The Mongol conquest of and rule over the Rus’ principalities and city-states remains a lively topic of historical research. Since 1991 both Russian and Tatar historians have made significant new contributions to our knowledge of the role of the Tatars in Russian history. This monograph by Iurii Vasil’evich Seleznev of Voronezh State University is devoted to the under-studied period of Russian-Tatar relations from 1382–1434, or approximately from after the sack of the city of Moscow by khan Tokhtamysh until the death of prince Iurii Dmitrievich of Galich two years after Horde Khan Ulug-Muhammed had ruled in favor of his nephew, grand prince Vasilii II, in their dynastic dispute.
Most of the book is a narrative of political and military relations between Rus’ and the Horde, personified by an Appendix containing a chronological register of Russian-Tatar “conflicts “ (military encounters) from 1387–1430. However, this narrative is framed by thematic sub-chapters which exceed the monograph’s stated chronological limits and raise wider issues.
The book begins with the usual obligatory surveys of historiography, which is quite selective of relevant Western publications, and sources. In general Seleznev does not regurgitate the often heated disputes among scholars on the dating of texts, such as the epic Zadonshchina, confining himself to citing secondary works, identifying alternatives, and expressing his preference. He productively draws upon his numerous previous articles, but in his Bibliography modestly lists only six of the more than forty to his credit. (Not even all these six are readily accessible in the United States.) In general he pays the most attention to recent secondary works in Russian. When appropriate he draws upon recent scholarship in archeology, numismatics, and geography, and even the Idigu (Edigei) Turkic epic.
Seleznev begins by repeating his observations on the place of the Russian principalities in the system of Horde administration and on the integration of Rus’ princes into the social and political hierarchy of the Horde. The general principles articulated here infuse the narrative which follows. One of the strengths of the monograph is precisely Seleznev’s expertise on the Horde and sensitivity to its point of view.
In the narrative core of the volume Seleznev pays scrupulous attention to the interaction of the Rus’ with their Horde overlords, tracing the ebb and flow of political relations through chronicles and princely treaties and testaments. He focuses on all the north-eastern Russian principalities, not just Moscow, which facilitates his perspective on events. He emphasizes that there was no precedent for Tokhtamysh to have kept the heirs to the thrones of Moscow, Tver’, Riazan’ and Nizhnii Novgorod-Suzdal’ as captives in the Horde during the 1380s, which Seleznev interprets as a sign not of Tokhtamysh’s strength but of his vulnerability. Seleznev highlights the interplay between inter-Rus’ and Rus’-Tatar relations; the provisions of treaties in which Tver’, Nizhnii Novgorod or Riazan’ princes promised not to deal separately with the Horde from Moscow impinged on Horde political privileges.
Seleznev presents both Rus’ policy toward the Horde and Horde policy toward Rus’ as often complex if not outrightly contradictory. He concludes that Vasilii I’s Tatar policy, given Edigei’s successful attack on Moscow in 1408, must be judged a failure. On a larger scale, Seleznev convincingly argues that the Muscovite civil war of the middle of the fifteenth century undermined progress in Rus’ aspirations toward national independence by reviving Horde influence. However, this setback should not be exaggerated. Juridically, Horde sovereignty was enhanced when Rus’ princes again traveled to the Horde for recognition of their thrones, but in practice the Rus’ princes did whatever they wanted. Payment of tribute, the defining trait of Horde sovereignty, continued until the 1470s.
Less successful is Seleznev’s presentation of the possible presence of Vasilii I in Tokhtamysh’s forces fighting Timur in the battle on the Kunchurga (Kondurcha) river, which could have been clearer.
Seleznev appreciates the social and political structure of the Horde, for example, that Edigei was not a khan and could never have aspired to become one, since he was not a Chingissid. However, Seleznev’s understanding of the place of Rus’ princes in the Horde hierarchy, itself an original contribution to the modus vivendi between Rus’ and Tatars, leads him to the somewhat formalistic observation that Vasilii I, as a Grand Prince, was hierarchically equal to Edigei, a senior or great emir (Seleznev does not call Edigei a bekliaribek, an office or status often attributed to him by historians although there is no direct source evidence) as if this explains Vasilii I’s disrespectful policy toward Edigei’s puppet khans. Surely power politics determined policy, although both sides were very sensitive to questions of status in ceremonial.
In explaining why Timur (Tamerlane) did not attack Moscow in 1395 after taking Elets, Seleznev makes good use of his analysis of the organization of the Horde to argue that Elets was part of the Horde’s core, Rus’ was not formally part of the Juchid ulus, so attacking Moscow would not have been part of Timur’s strategy. Seleznev examines the anomalous position of Chervlennyi Iar, part of the Horde administratively but ecclesiastically under the jurisdiction of the Rus’ metropolitan.
After completing his narrative Seleznev attempts to estimate the size of the population of the grand principalities of Moscow and Vladimir on the basis of the Horde tribute, and, following existing scholarship, evaluates the significance of Rus’ coinage for Russian-Tatar relations. In discussing the ideological theme of national independence, Seleznev creatively argues that the shift in a passage of the vita of Stefan of Perm’ to dating events listing the regnal years of the Byzantine Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople ahead of, instead of after, that of the Horde khan, as in earlier chronicle entries, suggests a change in the relative hierarchical status of the khan in Rus’ eyes.
The conclusion is largely summary.
This is a well-researched, professional monograph, addressed primarily to specialists, containing many original and interesting observations. The narrow chronological focus, despite the thematic flexibility, precludes addressing broader issues of the overall Tatar influence on Russian society, economy or culture or institutional borrowing, except in his historiographic introduction. One of the less obvious virtues of the book is its restraint in vocabulary. Although in his Introduction Seleznev (P. 6) does refer to “struggle of Rus’ for independence and liberation from the Tatar Yoke”, this is the only invocation of the anachronistic and value-laden term “Tatar Yoke” in the study. Similarly, Seleznev refers throughout to “the Horde”, eschewing the anachronistic term “the Golden Horde” by replacing it with the term most often found in the medieval chronicles.
Of courses many sources are subject to differing interpretations. The passage in the epic Zadonshchina that the fleeing Tatars will no longer collect tribute (vykhod) from the Rus’ refers, I think, not to termination of the tribute in principle but to the imminent death of Mamai’s Tatars. I have become skeptical that it is permissible to cite the reconstructed Trinity Chronicle as if it were a text, i.e. an actual source.
Seleznev’s conclusion that the Rus’ princes conducted censuses in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is of wider import. It strikes me as a dubious inference from paragraphs in the princely wills and treaties which refer to a written allocation of Tatar tribute. There is no other evidence that the Muscovite princes had the administrative expertise to conduct censuses or that the Rus’ ever referred to anything other than the original thirteenth-century Mongol Empire census. The referenced written source may have been no more than a tax allocation table. While Seleznev’s attempt to infer the population of the Moscow and Vladimir principalities from the amount of their tribute is imaginative, it is also very speculative, and assumes not only the validity of modern statistics on family size, even though he allows for ranges here, but also crucially that the Tatars maintained the tribute at the level of a tithe of total income, based upon the precedent of the conquest tithes exacted by Chinggis and Batu. I seriously doubt that the apportionment of the tribute was nearly that fastidious by the fourteenth century. By the same token, his assessment of the size of Tatar armies rests upon the assumption that every Chingissid, following his table of status equivalents, commanded a t’ma or tumen of 10,000 troops, and every emir 1,000. For the Mongol successor state in Iran, the Ilkhanate, this assumption is demonstrably false, a tumen could have significantly fewer troops. For the Horde, there is simply no evidence to decide the matter.
Seleznev’s fine study will be of interest not only to students of Rus’-Horde relations but to all historians dealing with Russian or Horde history during the Tatar period. It is a valuable addition to scholarship.