Mongol patronage was one of four factors that the great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii proposed to explain Moscow's rise to regional power; the others were its securing the see of the Orthodox metropolitanate by the 1320s; the dynasty's de facto primogeniture in the face of the partible inheritance practiced by its rivals; and, finally, its advantageous geographical position. Through tributaries of the rivers on which Moscow was located (the Moskva, Iauza, and Neglinnaia), Moscow could access the Caspian via the Volga, Novgorod via the upper Volga and portages and lesser rivers, and the Black Sea via the Don. Tver' was well located, but did not enjoy access to the Don.
The Qipchaq khanate at Sarai exerted strong control over the Russian center from the mid-thirteenth into the late fourteenth century. Later historians have often looked at this stage as formative of Russian history and even of Russian character. The Mongol "yoke," as they termed it, was responsible for splitting the Russian center from the lively interchanges with western Europe that Kyiv had enjoyed (Kyiv princesses married European kings, trade was brisk). The Mongols are held responsible for Russia's centralized autocracy; some say the Mongols' "Asiatic" ethos made Russians crude and barbaric (compared to Europe). These normative generalizations do not stand up to much scrutiny.
The Mongols were Turkic-speaking, steppe nomads, and they remained living in the steppe (no Tatar gravesites are found in the forested center). After the first few generations, few Mongol tax collectors and administrators ventured north; Sarai ruled through the intermediaries of the Moscow princes. The East Slavs and Finno- Ugric peoples of the forest therefore had little contact with the Mongols (unless they were so unfortunate as to be enslaved). They were farmers, the Mongols were nomads. They were Christian or animist, while the Mongols were Muslim. They did not speak the Mongolian or Turkic languages of the Mongols and their local steppe clients. All this meant that there was little intermarriage and little cultural exchange, at grass roots or elite levels. To the extent that historians can identify the "influence" of the Mongols, it is exactly where one would expect it—at the level of princely contact with the Horde. Borrowings of Turkic words into Russian from these centuries fall almost exclusively in the areas of interchange between the leadership—military, fiscal, and bureaucratic terms. The Russian word for money (dengi), for example, has Turkic roots, as do words for weaponry (saadak, sablia, tiufiak) and military commanders (ataman, esaul), and a plethora of terms about horses. Forced to pay homage frequently and leave sons at the Sarai court for years as hostages, Russia's ruling princes and their elites undoubtedly assimilated Mongol practices and concepts of rulership, just as they also had available to them potent ideas about political power and self-representation from their Orthodox religion.
RISE OF MOSCOW IN A REGIONAL VACUUM OF POWER
The political cohesion of the Qipchaq khanate began to weaken from the 1360s with internecine struggles that ended in dissolution into rival khanates by the mid- fifteenth century. This long process created a vacuum of power that sparked tremendous competition for regional primacy. It was a time of expanding trade in both the Baltic and the Black Seas (strife in the Horde relatively weakened the Volga route). Overland routes in modern day Belarus'an and Ukrainian lands through such princely centers as Velikie Luki, Toropets, Smolensk, Vilnius, Vitebsk, and Polotsk carved east-west connections with the Baltic, while towns on routes to the Black Sea also came into their own, including Chernigov (on the Desna), Smolensk, Pereiaslav, and Kyiv (all on the Dnieper). Since the late 1300s Black Sea trade had revived with Genoese colonies at Sudak and Caffa exchanging caravans with East Slavic lands to the north. In the Volga-Oka mesopotamia, merchants forged routes south, through Kolomna and Riazan' on the Oka and on to the Desna, Dnieper, Don, and Volga.
In the mid-1300s Moscow was the strongest military force in the Russian center, but faced a formidable rival in the Lithuanian Gedyminide dynasty on the Baltic (descended from Prince Gedymin, d. 1341), which took advantage of weakness in the Horde to expand aggressively east and south into modern day Belarus' and Ukraine. The Gedyminides halted their expansion south at the steppe near Kyiv around the 1360s. This brought the still pagan Lithuanians (speaking a Baltic language) into control of Orthodox Christian and East Slavic-speaking principalities descended from the Kyiv Rus' state. On the Baltic coast the Grand Duchy, as it is conventionally called in English, faced the expansionist Livonian Knights;
reaching out for military help from the Kingdom of Poland, in 1387 the Gedyminide dynasty formed an alliance with Poland and adopted Catholicism for the Lithuanian elite. They did not, however, impose Catholicism on their Ukrainian and Belarus'an Orthodox elites or peasants. Over time the dynastic union more tightly intertwined the Grand Duchy's elites with Polish culture—they adopted Polish noble and urban institutions and intensified the dynastic union into a full- fledged political federation in the "Commonwealth" in 1569. Polish and Grand Duchy lands all participated in wave upon wave of European cultural trends (Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Enlightenment); the Grand Duchy's educated Orthodox elites in turn became in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a powerful conduit of European ideas into Russia.
While Moscow was occupied consolidating its power over neighboring principalities to the mid-fifteenth century, the dissolution of the Horde changed the landscape on the lower Volga and steppe. Splinter groups of the Golden Horde claimed traditional trade emporia—khanates had arisen at Kazan by 1445 and at Astrakhan by the 1460s, both claiming charismatic descent from Chinggis Khan. The Girey clan, also Chinggisid, claimed control over the Crimea and its Black Sea steppe by 1443. While the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates were busy profiting from steady transit trade of furs and oriental goods up and down the Volga, the Crimean Tatars maintained the age-old raiding and trading steppe lifestyle, dominating the active slave trade of the region. Their merchants transported slaves from the Caucasus to their emporia; their slaving raids into East Slavic territories brought in thousands. Further to the east, in the early sixteenth century the Nogai Horde occupied steppe lands on either side of the Volga from the Sea of Azov to the Aral Sea south of the Urals, alternately raiding and trading with Russia, bringing thousands of horses annually to Muscovy for sale. South of them, the Great Horde coalesced on the lower Volga in the wake of the final destruction of Sarai by Timur (Tamerlane) in the first years of the fifteenth century. Like the Nogais, the Great Horde traded and raided as Russia gradually pushed into the steppe over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but neither established the settled political permanence of the other three khanates. Eventually, as we will see, they were co-opted into Russian service, but in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries all these forces in one way or another profited from, or harassed, transit trade down the Volga, Don, and Dnieper. Moving east, the Kuchum khanate in western Siberia similarly claimed Chinggisid legacy, but was less potent than its Kazan and Crimean counterparts.