Golden Horde

At a glance

What was the Golden Horde and when was it established?

It began as a share of an inheritance. Chinggis Khan gave his eldest son Jochi, as the Persian historian Juvaini put it, the lands from Qayaligh and Khwarazm to the far reaches of Saqsin and Bulghar, "and as far in that direction as the hoof of Tartar horse had penetrated". Jochi died before his father, probably in 1225 (older accounts say 1227), and the ulus passed to his son Batu. The full story of Jochi and his doubtful parentage is told in our article on Jochi.

The ulus became a real state only after the western campaign of 1236–1242. Batu and the general Subutai conquered the Volga Bulgars and the Kipchak steppe, took Ryazan and Vladimir in the winter of 1237–1238, and Kiev on 6 December 1240, and in 1241 struck Poland and Hungary. In 1242 Batu withdrew to the lower Volga. Historians therefore date the Golden Horde from 1242, but this is a convention; as the historian Donald Ostrowski puts it, the khanate was set up "in the 1240's after the return of the Mongol force that invaded central Europe". The campaign itself is told in our articles on the Mongol invasion of Rus' and Batu Khan.

Batu was not yet an independent ruler. He acknowledged the Great Khan in Mongolia, and some of the Rus' princes who came to him had to travel on to Karakorum: Yaroslav of Vladimir died on the way home from there in 1246. The Russian historian R. Yu. Pochekaev argues that neither Batu nor his first successors held the title of khan or real independence, and that the first true khan of the Golden Horde was Batu's grandson Mengu-Timur, from 1269. Most handbooks, however, count Batu as the first khan.

Why is it called the Golden Horde?

No one in the khanate called it that. The khans called their state the ulus (people, realm) of Jochi, or of Batu or Berke; Arabic and Persian writers spoke of the Desht-i Qipchaq; and the Rus' chronicles say only Orda, "the Horde". Ostrowski states it plainly: "we have no evidence that the Qipchaq Khanate was ever referred to as 'Golden Horde' during the time of its existence".

The phrase appears first in the Kazan History (Kazanskaia istoriia), a Muscovite account of the conquest of Kazan. Its modern editors date it to 1564–1565, though some scholars place it later. It speaks of Rus' paying tribute "to Tsar Batu in the Golden Horde" (vo Zlatuiu Ordu). In 1624 the merchant Fedot Kotov, travelling to Persia, saw the ruins of the old capital on the Akhtuba and wrote: "Here … stands the Zolotaia Orda". The name, it seems, first belonged to the khan's capital and only later to the whole state.

Where "golden" came from is not known. The Soviet historians Grekov and Yakubovsky admitted in 1941 that it was still unexplained. Three ideas are common:

• The khan's tent. Ibn Battuta saw Özbeg Khan receive his court in a "golden pavilion", and the German historian Bertold Spuler linked the name to the khan's gilded tent. But other khans had such tents too.
• The centre. The historian George Vernadsky suggested that "golden" marked a central position, which would fit the late period, when the khan's realm lay between the Crimean and Kazan khanates. Ostrowski objects that neither of those khanates was ever given a colour.
• Wealth. In the 18th century Princess Ekaterina Dashkova explained the name by the Horde's "great quantities of gold". Ostrowski calls this folk etymology.

Who were the khans of the Golden Horde?

The table follows Pochekaev's Tsari ordynskie (2012); other dates are given where the sources disagree. After 1359 the khans followed each other so fast, often several at a time, that only the main names are listed.

Two of the most powerful men in the Horde were never khans. Nogai, a great-grandson of Jochi, commanded the western wing on the lower Danube from the 1260s and made and unmade khans between 1280 and 1299; he was killed in his war with Toqta. Mamai, an emir, ruled the western half of the Horde through puppet khans from the early 1360s until his defeat at Kulikovo in 1380. Neither could take the title. Mamai was not a descendant of Chinggis Khan at all. Nogai was, but Pochekaev explains that his grandfather Bo'al, a son of Jochi, was born of a concubine, which barred all his descendants from the throne.

Who was Berke Khan?

Berke was Batu's younger brother and became khan in 1257, after the short reigns of Batu's son Sartaq and of the boy Ulaghchi. He is remembered for two things: he was the first ruler of the Horde to become a Muslim, and he went to war with his own cousin Hülegü, the Mongol ruler of Iran.

The earliest witness is the Franciscan William of Rubruck, who crossed Batu's lands in 1253–1254. He wrote that Berke "has made himself a Saracen, and he does not allow pork to be eaten in his ordu", and that Batu had moved Berke's camp to the east bank of the Volga, "not wanting Saracens to pass by where he was". When Berke became Muslim is disputed: other sources say he was raised a Muslim, or converted only after his accession. His Muslim name, according to later sources, was Jamal al-Din. In 661 AH (1262–1263), according to the Egyptian chronicler Baybars al-Mansuri, Berke's envoys reached Cairo "with the news that he had adopted Islam".

The war with Hülegü began in 1262. The Mamluk writers say the cousins fell out over Hülegü's sack of Baghdad and the killing of the caliph in 1258, and over the spoils of Persia. Berke wrote to the Mamluk sultan Baybars in 1262 and appealed to their common faith; the historian Peter Jackson calls it "the first occasion" on which "a Mongol prince showed himself ready to enter into friendly relations with an external (and still unsubdued) power on the grounds of their shared hostility towards fellow Mongols". The war went on along the Caucasus after Hülegü's death in 1265, against his son Abaqa, until Berke died near the Terek. The Ilkhanate and the Mamluk Sultanate remained enemies for decades, and the Horde and Egypt exchanged embassies for nearly a century.

Berke did not make Islam the religion of the Horde. Under his rule, and probably with his approval, the Rus' Church set up a bishopric in Sarai in 1261. "Berke khan" is still searched for today mostly because of his conversion, but in his own time he was above all the khan who turned the western Mongols against Iran.

How did the Golden Horde rule Rus'?

The khans never governed the Rus' lands directly. They left the princes in place and ruled them through three tools: the patent, the census and tribute.

The patent (yarlyk). Every prince needed the khan's patent to rule, and the grand prince of Vladimir needed it to hold the senior throne. The princes therefore travelled to the Horde, often for months, and sometimes on to Karakorum. A yarlyk was, in Ostrowski's definition, "a decree or firman of a Mongol khan". The khan could give it to a rival or take it away; the long struggle between Tver and Moscow was largely fought in the khan's camp.

The census. In the winter of 1257 the Laurentian Chronicle notes: "there was a census, and they counted all the Rus' land, except those who serve in the church". The census officials then counted "all the land of Suzdal, Ryazan and Murom" and appointed "decurions, centurions, chiliarchs and temniks", leaders of tens, hundreds, thousands and ten thousands. In 1259 the census reached Novgorod, which had escaped the conquest. The Novgorod First Chronicle records how the officials "began to ride through the streets, writing down the Christian houses", and adds bitterly that God had brought "wild beasts out of the desert to eat the flesh of the strong". Alexander Nevsky forced the city to submit.

Tribute and officials. The census fixed the tribute, which the chronicles call the vykhod, the "outgoing" payment. At first it was collected by tax farmers and by the khan's agents, the baskaks; risings against the collectors broke out in Rostov, Vladimir, Suzdal and Yaroslavl in 1262. In the 14th century the grand prince of Moscow took over the delivery of the tribute; Dmitry Donskoy's will of 1389 still provides that if "God changes the Horde", his children shall no longer "pay the vykhod to the Horde".

Judgement and punishment. The khan judged the princes, and several died in the Horde. Mikhail of Chernigov was killed at Batu's camp in 1246. Mikhail of Tver was executed on Özbeg's orders on 22 November 1318; his son Dmitry killed Yuri of Moscow at the Horde in 1325 and was executed in turn in 1326; Alexander of Tver and his son Fyodor were killed in 1339. When the people of Tver rose against the khan's envoy Shevkal in 1327, a Horde army, with Moscow's help, ravaged the principality.

The Church. The Church was protected. The census-takers, the Laurentian Chronicle says, "did not count abbots, monks, priests, choir clergy". Khan Mengu-Timur gave the metropolitan a yarlyk freeing the clergy from taxes and services; Pochekaev dates it to 1267, the older reading to 1279. Seven such patents of Golden Horde khans and khatuns survive, but only in later Russian copies, and recent studies by E. A. Maslova show that the Russian translators added Christian phrases and tax terms of their own.

What was the capital of the Golden Horde?

The capital was Sarai, "palace" in Persian, on the lower Volga. The Persian historian Juvaini wrote that Batu "abode in his own encampment, which he had set up in the region of the Etil [Volga]; and he built a town there which is called Sarai". In 1254 a servant of Batu's son told Rubruck that Batu was staying "near Sarai, the new town that Baatu is making on the Etilia". Building began around 1250.

There were two capitals, though, and where each stood is one of the open questions of the Horde's history.

Historians disagree: where were the two Sarais?

The old view, set out by Grekov and Yakubovsky in 1941, placed Batu's Old Sarai at the great ruin field of Selitrennoye near Astrakhan and the later New Sarai at Tsarevskoye on the Akhtuba near Volgograd. Recent excavations have changed this. The archaeologist S. A. Vasyutin (2026) sums up the new evidence: Selitrennoye has no layers from the second half of the 13th or the early 14th century; it is Özbeg's New Sarai (Sarai al-Jadid), founded in the 1330s. Tsarevskoye is usually identified with the town of Gulistan, which flourished under Jani Beg. Where Batu's Sarai stood is still disputed: candidates include sites near Krasny Yar and Komsomolsky in the Astrakhan region.

Ibn Battuta came to New Sarai around 1334. He called it "Sera Berekeh", the palace of Berke, and wrote, in Defrémery's French translation:

"Sera is among the most beautiful of cities, and its size is very considerable; it stands on a plain and is crammed with people; it has fine markets and wide streets."

He rode across it from early morning until after noon. There were thirteen congregational mosques, and each nation lived in its own quarter: the Mongols, "the masters of the country"; the Alans, who were Muslims; the Kipchaks, the Circassians, the Russians and the Greeks, who were Christians. Foreign merchants lived in a walled quarter of their own.

Neither Sarai survived. Timur's armies sacked the capital in 1395, Mengli Giray of Crimea in 1502, and from the 16th century the ruins served as a quarry: Kotov saw in 1624 that "all these buildings are being dismantled" for their stone.

How was the Golden Horde governed?

At the top stood the khan, who had to be a descendant of Chinggis Khan through Jochi. Beside him sat a council of four leading emirs from the great clans, the qarachi beys, and one of them, the beklaribek (emir of emirs), commanded the army. Men such as Nogai, Mamai and Edigu used that office to rule in the name of puppet khans.

The 14th-century Arabic historian al-Umari described the khan's realm as four parts: Sarai, the Crimea, Khwarazm and the Desht-i Qipchaq. The army was organised by tens, hundreds, thousands and ten thousands, the same units the census used in Rus'.

The ruling Mongols were few. Ostrowski estimates "no more than 4000 Mongols" over a population of Kipchaks, Kangli, Alans, Circassians, Rus', Armenians, Greeks, Volga Bulgars, Khwarazmians and others. The Mongol elite merged into the Kipchak majority, and the name "Tatars", which outsiders had used for the Mongols from the start, passed to the khanate's Turkic-speaking people.

Messages travelled along a network of post stations, the yam, where couriers could change horses. Jackson traces both the yam and the paiza back to the officials the Mongols took over from the Qara-Khitai. A recent study by Meriç and Paşaoğlu (2023) shows that its couriers were themselves called yam or yamchi in the Golden Horde. Officials and envoys carried a paiza, a metal tablet that proved they acted for the khan.

What was the religion of the Golden Horde?

At first the khans followed the religion of the steppe, with its sky god Tengri, shamans and ancestor cults, and they tolerated every faith. Batu's son Sartaq was reputed in the West to be a Christian; Berke was a Muslim; Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim clergy all received patents.

Islam won the court under Özbeg. The Simeon Chronicle notes under 1313 that the new khan "Ozbyak sat on the throne and became a Muslim". Pochekaev dates the official adoption of Islam to around 1320 and writes that more than 120 Chinggisid princes who refused it were executed; this figure comes from his reconstruction and cannot be checked against a surviving primary source. Even so, Özbeg protected the Church: he gave a patent to Metropolitan Peter and, on 20 March 1314, one to the Franciscans. A Russian study of 2017 in the Golden Horde Review shows that the darker picture of Özbeg's religious policy in Russian chronicles is largely later and ideological.

By the time Ibn Battuta visited, Sarai had thirteen Friday mosques. Vasyutin describes New Sarai as a state project, a city built according to Muslim norms for a Muslim population, with Islamic architecture.

What was the Golden Horde like under Özbeg?

Özbeg ruled for twenty-eight years, from 1313 to 1341, and his reign is usually seen as the high point of the Horde. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who reached his camp in 1334, called him "one of the seven greatest and most powerful kings of the world".

Ibn Battuta's account is the most vivid picture of the court. Every Friday after prayer the khan sat in a "golden pavilion", made of wooden rods covered with gold leaf, on a wooden throne "covered with plates of gilded silver". His wives sat beside him, Taytughli and Kabak on his right, Bayalun and Urduja on his left, while his sons Tinibeg and Jani Beg stood below the throne. Women of the ruling house held real power. The khatun Bayalun, said to be a daughter of the Byzantine emperor, travelled to Constantinople to give birth at her father's court, escorted by the emir Baydara and his troops, and Ibn Battuta went with her.

Under Özbeg the khan's grip on Rus' was firmest. He married his sister Konchaka to Yuri of Moscow in 1317 and gave him the grand-princely patent, had Mikhail of Tver executed in 1318, and crushed Tver in 1327. Moscow under Ivan I Kalita became the khan's main partner, which laid the foundation of its later rise.

How did the Golden Horde trade with the world?

The Horde sat on the crossroads of two trade systems: the river route along the Volga to the Caspian and Central Asia, and the sea route from the Black Sea ports to the Mediterranean. Furs, wax and slaves went south; silk, spices and cloth came north.

The Italians ran the sea trade. The Genoese built their base at Caffa in the Crimea from about 1275, and Venice had a colony at Tana at the mouth of the Don; Özbeg granted the Venetians a charter in 1332. Under a charter of 1333, Jackson notes, Venetian merchants paid a commercial tax of 3%, which the treaty of 1347 raised to 5%. The Republic of Genoa fought the khans when relations broke down: Toqta arrested the Italians in Sarai and besieged Caffa in 1307, and Nogai sacked the town in 1298 or 1299.

The khans struck their own silver coins, the dirhams, at Sarai, New Sarai, Gulistan, Bulgar, Qrim (Solkhat) and other mints. Glazed pottery, tiles and coins found in the ruins of the capitals show how rich these towns were in the 14th century.

Did the Golden Horde start the Black Death in Europe?

The Golden Horde was the first part of Europe to suffer the Black Death, but the famous story that it spread the plague on purpose rests on a single source.

In 1343 a brawl at Tana led to the expulsion of the Italians, and Jani Beg besieged Caffa, first in 1343 and again in 1345–1346. The Arab writer Ibn al-Wardi reports that plague reached "the land of Özbeg" in Rajab 747, that is October–November 1346, and emptied its villages and towns; a judge in the Crimea estimated 85,000 dead. The Italian notary Gabriele de' Mussis of Piacenza wrote that the dying Tatars "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city", and that ships from Caffa then carried the plague to Italy.

The microbiologist Mark Wheelis, who studied the account in 2002, found it plausible but noted that de' Mussis was not there: his story "is probably secondhand and is uncorroborated". Many other Crimean ports were under Tatar control, and the plague also travelled overland from Sarai and Astrakhan to the Middle East. Wheelis concluded that the siege of Caffa was unlikely to have been "seriously implicated" in bringing the plague to Europe. The historian Uli Schamiloglu argues that the depopulation caused by the plague was itself one of the causes of the political instability that followed.

What were the Great Troubles?

When Jani Beg died on 22 July 1357, the Horde entered two decades of civil war, which the Rus' chronicles call the "great turmoil" (zamiatnia velika). Jani Beg had taken Tabriz and northern Iran from the Chobanids in 1356 or 1357 (the sources differ), but he fell ill on the way home, and one tradition says his son Berdibeg strangled him. Berdibeg then killed his brothers and was himself killed in 1359.

On 28 February 1360, according to the record of a Venetian notary in Tana, the khan Qulpa and his two sons were killed in the coup of Navruz. Khan followed khan. The Soviet historian M. G. Safargaliev counted "more than 25 khans" in twenty years; Jackson writes that "sometimes as many as three or four khans vied for recognition". The line of Batu probably died out in these years.

In the west the emir Mamai ruled through his own khans. Around 1362 Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania defeated three Horde commanders at the Blue Waters, a tributary of the Southern Bug, in a campaign that, as Jackson writes, "pushed deeper into Mongol territory than any previous expedition". In 1378 a Horde army was beaten on the Vozha, and on 8 September 1380 Mamai himself was defeated at Kulikovo by Dmitry of Moscow; see our article on the Battle of Kulikovo.

How did Timur break the Golden Horde?

The man who reunited the Horde also brought about its ruin. Tokhtamysh, a Jochid prince from the eastern wing, took Sarai with the help of the Central Asian conqueror Timur, defeated what was left of Mamai's forces in 1380 and burned Moscow on 26 August 1382. Then he turned on his patron. Timur answered with two great campaigns: he defeated Tokhtamysh on the Kondurcha on 18 June 1391, and on the Terek on 15 April 1395. After the second battle his army sacked Astrakhan, Sarai and Tana. Tokhtamysh's story is told in our article on Tokhtamysh.

The Timurid Empire did not hold the steppe, but the trade towns never fully recovered, although the Russian historian S. P. Karpov has shown that Tana's trade revived surprisingly quickly after 1395. Power passed to the emir Edigu, who set up a series of khans, defeated Lithuania and Tokhtamysh on the Vorskla on 12 August 1399, and marched on Moscow in November 1408. He was killed in 1419 or 1420.

When and how did the Golden Horde end?

There was no single end. From the 1430s the Horde broke into separate khanates, each ruled by a branch of Jochi's descendants:

• Kazan on the middle Volga, founded by Ulugh Muhammad's line around 1438 or 1445 (the sources differ).
• Crimea, under Hajji Giray from the 1440s; he drove out the khan of the Horde in 1449.
• Astrakhan, founded by Mahmud around 1465–1466.
• The Nogai Horde east of the Volga, the Khanate of Sibir, the Qasim khanate (a Muscovite vassal) and, in Central Asia, the Uzbek and Kazakh khanates.

What remained around the lower Volga was called the Great Horde (Bolshaia Orda). Its khan Ahmad still demanded tribute from Moscow. In 1480 he marched against Ivan III and stood on the Ugra, a tributary of the Oka, through the autumn. On 11 November 1480 the two armies withdrew, "running from each other", as the chronicle says. Russian tradition later saw this "Stand on the Ugra" as the end of the Tatar yoke. A study of 2019 in the Golden Horde Review points out that Moscow went on paying tribute to the Tatar successor khanates, so its dependence did not simply end on the Ugra. Ahmad himself was killed in his camp on 6 January 1481 by Ibak of Tiumen and the Nogai mirzas.

The final blow came from Crimea, allied with Moscow. In June 1502, the Nikon Chronicle reports in a single line, "the Crimean tsar Mengli Giray defeated Shaykh Ahmad, tsar of the Great Horde, and took the Horde". The historian V. V. Trepavlov dates the battle to 15 June 1502, on the Sula, a tributary of the Dnieper. Mengli Giray then called himself the successor of the khans of the Golden Horde. Shaykh Ahmad fled and ended his life as a captive in Lithuania; Pochekaev dates his reign "1481/1482–1502/1528", counting his years as a claimant in exile.

What was the "Tatar yoke"?

"Tatar yoke" is the Russian name for the period of Horde rule over Rus', usually dated from 1237–1240 to 1480. The expression is much later than the period it describes. The historian Charles Halperin, summing up the research in 2025, notes that the Slavic phrase tatarskoe igo first appears in the second half of the 17th century, and that Ostrowski and Edward Keenan found Latin uses (jugum tartaricum) in foreign texts of 1521 and 1575. The Russian scholar Yu. V. Seleznev has argued from two 13th-century Latin references that the idea is older; Halperin reads these differently.

How much the Horde shaped Russia is still argued over:

• Destruction and isolation. The older Russian view, from the chronicles on, saw two centuries of tribute, raids and humiliation that held Rus' back.
• Borrowing. Ostrowski, in Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier (1998), argued that Muscovy adapted political and military institutions from the steppe.
• Cooperation. Some recent studies stress cooperation between the Horde and Rus'. Halperin (2020) objects that they "idealize Rus'–Tatar cooperation": the relationship "rested upon destructive conquest and often destructive rule", and in the Jochid ulus "the Kipchaks played a far more important role than the Rus'".

For the Tatars of the Volga and for Kazakhstan, the Ulus of Jochi is part of their own national history. The Marjani Institute of History in Kazan gave it a whole volume of its seven-volume History of the Tatars (2009).

Common myths about the Golden Horde

Timeline of the Golden Horde

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Golden Horde from 1294 to 1362 and again from 1385 to 1501; the gaps and the late start are artefacts of the map data, which samples borders at fixed dates. At 1340 on the map it stretches from the Danube to the Irtysh, south of the Rus' principalities and north of the Ilkhanate. At 1395 Timur's empire presses on it from the south. By 1480 the Crimean Khanate, Kazan, Astrakhan and the Nogai Horde stand beside the remnant of the Great Horde, and the Mongol Empire that gave birth to it is long gone.