1.68 - A ‘Mongol Yoke’?

[00:00:26] Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast, the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire. I'm your host, JP Bristow. This is Season 1, The Forest, The Steppe and the Birth of the Russian Empire.

[00:00:44] Episode 68, The Mongol Yoke. Thank you to new boyars, Cathy, Brent and Benjamin. Special thanks again to Tsar Mohanad for his generous support. And thank you to everyone subscribing through any other platform. I realise the latest member episode is a bit overdue. I've had some family things going on, culminating in my niece getting married next weekend.

[00:01:12] Don't worry though, because the episode after that will be coming quicker so that we can catch up. The next episode will complete the early Caucasus series and then we'll be moving on to the Mongol conquests of Central Asia and the Caucasus. When you think of the Mongols and Russia, several things may come to mind.

[00:01:38] You may think of the Ulus of Jochi as the Golden Horde. This is a name that actually only came into use in the 16th century. You may think of Mongol rule in Eastern Europe as the Mongol Yoke. This is a phrase that appeared even later, first in religious writings. No one used it during the actual period of Mongol rule.

[00:02:06] You may think of the Mongols as the reason for Russian autocracy, authoritarianism and imperialism, alleged backwardsness and inability to democratise, for it being somehow more Asian than European. We will certainly give that viewpoint.

[00:02:30] You may think of the Mongols as particularly cruel and savage, a barely civilised force that somehow, almost inexplicably, overran half the world through sheer numbers and violence. This one surely falls apart as soon as you compare them to almost any other empire. These stereotypes and narratives have a long history and different causes at different times.

[00:03:02] Many countries, of course, have embarrassing historical episodes that become problematic in their historiography, although Russia maybe has more than most. The role of the Mongols may be the biggest such problem in Russian history, certainly in pre-Soviet history. And this one is still going on and it applies almost as much outside Russia as within it.

[00:03:30] The question of how to adequately assess the Mongol conquest and rule of what became Russia, and the Mongol impact on Russian development, especially on aspects that are seen as different about Russia, is still ongoing. And it's not just a problem for Russia and the Slavic peoples affected by the Mongols.

[00:03:56] The Ulus of Jiuqi ran from the Sian, Altai, Tianshan mountains in the east, along the lower Seadaria, taking in Huarazim, the Pontic Steppe, Azerbaijan, Crimea, southern Rus, the dependent north-eastern Rusknežestva, the territory of Volga Bulgaria, the Urals, western and southern Siberia,

[00:04:23] covering a large and the most populous part of what will become the Russian Empire. This region was always multi-ethnic, with all the same peoples of the steppe and forest that we've been talking about. And Mongol rule meant different things to different peoples, to their histories and their identities.

[00:04:49] Histories of Russia have usually been written from the viewpoint of the Slavic populations, with the Mongol as invader and conqueror. But it's not hard to see that the steppe peoples that joined the Mongol confederation could have a very different viewpoint.

[00:05:08] And peoples that were both conquered and incorporated into the Mongol confederation could have a mixed and ambiguous attitude to this aspect of their past.

[00:05:33] If we go back to the beginning, it's clear where the problems with narratives around the Mongols come from. If we start with the Rus side, we have the various chronicles that by now were kept in every Kniasestva. Scholars have used the term conspiracy of silence to describe how the chronicles treat the Mongols. And we don't have to go too far to get an idea as to why.

[00:05:59] We've already discussed who wrote the chronicles and how their worldview affected what they cover. And the same factors still apply here. The chronicles were written by churchmen, and their primary focus was on Rus as Orthodox. They wrote about their Kniases as the Orthodox rulers of their domains, whose task was to defend and promote Orthodoxy.

[00:06:25] And they promoted their legitimacy in terms of their relationship to the church and to Orthodoxy. This meant that essentially all of their relations with the Mongols became things that the chroniclers did not want to talk about. Hence the conspiracy of silence.

[00:06:47] They did not want to talk about various church notables getting along well with the Mongols. Because the Mongols were not Orthodox, and therefore these things undermined the structure of legitimacy that the chronicles had been creating since Vladimir.

[00:07:09] Later, these relations with the Mongols will be transformed into pragmatic moves made with the intention of saving Orthodoxy. But to begin with, any mention will simply be minimized. The chronicles' position, as we've already heard in the passages quoted in the preceding episodes, was that the Mongol invasion was a punishment from God for the sins of the Rus.

[00:07:38] In this narrative, Mongol rule becomes a period of suffering and endurance, leading to national liberation led by heroic figures. Which is how it continued to be treated as a story essentially set by the church, down to the early 19th century and the development of proper history.

[00:08:03] This is not to say that we cannot gain any useful information from the chronicles. As we will see in coming episodes, what they say, what they don't say, and when they say or don't say something, combined with what we know from Mongol sources, can tell us an awful lot sometimes.

[00:08:22] The church's narrative in the chronicles was dominant through the first attempts at writing Russian history by Tatechev and Karamzin, who took much of their chronicles at face value in their work.

[00:08:38] In 1826, the Russian Academy of Science announced an award open to any historian, Russian or otherwise, of 100 gold chavonetses for the writing of a report on the consequences of the Mongol conquest of Rus, with a period of three years allowed to produce it.

[00:09:13] No one managed to submit an entry in time, and there were some complaints that the subject was too big and complex, and too many sources needed to be searched out and translated. The Academy extended the contest and restated its subject more specifically.

[00:09:33] Now it was to write the history of the Ulus of Jorchi, known as the Golden Horde, critically treated on the basis of sources including coins preserved from the Khans. The Russian, Polish, Hungarian and other chronicles, contemporary European writings, and other sources. The award was doubled to 200 gold chavonetses.

[00:10:01] In 1840, a prominent Austrian Orientalist, Josef von Hamer Perkstall, submitted his History of the Kipchak Golden Horde, that is, the Mongols in Russia. The work was a first attempt at a history of the Golden Horde, and presented it as a significant medieval state, attempting to situate it in the wider context of its time. The Academy rejected it.

[00:10:32] Officially, the claim was that it had not sufficiently investigated the sources or developed its themes. But it was somewhat strange that it was rejected outright rather than critiqued for further revision. This was because the true reasons for the rejection lay outside the qualities of the work itself.

[00:10:56] Cast your mind back all the way to episode 22, if you can, and our discussion of the Normanist controversy. Despite a few holdouts, it's no longer controversial that Scandinavians were involved in the emergence of Russ. Certainly outside of Russia and Ukraine.

[00:11:16] But back in the 18th century, when history as an academic discipline as we understand it today, was first developing and the first scholarly surveys of Eastern Slavic history were made, many found this unacceptable.

[00:11:32] It was politically inconvenient, depending on Russia's relations with the Germans, and it wounded national pride, seeming to suggest the Slavs had been unable to form a nation by themselves. Blominov's attack on foreign historians undermining Russian history and calls for patriotism was still ringing in the ears of many at the Academy.

[00:12:01] And this time, the issue was worse than some Scandinavians being the first rulers of Rus. Not only did the work break with the Orthodox narratives from the Chronicles, which had been continued in the works of Tatishev and Karamazin, it was asking Russians to consider themselves being ruled by Asians, at the height of racialised European imperialism.

[00:12:27] To some degree, the distaste was normal and understandable. No one likes to be conquered, and it can be difficult for any people to consider their conquerors objectively. But in many other ways, it was the result of Eurocentrism, prejudice, and, let's be honest, simple racism.

[00:12:53] This was not just the time of curiosity about the past and the natural world, the development of the scientific method and the application of scholarly rigour to new fields of study. There was a time when all of these things, and some of the greatest minds of the age, were used to justify the new age of imperialism, colonial subjugation, and slavery,

[00:13:17] coming up with reasons why it was natural and right for Europeans to rule the world. For the Europeans of the time, it was self-evident that Asians were culturally inferior. Therefore, what could it mean for Russians that they had been ruled by them? It became crushingly embarrassing and inexplicable that as Europeans, they had been conquered and ruled by Asians.

[00:13:47] And for both Russians and non-Russians, it became an explanation for anything seen as wrong with Russia. The attempt to confront this issue led to a split among historians. The largest group was historians that we've already encountered.

[00:14:16] Solovyov, Klutevsky, Milukov. The so-called State School, which developed the traditional narrative of Russian imperial history. Solovyov explicitly stated how he thought the matter should be treated. Quote The historian has no right to interrupt the natural sequence of events from the second half of the 13th century.

[00:14:41] In particular, the gradual transition of tribal and Knie's relations into state relations. By inserting the Tata period or emphasizing the Tata period and Tata relations. Which would obscure the main events and phenomena and the reasons behind those events and phenomena. End quote

[00:15:02] That is, the entire Mongol period is something external and unrelated to the development of Russia from Kniezhestva to Tsastva. And indeed can only distract from the actual story. Following Solovyov meant removing the history of Mongol rule from the list of subjects to be addressed in national history. And mentioning it only in passing.

[00:15:30] As something lying outside of Russian history. Albeit something that had a certain negative impact and influence. The Mongols were rather shoehorned into an overarching conceptualization of the steppe. As a constant threat faced throughout Russian history. As stated by Kluchevsky. Quote The struggle with the steppe nomad. The Paulovtsi. The evil Tata's.

[00:15:58] Lasted from the 8th to the end of the 17th centuries. And is the heaviest historical burden on the Russian people. Living as neighbours to the hostile and predatory steppe for more than a millennium. Is a circumstance that can excuse more than one European flaw in Russian history. End quote

[00:16:19] Of course, these historians were forced to admit that the Ulus was involved in the rise and ultimate success of Moscow. How could they not? But they downplayed it as much as possible. The Mongols gave Moscow the opportunity. But it was the Muscovites who made what they did of the opportunity. Despite the Mongols. Nothing to thank the Mongols for.

[00:16:47] And of course, no reason to see Moscow as one of the successors to the Mongols. In fairness, we have to admit that this kind of view of the Mongols was also widespread across Europe.

[00:17:13] One European intellectual with an interest in history whose view of the Mongols would have an impact on Russia was Karl Marx. Marx was enamoured of the phrase, the Tatar yoke. Which he wrote about while trying to demonstrate that the Tsarist regime of the time, rigid, oppressive, anti-reform, with serfdom and widespread repression, was down to Mongol rule. Quote

[00:17:42] This yoke not only suppressed, but humiliated and seared the souls of people, its victims. Tatar's established a regime where systematic terror, devastation and bloodshed were commonplace. End quote.

[00:17:59] Later, these writings would provide a justification for Soviet historians, returning to a view of the Mongols that little differed from the ecclesiastical narrative of medieval chronicles and Tatar's ship.

[00:18:12] At the same time, 19th century Russia developed its own school of orientalists who looked to sources beyond the chronicles and contemporary European writers, to sources from the Muslim world and China, and tried to consider Mongol history more objectively.

[00:18:43] From the middle of the 19th century, Ilya Biryozin, working in Kazan and later St. Petersburg, researched and translated eastern sources on the Mongols, commencing publication of the Library of Oriental Historians in 1850, and going on to produce works on the Turkish and Persian languages, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Syria.

[00:19:13] Biryozin was responsible for translating and publishing Rashid-ad-Din and Duvayne in Russian, introducing them as primary sources on the period that should be used in its study. However, we should note that his true interest lay in the languages and texts which he made available with commentaries, rather than constructing any historical narrative based on what he found there.

[00:19:42] Throughout the second half of the 19th century, Russian orientalists used their growing library of eastern works, numismatic studies and archaeology, to begin expanding knowledge of the Kipchaks, the internal organisation of the Ulus of Gyorgy, and Mongol rule across the Russian Empire, which now also included Central Asian parts of the Ilkhanet.

[00:20:10] Vol. Valdemar von Thiesenhausen was mainly a numatematist and archaeologist.

[00:20:17] After studying the coins, Arab and Persian sources available to him in Russia for several years, he spent more years travelling around Europe, looking for more sources to fill in the gaps, before publishing the first volume of his Collected Materials on the History of the Golden Horde in 1884.

[00:20:40] Like the state historians we have already heard from, he clearly articulated his position. The lack of a thorough, complete and critical history of the Golden Horde, or the Ulus of the Gyorgyz, that is, the appanage of the descendants of Gyorgyz, the elder son of Gyorgyz Khan, is one of the most important and sensitive gaps in our Russian history.

[00:21:08] Depriving us of the opportunity not only to study the course and system of this vast semi-nomadic empire that for more than two centuries controlled the destiny of Russia, but to correctly evaluate its impact on Russia, to conclusively determine what was affected by the Mongol-Tatar domination, and how it actually hampered the natural development of the Russian people. End quote.

[00:21:40] Unfortunately, Tiesenhausen died before he could publish the further planned volumes, although his notes were later compiled. His work was extremely highly rated by other Orientalists. Even in the middle of the 20th century, prominent Soviet Orientalist Alexander Jakubovsky wrote that no historian working on the history of the Golden Horde could do without the materials collected by Tiesenhausen.

[00:22:06] Naming it the standout work of the preceding century. Other late 19th century scholars continued the work. Vasily Bartold, a specialist in Islam and the Turkic peoples, wrote extensively on the Mongols in Central Asia and greatly expanded the sources available, including translating the early Arab writings on the Rus.

[00:22:32] Tatar scholar, Tatar scholar, Shihabeddin Marjani became the first Muslim admitted to the Society for Archaeology, History and Ethnography of Kazan State University, where he used Arab, Persian and Chagatai sources to study the Ulus of Giorgi in a broader framework of the history of the Bulgars, Kazars, Bashkirs and other Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire,

[00:23:02] developing his theories around the Ulus in the development of the Volga Tatars. Marjani inspired followers who examined the Golden Horde as part of the history of the Muslim world and Turkic peoples. Some of this work has been criticised for idealising the Ulus of Giorgi. Understandable given that they were writing from the position of repressed peoples rediscovering their history,

[00:23:31] but it was also important to conceptualising the Ulus as an integral part of Tatar history. Listening to all of this, you're probably wondering how what seem to be two opposing historical narratives,

[00:23:58] that of the state historians and that of the orientalists, were reconciled, and the answer is they mostly weren't and still haven't been. The problem remained in a somewhat different form into the Soviet period. For a while in the 20s, the brief period of Soviet anti-imperialism when national identity and the cultures of the peoples of Russia were celebrated

[00:24:25] in an intentional contrast to Tsarist Russia, some attempts were made to reintegrate the Mongols into Russian history. The historian Mikhail Bakrovsky was the first president of the Society of Marxist Historians, a founder of the Central State Archives of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and held other prominent state positions.

[00:24:55] He saw Tsarist Russia as the prison house of nations, declared that Russia was built on the bones of non-Russian nations, and rejected the idea of a continuous struggle between the forest and the steppe, arguing instead for the Mongols' influence on Russian culture. There was a burst of works by Tatar historians, treating the Golden Horde and its role in the formation of the Tatar people from a Marxist standpoint.

[00:25:29] The problem of reconciling the Russocentric historical narrative with the increasing knowledge of the Mongols was recognised and attempts were made to address it. In 1941, Yakubovsky published a book with the simple title of The Golden Horde, stating that it was an attempt to finally fulfil the old debt and write the unwritten history of the Golden Horde,

[00:25:54] without which we cannot understand the history of the Tatar and Crimean autonomous Soviet republics. In it, Yakubovsky sets out a history of the Ulus of Giochi as a mixed, nomadic and settled, multi-ethnic state that achieved a high level of organisation and prosperity. However, this picture was not allowed to stand on its own.

[00:26:21] For balance, the volume also included a chapter by Boris Grekov, best known as an opponent of Mikhail Khrushchevsky, which emphasised Russia's role in saving Europe from the invasion of the Tatar Hordes, described Russian suffering at length and stated that it was impossible to study the history of the Golden Horde without focusing on the extent to which it was a terror and scourge for the history of Russia.

[00:26:53] As it turned out, despite its obvious drawbacks, this book was a high-water mark. Soon the official Soviet position would swing back to a heavily Russocentric and anti-Mongol narrative. Pachorovsky was condemned as an anti-historian, his followers were called a despicable gang of fascist agents, and the ethnic cultures and histories so recently celebrated were now denounced as bourgeois nationalism.

[00:27:37] In 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued an order classifying any positive treatment of the Golden Horde in Tatar history as a nationalist error and requiring the Mongol period to be treated as the joint struggle of the Russian, Tatar and other nations of the USSR against alien invaders. The Golden Horde was declared to be parasitic,

[00:28:03] an accidental state formation without its own culture or natural development that only devastated and plundered Rus'. The East and the Turkic world was to be presented in opposition to the West, Europe and Christianity. This decree was part of deliberate narrative building that some historians have linked to Stalin's deportations.

[00:28:31] When the Crimean Tatars, Karachais, Kalmyks and other ethnic groups were deported, the deportation of the Tatars of the Volga-Ural regions was also discussed. Potential destinations were Western Siberia or the recently annexed Tuva. The Tatars were saved only by their large and dispersed population. It was possible to round up and deport a couple of hundred thousand people,

[00:29:00] but there were millions of Tatars and only around a quarter of them lived in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. There was already a history of anti-Tatar policy. The Tatars had been key supporters of the Bolsheviks in the hope of acquiring their own homeland, but the borders of the Tatar Republic had been carefully created to maintain a non-Tatar majority population

[00:29:29] and to exclude most Tatars. The Bolsheviks had no interest in creating a Tatar homeland that could potentially seek independence one day. As soon as they felt secure enough in power that they no longer needed to lean on the Tatars, they cracked down on the Tatar party and executed its leadership.

[00:29:52] It also tied into Second World War narratives. The Russian people, specifically, so the official line went, suffered foreign invasions and saved Europe from conquest. And so the official emphasis also fell on other times in Russian history when propagandists could claim that the Russian people had saved themselves or Europe by their sacrifice.

[00:30:22] Here's a couple of passages by way of example. The first is an entry on the Ulus of Giorci from the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Prokgalzen Efron published between 1890 and 1907. Quote, The Ulus of Giorci claimed a large territory that had not been fully conquered. The Kipchak steppe from the Seadaria, Kivar,

[00:30:51] part of the Caucasus, Crimea and Russia. Giorci died before the territory was divided among the heirs of Chinggis Khan, which delayed the second Mongol invasion of Russia. That task fell to the heirs of Giorci, headed by Batu. At the Kurultai in Mongolia in 1229, it was decided to send an army of 30,000 to conquer the countries to the north of the Caspian and Black Seas.

[00:31:21] For some reason the army did not depart and only the Kurultai of 1235 put the plan into action. Batu led the army with Subutai, who took part in the first invasion as his general. By 1240, Russia was conquered, along with the Caucasus to Durbent. Batu set off for Poland, then Silesia, Moravia and Hungary. He was victorious everywhere

[00:31:49] and one of his units reached Transylvania and laid it to waste. Batu turned back only upon hearing of the death of Khan Ugedei. End quote. Seems quite straightforward, objective enough, although we could certainly nitpick. Now try this entry on Batu from the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia

[00:32:19] published after World War II. Quote Batu, Sayen Khan, Mongol Khan, son of Giorci, grandson of Chinggis. After conquering the Desh to Kipchak, he headed the campaign into Eastern Europe, which was accompanied by mass extermination of the civilian population and destruction of cities. As a result of the heroic resistance of the Russian people, who courageously defended Rezan, Moscow, Vladimir,

[00:32:49] Kazelsk, Kyiv and other cities, Batu's army suffered severe losses. By the end of 1240, exhausted by Russian resistance, the Mongols continued their invasion into the ancient countries of Eastern Europe, Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Dalmatia. Meeting resistance and afraid of Russian attacks from the rear, Batu was forced to flee to the east in spring 1242. End quote.

[00:33:18] Can you feel the difference? On the basis of the Central Committee's decree, the Tatar Obelist Committee of the All-Union Communist Party also issued its decree that the Golden Horde was a barbarian state that existed only by means of violence and plundering conquered peoples, impeding the progressive development of the hard-working and freedom-loving Russian people.

[00:33:47] In the Tatar Republic, this led to the direct suppression of the history of the Golden Horde, which effectively became a forbidden subject for the next three decades. Tatar history covered the Bulgars, who then came under the control of a predatory and parasitic entity from which they were released by the heroic struggle of the Russians. Hearing the defense of dissertations by history students

[00:34:15] as this new approach came in, historian Mikhail Tigomirov told them, quote,

[00:34:44] End quote. Existing work that took a more objective view was subjected to party ideological criticism and removed from circulation. New works following the orders were published in mass editions of millions. These presented the nomads generally in entirely negative and xenophobic terms,

[00:35:13] often straying into outright racism. And these textbooks were translated into the other languages of the Soviet Union without changes and used for the education of millions of people of Turkic, Iranic, and Mongolic heritage. Yakubovsky's The Golden Horde was revised and reissued to comply with the new policy. As the post-Soviet Tatar historian Iskandir Ismailov notes,

[00:35:43] effectively they restored a combination of the state school and the old church imperial myths. The standard works on the subject became a tale of the eternal enmity of Slavs and nomads, Russian suffering under the Tatar yoke, its disastrous consequences for Russian history and the civilising role of Russia towards the people it's conquered as part of the natural process of liberating itself

[00:36:13] from the said yoke. New information started to come through again in the 1970s and 80s from numismatics and archaeology, which were somewhat outside the mainstream of historical work. Although they brought new details and knowledge, they still mainly followed the framework of the Mongols as an alien and parasitic blight on Russian history.

[00:36:45] One exception was Gumilyov, who revived the Eurasianist narrative elaborated by some exiled Russian historians, who wanted to see the former Russian Empire as its own civilisation, Eurasia, separate from both Europe and Asia, and treated the Mongols as a key part in the development of this unique civilisation. While Gumilyov's main influence

[00:37:14] on Russians lay in his crazy ideas about magic space rays, ethnogenesis, and the pernicious influence of Jews, he inspired a new generation of historians from the Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union to return to the study of the Golden Horde and its role in their history.

[00:37:47] In post-Soviet Russia, scholars gained new freedom to examine the past, but the treatment of Mongol rule remained distorted and the textbooks used in schools and universities barely improved. The Russian History school textbook by Danilov and Kasulina, published around 15 years ago and still in use, illustrates its chapter on the Mongols with a reproduction of a 13th century English miniature

[00:38:16] depicting Mongol cannibals and captioned Mongol brutality. There's no evidence that the Mongols practiced cannibalism, although calling your enemies cannibals was a standard trope of medieval propaganda. Textbooks continue to present the Mongols as somehow uniquely backwards, savage, and wild. The existence of the Ulus of Giorgi is always presented

[00:38:46] as somehow incidental to the development of the Rus Kniasestva, a backward, nomadic state that only impeded development. its centers as sad places compared to northeastern Rus and especially Moscow. This creates a problem for talking about Russian development as the Kniasis, boyars, and even church leaders were actually continually traveling to those supposedly inferior Mongol centers

[00:39:16] to do obeisance, obtain approvals for their plans, maneuver against their enemies, and legitimize their succession. It becomes difficult to understand why all the important administrative and political problems of the day had to be addressed in backwards places without culture. Now, I do have to note that over the last few decades there has been considerable advances in the study of the Mongols

[00:39:46] and there are now many historians writing about the Mongols in ways free of prejudice, Eurocentrism, and xenophobia. And it's hard for me to judge since obviously I'm interested in the Mongols myself and follow the subject, but I do think a more accurate historical image is spreading. However, I do think this does not yet extend to the Mongols in Russia. This podcast will,

[00:40:15] as its mission of telling the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire requires, be trying to tell a story that does integrate the Golden Horde into the history of the Russians and all the other peoples involved. Not necessarily a revisionist history. I won't be setting out to say, no, the Mongols were actually a wonderful peace-loving nation of scholars, but in a way that treats them just like anyone else.

[00:40:44] The Mongols killed plenty of people, soldiers and civilians, and caused widespread suffering, but there was nothing unique about this. All conquerors and invaders do this. Romans, Charlemagne, Alexander, various Chinese dynasties, the Caliphates, from the ancient world down to the European colonial empires of the modern age, and, of course, Russia. We have no reason to consider the Mongols

[00:41:13] especially cruel or savage. The Mongols were not backwards primitives who overwhelmed the civilised world through sheer numbers and violence. They had a sophisticated and highly organised society that was, maybe uniquely for its time, also open to and capable of adopting advantageous technologies and practices from the people they came into contact with. If we were going to make the argument that the Mongols

[00:41:43] are responsible for Russian autocracy and imperialism, which we won't, we would somehow have to overcome the fact that Mongolia itself is a functioning democracy, despite being surrounded by authoritarian states. Maybe they missed out on the Mongol influence. In the last couple of episodes, we've seen that the Mongols did not just roll over Eastern Europe

[00:42:12] as an unstoppable horde. There were hard-fought campaigns that had a couple of false starts before they found the right approach, and they won by being better organised, more disciplined, and intelligence operations that let them understand and take advantage of local conditions. The Ulus was a real state. It had a strong and effective central government administration, financial and taxation systems.

[00:42:43] It had an extremely effective communication system, including the Yam postal careers. Within its territory, strict governance reduced crime to a minimum and ensured the safety of travellers and ordinary residents, to the extent that this became known at the Pax Mongolica. Although this would change later, the Mongols practised religious tolerance, did not

[00:43:12] interfere in the spiritual life of their subjects, and did not prevent them using their own languages and writing systems. The Ulus of Giorgi, in particular, created the conditions for the development of what would become the Tatar language, which became the basis for an extensive record-keeping and literary culture. The Ulus preserved the local nobility, landowners, monasteries, and other parts of the societies they conquered,

[00:43:42] which enabled the preservation of identity. And although it might be hard to see amongst all the anti-nomadic invective, it also fostered the formation of urban society on a new scale in the region, with cities that had multi-ethnic populations of Kipchaks, Bulgars, Rus, Central Asians, Caucasians, and others, as well as advanced artisanal industry. We will look at how

[00:44:12] they impacted the development of the Turkic and other peoples they ruled, what their actual effect on the formation of Russian statehood was, what the negative aspects were, and whether there was anything positive, too. I'm sure we will manage to break down some stereotypes along the way. Join me next episode as Batu completes his western invasion and begins to consolidate his new Ulus.

[00:44:43] Thank you for listening, and until next time, goodbye.