Intersecting Mobilities
The Jochid hordes were spread all over the steppe belt. In addition to Batu’s and Sartaq’s, there were at least seven other big hordes: one on each side of the Dnieper; one near the Don, led by Batu’s sister and her husband; one on each side of the Ural, led by military commanders; one led by Berke, Batu’s younger brother, and located in Transcaucasia; Orda’s horde, near the city of Emil; and, in the region of Lake Ala Köl, Jochi’s horde, which, after his death, was under the control of one of his wives.65
Although some hordes, like Batu’s and Sartaq’s, were neighbors, others could be separated by hundreds of miles. They communicated through the yam, a chain of official posts that allowed a horseman to go from the Volga to the Irtysh in eight weeks. The yam was a multifaceted system, which served the whole Mongol Empire in myriad ways. The Mongols used the yam to spy on enemies, carry goods and messages between far-flung locations, and supply military camps, cities, and hordes. Development of the yam began under Chinggis Khan, although equestrian communication networks long predated him. Since at least the seventh century, Türks, Kitan, Uighurs, and other Central Asian rulers had implemented messaging systems. The Mongols merged these regional networks and fit them to their own ambitions. By the mid-thirteenth century, the yam was fully operational.66
There were hundreds of yam stations, small camps run by Mongols and locals, where official travelers and emissaries could obtain food and fresh mounts. The cost of maintaining the stations fell on the local people, who were required to provide horses, water, food, and clothing and to accommodate official travelers, foreign emissaries, and their escorts. The yamchi, postmen, who staffed the stations did not give away horses but rather exchanged them for horses that the travelers had received from a previous station. Mongols were selective about horses. They distinguished between pack, post, and war horses and between those suited to long distances and sprinters useful for urgent missions across short distances. The army controlled the whole yam system.67
In the Qipchaq steppe, yam stations were located roughly a half-day’s distance from each other. Their facilities, equipment, and size varied. Yam posts near villages and cities were better supplied, while posts located deeper in the steppe were sometimes rather poor. All the yam horses belonged to the empire; the yam operated like a state-run horse rental company that covered the whole Mongol territory.
The yam combined the Mongol supply and communication networks. To function effectively, it required mastery of diverse technologies of transportation and mobility, braiding together three subsystems. The tergen yam, comprising carts pulled by oxen, camels, and strong horses, moved heavy loads and covered only portions of territories, like the area around Qaraqorum. The morin yam, the regular postal route, was limited to riders on horseback, and ran through the whole empire. And via the narin yam, a secret communication system, a messenger could travel more than a hundred and twenty miles a day. This ability to combine different forms and patterns of mobility explains how fewer than a million Mongols scattered over huge distances could rule an empire almost a continent in size. The yam made the steppe smaller.68
Movements of the Jochid hordes, showing intersecting yam routes.
By making fresh mounts available to horsemen who also knew how to cross the great rivers, the Mongols not only gained firm control over their new territories but also developed a unified transportation system. The yam enabled east-west mobility, which intersected with the north-south migration routes of the hordes. The horizontal mobility of the yam was fast and flexible; a rider could take advantage of the yam at any time and travel in either direction. The vertical mobility of the hordes along the great river valleys was slower and seasonally directional.
The intersecting horizontal and vertical mobilities were like the fast- and slow-twitch muscles of the empire: they worked because they were complementary. Vertical mobility enabled the slow, long-distance march of the annual round, while horizontal mobility enabled sprints across the empire and jumps from one horde to another. The yam routes were also mobile, to ensure that they intersected the hordes as they made their rounds: yam routes ran along more southerly latitudes in winter and more northerly ones in the summer. East Asian nomads might have known from long ago the powerful dynamics of intersecting mobilities, but the Mongols maintained this system over generations at a previously unseen level of complexity.
The Mongols developed and completed the colossal projects that Chinggis Khan had launched. They had learned to absorb ideas, skills, institutions, and people in order to create new infrastructure and project their power. The yam relied on the Mongols’ knowledge of ecology and animal biology, on their ability to move fast and endure long-distance rides, and on secure written communication enabled by the Mongol bureaucracy, which created special seals and paper formats, registered translators and emissaries, and issued passports. The yam grew with the empire itself, both reflecting and enabling imperial practice. It was an effective system, and the Mongols were proud of it.
Come Out So That We May Count You According to Our Custom
The Qipchaqs gave themselves up to the Mongols. Around 1245–1246 the Qipchaqs returned in large numbers to their homeland, leaving Bulgaria and Hungary, where they had been attacked, enslaved, and otherwise mistreated by the local populations. Their old territory was now ruled by Batu’s horde; the Qipchaqs would never take power again. Instead, their reappearance increased the Jochids’ manpower. Some of the Qipchaqs entered the tümen system and became, at best, low-status members of the Horde. Hundreds of others ended up on the slave market; the most fortunate of these were bonded to the Mamluk courts of Delhi and Cairo.69
The Jochids had replaced the Qipchaqs and created a new order. The Mongols imposed their laws, and their tümens atomized the old kinship groups and established a pyramidal hierarchy. The level of governance and social control were previously unseen in the western steppe, but nomadic and sedentary subjects alike had no choice but to accept it and integrate into the Mongol socioeconomic system. Qipchaqs and Russians submitted to the new regime, but only the Russians survived the Mongol embrace with a sense of distinctive peoplehood intact.
In the 1240s there was no unified Russia but instead a range of principalities. Most of the Russians who submitted to the Mongols were fishermen, craftsmen, and peasants dwelling in small forest towns. The former Russian capitals of Kiev, Vladimir, and Suzdal had suffered severely during the conquest and remained half empty. Trading cities—especially Novgorod, which the Mongols had left untouched—fared better. Only a few days’ boat ride separated these northern towns from the khan’s camp; a growing number of Russians took advantage by seeking work in the Jochid hordes as servants, translators, artisans, and priests. The most numerous of the Jochid subjects, Russians could immediately find a role in the Mongol economy, a vast new world that stretched from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean. But at the same time, the Russians faced considerable uncertainty as to what they could expect from Mongol domination. They only knew that dramatic changes were taking place.
The bad news came in winter 1257 and spread quickly in Novgorod and the surrounding region. The Tatars, as the Russians called the Mongols, had come to levy taxes. The khan’s envoys, protected by Kniaz Alexander, arrived in town to collect taxes in cash, fur, and young people. The Novgorodians were waiting for them. They welcomed the envoys, talked peace, and offered gifts for the Tatar tsar. Eventually the Novgorodians convinced the Mongols to accept the gifts and suspend the payment. But the envoys considered the gifts a mere advance on what was owed. The Mongols would be back, and the next time they would be less merciful.70
In 1259 the envoys returned in winter, the Mongol season of war. The chief tax collectors settled in the area of Novgorod with their wives and warriors. They counted houses and levied taxes, provoking a “great tumult.” The inhabitants turned against the Mongols, who warned Kniaz Alexander to “give us guards, lest they kill us.” Alexander was in a difficult position. By 1
259 he was a major political figure—not only the prince of Novgorod, but also the grand prince, with authority over all the other princes of the Russian principalities. Novgorodians and others expected him to live up to his reputation as their defender: in 1240, at just nineteen years old, he had gained the sobriquet “Nevsky” by successfully leading Russian troops against Swedish invaders at the Neva River. But while Alexander was an esteemed leader and fighter, he also knew what the Mongols were capable of. He was present during the conquest of the 1240s and had spent several months at Great Khan Güyük’s court. Indeed, Alexander’s father was reportedly poisoned by Güyük’s mother during her son’s enthronement festivities. But while Güyük’s party had threatened Alexander and his family, Batu had always shielded him from the great khan.71
Alexander convinced the Novgorod boyars to protect the tax collectors, but the commoners rebelled and refused to be counted. They knew that the purpose of the chislo, the census, was military conscription and taxation. The greater the number of Russians counted, the more the tribute would cost. Ultimately Alexander himself led the Mongols into town with the help of the boyars, who “thought [the tax] would be easy for themselves, but fall hard on the lesser men.” According to the Chronicle of Novgorod, “the accursed ones,” that is, the Mongols, then “began to ride through the streets, writing down the Christian houses.” The Mongols made their count, fixed the tribute, collected the payment, and left. Alexander marched alongside the tax collectors as they returned to the khan’s horde. Allowing the tax collectors to leave the city empty-handed would have meant war, and Alexander would rather fight Swedes than Mongols. Alexander played Batu’s game in order to fulfill his own long-brewing ambitions.72
For the Mongols, census-taking was a key technique of rule. It was essential to both the tümen and taxation, not least because people themselves constituted one form of payment the Mongols collected. Already in Chinggis’s time, the Mongols counted the households of conquered peoples in order incorporate subjects into the tümen and eventually the military. According to the Secret History, Chinggis ordered his adoptive son Shigi Qutuqu to keep the population register, known as the Blue Register (köke debter), in proper order. Quite likely this primary form of registration developed into the tax census. Many scholars have argued that the Mongols learned registration practices from the Chinese, but persuasive evidence shows that the Mongols borrowed their method from the old steppe empires.73
We know that, as the Mongols gained ground in the west in the early 1240s, they made a systematic effort to count Russians, because Basqaq and darughachi—tax collectors—were sent to the yielding Russian cities. As soon as the inhabitants surrendered, the Mongols asked them to “come out so that we may count you according to our custom.” In 1245 Batu ordered the first census of the Russian principalities. His letter to the kniaz of Kiev, recorded in the Sofijskaya Chronicle, ordered all subjects, including fugitives, to register for the dan’, the tribute. New subjects were also required to enroll in the Horde’s troops and perform community service, such as herd management and maintenance of river fording points.74
The Mongol tithe required 10 percent of everything—people, goods, and animals. While traveling in Russia, Plano Carpini heard that a Mongol tithe collector—a Muslim, perhaps an old administrator of the Qara Khitai—was demanding from every Russian family he counted one boy out of three. He also apparently took unmarried men and women and poor people. According to Plano Carpini, other items collected as taxes included “the skin of a white bear, a black beaver, a black sable, a black fox and the black pelt of a certain animal.” Those lacking such goods would have to pay in other ways. “Whoever does not produce these things is to be led off to the Tartars and reduced to slavery among them,” Plano Carpini wrote.75
The Mongols adapted the tümen system to sedentary populations. In the Horde, contingents of Russians, Alans, Bulgars, Magyars, and others were divided into units of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000, a task that fell on census takers. Their job was thus not only to survey but also to maintain the redistribution system by organizing the people into groups to which revenue shares were directed. The 1245 census was intended for use by the Jochid hordes and by the empire as a whole, a double assignment that allowed Batu to create a much-needed embryonic administration for the new territories, although he never managed to complete the first census.
At that time tax collection was the empire’s main source of revenue, more lucrative than trade and other moneymaking ventures. As the Mongols took over foreign territories, they quickly realized that it was more useful for tributes to be paid in local goods and currencies: raw silk in the east; fur-based currency or silver ingots in the pagan and Christian north; and dinars and dirhams in the city of Bulgar, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The Mongols actually created new local coins because existing ones in conquered places bore the symbols of the rulers whom the Mongols deposed. Thus Ögödei implemented fiscal reforms around 1231–1232 and issued new coins for Central Asian taxpayers. Later he issued separate coins for merchants and craftsmen settled in Qaraqorum. The first Qaraqorum coin featured Ögödei’s tamga and combined words in Arabic and Uighur scripts.76
Ögödei’s new coins were different from the earlier coins struck under Chinggis Khan. Reflecting Mongol conquests of Muslim lands, for example, some of Ögödei’s coins contained the Islamic profession of faith; mentioned khānī or qānī, meaning “imperial”; and included the name or simply the title of the Abbasid caliph al-Nāsir li-Dīn Allāh, though he was deceased. The familiar name of the caliph was meant to reassure the Sunni Muslims who used these coins. The Mongols were appropriating one of the foundational rights of Muslim rulers: the sikka, the right to mint coins.
The Mongols manufactured the money in which their subjects had to pay tribute. In 1243 the Mongol general Baiju conducted the census in Georgian and Armenian lands; the following year, the Mongols started minting coins in the same area. In 1246–1247 the Georgians were reportedly paying the Mongols a tribute of 40,000 bezants. The coins had a mounted archer engraved on them, along with the inscription ulugh Munqul ulush nyk, meaning “one great Mongol nation.” In keeping with the Georgians’ participation in Muslim-dominated trade networks, the inscription was in Arabic script. In 1248 the same coin was issued in the city of Bulgar, on the Volga. The Mongols were turning their new subjects into taxpayers as quickly as they could.77
The Mongols had good reason to issue coins featuring Islamic signifiers: they wanted to enter the Islamic mercantile system. Founded on trust in a political order nominally headed by the caliph, the Islamic system was the most extensive and integrated commercial network in Eurasia, stretching from the Qara Khitai to the Mediterranean and including a large section of Africa. Abbasid dinars and dirhams were used, and often imitated, from Sweden to North Africa. In the crusader kingdoms, the Franks used Fatimid dinars and minted both dinars and dirhams bearing the Muslim profession of faith. The Mongols successfully conformed to the existing system. With the aid of Muslim advisers whom they pressed into service—including Qara Khitan and Khwarezmian financiers and the best minters of Baghdad, Tabriz, and Balkh—the Mongols produced coins that Muslims instantly identified as acceptable means of payment.
The new issuance of Islamic coins roughly coincided with Great Khan Güyük’s second census, taken in 1247. This census was of a much larger scale than its 1245 predecessor. The Mongols planned to register the sedentary populations of China, Central Asia, Iran, and the Russian principalities. Due to the complexity of the process and local resistance, they succeeded only partially. In the western wing, where Batu did not comply with Güyük’s orders, a proper census would not take place until around 1254, when a new great khan, Möngke, had ordered again that the entire population of the empire be counted. This time Batu decided to cooperate.78
The great census would finally be completed in 1259. In 1257, according to the Yuan shi, Möngke nominated a chief darughachi for the Volga region. A number of counters—chisle
nitsi, in the Russian sources—assisted him. They covered Crimea, the Caucasus, the Qipchaq steppe, and the north, possibly up to southern Siberia. They counted the population of Suzdal, Ryazan, Murom, and Vladimir. The region of Novgorod came last, in 1259. The Mongols sent only a few men to supervise the tax collection and relied heavily on local elites to convince hostile cities and villages to comply. Andrei, who preceded Alexander Nevsky as kniaz of Vladimir, also became a spokesman for the Mongol census, as he too understood that helping the census takers would bring favor.79
The Jochid census operations took around five years, a surprisingly long period in comparison with the rest of the empire. It may be that Jochids counted things other Mongols did not—not only houses but also animals, cultivated fields, vineyards, orchards, barns, and mills.80 Bitigchis, imperial secretaries, developed a writing system for administrative purposes like the census. They also created a centralized chancellery and archives to assist in tracking people, goods, and lands. Lists of these items were sent to the great khan’s administrators, who compiled from them a comprehensive record of resources at hand. The Mongols counted houses and tents rather than individuals, although they did note people’s professions and social status. They especially valued craftsmen, metalworkers, jewelers, traders, translators, religious leaders, musicians, and those who could read and write.81
As a general rule, the Mongols exempted clergymen from the kupchir, the main tax, and from a number of secondary obligations like supplying the yam. Tax exemptions were highly advantageous. Mongol leaders granted them not only to Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Taoist religious men, but also to those who had contributed to building the empire, such as Chinggis’s close circle and their descendants, military men, and literati. Those exempted were called tarkhans. The tarkhans became a new category of influential people who had nothing in common except their protected status and a strong interest in seeing the Mongol regime prosper.82
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