Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

It marked a temporary end to his military campaigns. Samarkand no longer bristled with the hum of armies preparing for war. The tovachis, the aides-de-camp who were responsible for conscription, invariably among the busiest of Temur’s senior officers, now fell silent.

      If military affairs had receded from the immediate horizon, politics soon intruded. A shabby, unkempt refugee arrived in Temur’s court. Notwithstanding his ragged appearance, Tokhtamish was a prince of the royal house of Genghis Khan. He had fled from Urus, khan of the White Horde to the north, and murderer of Tokhtamish’s father. Now in exile, determined to avenge his father’s death and, although Temur did not yet know it, ambitious for the leadership of a reunified Golden Horde, Tokhtamish threw himself on Temur’s mercy.

       ‘If we wish to enter upon a branch of inquiry which seems utterly wanting in unity, to be as disintegrated as sand, and defying any orderly or rational treatment, we can hardly choose a better one than the history of the Asiatic nomads.’

      HENRY HOWORTH, History of the Mongols

      To understand Tokhtamish and the khanate he aspired to lead, it is necessary to return to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. The Golden Horde, or Dasht-i-Kipchak as it was then known, had been carved out by Batu, second son of Genghis Khan’s eldest son Jochi. In accordance with the custom of the steppe, Jochi had received territories farthest from the heart of the empire in Karakorum. These ranged west from the river Irtish in Siberia ‘as far as the soil has been trodden by the hooves of Mongol horses’, according to the marvellously vague definition of the thirteenth-century Persian historian Juvayni. The uncertainty underscored the fact that the gift of these lands was theoretical, as they had yet to be fully conquered. Jochi died in 1227, however, shortly before his father. His eldest son, Orda, received western Siberia and the corridor of land sandwiched between the Amu Darya and Irtish rivers, a territory called ‘the eastern Wing of the Ulus of Jochi’, later known confusingly as both the White Horde and the Blue Horde. It fell to Batu to consolidate his hold on the lands immediately to the west – the westernmost branch of the Mongol empire, later the Golden Horde – and establish just how far those horses had travelled.

      In 1235, he was given his chance. Great Khan Ogedey appointed Batu commander of a 150,000-strong army sent to subdue the Bulgars of the Volga and the Kipchaks. The nomadic Bulgars, among the world’s most northerly Muslims, had established a prosperous state whose capital in Bulgar lay near the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Living in tents and breeding cattle, they also traded furs and slaves with Mawarannahr in return for weapons and manufactured goods. The Kipchaks were a powerful confederation of Turkic nomads whose steppe territory, north of the Caspian Sea, stretched west from Siberia to the Danube.

      The Bulgars were quickly crushed, their capital destroyed. Bachman, the chief of the Kipchaks, mounted stiff resistance against the Mongols but was eventually captured after a lengthy chase up and down the Volga. Like all defeated adversaries he was ordered to kneel before the victors. ‘I have been myself a king and do not fear death,’ he replied. ‘I am not a camel that should kneel.’ He was promptly cut in two.

      Batu’s forces reached the river Ural in 1237, crossed into Russia and laid waste to every city from Moscow to Kiev, taking advantage of the hopelessly weak and divided Russian princes. The cities of Ryazan and Kolomna in the western reaches were so thoroughly sacked, wrote an anonymous chronicler, that ‘no eye remained open to weep for the dead’. Other towns simply disappeared from the map altogether. Kiev fell shortly before Christmas 1240, its Byzantine churches torched to the ground, the saintly bones they harboured burnt in contempt.

      Plundering and massacring as they advanced to the gates of Europe, the Mongol army marched into Poland in 1241. In a region utterly unknown to them, thousands of miles from home in the depth of winter, they overcame the Polish feudal chivalry – like the Russians, enfeebled by divisions – through the superb military acumen of Subedey, Genghis’s veteran commander. Krakow fell on Palm Sunday. In a subsequent battle outside what was later known as Walstadt, the Mongols collected nine sacks containing the ears of the defeated Germans and Poles. Silesia was similarly devastated before Batu’s hordes turned their attention to the kingdom of Hungary, which fell after catastrophic casualties in the region of sixty-five thousand at the battle of Mohi. Contemplating the Mongols’ onward advance into the heart of Europe, Emperor Frederick II despatched a letter to the kings of Christendom appealing for contributions to a common army. His request met with a deafening silence. Pope Gregory IX published his own appeal in August 1241, but died shortly afterwards. The continent lay vulnerable before the Mongols.

      By 1242 Batu’s army was camped outside the walls of Neustadt, south of Vienna, and Christendom stood on the brink of disaster. There were further forays into Croatia and Albania. It is said that the Mongols’ depredations in Hungary prompted Queen Blanche of France to ask her son Louis IX what action should be taken against them. ‘If these people, whom we call Tartars, should come upon us, either we will thrust them back into Tartarus, whence they came, or else they will send us all to heaven,’ he predicted. Fortunately for the kingdoms of Europe, it was not to be. In an extraordinary piece of good luck, the continent was saved by news of Ogedey’s death the previous December.

      The Mongol army had already been riven by disputes between Batu and rival Mongol princes, harbinger of a more lasting and damaging split between the houses of Jochi and Tuli on the one hand and those of Ogedey and Chaghatay on the other. A struggle for the succession in Karakorum now appeared likely, a consideration which would have weighed heavily with Batu, who wanted to ensure that the candidate most favourable to his interests ascended to the throne. He therefore decided to return to participate in the qurultay to appoint the new Great Khan, in the event a matter which took several years to resolve. His horde turned eastwards and Europe survived. Had Ogedey lived longer, the Mongol empire would almost certainly have reached the shores of the Atlantic.

      ‘At a distance of more than seven centuries,’ wrote John Joseph Saunders, ‘the historian is still struck with wonder at this extraordinary campaign. Whether one considers the geographical scope of the fighting, which embraced the greater part of eastern Europe, the planning and coordination of movement of so many army corps, the clockwork precision whereby the enemy was surrounded, defeated and pursued, the brilliant manner in which problems of supply were solved, or the skill with which Asian armies were handled in an unfamiliar European terrain, one cannot fail to admit that the Mongol leaders were masters of the art of war such as the world scarcely saw before or has seen since.’

      Following the end of the European invasion, and in anticipation of further Mongol divisions, Batu’s priority was to establish his own kingdom or ulus. From 1242 to 1254 he built his capital, Old Saray, on the east bank of the Akhtuba, a tributary of the Volga, sixty-five miles north-west of Astrakhan. After his triumphs in Russia and Europe, his ulus – which had originally consisted of a relatively modest slice of land north of the Caspian – extended to include the vast swathe of territory slanting south-west from Nizhniy Novgorod and Voronezh in Russia to Kiev in Ukraine and the river Prut on the borders of Romania. In the east his horde encompassed Khorezm and the famous city of Urganch.

      With Saray as their centre these lands were what became known – though only from the sixteenth century – as the Golden Horde. The khanate took its name from Batu’s fabulously embroidered silk tents pitched on the banks of the Volga to receive the defeated Russian princes who were summoned thither to pay him homage. Yellow or gold was, besides, the mark of imperial power. Genghis’s descendants were known as the Golden Family, and the Great Khan traditionally held sway from the Golden Ordu, his seat of power.

      Though the borders Batu established remained essentially the same until Temur’s interventions in the late fourteenth century, after his death in 1255 or 1256 his brother Berke mounted the throne of the Golden Horde and raised another city, New Saray, also on the banks of the Akhtuba, east of Volgograd. New Saray became the capital of the khanate under Uzbeg, whose reign from 1313 to 1341 represented the height of the Golden Horde’s power and glory. At this time it started to eclipse the Chaghatay ulus as the principal caravan route linking Asia with Europe. The Genoese and Venetians, those indomitably commercial European pioneers, were allowed to establish colonies in Kaffa and at Tana at the mouth of