Mongol military campaigns, seizures of captives, and demands for labour and tribute were not the only factors that adversely affected the demographic and economic condition of north-eastern Russia. Just over a century after the Mongol invasion, the Black Death or bubonic plague reached the region. Having spread through the lands of the Golden Horde in 1346-7 to Europe, it circled back to northern Russia and reached Pskov and Novgorod in 1352. The following year the epidemic reached north-eastern Russia, where it claimed the lives of the metropolitan, the grand prince, his sons and one of his brothers. After the initial bout, the plague returned repeatedly during the following century. Chronicles reported that as many as a hundred persons died per day at the peak of the epidemic. Scholars estimate that the Russian population declined by 25 per cent as a cumulative result of the waves of plague.13
Despite the debilitating effects of conquest and plague, north-eastern Russia experienced a gradual economic recovery. Residents fled from the towns and districts that were favourite targets of Mongol attack. Thus, the capital city ofVladimir lost population and, despite the efforts of its prince Iaroslav Vsevolodich to rebuild it, recovered at a slow pace.14 But the refugees settled in other towns and districts, such as Rostov and Iaroslavl', that were situated in more remote areas. Five of eight districts that were fashioned into separate principalities between 1238 and 1300 were located beyond the former main population centres of Rostov-Suzdal'. In addition, forty new towns were founded in north-eastern Russia during the fourteenth century. Thus the demographic shift, prompted by the devastation caused by Mongol attacks, also stimulated economic growth. Among the towns and districts that benefited from the
York: Random House, 1970), pp. 56-7; Michel Roublev, 'The Periodicity of the Mongol Tribute as paid by the Russian Princes during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries', FOG 15 (1970): 7.
12 Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, pp. 108-9; Roublev, 'The Periodicity of the Mongol Tribute', 13.
13 PSRL, vol. x, pp. 217, 226; PSRL, vol. xi: PatriarshaiailiNikonovskaialetopis' (St Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaiakommissiia, 1897; reprinted Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 3; Lawrence N. Langer, 'The BlackDeathin Russia: Its Effects upon Urban Labor', RH2 (1975): 54-7,62; Gustave Alef, 'The Origins ofMuscovite Autocracy. The Age ofIvan III', FOG 39 (1986): 22-4; Gustave Alef, 'The Crisis of the Muscovite Aristocracy: A Factor in the Growth of Monarchical Power', FOG 15 (1970); reprinted in his Rulers and Nobles in Fifteenth-Century Muscovy (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), 36-8.
14 Fennell, Crisis, pp. 119-20; A. N. Nasonov, Mongoly i Rus' (Istoriia tatarskoipolitiki naRusi) (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1940; reprinted The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1969), pp. 38-9.
redistribution ofpopulation were Tver' and Moscow, which became dynamic political and economic centres of north-eastern Russia during the fourteenth
century. [12]
One visible sign of economic recovery was reflected in production by craftsmen. Despite the transfer of artisans and specialists into Mongol service, carpenters, blacksmiths, potters and other craftsmen continued to manufacture their wares in the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth century they were producing more goods than they had before the invasion.[13] Building construction, particularly of masonry fortifications and churches, was curtailed in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Only one small church of this type was built in Vladimir in the twenty-five years after the invasion. But half a century later patrons of such construction projects, including princes and, to a lesser degree, metropolitans, were able to muster the finances and skilled labour to undertake them. From the beginning of the fourteenth century new construction was occurring in north-eastern Russia. Appearing first in Tver', building projects were almost immediately also launched in its rival city Moscow. There the church ofthe Dormition, the cathedral dedicated to the Archangel Michael, and three other stone churches were erected within a decade. By the middle of the century, prosperity was similarly visible in Nizhnii Novgorod.[14]
Economic recovery was attributable, at least in part, to commercial activity. The Golden Horde, known for its brutal military subjugation of the Russians as well as their neighbours in the steppe, was part ofthe vast Mongol Empire that fostered and depended upon an extensive commercial network that stretched from China in the east to the Mediterranean Sea. Sarai became a key commercial centre in the northern branch of the segment of Great Silk Route that connected Central Asia to the Black Sea. Khan Mangu Temir (1267-81) was particularly active in developing commerce along the route that passed through his domain. To this end he granted the Genoese special trading privileges and encouraged them to found trading colonies at Kafa (Caffa) and
Sudak (Surozh, Soldaia) on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea. Using the bishop of Sarai as his envoy, he also opened diplomatic relations with Byzantium. [15]
Northern Russia was drawn into the Mongol commercial network. Goods collected as tribute and gifts for the khan and other Tatar notables were conducted down the Volga River to Sarai. But the Mongols also encouraged Russian commerce, particularly the Baltic trade conducted by the northwestern city ofNovgorod. Khan Mangu Temir pressured Grand Prince Iaroslav Iaroslavich (1263-71 /2), despite his unpopularity in Novgorod, to promote that town's commercial interaction with its German and Swedish trading partners and to guarantee its merchants the right to travel and trade their goods freely throughout Vladimir-Suzdal'.[16] Through the next century a commercial network developed that brought imported European goods through Novgorod into north-eastern Russia, then down the Volga River to Sarai. By the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century Russian merchants were conveying those imports as well as their own products down the Volga River by boat and appearing not only at Sarai, but also Astrakhan' and the Italian colonies of Tana, Kafa and Surozh. At those market centres European silver and textiles as well as Russian luxury furs and other northern goods joined the commercial traffic in silks, spices, grain and slaves that were being conducted in both eastward and westward directions along the Great Silk Road.[17] The steady flow of tribute and commercial traffic through north-eastern Russian market towns from Tver' to Nizhnii Novgorod stimulated their economic recovery and development.
It was within the framework of the economic demands and opportunities created by the Golden Horde that north-eastern Russia recovered. It was similarly under the pressures of Mongol hegemony that north-eastern Russia underwent a political reorganisation during the century following the invasion.
Table 6.1. The grand princes of Vladimir 1246-135 9
Vsevolod d. 1212
Konstantin d. 1218
Vasil'ko d. 1238
12
Janet Martin,
13
Langer, 'The Medieval Russian Town', pp. 23-4; Vernadsky,
14
Langer, 'The Medieval Russian Town', pp. 21, 23; David B. Miller, 'Monumental Building as an Indicator of Economic Trends in Northern Rus' in the Late Kievan and Mongol Periods, 1138-1462',
15
Vernadsky,
16
17
Langer, 'The Medieval Russian Town', pp. 20-1; Martin,