The battle on the Kalka had been part of a reconnaissance. In 1236 the full force of the Mongol army moved west under the command of the grandson of Genghis Khan, Batu, son of Jochi. With perhaps a hundred thousand warriors at his disposal, Batu first subdued Volga Bulgaria and the Kipchaks, and then during the years of 1237 through 1240, in a series of campaigns, he smashed Vladimir and the other northeastern towns. He razed Kiev to the ground, wiping out the people or selling them into slavery. The old center of Kiev Rus was gone, and would not recover for a century and a half. Batu continued on to the west, defeating a hastily gathered army in eastern Germany, and then turning south to Hungary, a suitable terrain for a nomadic host. There Batu’s army wintered over and Europe was in panic. Suddenly in the spring of 1242 the supreme Khan Ogedei died, and the army returned home to Mongolia to participate in the succession, never to return.
The great Mongol empire soon split into four large domains (or ulus): China, Central Asia, Iran with Iraq, and the western steppe. The last was the ulus of Jochi in Mongol terminology, the heritage of Jochi’s son the conqueror Batu. The Persians and later scholars would call it the Golden Horde, while the Russians just referred to it as the Horde (or Orda, a military camp, in Mongol). The Golden Horde was a nomadic state whose center lay on the lower Volga, in the city of Sarai, near the later Stalingrad. As a nomadic state, its people followed the annual migration, wintering near the mouths of the rivers and moving north with the melting snows. This had been the pattern of the Kipchaks and the Khazars before them, but the Golden Horde was on a much grander scale. It stretched from Rumania in the west to the eastern parts of Kazakstan and included Khwarezm in Central Asia, the latter a bone of contention with the Central Asian ulus of Chagatai. Like most nomadic states, the Golden Horde included agricultural lands along the borders. One of these was Khwarezm, others were the land of the Volga Bulgarians, the Crimea, and the Rus principalities, both in the southwest and the northeast. In the Rus principalities the khans experimented with their own tax collectors, but eventually they simply required the Grand Prince of Vladimir, the nominal supreme ruler of the northeast, to send the annual tribute to Sarai. The Horde demanded tribute and obedience, nothing else. The center of attention of the Khans of the Golden Horde was not on the Rus lands but on the south, and on the contested borderlands with Central Asia (Khwarezm) and Persia (Azerbaidzhan). These were rich territories that also included important trade routes. By comparison, the northern pine forests of Rus, with their sparse population, were not much of a prize.
Thus the Rus principalities, and especially those of the northeast and Novgorod, were included on the fringes of a vast Eurasian empire. Historians often speak of this period as one of “Mongol rule,” but the term is misleading, for the actual population of the Golden Horde included almost no actual Mongols outside of the khan’s household. Batu had incorporated the Kipchaks and other Turkic peoples into his army and soon all that remained of the Mongols was the name Tatar, the name of one of the leading Mongol clans. In Russian it came to signify the nomads of the Horde and the peoples who descended from them. The language of the Horde was not Mongolian but Kipchak Turkic, the lingua franca of the steppe and of the Horde’s winter capital at Sarai. Sarai was a great city, with much of it made of felt tents and considered an important waystation on the trade route from Europe to Inner Asia and China. The population of the city included all sorts of people: Tatars, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Persians, and many of the Muslims of Central Asia. There was even an Orthodox bishop of Sarai, which became an eparchy of the metropolitanate of Kiev. The Mongols had been tolerant of various faiths, and the Horde continued this policy even after its conversion to Islam under Khan Uzbek in the 1330s.
During the succeeding centuries, life continued much as before for the people of the former Kiev Rus. The princes feuded with one another over land and power, the cities slowly came back and the churches were rebuilt. The tribute to the Horde must have been a burden, but not enough to prevent the recovery of the devastated areas. In the northeast, the main prize of political contest was the Grand Principality of Vladimir, which not only gave control of that town and its lands but a theoretical overlordship of the whole area and even of Novgorod. The Grand Principality of Vladimir was now in the gift of the khan in Sarai. Thus, Alexander Nevsky, who ruled in Vladimir (1252–1263), came to the throne after more than a decade as Novgorod’s elected prince. He went to Sarai to the khan for confirmation of his title and power. From 1304, however, Vladimir ceased to be an independent center of power, and like Kiev earlier, it became the prize in the struggle for power among the northeastern princes of Tver and Moscow. Ultimately the Moscow dynasty would secure the Vladimir land and title for itself, forming in the process the Russian state. Medieval political rivalries make dull reading for the modern reader, for they were an endless chain of petty conflicts, military and diplomatic; appeals to higher authorities; and short-lived and quickly reversed alliances.
Moscow first appears in written sources in 1147 as a small fortress, but it seems to have been Daniil, Prince of Moscow (circa 1280–1303) and grandson of Alexander Nevsky who consolidated the small territory along the Moscow River. His son Iurii Danilovich expanded that territory, but his power was limited by Prince Michael of Tver’s acquisition of the Vladimir throne in 1305. From that moment Moscow and Tver were locked in a bitter struggle for that throne that included the Moscow-inspired execution of Michael of Tver in 1318. Eventually Michael became a saint, honored most of all in Moscow. The murders and denunciations to the Horde continued until Iurii’s son Ivan (“Kalita,” the Moneybag) finally secured the Vladimir throne from Khan Uzbek in 1328 and held it until his death in 1340. His success guaranteed Moscow the leading position among the northeastern princes, and with time his descendants came to be the Grand Princes of Moscow and Vladimir. The new town had eclipsed Vladimir and Ivan proceeded to fortify Moscow with the first wooden Kremlin.
It was not only the Vladimir title and suzerainty over the Russian princes of the northeast that came to rest in Moscow. The Mongol conquest and destruction of Kiev had left the Metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the church, without a home until Metropolitan Maximos, a Greek, moved his residence to Vladimir in 1299. His successor was Peter (1306–1326), not a Greek but a nobleman from southwest Rus, who identified himself with Moscow and on his death was buried in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral. Ivan Kalita convinced his successor, the Greek Theognostos, to remain in Moscow as well. The Moscow princes now had at their sides the Metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus.
By the middle of the fourteenth century Moscow was in a secure enough position to dominate the politics of the area. It had incorporated a number of lesser principalities and exerted hegemony over almost all others. Only Novgorod had real freedom of action. The limit to the power of the Moscow princes came not from their neighbors but from the Khans of the Golden Horde; however, here as well the situation was changing, if only gradually, and it was changing in Moscow’s favor. Dmitrii Ivanovich, the grandson of Ivan Kalita, inherited these advantages when he came to the Moscow and Vladimir throne in 1359. His early years were spent building a new white-stone Kremlin in Moscow and on rivalries with other Rus princes and Lithuania. Then in 1378 he defeated a raiding party from the Horde. At that moment the Horde had its own internal problems – for the Emir Mamai, commander of the western wing of the Horde, had come to overshadow the khan himself. Mamai set out against Dmitrii to restore his own and the Horde’s prestige and power over their unruly vassal. Instead, the battle on Kulikovo field, near the upper Don River, in 1380 was a resounding victory for Dmitrii, who was ever after known as Dmitrii Donskoi.