In the historiography, it is customary to call the Great Horde part of the Golden Horde (Ulus of Jochi) of the 15th century in the southern part of Eastern Europe. In fact, this was an area that remained under the control of the “central” (Saray) government after the falling away of the newly formed khanates. The Russian expression “Great Horde” is probably a tracing-paper form of the Turkic phrase Ulug Ordu, one of the official Tatar names for the Golden Horde (although some historians dispute this interpretation). The Turkic names of the Great Horde, adopted both in itself and in the surrounding territories, were phrases that included the term takht (throne, crown) and are repeatedly found in chronicles and diplomatic correspondence: Takht eli, Takht memleketi, Takht vilayeti. All of them are translated approximately as “Throne possession,” “Capital area,” and “Metropolitan area.”

The Great Horde throughout its existence constantly interacted with strong neighbors—the Crimean Khanate, Muscovy, and the Polish–Lithuanian states.

The relations of the Great Horde with the last of them, the patron of the Crimean khans Girays hated by it, were initially hostile. The tidings of Jan Długosz about a large raid on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania date back to 1469.Footnote 1 Hordes of Tatars led by the son of the Tsar of Zavolzhye Maniak (according to Maciej Stryikovskii, by Maniak himself) crossed the Dnieper and, divided into three parts, fell upon Volhynia, Zhitomir region, and Lvov region. Everywhere they created great devastation, and they captured thousands of people. Warned by Khan Mengli Giray about the impending invasion, King Casimir IV ordered the governors to organize defenses, but they failed or did not have time to repel the enemy. Those Tatar detachments that were sent to Moldavia were defeated there by the local governor Stefan. The son of Maniak was taken prisoner. The khan sent ambassadors to the voivode with a request to release the prince. Stefan did not heed the request and ordered the noble captive to be quartered in front of the ambassadors, and then they themselves should be killed. They left one Tatar alive, who was sent back with an order to tell Maniak about the execution.Footnote 2

But two years later, a coalition partnership emerged between the two states. The confrontation with Moscow pushed the Khan of the Great Horde Akhmed and King Casimir to a military alliance. In 1470, the ambassador Kirei Krivoi came from Krakow to the Horde with a proposal for a joint attack on Russia. This idea was enthusiastically picked up by the highest beks, led by the chief Horde commander (beklerbek) Timur. However, Akhmed hesitated for a long time: Kirei spent a whole year at his headquarters, and the khan would not let him go home, “for the sake of his holds,” i.e., because of some obstacles.Footnote 3 These “holds” could have been some kind of internal conflicts,Footnote 4 but the unwillingness of the khan to attack the “vassal performing his duties,” Ivan III, is not excluded.Footnote 5

Nevertheless, in the end, negotiations continued. The activity of the Poles and Tatars was stimulated by the attack of the Moscow sovereign on Velikii Novgorod, which had long-standing and close ties with the Polish–Lithuanian authorities, as well as by the peculiar relations of Casimir IV with the Crimea. In 1472, Mengli Giray gave him a grant to the Russian lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Novgorod. Maybe Casimir wanted the same from Akhmed.Footnote 6 This assumption of A.A. Gorskii is confirmed by a letter from Mengli Giray to the pans of the Rada of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1506. The khan reproached the addressees for forgetting their former close ties, which were then undone, he says, by the contacts of the Polish–Lithuanian state with the hostile Great Horde. He recalled that at one time the Khan of the Golden Horde Tokhtamysh gave Kyiv, Smolensk, and other cities to the Grand Duke of Lithuania Vitovt. Subsequently, the designations for these cities were granted by the Crimean khans Hadji Giray and Nurdevlet. Casimir’s embassy brought to Mengli Giray the old designation of Hadji Giray to Kyiv and Smolensk and received from him confirmation of these conferences; in addition, at the request of the king, the khan entered the cities of Ryazan and Odoev there. Mengli Giray called for them to remember these ties and involuntarily blurted out: “Our designations are in the belongings of y(o)urs, look, from Ts(a)r Temür Qutlugh, and from Ts(a)r Akhmat, designations taken about such written cities and about friendliness and brotherhood.”Footnote 7 Thus, Casimir really managed to demand a grant to the Russian cities in the Great Horde, although, however, Velikii Novgorod did not appear among them in any form.

Kirey Krivoi returned to his overlord, accompanied by the Tatar embassy. Funds for the maintenance of these Tatars who arrived in August 1471 were included in the corresponding list of expenses of the Krakow court.Footnote 8

The conflict with Hungary distracted the king from continuing the purposeful formation of an anti-Moscow coalition, and the next cycle of negotiations with the Great Horde took place in 1479–1480. Obviously, at that time, as a result of the exchange of embassies, a formal agreement on joint actions was concluded. With this union, the Crimeans bitterly reproached the Poles many years later: “… and also you wanted to break your oath, and then you broke your oath for the tsar of Zavolzhye and for Akhmet tsar … you turned to brotherhoods and friendliness.”Footnote 9

At first, relations between the Great Horde and Muscovy were built traditionally, based on the two-century tribute dependence of the Russian lands on the Ulus of Jochi. In the 15th century, the visits of the grand dukes to the Horde gradually faded into the past, and from the 1440s contacts between the two states were maintained through ambassadors. The Moscow rulers explained the regular mutual visits of embassies not by the fact of paying a regular tribute, i.e., “ransom” or receiving grants (which was indisputable for neighbors), but by establishing such orders “from fathers and from grandfathers and from great-grandfathers” or the geographical proximity of possessions.Footnote 10

The chronicles recorded a fairly active exchange of embassies in the 1470s. The most indicative is the arrival in Moscow of the envoy Akhmed Bochuki in July 1476 with the demand for Ivan III to appear “before the tsar in the Horde.”Footnote 11 It is no coincidence that the message about this embassy is placed immediately after the mention of the war between Akhmed and Mengli Giray. It seems that those historians who saw the connection between these events are right, namely, Akhmed’s desire to restore the former, Golden Horde statehood and to collect fallen-away yurts under his rule and force Russian tributaries to come to the Horde with an expression of humility and for designations.Footnote 12

If so, then Akhmed miscalculated. Muscovy was gaining strength and was increasingly burdened by the obligation to collect a “ransom” for the khan. Under Ivan III, the payment of the tribute was discontinued. Recent studies show that Moscow was gradually moving towards a release from tribute duties. In the 1440s–1460s, the “ransom” was sent to the Horde with long breaks, and finally stopped being paid in 1471.Footnote 13 This explains the relatively frequent visits of Akhmed’s ambassadors to Ivan III: the “tsar” demanded the tribute laid down and bequeathed by the ancestors.

The culmination of the growing conflict was “Standing on the Ugra” in 1480, the most famous and most thoroughly studied episode of Russian–Horde relations of the 15th century. Akhmed spent the autumn and winter of 1480 in fruitless and powerless standing on the banks of the Ugra, a tributary of the Oka, opposite the Moscow army of Ivan III, not daring to attack the Russians and vainly waiting for the allied Polish–Lithuanian army. At the end of the year, the emaciated and starving Horde army was led by the khan to the south and disbanded to the uluses.

The interpretation of the outcome of “Ugor-shchina” among the Tatars and Poles differed significantly from the Moscow version. The son of Akhmed, Khan Sheikh-Akhmed, in a message to the Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander Kazimirovich in 1497, called the reason for the retreat of the Horde troops the persistence of the Khan’s entourage, which dissuaded their master from hostilities due to the failure of the Poles to arrive: “Being angry at Ivan, the tsar, our father sat on a horse, and your father, the king, did not take that fate. Then our uhlans and pr(i)nces said to our father: Ivan is both your servant and the king’s, so the king did not take that fate, and you shall return … And they took my father by the reins and returned. And then God’s will shall become our father’s fate.”Footnote 14

Maciej Stryikovskii in his chronicle explains the failure of the campaign due to the greed and intrigues of Beklerbek Timur. The tsar of Zavolzhye stood on the Uhrae River, waiting for news from King Casimir, and in the meantime, the Moscow prince sent rich gifts and a commemoration to “the hetman, the tsar’s prince Temür.” He began to convince the king to retreat. Khan obeyed, and “then Temür the hetman stabbed him to death for the gifts of the great prince.”Footnote 15 The attribution of this murder to Temür, and even deliberately for the benefit of the Russians, apparently had a rather wide and long circulation in the Turkic environment. In 1549, the ruler of the Nogai Horde, biy Yusuf, also assured Ivan IV that “our brother [actually, uncle–V.T.], Prince Temür, killed Tsar Akhmat for the brotherhood with the white prince.”Footnote 16

In Russian sources, the death of Akhmed is described in a completely different way. In January 1481, the Siberian–Nogai army defeated the nomadic headquarters of Akhmed, and the Nogai Mirza Yamgurchi killed the khan himself.Footnote 17 Some chronicles indicate that Akhmed was killed by the Tyumen Khan Ibak, who led this campaign.Footnote 18 According to Gorskii, this discrepancy can be explained by the desire of each of the coalition partners in correspondence with Moscow to attribute the murder of the khan to themselves.Footnote 19 Curious details can be gleaned from individual annalistic texts: the size of the Siberian–Nogai army (16 000), an indication of the murder of Akhmed early in the morning, and the capture of Akhmed’s daughter by Ibak.Footnote 20

After the death of Akhmed and the complete and humiliating defeat of his headquarters by the Nogai, the Great Horde no longer had the strength for tangible participation in political life (although there is an opinion in the historiography that it “remained the most important component of international politics in Eastern Europe, determining the relations between the rest of the Eastern European states”Footnote 21). The assessment of the situation by the Polish historian F. Konecny seems to be more realistic: “The Kipchak civil war turned into a kind of chronic one; the Horde fortune changed over and over again.”Footnote 22 The last twenty years of the history of the Takht eli state were marked by its steady weakening, unsuccessful attempts to maneuver between strong neighbors, a decrease in population, economic decline, and internal strife.

At the very turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Great Horde began to plunge into chaos. The collapse of its already primitive statehood was clearly manifested in an increase in the number of simultaneously reigning dynasts—the sons of the deceased Akhmed. Moreover, it is not noticeable that there were any disputes about territories between them. Each khan controlled the contingent of ulusniks that he inherited and no longer claimed absolute supremacy (which did not exclude violent conflicts).

It is interesting that at that time the relations of the Great Horde with the Christian Polish–Lithuanian state (and during the periods of its division, especially with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) became much closer and warmer than with any of the Muslim possessions. Lithuanian–Muscovite border disputes and skirmishes continued, and Casimir IV continued to consider the Tatars of Takht Eli as allies in the fight against Ivan III. In 1482, Ivan Vasilyevich informed Mengli Giray that the king “now does not want love and completing with me, but sent ambassadors to the Horde, and raises my enemies against me”—the sons of Akhmed.Footnote 23 Two years later, the co-rulers of the Horde, Murtaza and Said-Makhmud, received another embassy from Krakow, headed by Stret. In his message to the king, Murtaza assured that he would not cause any harm to his possessions.Footnote 24 When Murtaza quarreled with his brothers, Casimir invited him to live in his land, “and we didn’t harrow our bread and salt for you, our brother.”Footnote 25

Moscow and Bakhchisarai watched this diplomacy with caution, rightly feeling the danger to themselves. Ivan III and Mengli Giray agreed to catch the Polish–Lithuanian and Horde ambassadors in the steppeFootnote 26, to interfere with the action of a hostile coalition. Mengli Giray used this for the Azov Cossacks, little controlled, but eager for easy prey.Footnote 27 The khan angrily blamed Alexander Jagiellon, who replaced Casimir, for his exchange of embassies with the enemies of Crimea, to which he received answers with excursions into history, reminders of the traditional nature of Lithuanian–Horde relations, the proximity of the Tatar nomad camps to Lithuania, and so on.

In fact, these relationships were not at all cloudless. One of the Horde ambassadors was held in Lithuania for several years, while the other did not recognize the proper diplomatic status.Footnote 28 Still, Alexander Casimirovich behaved towards the Great Horde more detachedly and cautiously than his late father. And the situation in the Horde was less and less conducive to a close coalition with it. The constantly quarreling and often changing co-rulers of the fading state were, in the eyes of Lithuanian politicians, less and less valuable allies. However, the Tatar cavalry was still able to divert a significant part of the Moscow army and thereby help Vilna in the confrontation with the Grand Duke of Moscow.

In the autumn of 1500, Alexander’s ambassador Mikhail Khaletsky appeared at the headquarters of Khan Sheikh-Akhmed. On behalf of his sovereign, he urged the khan to start military operations against the Muscovites. In this war, the ambassador said, the Horde would have powerful allies: the Polish king Jan Olbracht and the Hungarian and Czech king Vladislav; Sheikh-Akhmed, on the other hand, was advised to involve the Nogai in campaigns against Russia. The persuasion was backed up by the richest gifts and huge upominkas—ordinshchina.Footnote 29 The Gustyn Chronicle adds that the Tatar ambassadors came to the Sejm, where Jan Olbracht, as a reward for the military alliance, promised to pay tribute to the Horde “every summer, thirty thousand for casings and cloth [sic.—V.T.].”Footnote 30

The khan, contrary to the opinion of his co-ruler brothers, agreed to military operations and in 1500–1501 attacked the Moscow “borderlands” twice. In addition to everything promised at the negotiations, he naively hoped that the allies would give him control of Kyiv. Accompanied by Khaletskii, the Tatar cavalry moved to the Seversk land, recently recaptured by Ivan III from the Lithuanians. Rylsk and Novgorod Severskii were taken, but not ruined: the khan considered them the property of Alexander Casimirovich. With the news of a successful campaign and with an invitation to join in joint battles, Sheikh-Akhmed sent Khaletskii to Vilna. For forty days the army of the Horde stood near Kanev, waiting for the Lithuanian army, then withdrew to Chernigov. The wait dragged on. The irritated Khan ordered the plundering of Chernigivschyna. Many years later, the boyars, at negotiations with the Polish–Lithuanian delegation in Moscow, recalled how, at the instigation of Alexander and accompanied by Khaletskii, “the tsar … came to the fatherland of our sovereigns, to Chernigov, and a lot of Christian blood was shed here.”Footnote 31

Alexander Casimirovich did not have the opportunity or, perhaps, the desire to take part in the campaign. Just at that time, after the death of Jan Olbracht, he was elected king of Poland and, instead of heading to Chernigov, went to Krakow for his coronation, “terminating his affairs with the tsar of Zavol-zhye.” The ambassador of Sheikh-Akhmed sent to him to “ask Kyiv” returned empty-handed. In letters to the Krakow Cardinal, Alexander writes with some causticity about the “Tatar of Zavolzhye,” who “calls himself the lord of Kyiv, Chernigov, and other cities in the Principality of Lithuania.”Footnote 32 In fact, at this time, Alexander Jagiellon settled for a break with his Tatar allies and thereby left them alone with the powerful and merciless Mengli Giray.Footnote 33

Sheikh-Akhmed and Beklerbek Tavakkul, who was with him (the son of Beklerbek Timur, who had died by that time), at the end of 1501 or at the beginning of 1502, came to the conclusion that an alliance with Lithuania did not give them any benefit. The Moscow ambassador reported with satisfaction from the Crimea in the summer of 1502 that “with the Lithuanian one… Tsar Shi-Akhmat is at odds.”Footnote 34 The rulers of the Horde set out to persuade Moscow to an anti-Crimean alliance, while promising to “leave the Lithuanian one alone.”Footnote 35 Ivan III did not want to break established ties with the Crimea for the sake of this dubious acquisition and informed Mengli Giray about the Horde embassy.

Unlike the Polish–Lithuanian monarchs, the Russian sovereigns had no plans to create coalitions with the Great Horde. On the contrary, moving with nomad camps along the southern border, it was a constant threat to Moscow’s possessions. Therefore, the efforts of Moscow’s diplomacy were aimed at creating anti-Horde alliances with the involvement of the Crimea, Kazan, and the Nogai and the use of the ever-increasing military forces of service Tatars in Russia. Several times, the troops of Ivan III, under the command of Russian governors and the servant of the Kasimov King Nurdevlet, went out into the steppe to smash the Horde uluses and drive them away from the borders.

The ambassadorial ties between the two neighboring states were quite rare. In the 1480s, in the minds of the Horde politicians, the idea matured to get Nurdevlet to them in order to make him the banner of the struggle against his brother, Khan Mengli Giray. To discuss the conditions for the relocation of the former Crimean Khan to Takht eli in August 1487, an embassy arrived in Moscow from another pair of corulers, Murtaza and Said-Makhmud.Footnote 36 But nothing came of this: neither Ivan III nor Nurdevlet wanted to get involved in the unpromising adventures of the “Akhmatoviches.”

At the end of 1501, Khan Sheikh-Akhmed and Beklerbek Tavakkul sent their representatives to the Kremlin to negotiate “about friendship and love,” and specifically to announce their reorientation from Vilna to Moscow for the sake of a joint fight against the Crimea. As mentioned above, this time the greater Horde failed. However, the grand-ducal ambassador D. Likhorev was sent to the Horde with the task of declaring to the khan “about love as well.”Footnote 37 He returned to his homeland after the fall of the Horde.

There was always a shadow of the former tribute obligations of Russia of the era of the “yoke” hanging over the relations of Muscovy with the Great Horde. When communicating with Ivan III, the Tatars did not even dare to mention this. In the initial protocol of the khan’s letters, the expression “(such khan’s) word to Ivan” was now used, i.e., simply with the designation of different ranks of rulers – the khan (“tsar”) and the grand duke, without the previous imperative turnover sёzyum, “my word.” But in correspondence with Vilna and Krakow, the Horde gave vent to nostalgia, accompanying the mention of Ivan Vasilyevich with the indispensable addition of “our servant.”Footnote 38 The Polish–Lithuanian side willingly supported these sentiments, strengthening the anti-Moscow mood in their Tatar interlocutors.

Just once Ivan III decided to pay some kind of tribute, and, as far as one can judge from the sources, without any special insistence from the Tatar side. In 1502, Sheikh-Akhmed wrote to Alexander Casimirovich, in an excess of joy: the Moscow prince “sent us such datka, which he did not give to our father or our brothers.” Tavakkul echoed him: “… what he did not give to the ancestor of the tsar and to ours, he sent us.”Footnote 39 Firstly, attention is drawn to the emphasis on the unprecedented nature of payments. It seems that the Horde had already forgotten how much the Russians had to pay to the Horde, and the very fact of payment was perceived by them as a revival of the orders of a very distant antiquity, even before “our father” and “the tsar’s ancestors.” Secondly, the concept of datka was used for payments, which, it seems, was not used in the practice of Russian–Horde tribute relations. Its use, instead of the expected tribute, ransom, yasak, also testifies to the uniqueness of the situation.

In essence, “datka” is a synonym for tribute and was a form of “ransom.”Footnote 40 But still, it was a single episode, caused by tactical considerations in the face of a tense struggle with the Lithuanians. Gorskii, noting the formal recognition by Ivan III of his dependence on the Horde, points to his diplomatic game: at the same time, Moscow’s envoys in Bakhchisarai raised Mengli Giray against the Horde.Footnote 41 After the defeat and disappearance of the Great Horde, the problem of “datkas” naturally lost its relevance.

That was the era of the final extinction of the Great Horde. The limits of its nomads narrowed, the population decreased, and the sons of Akhmed were constantly at enmity with each other. In the summer of 1502, the victorious campaign of Mengli Giray put an end to the existence of Takht eli.

The disappearance of this state, the nominal continuation of the Golden Horde, finally put an end to the long history of Russian–Horde relations, determined by the system of domination–subordination. On the territory of the former Ulus of Jochi, several independent khanates were formed. From time to time, some of them began to claim leadership among the fragments of the broken empire. However, frequent feuds between these historical successors of the Golden Horde and the struggle between them for disputed territories, resources, and trade routes steadily weakened them (a certain exception was the Crimea, protected by the Ottoman protectorate).

Against this background, growing Muscovy, which from the second half of the 15th century became an increasingly prominent actor in the post-Horde space, was able to become an equal and, as a result, victorious participant in the struggle for the “Golden Horde heritage” in Eurasia. The territorial expansion of Russia in eastern and southern directions, which began in the middle of the 16th century, eventually led to the unification of the vast expanse of the former Golden Horde within and under the rule of the new state. After the subjugation of the Volga khanates in the middle of the 16th century, the Moscow tsar objectively acquired the rank of senior sovereign in relation to the rulers of the Turkic possessions, both those that had been conquered and those still retaining independence east of the Volga. In a certain sense, he assumed the functions of the supreme overlord, a role traditionally associated there with the khans of the Golden Horde, Kazan, and Siberia.