It is not difficult to see, now a favorite topic of Ukrainian propaganda, that Russians, they say, are Mongolo-Tatars or something like Horde, Asians; and from this it is concluded that they are second-class people with all the ensuing consequences. The accusations are racist, fascisoid, coinciding with the clichés of Nazi propaganda, but readily relayed by Russian liberals as well. And the basis for this kind of propaganda is the fact of the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Russia during the Middle Ages. (I note right away that the rule of the Europeans, the same Englishmen, not only in the Indies, but also in European Ireland, gives examples of cruelty, treachery, predation, plunder, which even the Mongol-Tatar conquerors cannot reach.
I have already touched upon the absurdity of these accusations in my note in "What was in fact 'part of Asia' and what was not." The special piquancy of these accusations is given by the fact that they are put forward by representatives of the "Square". But on the territory where Ukraine is now located, the Mongol-Tatar yoke caused the maximum damage and left the most difficult traces. Now I will not touch on the question of how the Horde (where the periods of the so-called barymta, "war of all against all", with its raids, alternated with periods of strong power and proper robbery of the sedentary population under its control) influenced the political culture of Ukraine. So far, I have compiled a small information on the Horde yoke on the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the very ones where the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian statehood were formed many centuries later …
The territories of South and South-West Russia in the early 40s. The 13th century was subjected to the Batu invasion - and here it turned out to be even more devastating and met with much weaker resistance than in North-Eastern Russia. The princes of South-Western Russia, who, unlike the princes of North-Eastern Russia, did not give a single field battle to the conquerors, quickly recognized the power of Karakorum, the great khan, and then the Golden Horde Sarai. Incl. the famous Daniil Galitsky (then still Volynsky), who preferred to leave for the time of Batu's invasion of Poland and Hungary, and in 1245 went to the khan's headquarters to receive a label for the Galician principality, which only after that became irrevocably belong to him. [1]
A characteristic feature of the yoke in South-Western Russia was the long-term direct rule of the khan's governors - in the North-East it was quickly curtailed due to the strong resistance of the cities behind which the princes stood. In addition, Tatar feudal lords directly roamed the vast territories of South-Western Russia, which was not observed at all in North-Eastern Russia. V. V. Mavrodin writes: “During the 40s - 50s, the entire Chernigov-Seversk land and Pereyaslavl were captured by the Tatars, and Pereyaslavl, apparently, lost its independence and was directly dependent on the Tatars; the Tatar chambul of Kuremsy (Kuremshy) stood in the city … Pereyaslavl turned into an outpost of the Tatar khan in the southern steppes; to his stronghold, from where the khan's governors ruled southern Russia … Just as in certain areas of the Right Bank, in the Pereyaslavl land, Tatar officials and military leaders ruled the region, collected tribute themselves, and perhaps forced the population to plow for themselves and sow millet, beloved by the Tatars … Considering that the Tatars really turned part of the left-bank lands into pastures, while the other part, having bled and devastated, completely subjugated them, we come to the conclusion that there is a Tatar administrative system ("darkness") and Tatar feudal lords on the Left-Bank Ukraine … The family … in 1278 was transferred to the direct subordination of the Temnik Nogai. " [2]
About a century later, these lands were included in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), mainly due to the military campaigns of the Lithuanian princes, who already in the 40s of the 13th century engaged in raids on the Dnieper region. [3] The lands of Volodymyr-Volynsky, Galich and Kiev were annexed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s. 14th century. Volyn, Podolsk (together with Pereyaslavl) and Chernigov-Seversk lands in the 40-60s. of the same century. Moreover, Tatar feudal landownership continued to exist on some of them - for example, on Sula, Psle and Vorskla (Circassians who had migrated from the Caucasus lived in Sniporod on the Sula river - did they not give the name "Cherkasy" to the population of the southern parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which they were called in Russian documents 16-17 centuries).
Chronicle sources record under the year 1331 under the Kiev prince Fyodor of the Horde Baskak, who oversees the fulfillment of vassal and tributary obligations. [4] The prince, together with the Baskak, diligently participated in attacks on travelers, for example, on the Novgorod bishop Vasily, who was returning from Vladimir-Volynsky through Kiev. “Poikha Vasily is the lord from the Metropolitan; as if they had arrived near Chernigov, and by learning the devil, Prince Fyodor of Kiev drove with a baskak of fifty people as a rogue, and the Novgorodians, having been wary of and having finished against themselves, little evil did not perpetrate between them; but the prince will take the shame and drive away, but he will not run away from the God of execution: he has lost his horse. " [5]
The payment of tribute from the Kiev region continues in the second half of the 14th and 15th centuries. [6]. The city of Kiev itself, which received the name Mankerman from the eastern conquerors, was located at the end of the 14th century. under the direct control of the nomads of the Bek-Yaryk clan.
“Timur the conqueror … heading against the right wing of the Jochi-khan ulus, moved into that boundless steppe to the Uzi (Dnieper) river … Having reached the Uzi (Dnieper) river, he robbed Bek-Yaryk-oglan and the people of the Uzbek ulus who were there and conquered most of them, so that only a few, and even then with only one horse, were able to escape. " [7]
"Pursuing the right wing of the enemy troops towards the Uzi River, Timur again led a raid (ilgar) into the army and, reaching the Mankermen area in the direction of the Uzi River, plundered the Bek-Yaryk region and all their household, except for a few who survived." [eight]
M. K. Lyubavsky notes that at the end of the 14th century Olgerd failed to "emancipate the Kiev region from the Tatars", and "when a strong khan's power was restored in the Horde and strife ceased, Prince Volodymyr Olgerdovich had to continue to pay tribute to them, and" on his coins we meet the Tatar tamga, which served as the usual expression of citizenship in relation to the Tatar khan. " [nine]
"From the documentary evidence of a somewhat late period, it follows that the population of the Podolsk land continued to pay tribute to the Horde people", and a tamga was placed on the coins of Vladimir Olgerdovich - "a symbol of the supreme power of the khan." [ten]
The diploma of the Podolsk ruler Alexander Koriatovich to the Smotrytsky Dominican monastery dated March 17, 1375 informs about the need to pay the Horde tribute by the monastery people: "If all the lands have a tribute from the Tatars, then the same people of dati also have silver." [eleven]
In the diplomatic documents of the Order, the princes of Southwestern Russia who have taken Lithuanian citizenship, like the Lithuanian princes themselves, are called Horde tributarii, that is, tributaries. [12]
A direct confirmation of the payment of tribute to the Horde is the label of the Great Khan Toktamysh to the Grand Duke of Lithuania Yagailo from 1392-1393: “After collecting exits from our citizens' volosts, hand them over to the ambassadors on the way for delivery to the treasury. [13]
Thus, having seized the lands of South-Western Russia, the Lithuanian princes began to collect and pay tribute to the Horde, called, as in North-Eastern Russia, the "exit". And the payment of tribute is the most important sign of the dependence of this or that principality on the khan's rate.
However, the obligations of the ancient Russian lands as part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were not limited to the "payment of the exit". [fourteen]
The agreement of the Lithuanian princes with the Polish king Casimir from 1352, speaks of the military service of the tributaries: "… Even the Tatars will go to the Poles, then the Russians will drink captive from the Tatars …" [15]
As for participation in hostilities as part of the Horde army, the Russian lands, which fell under the rule of Lithuania, were in a much worse position than North-Eastern Russia. As Daniil Romanovich Galitsky and Roman Mikhailovich Chernigovsky gave their troops for the campaigns of the Tatar-Mongols to the west, so did the Lithuanian princes a hundred years later.
So, in the 14th century, the Russian lands, which became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, bore the full complement of tributary duties in favor of the Horde, and the Mongol-Tatar yoke there was de facto heavier than in North-Eastern Russia, where the Basque government was at that time a forgotten past, and in fact there was no military service (only one such episode is noted, in the 1270s).
Only the recognition by the Lithuanian princes of the sovereign rights of Sarai to the Russian lands could ensure Lithuania's inclusion of the latter in the sphere of its domination. Legally, this was formalized in the form of a label received by the Lithuanian Grand Duke on Russian lands, and later on Lithuanian ones. Lithuanian princes had to send ambassadors-kilichei to receive investiture, or the khan himself could have sent such ambassadors - an example is Tokhtamysh's label to the Polish king Vladislav II Jagiello.
At the beginning of the 15th century, following the defeat of Tokhtamysh and Vytautas from Murza Edigei (who, by the way, was an analogue of Mamai) in the battle on Vorskla, there was a kind of Asiaticization of Lithuania. Immigrants from the Golden Horde settle in different areas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, large Horde detachments take part in almost all military campaigns of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, making up up to half of the Lithuanian army, including in wars against European opponents, such as the Teutonic Order, and in the invasions of the Russian principalities, in the first place Pskov. [16]
So in 1426 Vitovt, at the head of a whole International, Polish, Lithuanian and Tatar regiments, tried to conquer the Pskov region for the second time. The Pskovites fought back with their last bit of strength. Novgorod, as usual, was afraid, but young Vasily II threatened Lithuania with war and the Lithuanian prince agreed to peace, having received an indemnity from Pskov.
Under Khan Seyid-Muhammad (1442-1455), in favor of the Big Horde, yasak was received from the Kiev region, the collection of which was directly handled by Tatar officials - "daragi" who were located in the cities of Kanev, Cherkasy, Putivl. [17]
"The register of writing off the zemyans of the zemyans of the Gorodetsky povet" (a collection of documents from the late 15th and early 16th centuries on the granting of privileges to the military class of the zemyans, a close gentry) contains the following records about the exemption from paying tribute to the Horde: “We are the great princess Anna Shvitrygailova. They released the Tatarshchyna esmo 15 grosz and the hunter's penny Moshlyak the old and his children. They do not need anything to give them, only to serve them as a horse, and nothing else is nobility. " [eighteen]
The tribute relations of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania continued after the fall of the Golden Horde, passing to its successor states.
Having defeated the Great Horde in 1502, Khan Mengli-Girey began to consider himself the successor of the Great Horde and the Dzhuchiev ulus, the suzerain of all lands previously subordinate to the Horde.
Referring to traditional tributary relations, the Crimean Khan demands the restoration of the receipt of tribute from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as it was "under Sedekhmat under the tsar" [19], payments of "tributes" and "exits" in the same volume: and let us serve the exits from the present hour. " [twenty]
Lithuanian princes, in general, do not mind, they only find a more diplomatic formulation for their dependence. Payments to the Crimean Horde are called "commemorations" (gifts), which are collected "from both belongings of ours from Lyadsky (present-day territory of Belarus) and from Lithuania." The Polish king Sigismund (1508) declares with great cunning that the commemoration is delivered "… not from our lands by ambassadors, even from our person, as it happened before …". [21]
The Crimean Khanate does not object to the changed wording, the main thing is to pay, by all means, and annually.
A. A. Gorsky points out that “at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th century, the Crimean khans, who considered themselves the heirs of the Horde, continued to issue labels to the Grand Dukes of Lithuania on Russian lands, and they still paid tribute - at a time when the Grand Duchy Moscow didn’t do that anymore!” [22]
During the Smolensk war, a Crimean nobleman friendly to Moscow, Appak-Murza, wrote to the Grand Duke of All Russia Vasily III: to be; unless you send him the same amount of treasury as the king sends, then he will cede these cities to you. And how can they not be friends with the king? Both in summer and in winter, the treasury from the king, like a river, flows incessantly, and to the small and the great - to everyone”. [22a]
If Lithuania did not keep up with the payment of tribute, then the Crimean Khanate carried out an "educational" raid. And protection from raids in Poland-Lithuania was very poorly set, due to the domination of the oligarchy, which was weakly interested in solving national problems. Muscovite Rus builds notch lines, creates continuous lines of fortifications and defenses on the border with the Wild Field, advancing from the forest-steppe to the steppe, increases the depth of the sentinel guard and village service, mobilizes ever greater military forces for action on its "ukraines", to protect the defensive lines and growing border cities, sends regiments to the steppe, little by little squeezing the Crimeans to Perekop and reducing the number of raids. [23] Poland-Lithuania, as a rule, is helpless before the raids of the Crimeans; defense based on rare castles and castle servants is ineffective against raids; all her forces, military and propaganda, are spent on the fight against Moscow Russia.
“This is not a city, but a swallower of our blood,” Michalon Litvin (Ventslav Mikolaevich) described the Crimean slave-trading Kafa. This Lithuanian author reports on the small number of escapes of prisoners of Litvin from Crimean captivity - in comparison with prisoners from Moscow Rus. Crimean slavery looked no worse for the Lithuanian commoner than life under the rule of the gentry. “If the nobleman kills the clap, then he says that he killed the dog, because the gentry considers the kmets (peasants) to be dogs,” the writer of the mid-16th century testifies. Modzhevsky. [24] “We keep in continuous slavery our people, obtained not by war and not by purchase, belonging not to a stranger, but to our tribe and faith, orphans, the needy, trapped in the net through marriage with slaves; we use our power over them for evil, torture them, disfigure them, kill them without trial, on the slightest suspicion,”Mikhalon Litvin is indignant.
The gentry and gentry transferred their estates to the tenants, who squeezed all the juice out of the peasants, and lived in strong castles that protected them from Tatar arrows. Michalon Litvin left curious descriptions of the nobility's life - the gentry spent time drinking and drinking, while the Tatars knitted people through the villages and drove them to the Crimea. [25]
During the first half of the 16th century. the assembly materials of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania constantly record the collection of the Horde tribute. Smolensk bourgeoisie from "silver" and "Horde and what other" payments are exempted only once, in 1502 [26] From 1501, the "horde" painting was preserved according to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Among the cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, obliged to pay tribute to the Crimean Khanate, in addition to recognizing the power of the Dzhuchiev ulus of Smolensk, Vladimir-Volynsky and others, such purely Lithuanian cities as Troki, Vilna, which were not initially included in the number of lands dependent on the Horde, are included. [27]
Now the tribute-Horde is regularly collected in the treasury of the Grand Duke of Lithuania now from the territories, which, judging by the surviving sources, in the 13-14 centuries, previously did not pay tribute to the Horde at all. So the obligation to pay the "Horde" from the Privilensk lands in accordance with the "old custom" is noted in the acts of 1537 [28]
Moreover, the Polish-Lithuanian authorities returned to the Tatars the "servants" who had escaped or taken out by the Cossacks, with the punishment of the guilty, somehow prescribed by the orders of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander and King Sigismund I. And after the Polish-Lithuanian union of 1569, the number of orders of the authorities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for the cruel punishment of "headstrong" only increased; the Cossacks, who greatly disturbed the Tatar or Turkish authorities, were executed. Somehow it was with the Cossack leader Ivan Podkova at the beginning of the reign of Stefan Batory. [29]
The last time the Grand Duke of Lithuania and the King of Poland received a label for reign from the Khan 130 years after Moscow did it (1432). [thirty]
The Horde raids and the Horde tribute were superimposed on the oppression that the Lithuanian conquerors, and then the Polish masters, brought to the population of South-Western Russia. The latter made a huge contribution to the creation of a political Russophobic Ukrainians, which re-formed the worldview and historical memory of a significant part of the population in the former South-Western Russia.
