From the time they had first settled in eastern Europe, the Slavs had learned to treat nomad harassment as an inescapable fact of life. Indeed, by the early thirteenth century they had even managed to establish a modus vivendi with the once dreaded Cumans, with whom they now married and joined in common military ventures. But then they always had the forest where they could retreat in case of an emergency. The nomads rarely ventured into it for any length of time, and the Slavic settlers
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
cultivating land in the Oka-Volga region, not to speak of those on distant Novgorodian territories, were reasonably safe from them. The appearance in the winter of 1236-7 of Mongol horsemen deep in the forest zone caused, therefore, a shock that has never been quite erased from the collective consciousness of the Russian people. These were forward patrols of a large army headed by Baty, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who had received in inheritance as his share of the global Mongol empire all territories lying in the direction of the setting sun. Baty's men were no mere band of marauders engaged in a hit-and-run raid; they were a superb military force come to conquer and stay. Their main army penetrated the Russian forest in the spring of 1237 '^e a darkness chased by a cloud', in the words of an Arab who saw them strike elsewhere. In 1237-8 and then again in 1239-41 they ravaged Russian cities and villages, massacring all who dared to resist them. Of the major cities only Novgorod escaped destruction thanks to the spring floods which made impassable to the Mongol cavalry the swampy approaches to it. Having burned Kiev to the ground, the invaders moved westward. They would probably have conquered western Europe as well, were it not that in the summer of 1242, while encamped in Hungary, news reached them of the Great Khan's death, whereupon they headed back to Mongolia never to return.
North-east Russia and Novgorod now became tributary states of one branch of the Mongol empire, the so-called Golden Horde, whose centre was at Sarai on the Lower Volga. (Lithuania with its sizeable Russian population escaped this fate.)* The Mongols were not interested in land, least of all in forest; they wanted money and recruits. Rather than occupy Russia, as they had done in the richer and more civilized China and Iran, they imposed on it a tribute. In i257,using imported Chinese experts, they conducted the first general census of the Russian population, on the basis of which they apportioned the tribute obligations. The basic taxable unit, as in China, was the household. In addition, a turnover tax (tamga) was imposed on all commodities exchanged in trade. Each city had to accommodate Mongol officials and their armed guards whose job it was to collect the tribute, turn over taxes and recruits (mostly children) and to keep an eye on their master's interests. There was nothing to restrain these consuls and their guards from abusing the population. Russian chronicles are filled with accounts of barbarities perpetrated by them. The population sometimes rebelled (e.g. 1257-9 m Novgorod and 1262 in several of the cities), but such
The force which subjugated Russia was led by Mongols but its rank and file consisted mostly of Turkic peoples commonly known as Tatars. The Golden Horde gradually became Turkicized or 'Tatarized', and for this reason one often speaks of the 'Tatar yoke'.
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disobedience was invariably punished in a most brutal fashion.* The Mongol khan became the country's first undisputed personal sovereign. In post-1240 Russian documents he is customarily referred to as the tsar or Caesar (tsezar'), titles previously reserved for the Emperor of Byzantium. No prince could assume authority without first obtaining from him an investiture charter called iarlyk. To secure it, appanage princes had to make pilgrimages to Sarai and sometimes even to Karakorum in Mongolia. There, dressed in Mongol clothes they were required to undergo a ritualistic passage between two flames, and then kneel before the sovereign to beg for title to their votchiny. On occasion, terrible indignities were inflicted on them, and some princes lost their lives at Sarai. Iarlyki were disposed of by means of virtual auctions, the prizes going to them who promised the most money and men, and gave the best assurance of keeping the restless population under control. In effect, behaviour contrary to what may be called national interest became the prerequisite to princely authority. Closely watched by agents of the khan dispersed throughout Russia (they still kept permanent missions in Moscow in the late fifteenth century), the princes had to keep on squeezing tribute and recruits without being allowed to consider the effects of these measures on the population. Any false step, any arrears, could mean a summons to Sarai, the loss of the charter to a more compliant rival, and possibly execution. Princes who under an impulse sided with the people against the Mongol tribute-collectors - and there were such - suffered prompt retribution. In these circumstances something like a process of natural selection began to operate under which the most opportunistic and ruthless survived, and the rest went under. Collaboration, or what Karamzin called 'the base cunning of slavery', became the highest political virtue for Russians. The veche, never strong in the north-east, declined drastically after a short period of ascendancy in the twelfth century. The Mongols did not like it, seeing in the veche a troublesome focus of popular discontent, and. they prodded the princes to liquidate it. By the middle of the fourteenth century little remained of the veche except in Novgorod and Pskov. With it vanished the only institution in some measure capable of restraining political authority.
There is considerable disagreement among historians as to the effect which Mongol rule produced on Russia; some regard it as paramount,
* I do not mean to imply that the Mongols and Turks of the Golden Horde were nothing but savage barbarians. At the time, they were in almost every respect culturally superior to the Russians: as late as 1591 the English traveller Giles Fletcher described them in these terms. But as the Germans and Japanese amply demonstrated during the Second World War, people with a high level of culture at home can behave on conquered territory in an odious manner. The greater the cultural difference separating conqueror from the vanquished, the more likely is the former to regard his victim as subhuman, and to treat him as such. In the words of a Japanese proverb: 'A man away from home has no neighbours.'
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
others treat it as a mere backdrop to internal developments occurring within the appanage or 'feudal' systems. There can be scarcely any doubt, however, that domination by a foreign power, which in its worst form lasted for a century and a half, had a very debilitating effect on the political climate of Russia. It tended to isolate the princes from the population further than they were already inclined to be by the workings of the appanage system, to make them less conscious of political responsibilities, and yet more eager to use power to accumulate private properties. It also accustomed them to regard authority as by its very nature arbitrary. A prince confronted with popular dissatisfaction had merely to threaten with calling in the Mongols to secure obedience - a practice that easily grew into habit. Russian life became terribly brutalized, as witnessed by the Mongol or Turco-Tatar derivation of so many Russian words having to do with repression, such as kandaly and kaidaly (chains), nagaika (a kind of whip) and kabala (a form of slavery). The death penalty, unknown to the law codes of Kievan Rus', came in with the Mongols. During these years, the population at large first learned what the state was; that it was arbitrary and violent, that it took what it could lay its hands on and gave nothing in return, and that one had to obey it because it was strong. All of which set the stage for the peculiar type of political authority, blending native and Mongol elements, which arose in Moscow once the Golden Horde began to loosen its grip on Russia.