The History of China - #182 - Mongol 12.1: The Golden Horde

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Jochi was tasked with subduing the Cuman tribes of the western steppes. Jochi failed. Now, under the second Great Khan Ögedei, it will fall to his successor, Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde, to finish what his father could not. He won't be going alone, though. In addition to his invincible tumens, he'll bring with him a host of imperial princes, as well as the greatest commander to ever mount a steed - Subotai the Valiant, now returns to the Western expanses to finish what he began 15 years ago... Note: this is part 1 of an extended bonus episode! Find the full episode and all other Bonus Episodes by become a patron at patreon.com/thehistoryofchina Time Period Covered: ca. 1235-1240 CE Major Historical Figures: Mongol Khanate: Ögedei Khaghan (1186-1241) Subotai Ba'atuur, The Last Orlok (ca. 1176-1248) General Uriyangkhadai (1201-1272) House Ogedeid: Guyuk (1206-1248) Khadan (?) Khaidu (c. 1230-1301) House Jochi (Golden Horde): Batu Khan (ca. 1205-1255) House Tolui: Möngke (1209-1259) Bujek (?) House Chagatai: Baidar(?) Buri (d. 1252) Kipchak-Cuman Confederacy: Bachman Khan (d. 1237) Khoten Khan (d. 1241) Russian Principalities: Grand Prince Yuri II of Vladimir (1188-1238) Prince Roman of Vladimir (d. 1238) Prince Michael of Chernigov (1179-1246) Dmitri, Voivode of Kiev (?) Kingdom of Hungary: King Béla IV (1206-1270) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of Terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hey everyone, before launching in today, let me take a moment to recommend another great show for you from the Agora Network. It's called The Cannonball, and it is, in their own words,

a monthly podcast co-hosted by two well-educated autodidacts who are attempting to read all of the books in the appendix to Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. Western literature is a tremendous body, and sometimes even the most ardent bibliophile can find that they've managed to miss out on a real classic gem. And other times, well, maybe some of those so-called timeless works we might find haven't stood the rigors of time quite so well. Who can say? Well, the legendary Dr. Claude Myron Guzer and the esteemed Daniel Doherty want to have exactly that discussion. Month by month, book after book. Right now, they're on The Divine Tragedy of Fausts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But you need

not sell your soul to Mephistopheles to join in the conversation about this excellent story. Just subscribe to The Cannonball. That's cannon with one n. A proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. One more thing before launching in. Please note that this episode is marked as part one of an extended version. The full tale is available, along with all of THOC's bonus episodes, via becoming the show's patron for as little as $1 via patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina. Thank you all. Happy 2020. And now, enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Longo 12.1. The Golden Horde. The same year, for our sins, unknown tribes came, whom no one knows exactly, who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, and others say that they are those of whom Bishop

Mephidi of Patmos bore witness, that they came out of the Atrean desert, which is between east and north. For thus Mephidi says that at the end of time those are to appear whom Gideon scattered, and they shall subdue the whole land from the east to the Euphrates, and from the Tigris to the Pontus Sea, except Ethiopia. God alone knows who they are and whence they came. Very wise men know them exactly, who understand books, but we do not know who they are, but have written of them here for the sake of the memory of the Russian kings, and of the misfortune which came to them from them. For we have heard that they have captured many countries, slaughtered a quantity of the godless Yas, Obez, Keshog, and Polovets peoples, and scattered others who all died,

killed thus by the wrath of God and of his Immaculate Mother. For those cursed Pologsian people had brought much evil to the Russian land. Therefore the all-merciful God wished to destroy the Cuman peoples, godless sons of Ishmael, that they might atone for the blood of Christians which was upon them, lawless ones. From the Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 In the year 1221 or 1222, as he'd been in the midst of his campaign against the Khwarizmian Empire and its treacherous emir, Genghis Khan had bestowed on his eldest son a mission of utmost importance. The great curl tie that had rendered him the Khan of Khans had made him such of all those who dwelt upon the steps in felt tents,

and proclaimed that any who resisted this heavenly mandate of rule was thus in rebellion against Genghis's new order. Unsurprisingly, that memo had not reached everyone across the incomprehensibly vast steppes of Central Asia, and even many of those who'd heard of such a writ were little disposed to simply prostrate themselves before this hunter-gatherer from the Onon River. One such group had been known as the Kipchaks, a broad array of Turkic stepwriters

who existed far to the west of Mongolia and its newly proclaimed Great Khan. Like the Mongols, the Kipchaks were no monolithic ethnic or cultural group, but rather a broad array of loose alliances, confederations, and blood oaths among hundreds of Turkic tribes across the region, and whose recorded names were as many and varied as the settled societies bordering the territories cared to list. Kipchak, Cuman, Polovtsian, Oguz, Pecheneg, Bolgar, Bashkir, Kimek, Karluk, Karakizhai, Kezar, Zhuyue Shi, Zhuyantuo. Elements of all these peoples would be associated with the Umbrella Confederation called Kipchak-Kumen, as of the dawn of the 13th century.

As Genghis had begun his assault on the Khwarazmian Empire's holdings, he had learned of these steppe peoples who yet existed beyond his grasp, in large part from his two top generals' great cavalry ride across the Caucasus and then back across First Russian and then Kipchak lands. Genghis had been enraged that not only had the Kipchaks rebuffed his appeal that they join his empire freely and of their own accord, but that they had instead attacked his soldiers and sided with the enemies of the Mongols time and again,

first with Ikhara Khitai and now with the Persians against Mongolian vengeance. Such defiance of his will by a people who dwelt in tents of felt, and thus needs must be under his dominion, was intolerable to the great Khan. As such, he dispatched his eldest son, Joche, to ride forth with the war banners of the Mongol Empire into the heart of the Kipchak-Kumen, and bring his father's justice to them with flame and steel. Jocha, as it turned out, proved rather less than eager to enact any such vengeance against the Kipchak, but instead seemed to prefer brooding away the months in his own camp, writing angsty entries into his diary about how mean his dad was,

how rude his brothers were to him, and how unfair it was that he'd been passed over for the succession to the throne in favor of his drunkard third brother, Ogedei. And when both Jocha and Genghis had followed each other into death one after the other in 1226-1227, what little effort had even previously been actually devoted to that campaign was abandoned completely. It would take the accession of a new great Khan to bring renewed vitality into that long-deprived arm of the Mongol war machine. For the time being, the Kipchaks and those who lay beyond in the cities and woods of stone, the Rus, could breathe easy. No new military operations could be undertaken, after all, prior to the formal election of the second Great Khan, Ogedei, which would only be held as of 1229. Even after his election as Khan, Ogedei first turned his attentions onto consolidating and

renewing his empire's military campaigns that had already been open, namely those theaters against the Jin Empire to the east and the resurgent Persian resistance across the southwest. Thus, it would wind up being more than seven years before the Mongols' attentions were once again refocused on the steppes of northwestern Asia and the people who resided in it and beyond it. The great Khan Ogedei had taken careful stock of the invaluable intelligence Subutai and Jeb's great cavalry raid had provided the Mongol Empire about the state of the peoples and their defenses and fortifications. He therefore was willing and able to take the necessary time and energy to plan for

an outfit of force that he deemed sufficient to take, hold, and permanently subdue such a vast addition to his holdings, even as the other Mongol warfronts continued to rage on across Asia, one fighting in Persia and the Caucasus, another subduing rebellion across Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, while the army of the southeast had traded one foe, the Dechangjin, which had been formally annexed as of 1234, for another, the southern Song out of Hangzhou. What would become known as the Russian Campaign would therefore be the fourth theater of operations overseen by Ogedei's empire. The Great Khan assembled a vast force for the task, purportedly some 120,000 to 150,000 strong,

a number arrived at as necessary by his intelligence officers, having both carefully studied the reports of the Great Raid, as well as the intermittent updates and outlooks provided by the Venetian traders Subutai had wisely entered into a compact with on the Crimean coast of the Sea of Azov. He'd done this along the Black Sea in exchange for wiping out their Italian rivals in the region and guaranteeing them trade protections. This 150,000-man army would not only subdue the Kipchak rebels and the Rus cities that allied with them, but would also serve as the initial force of an even grander project. With this first spear thrust, his initial intelligence officers informed the

Great Khan. The Mongol armies would then be poised, pending reinforcements and levying further troops from the conquered populations, of course, to expand the writ of the Great Khan's rule not only to the Ural Mountains, but beyond, all the way to the great ocean of the far west of the world, and conquering entirely the backward, bickering peoples of Europe who stood in between. It would take, all in all, his agents informed him, some 16 to 18 years of continuous pushing, and then he would truly have completed what his father had begun. Ogedei Khan would rule the entire world. This was no simple feat. In fact, Ogedei was keenly aware that it was the greatest and most ambitious conquest the Mongols had ever

undertaken. From Frank MacLean, quote, Relatively speaking, both the Jin realm and the empire of Khwarizmia were on Mongolia's doorstep. But in this case, Ogedei's armies would be operating at least 8,000 miles from their home base, with all the massive logistical and commissariat problems such huge distances would engender. As such, the Great Khan took his painstaking time in planning and accounting for this, his greatest campaign. Again from McLean, In 1235, Ogade held a great curl tie on the slopes of Mount Dalandaba, which means the Seventy Passes, in Mongolia. The Khan, who, if he'd known anything about the Romans, would have approved of their motto, Festina Lente, make haste slowly,

spent a leisurely month alternating carousing with his grand council. Finally, he announced that, with the wars against Jalal al-Din, Jin China, and Korea all successfully completed, the next target for the Mongols would be Russia and Eastern Europe. The imperial tax on horses, previously requiring 1 out of every 100, was now raised to 1 out of every 10, and a brand new tax on cattle at a rate of 1 out of every 100 was added into the legal code. In terms of meeting the required estimated manpower, every Khanate, sub-Khanate, appanage, city, and town was required

to supply troops commiserate with their population. By 1234, this fourth Mongol army stood at the ready, needing only the appointment of its commanders to lead it to victory and conquest. This honor would be given, as per Genghis's initial command that it be Joche and his family that mete out punishment on the Kipchak peoples and then rule over them, now to the scion of Joche, his son Batu of the Golden Horde. Having a prince of the blood and a Khan beside certainly served to lend credibility and prestige to the undertaking. Moreover, he was given an honor guard of some 4,000 Kashyyyk immortals to serve as his own personal bodyguard and command staff. Even so, Ogedei well understood that his nephew, who was perhaps not even 30 years old yet,

still lacked the sufficient experience to adequately lead such a vast force for such a monumental undertaking. He therefore appointed as Batu's chief of staff and operational field commander, or orlok, the most able and experienced of all the soldiers of the realm, Subutai Batur, the Valiant, now at fifty-nine years old, the battle-hardened veteran of a dozen or more campaigns. MacLean writes, however, that, quote, Until 1231, this hesitancy to make full use of the Ba'atur was countered by Subutai's own champion among the imperial family, no less than Genghis's youngest and most martially-oriented son, Tolui. Tolui had argued, first to his father and now to his brother, that Subutai was no prima donna, but simply that he did not suffer fools in any of his staff.

Though Ogedei would never hold much love in his heart for Subutai, and indeed we're told that he wanted to actually personally command the host against Russia, such a course of action had been strenuously opposed by his little brother at his Kurotai in 1229. And Ogade apparently cherished and respected his little brother's appraisal, as well as his defense of the great general, enough that he was at last won around to assigning him to such a pivotal command role in his stead. Rounding out this general staff to this momentous operation were Manka and Bujek, both sons of the now dear departed Tolui, Baidar and Buri, the son and grandson respectively of Chagatai, Guyuk, Karan, and Kaidu, the two sons and grandson respectively of Ogedei, as well as General Subutai's own son, Oryankarai. Before moving forward, it feels important to hammer home once more a pivotal plank of the why of this new round of conquest.

That is, why start a new round of conquest at all? Why not simply be content with the now truly unimaginably vast holdings that they already possessed? Why not leave Russia and Europe well enough alone? After all, unlike Song China, the pretext to war would have been built for the Russian steps on the flimsiest and most heavily manufactured of pretexts. Often, this is dismissed in one of two ways. Either that the Mongols simply found that they had such a taste for such things that they couldn't stop once they'd begun, or that some sense of divinely ordained manifest destiny impelled them to fulfill this rule over the four corners of the world begun by Genghis. Neither of these is entirely in the wrong, but it does bear giving such easy

rationales a harder look. As we've seen in the course of this mini-series, the Mongol Empire had very early on fallen prey to that most imperial of maladies. It's frequently referred to as the Conor de Marist model of empires, and it lays a strong case that the very reasons, rationales, and strengths that first impel a conquest empire to power and glory ultimately ensure that it remains ever after an inherently unstable enterprise that must either continue to grow and grow forever, or else begin consuming itself from within. Even before the end of his life, Genghis Khan had seen the rapacity that had overtaken almost all of his kinsmen.

Once simple herdsmen that had been sated by the most basic of sustenance and needed only firm, hard ground to sleep upon, they now demanded only the finest of foods, spices, liquors, and comforts, and all with ever greater neediness and demanding for yet more. It was the classic hedonic treadmill. Too much would never be enough. And there was little enough that even one so powerful as the great Khan Ogedei could do about it, even if he'd so desired.

MacLynn writes, As more and more Mongol princes, begotten as a result of Genghis's policy of intermarriage, reached adulthood, they demanded the wealth and privileges, the lands and appanages of the previous generation. These aspirations had to be satisfied or a dangerous pre-Civil War situation would arise.

In short, by having grown and rendered the fruits of such victory the new normal, the Mongols now had to keep growing or else face immediate decline, a decline that would herald the violent end and overthrow of whichever branch of the Borjigin household had precipitated it first and foremost, and no one wanted to be that guy. Meanwhile, far to the west, the boyars and princes of the Russian principalities had been given due warning back in 1222-1223, when none other than Subutai himself, his second-in-command, Jeb the Arrow, and the 25,000-strong scouting force had laid waste to Kievan Rus, and in such a stunningly cruel and thorough manner,

that many of the surviving princes had up and fled Russia forever rather than risk ever facing down the Mongols, or as they'd come to know them, the Tartars, ever again. We might reasonably expect, therefore, that when the expected coup de grace never came and an unexpected, uncomfortable respite from the carnage had instead fallen over the Russian territories, that its remaining princes and populace would then band together, bolster their defenses however they could, and get the word out to everyone else that there was a monstrous force that existentially threatened all of Christendom. Yet this did not prove to be the case. By the end of the Mongol invasion, as of 1236, the Russian principalities were still, in the words of Richard A. Gabriel,

a nation of vast forests, swamps, and plains inhabited on the eastern periphery by a number of semi-barbarian and pagan tribes. Within Russia proper, there was no national authority. The country was divided into a number of small and weak principalities. Feudalism reigned, with little, real sense of ethnic or political solidarity or cohesion at even the best of times. In fact, between the beginning of Russia's oldest extant history, the Chronicle of Novgorod in the early 11th century, and the initial Mongol rampage in 1223-1224, quote, Russia had endured 83 civil wars between principalities, and it had been invaded no fewer than 46 times from east or west, end quote.

So it is both shocking, and yet somehow completely par for the course, that when the Mongol death blow never came after the disastrous Battle of the Kalka River, but instead Subutai, Jeb, and their army continued eastward to report back to the awaiting Genghis of their reconnaissance, the Russian princes essentially shrugged their collective soldiers and said, well that was weird, probably won't happen again though, and went right back to knifing each other in the back. They did not, could not, know who, or even what, the Mongols were, much less their objectives, motivations, or designs. They were, as the Chronicle of Novgorod put it,

in terms the Mongols would surely have found to their own satisfaction, nothing less than the wrath of an angry god himself for sins the Russians must have committed against his divine majesty. And they'd been castigated harshly, but now that punishment was over, and the demonic Tartars had been sent back to their home in Tartarus. Such an utter lack of information was not a problem that the Mongols had. As I mentioned before, Subutai and Jeb had left littered in their wake amidst the carnage and destruction hundreds, if not thousands, of sleeper agents and informants who secreted information back to the Mongol intelligence service.

That is to say, they had eyes on the inside and knew precisely how and where the Rus could be best exploited. The key to victory over the Rus, they determined, lay in maximum exploitation of two of the Mongols' favorite strategies, unrivaled speed and aggressive diplomacy. They knew that the Russian princes were loath to cooperate with one another, and would be slow even under dire threat to thus pool their resources or defenses. Moreover, this endemic sluggishness would be exacerbated for the Russians by their own infrastructural backwardness, even for the 13th century.

Quote, Russia was a country almost without serviceable roads that could be used as axes of advance. Enormous distances, severe climatic conditions, and the scarcity of stone account for the fact that ballasted roads appeared in Russia only shortly before the railroads. End quote. In the springs and autumns, known as the Rasputitsa season, what few dirt roads existed across Russia were rendered utterly impassable by the torrential rains or thawing snows, turning them into mud slogs deep and thick enough to mire down, say,

even Napoleonic artillery or German panzer tanks. The height of summer dried these roads out, but typically left them so becradered that they were likewise near impassable, and the winters were so bitter that only a suicidally insane person would condemn their army by commanding that they march during that season. This was certainly no cup of tea for the denizens of the Russian principalities, but it had been, and would for centuries thereafter be, proved to be an even greater obstacle to invading armies. With only brief pockets of time that any conventional force could even move, much less operate, amidst the endless expanse of Central Asia beyond the Urals, well, to put it in the words of the Wehrmacht field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in 1942, quote, So, Russia is pretty much just out-and-out unconquerable year-round.

Unless, of course, you are, wait for it, the Mongols. I mean, yeah, rain sucks, and they hated heat as much as anyone. But cold? The bitter freezing Russian cold that, say, could reduce a 19th century pan-European ground army by 80%? Baby, that is prime campaign season for the Mongols. Frozen lakes, rivers, bogs, and swamps don't just become traversable on horseback, but essentially become superhighways straight to each and every one of

the cities, since, after all, most cities tend to like having a regular supply of water right nearby. Winter was therefore not only no obstacle to Mongol invasion tactics, but positively enhanced it. While every other commander on Earth would have long since settled into winter quarters to wait out that fatal freeze, the Mongol troops just needed to close up their sable fur-lined heavy deals, flip down the old wolfskin ear flaps, and it was conquering time. It was thus in the winter of 1236-37 that, incomprehensibly to the Russian princes, who'd long since huddled themselves into their cities and castles for the winter, that the Mongol military operations began against them. Ogedei, in a fashion typical to him as well as his lord father Genghis,

masked his true intentions and target by dispatching a small raiding party to Sindh, a province on the furthest southern reaches of modern Pakistan that abuts the Indian Ocean. It was convincing enough of a feint, at least, that it would prompt the Sultan of Delhi to respond with a token of submission to the Khanate that same year. In truth, however, the first primary objective would be the destruction of the Volga-Bulgar Kingdom at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Those same Bulgars who had so vexed Subutai during his return trip to Genghis back in 1224, and had thereafter continued to prove themselves a thorn in the side of the Mongols that had as yet proved impossible to pry loose. This was no mere revenge kick, though that certainly couldn't have hurt in the old field

commander's eyes, but rather a key strategic target aimed at neutralizing all of the potentially very troublesome nomadic tribes to the east of the Volga in one fell swoop. Batu would lead the vanguard westward in late 1235, followed the subsequent February to March by the main force led by Subutai. From Gabriel, quote, Subutai sent his soldiers to subjugate all the peoples east of the Volga between the Kama River and the Caspian, destroying their towns, slaying their inhabitants, and taking many of their men prisoner. By one account, the destruction of the capital city occasioned the death of 50,000 people. End quote. Appomattox Courthouse, from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877, from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era

in American history. I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for the Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. The measure of his revenge for their humiliation of him back in 1224 would be repaid in full. Of that much, Subutai would make certain. The utter destruction of their capital, called Bulgar, permanently ended their role as middlemen of trade across Central Asia. Systematically looting and destroying every single inhabited city and tribal camp up and down the

Volga, Subutai and Batu swiftly completed their objective, and in the process are estimated to have slaughtered four out of every five Bulgars along the Volga. In any event, all who remained now knelt in submission and terror before the absolute might of the Mongol Khanate. All, that is, save for those who had managed to flee westward, seeking refuge and allies from amongst those that they'd so recently been raiders and thieves, the Russian principalities. Before engaging in the pursuit of the fleeing Bulgars, Subutai felt it both necessary and proper to blood those princes under his protection and charge,

before committing them to the realities of the Russian campaigns yet to come. By following up the extermination on the Volga, we're meeting out similar fates to the Cuman tribes of the south. No less ferocious or skilled in the horse and bow than their Volga-Bulgar or even Mongol counterparts, the Cumans differentiated themselves from the Bulgars primarily by having retained their traditional Tangriest shamanism, whereas the Bulgars had long since adopted Islam. The Mongols ripped through the Cuman lands, with the most significant resistance brought against the contingent commanded by the future Great Khan, Monka. The Cuman chieftain in command of this force was called Bachman. Bachman had taken his warriors into the hills and wilds, making effective use of guerrilla tactics rather than committing themselves

to any outright battle. In response, Manka, who was then about 26 or 27, employed the tactic of batue, that is, driving game animals in a desired direction by beating drums or otherwise making oneself known and heard in every direction but that one. Using a flotilla of more than 200 riverboats up and down the Volga, in conjunction with his mounted cavalry, Manka proved his battlefield genius by gradually encircling and then tightening the noose around Bachmann and his guerrilla fighters. At last, in the course of a search,

a contingent of Manka's troops came upon evidence of a camp that had only recently been abandoned. Sensing their quarry was near, the Mongols questioned an old lady nearby, who told them that the Cuman warlord was hiding out with his men on a nearby mid-river island. Without ships of their own to cross, the Mongols, so the story goes, were rather miraculously able to ford the river on foot when a high wind lowered the water level enough for them to cross. Taking the Cuman contingent completely by surprise, they commenced with slaughtering almost all of them, or watched as they ran into the waters of the Volga, only to drown. Bachmann himself was taken alive and made the Mongols captive, who bore him under Monca's

presence. Having apparently already heard about the wind miracle Mungka was overjoyed at his turn of good fortune, exclaiming that, quote, Heaven has opened my way. When he commanded Bachmann to kneel before him, however, the warlord only scoffed. I have myself been a king, and do not fear death. I'm no camel that I should kneel. He went on to taunt the Mongol commander

that the men they'd left back at the small island would be trapped there when the waters rose. His joy turning to rage, Manka turned to his brother, Bujak, and commanded him to cut the prisoner in half with his giant sword. So ended Cuman resistance, and with it, by autumn of 1237, all potential enemies across the steppes east of the Russian principalities. It was to them that Batu and Subutai now turned their full attention. MacLynn makes no secrets of his disdain for the sheer lack of preparation shown

by the princes of Rus, in spite of the tremendous lead time they'd received. He writes, quote, Although the Russians had had at least a year's warning of grave danger on their eastern borders, they had done nothing, perhaps thinking the Mongol-Cuman clash was some kind of civil war within the domains of their old enemy, the Polovtsians. In many ways, the prelude to the Great Russian Invasion of 1237-1240 was uncannily like the run-up to Subutai and Jeb's Great Raid 15 years earlier, with the period of 1223-1237 a carbon copy of 1200-1222. The same petty factionalism, complacency, and lack of interest in the interloper's identity on display in the earlier period was repeated."

In the years immediately leading up to the Mongol invasion of Russia, in fact, several of the region's key boyar princes had allowed their factional conflicts to erupt into a costly and draining civil war, pitting Galicia and Volhynia, led by Daniel Romanovich, against the princes of Smolensk and Michael of Chernigov in the south, while the princes of the north, in regions like Novgorod and Suzdalia, played puppet master with their southern brethren and stoked the fires of the internecine conflict. The takeaway of all this was that by 1235, southern Russia had exhausted itself in civil war after civil war, leading the northern states to have emerged as the most powerful players in Rus'.

Had the Russian princes proved themselves capable of uniting to face their collective and clearly looming threat from the east, there is a chance that they might have been able to field a force of as many as 100,000. Any such estimation, however, is moot, since instead the Russian princes continued to bicker and squabble amongst themselves even as the Mongol tidal wave crashed down upon them. Rather, just as their intelligence agents had predicted, Subutai and Batu were able to pick and choose individual principalities at will, surrounding, isolating, and destroying them one by one

as the others did little but look on. The Mongols were even able to enjoy a, for them, rare treat of fielding superior numbers against a foe in battle. And not just once, but time and again. From McLean, quote, With a predatory cunning, the Mongol high command decided that they should remove the most powerful enemy piece from the board first. Striking in the depth of winter and using the frozen waterways, so often relied upon by the princes to protect themselves, instead as a mainline directly to their city gates, the Mongols pulled their heavy equipment and siege engines via ice-top sleds right up to the gates of their first target, the citadel city of Ryazan, some 200 miles southwest of Moscow, then just a nothing village. Within the city's walls was the ruling prince Yuri, as well as his younger brother Roman. With their forces displayed without,

Subutai sent forth his messengers in classic Mongol fashion, with a simple surrender or die missive, the surrender to be accompanied by a quote-unquote tithing of the entirety of the city's wealth to the Great Khan as a token of submission, a one-time offer that was flatly rejected by the princely brothers. Thus did the siege of Riazan commence, and it did not last long. Opening the siege on December 16th, 1237, Subutai methodically surrounded the city walls with a palisade of his own, to better ensure that none of his quarry might escape. It would not prove to be an extended affair. After just five

days, the fortifications were breached and the city fell, resulting in the by now typical widespread massacre of the population. Prince Roman had managed to secret himself away from the doomed city, and while it burned, he was halfway to Moscow in Kolomna. His brother was not so fortunate. Prince Yuri of Vladimir and the whole of his family were captured and executed by the Mongol conquerors. One Russian chronicler would lament in The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan, quote,

They burned this holy city and all its beauty and wealth, and the churches of God were destroyed, and much blood was spilled on the holy altars, and not one man remained alive in the city. All were dead, and there was not even anyone to mourn the dead, end quote. Wrote another chronicler, quote, some were impaled, or had nails or splinters of wood driven under their fingernails. Priests were roasted alive, and nuns and maidens ravished in the churches in front of their relatives. Prince Roman's flight to Columna, however, would buy him precious little time. Though reinforcements were sent from Vladimir, by the time they had arrived, it proved too late. Columna had been

taken and sacked with all the viciousness that had befallen Riazan. Perhaps even more brutal, in the course of the fighting, one of Genghis Khan's favored son-in-laws, known as Togashar, was slain. This impelled the Mongols to even greater heights of brutal revenge as they proceeded onward to Moscow

again, then nothing more than an insignificant fishing village, and sacked it, along with 14 fourteen other towns in a lightning campaign. The outskirts of the principality taken, it was then time to take the fight to the capital, Vladimir's city itself. Commanded by two of the Grand Duke's sons, the city had a better showing than Ryazan or any of the other sacked cities so far, managing to hold out for eight days against the relentless pounding of the catapults, and then the scaling ladders against the outer walls.

Finally, on the morning of February 7th, the city defenses buckled in four places amidst a massive assault, resulting in an end to any significant opposition by noon. The citadel within would hold out for a further 24 hours, until it too was overrun. Outside of the temporary safety of the citadel, though, the trapped residents of the city did what little they could to stave off the doom that was upon them. Many of them, including all the female members of Prince Yuri's family, sought refuge in the city's Cathedral of the Assumption, praying that the Mongols would abide by Christian customs regarding church sanctity.

They would swiftly learn that the writers either didn't know about or didn't care about any of that, as the cathedral was set alight, burning everyone within alive. Grand Prince Yuri would escape the carnage of Vladimir, but virtually alone. Yet again, it was to little end. Finally, the Mongols ran Yuri himself into the earth at the river Sit, on the 4th of March, 1238. The lackluster Yuri was trying to make contact with his brother's army, and prepared no contingency plans in the event of being intercepted by the Mongols, and, not surprisingly, was heavily defeated. He himself joined the growing roster of royal

Russian casualties, and perhaps he was glad to die, given that his entire family had perished, most of them in the conflagration at Vladimir, end quote. Though the Mongol commanders claimed to have captured and executed him, apparently he was actually beheaded by his own men, who panicked and thought that they might be able to buy their way out of their looming fate by offering Yuri up as a sacrificial victim to their pursuers. Suffice it to say, it did not work out well for them. Vladimir and its holdings now ground under heel, Subutai split his forces into two.

Matu would command one half to the northeast, while Subutai would head northwest with his, toward Novgorod. Materially interested as any Mongol invasion was, Novgorod was an obvious target because it was the thriving hub of commerce, and especially skilled artisans of all sorts. Leatherworkers, shoemakers, bone carvers, painters, spinners, weavers, bakers, brewers, fishermen, smithies of silver, copper, iron, and steel, engravers, jewelers, and many others beside. MacLynn writes that the bounty of skilled laborers within the walls of Novgorod was such that, quote, if the Mongols had followed their usual practice of transporting all skilled workers in a city, they would have had to transfer two-thirds of the city to Mongolia,

end quote. Subutai would, once again, target the outlying communities and cities of the territory in order to wear down Novgorod's southeast. When the Mongol force appeared on the horizon, the defenders of Torzok sent desperate pleas to the capital, begging for assistance. Their missives would fall on largely deaf ears, however, since, quote, Novgorodians had a reputation for callous selfishness. They had been conspicuously absent at Khalkha in 1222, and never displayed solidarity with the other Russian princes, end quote. So here too now, the city dwellers shut their own gates and left the

outlying townspeople to their fates. Any lesson that might have ever been learned from the debacle of the Kalka River a decade and a half prior had clearly been long forgotten. For all they'd been abandoned by their own capital, the denizens of Torjok nevertheless put up a tremendous resistance. While Riazan had held out for five days and Vladimir for eight, tiny Torjok held out alone against the onslaught for a full two weeks before their defenses were at last overrun on March 23rd. The valorous defense did not prove their salvation, however, and once in the Mongols' power, they met the same grim fate as every other conquered city.

Novgorod itself was the next obvious target on Subutai's to-kill list, yet some 55 miles away from the city, he suddenly turned back. Reading through the accounts of the Novgorodians, they tell that the infamous Rasputitsa spring thaw had made the roads too muddy and impassable for the Mongol horses and artillery, necessitating the withdrawal of the invasion force. In fact, this was a clever propaganda campaign put forth later by the city to hide from the other Russian principalities a far more embarrassing truth, that there had been no thaw that early in the year, and that wasn't due for at least another month's time. Instead, what had turned the Mongol force away from Novgorod was the submission by the city of a massive payment to Subutai, along with the promise that it would continue to pay tribute as a vassal territory of the empire. Subadai had not yet arrived at the city walls, and had neither sent for his usual token emissary

to make a demand, nor taken the time and effort to set up and deploy the siege equipment. Thus, Novgorod had met the Mongol requirement of surrendering forthwith and completely, all without requiring an assault. They were thus allowed to keep their lives as subjects of the Khanate. Subutai turned south. Batu had a less pleasant time of things in the course of his own campaign. Thinking the town of Kozelsk would prove an easy target, Batu wound up bogged down in a seven-week-long siege against the city. At last, he was forced to swallow his pride and send a messenger to Subutai, begging the general to send him aid and reinforcement.

When they were duly dispatched and the city finally breached and taken, Batu unleashed his rage on the city for having been forced to so shame himself to Subutai, ordering that there be no survivors left whatsoever. With Kozelsk annihilated and Novgorod prostrate in submission, Subutai and Batu rejoined their armies and called it a campaign season. The spring muds were coming in truth, to be followed by the intolerable summer heat, which would make further conquest difficult and even less pleasant than usual. Instead, the Mongol army retired for the remainder of 1238 and most of the following year to

the steppes west of the river Don. While there, and allowing their steeds and men both to rest, recuperate, and fatten up, Subutai took the opportunity to call for fresh horses from Mongolia to replace those lost so far, while his army was replaced with captives taken from amongst the captured Cuman and other steppe peoples who'd submitted to the Mongol yoke. This wasn't all to say that the soldiery was doing nothing at all during this furlough. They were rotated through periods of relaxation and periods of duty, consisting of garrisoning their captured cities, while others conducted minor campaigns against the remaining

elements of the Cumans and into the Caucasus, in order to let their younger, less experienced commanders get some much-needed field experience, and to keep the soldiers in fighting form. Shiban and Bori successfully took Sudak in Crimea, or rather retook it since Subedai and Jeb had already sacked the city 15 years prior, while Manka led a contingent to capture the city of the Alans, Magas. Burka was sent directly against the Cumans, and he resoundingly defeated them time and again, ultimately causing their chieftain to rally some 40,000 survivors and flee southwest across the Danube River and through Bulgaria, and then into Thrace, wreaking their own widespread havoc upon the settled population as they went.

Finally reaching the borders of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1239, the Cuman chieftain, Khotan, sent a message to its king, the recently enthroned Bela IV. Promising that he would lead his people in a mass conversion to Christianity should the Hungarian monarch grant them entry and settlement into his lands, Khotan was able to convince Bela to agree to these terms, together with a vow that the Cumans would in turn fight for Hungary when and if the Mongols arrived at the Hungarian doorstep. It would prove a fateful decision for Bela and his Magyar kingdom. In the meantime, the army of Subutai and Batu had set about and largely succeeded in both pacifying the majority of the Western Asian steppe, as well as securing their

rear against possible counter-assault. MacLynn writes, quote, lesser commanders might have been tempted to achieve the conquest of southern Russia prematurely, but Subutai bided his time. The year 1239 was one of those when, it seemed, the Mongols could do no wrong. Raiding and scouting parties penetrated as far northward as Finland, and even learned through their contacts amongst the Finns and Russians of the Arctic Ocean, which they dubbed, appropriately enough, the Sea of Darkness. Notably, a later northward expedition, in 1242-43, would have the scouts reporting back of similar tales, along with reports of people with fair hair and of a land with just one hour of night per day.

It wouldn't be until the late summer of 1240, then, that the main host of Subutai and Batu at last struck their steppe camp and departed south into Ukraine. This campaign was left almost entirely under the jurisdiction of Batu, for uncertain reasons, and he began by sweeping through the southern half of Chernigov, pillaging, burning, and slaughtering in the horrifically typical manner, before ringing off and closing in on the capital itself. Chernigov surrendered on October 18th, 1240, after which it was destroyed. Pereslav was next to follow. From Gabriel, quote, Russian defense remained only local, with no effort to organize a national defense.

The peasant levies and the city militias led by their small feudal aristocracies of knights took the field only to be slaughtered by the superior Mongol military machine, end quote. In fact, by this time, of all the times there were, the Russian princes had actively turned on one another in one of their depressingly predictable periods of interstate strife. The Prince of Novgorod, who was now secretly a Mongol tributary, was locked against the Prince of Chernigov for the title of who would get to be called the greatest prince of Russia, even as it all burned around them. Eventually, having lost the Prince of Novgorod just ahead of the Mongol campaign against his own lands, the Prince of Turnigov, named Michael, decided that he'd had enough fighting, and so removed himself from his soon-to-be-ravaged lands just in the

nick of time. He followed a very similar route westward as the Cumans had prior, like them arriving at the Hungarian border where he found sanctuary, again, in the court of Bela IV. Yet in his haste, he sealed the doom of no less than Kiev itself. Following the fall of Chernigov, a retinue led by Monka approached the outskirts of Kiev, who was noted as having been keenly impressed by the sight of the great city. Having heard that there was a sizable pro-peace faction within the city, Mungka set forth generous terms to be presented by his emissaries in exchange for the peaceful surrender of the city by its burghers. Instead of hearing them out, however,

Michael, who had not yet peaced out to Hungary, had the Mongol ambassadors slaughtered in order to ensure that the city could not surrender. He knew, like everyone knew by this point, that the one thing you didn't ever want to do was kill Mongol emissaries. But he did it anyway, and then got on his horse and left the stranded city populace to face the inevitable wrath to follow. Nice going, Mike. Even without this 11th hour giant middle finger to the entire population by the prince, McGlynn notes that the morale of the city wasn't exactly sky-high in Kiev. For the five previous years, disputes about the succession and the constant intervention

of other princes had weakened it spiritually and morally. In 70 years, it had been sacked four times, by Svezdalya, Galicia-Volhynia, Chernigov, and Smolensk, and its location so close to the power bases of the Polovtsians scarcely helped. As one historian commented, the rapid changes of rulers in Kiev over the past five years can hardly have inspired the inhabitants of the capital with confidence. Even so, Kiev would prove to be no easy pickings for the Mongolian invasion force. Well positioned defensively atop a hilly region, and with a population of somewhere between 40 to maybe as close to 100,000, and with the Dnieper River defending one approach, Kiev would be a difficult nut to crack.

The defense of the city fell to a voivode, a senior military officer by the name of Dmitry, who had the command of the city guard fall into his lap after he learned that literally every single one of the other Russian princes within Kiev had followed Michael's lead and beat a swift exit westward. And with that, the siege began. Amidst the constant pounding of the Mongol artillery, Batu kept up the psychological pressure on the Kievans by blasting them with terrible noise. Bellowing camels and whinnying horses mixed together with the ever-present drumbeats and Mongol war cries and chants, raising a din so cacophonous that it's said that even conversation within the city soon proved impossible. The heavy siege artillery was positioned opposite the southernmost gate, known as the Polish Gate. Over the course of the following ten days,

the four layers of the city's fortifications were methodically ripped apart one after the next. But once the last barrier had fallen and the Mongols entered the city proper, the end proved swift indeed for those within. Batu gave the usual order to loot and plunder the city at large, but with the rather unusual stipulation that the garrison commander, Voivode de Dmitri, be spared and taken alive. He had proved his worth in battle as a truly capable commander and one of exceptional courage, especially as Batu wished it to be known far and wide in comparison to all the gutless princes who'd run away. That should be rewarded. Dmitri, clearly knowing which way the wind was blowing, joined the Mongols as a

knowledgeable and valued advisor to Subutai and Batu in the battles to come. As for the rest of Kiev, it was left a gutted, smoldering ruin, all but devoid of life in the wake of the Mongols' sacking. True, the city had fallen many times in the prior century. This was its fifth capture in that period, after all. But never before had the destruction been so absolute. Such was the totality of the carnage within the great city's walls that even some six years later, the passing Franciscan monk, Giovanni di Pian de Carpine, then on his way to bear personal witness to the Carletai

and enthronement of Ogre's son and eventual successor, Goyuk Khan, would write of the haunted ruin that only a few dismal huts had been re-erected, and that the ground around the whole city was still choked with countless skulls and bones of dead men. Though for the Mongol army, Kiev was but the latest in a long series of conquests and cities put to the torch. For the monarchs of Europe, the fall of such an ancient, storied, and magnificent city as Kiev-upon-the-Dnieper was cause for true panic. Quote, Despite its decline, the splendid city was still regarded as the showpiece of Rus, and

the spiritual mother of the Russians. Now it lay in ruins, laid waste and reduced to rubble. End quote. Though several other campaigns would take place across the Russian principalities following the fall of Kiev, most notably those of Galicia-Volhynia and Podolia. They were less pitched battles than cursory walkovers for the by now utterly dominant Mongol army. As put by McLean, quote, It was the end of old Russia and the dawning of the dominance of the Golden Horde. Yeah. islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica

follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.