on a coin of Gazi Girai
Khan.**

Directly east of Ak Mejid or Simpheropol, on the road to Kertch, is the
town of Karasu bazar, which was a famous Tartar settlement, and which still
contains a famous Tash-Khan, or mercantile hall, and several mosques.tt Its
streets, like those of all Tartar towns, are narrow, irregularly built, and mostly
lined with the walls of enclosed premises. " Some tolerable dwelling-houses,
the large mercantile halls built of stones, and the mosques with their

• Id. t Blau, op. cit, 65. J Op. cit., ii. 120-125. § Seymour, op. cit., 144, 145.
II Id. t Jd., 189-191. ** Blau, 65. Tt Pallas, op. cit., ii. 206.

622 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

minarets, give it a picturesque appearance." Pallas says it contained in his
day twenty-three Tartar mosques, three churches (one of which belongs to the
Armenians), and a synagogue. There were further twenty-three khans or
mercantile halls of different sizes, no booths or shops, twenty-three coffee-
rooms, and 915 dwelling-houses. There were also seven mills turned by water
in the town and neighbourhood. There were about fifteen thousand male
inhabitants, of whom one thousand were Tartars, two hundred Jews, two
hundred Armenians, and one hundred Greeks, besides two thousand females.*

According to Peyssonel, Karasu was, after Kaffa, the most important trade
mart in the Krim, leather, butter, wool, corn, and saltpetre being the chief
products.t Like Baghchi Serai, Karasu was reserved by the Empress
Catherine for the exclusive residence of the Tartars and their clients. The
largest of its khans or caravansaries is called the Taslikhan, and was built in
1656 by Sefir Gazi Achiu, minister of Muhammed Girai. It is an immense
structure, with four blank walls outside, and containing a large court occupied
by rooms for travellers, and a number of shops. Between Karasu and Kertch
were the vast domains of the Shirin family, and a mountain near Karasu is
called by the Russians Shirinskaia Gora, or the Hill of the Shirins. They used
to muster their dependents there. ^ The principal prodiict of Karasu was
morocco leather, for whose preparation the Tartars were famous. Mrs,
Guthrie has described their method of preparing it in some detail. § Karasu
occurs as a mint place on a coin of Gazi Girai. jj

South of Karasu bazar, on the southern coast of the Krim, are the remains
of the once famous city of Soldaia, formerly the cbief port of the Krim. It was
variously called Sidagios, Sogdaia, Sudagra, and Sugdaia, and was once so
prosperous that all the Greek possessions in the Krim were called Sugdania.
It is called Sudak by the Tartars, and is referred to by this name by Abulfeda
and Maghreby ; is called Surdak by Shemseddin Dimeshky, and Sholtadiya
by Edrisi,1T who doubtless adopted the Genoese corruption Soldaia. Sudak,
the Sidagios of the Greeks, is probably the more correct form of the name.
In regard to this name Dr. Clarke has a curious note. He says that a curious
etymology of it occurs in Gale's Court of the Gentiles, Oxon, 1669, who
quotes Eusebius and Damascius, to show that the Dioscuri and Cabiri were the
sons of Saddik, a Phoenician god answering to the Greek Jupiter, " and no
other," says the quaint old writer, " than a Satanic ape of the sacred name of
Saddik attributed to the true God of Israel, as in Psalms 119 and 137, and
elsewhere. Thus in two instances in Greek cities in the Krim we have
appellations derived from the most ancient names of the deity among the
Eastern nations : Ardauda or Eptatheos, a name of Theodosia, and Suduk or
Sadyk, preserved in the present Sudak."**

It was the. see of an archbishop as early as 786, and was governed by a line
of Greek princes owning but slight allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor. After
the Frank conquest it apparently fell to Trebizond, and was taken by the
Mongols in 1222. Some time later the Venetians established a factory there,

• ///., 249, 250. t Op. cit., i. 15. I Seymour, op. cit., 241, 242.

^ Op. cit., 202, 203. 8 Blau, 65. 1; Frahn, Ibn Fozlan, zb. Note.

*• Clarke's Travels, 581. Note, i.

NOTES. 623

which in 1287 became the seat of a consul.* Rubruquis mentions it as the
entrepot of trade between Turkey and Russia, and tells us he himself landed
there on his journey into Tartary, Ibn Batuta calls it one of the four great
ports of the world. At the beginning of the fourteenth centurj', when the
Tartars became Muhammedans, they in their new-born zeal drove out the
Christians. A curious edifice still remains, dating probably from this period.
" It must," says Mr. Seymour, " have been originally built as a mosque,
because it does not face east and west, like a Christian church, but north and
south, with the altar {mMarab) of the mosque turned towards Mekka." The
style of its ornaments is older than the later Turkish occupation.t In 1323 we
find the Khan Uzbeg, in conformity with a bull issued by Pope John XXII.,
allowing the Christians to return to Soldaia.J In 1365 the town was captured
by the Genoese, who converted its Greek churches into Latin ones. The town
was captured on the i8th of June. " Then it was that, to secure possession of
the fertile territory of Sudak and defend it against the Tartars, the enterprising
merchant princes erected on the most inaccessible rock at the entrance of the
valley that formidable fortress of three stories, crowned by the gigantic
Maiden Tower (Kize Kaleh), whence the warders could overlook the fort, the
sea, and the adjacent regions."§ It remained in possession of the Genoese
until it was captured by the Turks in 1475, after a long siege and an obstinate
resistance. IJ The churches were once more converted into mosques, and so
remained until the Russian final conquest of the Krim. After its capture by the
Turks the town rapidly decayed until it reached the ruined condition described
by Pallas. Most of the ruins he mentions have now disappeared. He says that
on several of its walls and towers there were formerly numerous inscriptions
with raised Gothic letters, elegantly carved in stone, including a bas relief of
St. George. He also describes the walls of many buildings in the Gothic
style, and a large and handsomely arched cathedral.

Kafifa was situated on the coast, east of Soldaia. It was called Theodosia
by the Greeks. The Tartars also named it Kuchuk Stambul or Little Con-
stantinople. It was the principal town in the Krim during the Genoese
domination, and it subsequently became, on the conquest of the Krim by the
Turks, their chief port north of the Black Sea, whence they watched their
proteges the Krim Khans. Pallas describes it as a mass of ruins that cannot
fail to excite commiseration. The strong and lofty walls, strengthened by
towers at distances of twenty, forty, and sixty fathoms apart, which were
built by the Genoese, are almost entire.^ These with the various remains of
the outlying forts are described in some detail by Pallas. He adds, " Among
the few inhabited, half-ruined houses within the precincts of the city and
between the heaps of ruins spread in every direction, we were particularly
struck with the large mosque called Beeyuk-Jam, standing almost in the
middle of the place. It is a noble specimen of simple architecture, and is kept
in a state of complete repair. It is seventeen fathoms long and fourteen broad,
and the large dome is upwards of nine fathoms in diameter, and is on three

* Yule's Marco Polo, 1-4. t Op. cit., 223.

Von H«mmer, Golden Horde, 292. Seymour, 223. De Hell, 391. ^ De Hell, 391, 392

\rd.,Z(i2. «[/<f.,265.

624 HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS.

sides embellished with eleven small cupolas." Formerly there were attached
to the mosque two octagonal minarets sixteen fathoms high, with serpentine
staircases leading to the top, but these have been destroyed. Near the mosque
was a large Turkish bath with two vaults ; one of these was converted into a
magazine, and the other into a guard-house. Outside the town, on the shore
of the bay, was an unfinished palace and a mint, built by Shahin Girai.*

The history of Kaffa is long and distinguished. It was founded about 600
B.C. by the Milesians, who named it Theodosia. It seems to have been the
chief mart during the sway of the kings of the Bosphorus, and from a
reference to it in one of the orations of Demosthenes it must have been one of
the most important cities in the East. It was destroyed by the Alans in the
middle of the first century a.d., and about sixty years after Arrian describes it
in his Periplus as entirely deserted. The Romans called it Casum. It passed
with the other neighbouring towns under the dominion of the Byzantine
Emperors and was captured in 965 by the Russian chief Sviatoslaf.t During
the Greek supremacy the Venetians and Genoese seem by turns to have had a
settlement here. With the rest of the Crimea, Theodosia was conquered by
the Tartars, and about 1266 we find them granting the Genoese the right to
trade here.J This permission was apparently given by Oreng or Uz Timur,
the son of Tuka Timur, who had received the grant of the Krim from Mangu
Timur. The Genoese called the town Kaffa, after its name in Roman times.
In 1292 the town was destroyed by the Venetians, but it quickly revived, and
about twenty years later was made into a bishop's see by Pope John XXII.
It now became the most important colony of Genoa, and occurs frequently in
the previous pages. Kaffa, as we have shown, sustained a brilliant siege at
the hands of Janibeg Khan. After which it was protected by its famous
circumvallation. These magnificent works were begun in 1353 and completed
in 1386. " The most remarkable tower, that at the southern corner which
commands the whole town, was dedicated to the memory of Pope Clement VI.,
in an inscription relating to the crusade preached by that pontiff at the time
when the Tartars were invading the colony."§ Its brilliant prosperity con-
tinued till the year 1475, when, as I have described, it was captured by the
Turks, who maintained a garrison there. This was followed by the trans-
portation of its Christian inhabitants and the destruction of its trade. It
remained stagnant for nearly two centuries, when, says Madame de Hell, in
consequence of the commercial and industrial movement which then took
place among the Tartars, it again became the great trading port of the Black
Sea. Chardin, on his journey to Persia in 1663, found more than four hundred
vessels in the bay of Kaffa, which then contained four thousand houses and
eighty thousand inhabitants. Its final decay dates from the Russian conquest,
which led to the destruction of nearly all its buildings, and to its reduction to
the proportions of a village. |!

Kaffa occurs as a mint place of the Tartars on the coins of Mengli Girai I.,
of his son Muhammed Girai, and on those of the last Krim Khan, Shahin
Girai.

Op. cit., 266, 267. t Guthrie, 139-141- I Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 254.

§ De Hell, 394. 395- I' Id., 395. 396.

NOTES. • 625

North-west of Kaffa and east of Karasu bazar is Eski or Staroi Krim {i.e..
Old Krim), the Cimmerium of the Greeks, which gave itg name to the
peninsula. It was in early times one of the most important mints of the
Golden Horde, and coins struck there occur from the year 683 hej., in the
reign of Tuda Mangu, to that of Sahib Girai in the year 937.* New Krim,
which occurs on a coin of Toktamish dated in 785, perhaps refers to Baghchi
Serai. The ruins of the old town are scanty, and consists of remains of a
Tartar bath, of some mosques, of a Greek and Armenian church, and an old
empty palace of moderate size, formerly belonging to the Khans, which Pallas
describes as being in his day in tolerable condition.t Mr. Seymour tells us the
town is almost deserted, and contains scarcely any remains of its ancient
grandeur. Traces of the pavements of the streets, he says, may be observed
in the fields that now occupy its site. The ruins of five mosques and large
vaulted baths remain, and one Greek church and one mosque are still used for
service. The Armenians are the only inhabitants who remain.^ Eski Krim
no doubt represents the Cimmerium of the Greeks, which was the capital of
the Taurida, to which it gave a name, of which Krim and Crimea are mere
corruptions. It was one of the most famous cities of the Golden Horde. A
horseman could hardly make its circuit in half a day. It was adorned with
mosques and other buildings by Bibars, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, who
had been a Kipchak slave. These were decorated with porphyry and marble.§
Eski Krim was also called Solgat or Solghat, which according to Von Hammer
is another form of Sogd. ||

In the extreme east of the peninsula are two sites which will occupy us
very shortly. These are Kertch and Yenikaleh.

' Kertch was the Panticapaeum of the ancients. It is a corruption of
Gherseti, a name the Turks gave to the Genoese fortress erected there, and
called in mediaeval times Bospro, Vospro, and Pandico.H It was of some
importance as a trade mart during the Tartar domination, and was the prin-
cipal place given up by the Turks to the Russians by the treaty of Kainarji.*'"^

Yenikaleh or the new fortress, to distinguish it from the old one at Kertch,
is situated a few miles east of the latter town. The Turks built a fort there in
1705, to prevent the Russians entering the Black Sea. It was governed by a
pasha and a body of janissaries.

Since writing the previous chapter I have considered with some care the
difficulties surrounding the parentage of Selamet Girai I., Janibeg Girai, and
Muhammed Girai III. Blau makes Selamet the son of Adil Girai (I don't
know on what evidence), while he makes Janibeg and Muhammed Girai III.
brothers, and both of them sons of Muhammed Girai I I.tt Kazimirski's authority
says nothing as to the parentage of Selamet Girai and Janibeg Girai, while it
makes Muhammed III. the son of Saadet Girai Khan, which seems chrono-
logically impossible. Von Hammer, in his history of the Krim Khans, makes
Janibeg and Muhammed brothers,!* and Langles makes Selamet, Janibeg, and
Muhammed all three brothers.§§

* Frshn. Fuch's Collection, 36. Blau, op. cit., 63. t Op. cit., 260, 261. I Op. cit., 243.

§ Von Hammer, Golden Horde, 255. || Golden Horde, 303. ^ Seymour, 256,

*• Peyssonel.'i. 22. tt Op, cit., 65. JJ Op. cit., 98. f^ Op. cit., 412,

3G

r. ■ HISTORY (., . ..^. xMONGOLS.

I.i C.i: ..bicrjcc cf any direct evidence, I have in the following table made the
three Khans brothers in accordance with Langles's view, thus modifying
slightly the position taken «p on page 538.

I overlooked on page 581 stating that Selamet Giiai II. is distinctly called
" ben Haj Selim Girai" on his coins.* Similarly Selim Girai II. is called "ben
Kaplan " on his coins.f

The table of the Choban Girais is largely conjectural; I have accepted Von
Hammer's theory of their origin as before given.:J: The Feth Girai who was
kalga to Gazi Girai Khan was no doubt his successor Feth Girai Khan. We
are nowhere told who was Adil Girai's father, and I have conjecturally made
him a son of Choban. Safa Girai Khan is called Safa ben Safa on his coins, §
and I have made his father a brother of Adil.

Noie 4.— Genealogy of the Krim Khans,

Haji Girai Khan.
I

Nurdaulat Khan. Haidar Khan. Mengli Girai Khan I.

1 i i T

Muhammcd Girai Khan I. Saadet Girai I. Sahib Girai Khan I. Mubarek Girai.

Gazi Girai Khan I. Islam Girai Khan I. Devlet Girai Khan I.

L_

I I I I

Muhammed Girai Khan II. Islam Girai Khan II. Gazi Girai Khan IT. Feth Girai Khan I.

,— ^ i i ._i_

Selamet Janibeg Muhammed | I

Girai Khan I. Girai Khan. Girai Khan III. Toktamish Girai Khan, muyci \jirai Khan III.

■ J :

I I I I I

Behadur Muhammed Islam Mubarek Kiim

Girai Khan. Girai Khan IV. Girai Khan III. Girai Sultan. Girai Sultan.

Selim Girai Khan. Murad Girai Khan. |__

I Haji Girai Khan II. Saadet Girai Khan II.

Devlet Gazi Kaplan Saadet Mengli Selamet

GiraiKhanll. Girai Khan III. Girai Khan I. Girai Khan III. GiraiKhanll. Girai Khanlll.

i Selim Girai Khan II. Hakim Girai Khan. Maksud Girai Khan.
Kaplan Girai II.

Feth Girai Khan II. Arslan Girai Khan. Krim Girai Khan. Ahmed- Girai Sultan.

Selim Girai Khan III. Devlet Girai Khan III. | [

Sahib Girai Khan II. Shahin Girai Khan.

THE CHOBAN GIRAIS.

Feth Girai Khan I. The Countess Potochi.
I I

Ahmed Choban Girai.
_l

Adil Girai Khan. Safa Gira'i Sultan.

Kara Devlet Girai Khan. Safa Girai Khan.

• Blau, 73. t lif. I Ante, 540, 541. § Blau, 6S.

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