In contrast to the picture of conquest and destruction attributed to the Mongols in the Middle Ages, the book of the French historian Marie Faveiro reveals that the legacy of a strong Mongol state extended beyond the war, and behind a wide development that resulted in a known modern world that owes thanks - in part - to the era of prosperity and trade and intellectual exchange in Europe and Asia in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.
The book "The Khanate: How the Mongols Changed the World" - published in 2021 by Belknap Publishing of Harvard University Press - provides a glimpse into the nomadic nature of the nomadic Mongols, who traveled vast distances and built advanced societies in the western Eurasian steppes, which became one of the medieval civilizations. in the region.
The Golden Horde Khanate controlled a gigantic region that stretched from Central Asia to Eastern Europe and included the Russian principalities and Siberia, and excelled in conquest, trade, acquiescence to local elites and collection of tribute, but it was weak in written culture and architecture. loot power.
To this end, the author focuses on the influence of the Golden Horde on the course of history, particularly the history of Russia.
She argues that the subordination of the Golden Horde khanate was beneficial to Russia, which at the time was fragmented and mostly rural and poor, while the Mongols created for the Russians - according to Faveiro - "a kind of rule commensurate with their political and economic peculiarities and cultural sensitivities".
The book "The Khanate: How the Mongols Changed the World" was published in 2021 by Belknap Publishing, affiliated with Harvard University Press (Al-Jazeera)
Al Jazeera Net conducted this dialogue with the author of the book, Marie Faveiro, a professor of history at the University of Paris Nanterre and a former member of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology.
Explain to us how your interest in Russia and Islam led to an in-depth research into the history of the "Golden Horde Khanate", how did it move from France and Britain to the Crimea and the Tatars?
I am French, born and raised in Paris.
She became interested in the Mughal Empire nearly 20 years ago.
I was studying history at the Sorbonne in Paris and wanted to work on the Islamization of Russia.
I started reading an old Russian book on the "Golden Horde" (the only book we had in the library!) and was amazed to discover that the Mongols played such a major role in both Russian and Islamic history.
It was a completely new field to me, had never heard of it and was immediately impressed.
However, my supervisor at the university told me that it would be difficult because we do not have enough resources on the subject, so you need to master Russian history and you will have to travel to Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia.
It was difficult, but it did not discourage me.
Since then I have been collecting all the sources I can about the Golden Horde and have discovered a lot of clues.
There is a myth that Bedouin culture must be mostly oral;
But, on the contrary, the Golden Horde was a sophisticated and administratively complex empire.
Its judicial system released a documentary record called "Yarliq" (Written Orders Preserved).
The rulers (khanates) were involved in important diplomatic correspondence with the outside world.
A large part of these documents are preserved in the Russian archives, as well as in Simferopol, Venice, Genoa, Vienna, Warsaw, and Istanbul.
There are also important Arab sources, mostly from the Mamluk Sultanate.
In your book, you dealt with the relationship between the Golden Horde Khanate and the building of regimes and national identity (especially Russian and perhaps Ukrainian). How can this relationship be explained?
The Russian school has dominated this field since the 19th century, with massive publications every year in archeology, numismatics, and history.
However, for Russian national studies, the Khanate of the Golden Horde is a peculiar entity with devastating effects on the formation of the Russian nation.
And in the Soviet Union, this period was distorted, marginalized, and often simply erased from textbooks.
Historians and archaeologists were not allowed to use the word Golden Horde.
It was referred to as the "Tatar yoke".
But the Tatars and other Muslims now living in the Russian Federation see the rule of the Golden Horde as an essential formative period in their history.
The origins of the Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Tatars, and other Central Asian communities in their collective memory go back to the time when Barakat Khan (1257-1267) and Uzbek Khan (1312-1341) converted to Islam.
Indeed, historians agree that the Islam of the Eurasian steppes, Crimea, Ukraine and Eastern Europe is one of the most important legacies of the Golden Horde.
Therefore, I argue that we need to transcend Russian nationalist prejudices, and ask new questions: How do we rethink the era of the Golden Horde in the context of continuous Russian history?
What is the legacy of the last nomadic empire in western Eurasia?
How does Russia reconcile with the Islamic dimension of its history?
My book is an attempt to provide some answers and show that we need to understand the history of the Golden Horde and the Tatars if we want to understand Russia and Ukraine.
The big question is the title of the book "How did the Mongols change the world and formed a kind of prelude to globalization and the modern world?"
In the second half of the thirteenth century, economic exchange intensified, incorporating almost all of Eurasia.
Historians are accustomed to calling this unprecedented commercial boom "Pax Mongolica".
In my research, the Mughal peace is re-analyzed as the "Mughal exchange" which is a major historical phenomenon in world history.
Mughal exchange, in my opinion, goes beyond the separation of medieval and modern.
It bridges the gap between the Silk Road in the ancient world and the Age of Discovery in the modern world, and is a precursor to the Columbian Exchange (after Christopher Columbus, discoverer of the New World) in the early 1500s.
Another important feature of the Mongol exchange is that it led to the rise of northern Eurasia.
As I explain in my book, the Golden Horde became the pioneer of the global economy at the end of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
Its liberal (free and open) and integrative policies have intensified links from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea and beyond, even to China.
Its policies combined state control (treats, currency issuance, taxation, road supervision) and free trade (liquidity of movement and partnerships, alliances based on common interest rather than ethnic or religious affiliation, low taxation).
Diplomatic agreements concluded by the Golden Horde with the Mamluks, as well as with the Byzantines and Italians, transformed the commercial, artistic, and intellectual spheres.
For the first time, people and caravans were able to travel safely from Europe to the Middle East and China along overland routes.
A complex system of currency exchange has been developed.
Multilingual narratives were produced in the Volga Valley, Egypt, Central Asia, and Yemen.
Significantly, during this period, we did not witness a clash between globalization and state building.
Finally, we must not forget that the Khans of the Golden Horde were the first Mongol leaders to convert to Islam and benefited from the most developed Islamic trade network in Eurasia in the early thirteenth century;
This contributes to explaining how the Golden Horde created favorable conditions for markets to flourish and how it participated in the creation of the largest integrated market in pre-modern history.
Lands ruled by the Khanate of the Golden Horde and included Crimea and large parts of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus (Shutterstock)
Mobile cities are not a military campaign, but they bear characteristics of nomads and differ radically from ancient and modern states alike.
How were the cities of the Khans and the Mughals?
First, we must review the assumption that the Bedouins did not build cities.
One of the most striking developments during the era of the Golden Horde is the enormous prosperity of settlements on the banks of the Volga, Don and other great river valleys, and in the Crimea.. (Archaeologists have discovered more than 100 settlements of the Golden Horde of various sizes, from huge cities with open spaces to small villages. ).
But this phenomenon was not a form of settlement, since at the same time the leaders of powerful nomadic groups were still migrating seasonally.
Second, as I discovered in my research, the Mongols built cities but they were never as important as the mobile khan court.
This court was called in the sources "the Khanate of the Golden Horde" and played the role of the capital, even though it was a "mobile city".
Contemporary travelers have attributed to the Khanate an impressive nomadic organization of great numbers of people and notables, their huge camps with their city-like facilities, a huge mobile market, and herds of cattle, as well as a mobile administration, which included the mint shop, the chancellery and the treasury with secretaries and accountants.
This organization differed radically from the stable forces.
Interestingly, the "Khaniyya/Hashd" appeared in all Western, Russian, Arabic and Persian languages in the thirteenth century.
The word was used to express a new kind of force (without translation) and they had no other word to express it.
There is a popular notion increasingly referred to these days with the escalation of the Russian war on Ukraine, that Russian tyranny is rooted in the brutal history of the Mongols, but you reject the Mongols as barbarians and even resilient and accept pluralism. How is that?
Contrary to the popular view, Mughal political culture was not based on the concentration of power in the ruler;
Governance was a collective process involving extensive, face-to-face negotiations with the elites in the "major gatherings" (Kurultai).
Those political councils were the main governing institution of the Golden Horde.
The entire political elite, including women, was required to attend those councils to legitimize the Khan's orders through unanimity.
Face-to-face consensus was a fundamental principle of steppe law.
Another principle distinct from the Golden Horde is its ability to harmonize different religious communities, a governing policy known as "religious tolerance".
In accordance with this policy, the Mongols granted the clergy (Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Jews) exemption from taxation and military conscription.
This system was very beneficial to these various religious communities, especially as the financial benefits allowed them to create new properties and build churches, mosques, synagogues, synagogues, monasteries, and religious schools.
The influence on Islam itself was significant, as the Golden Horde combined diverse Islamic heritages into one community, linked Seljuk Islamic practices, Abbasids, Volga Bulgars, and Central Asia, and fostered a sense of unity among the disparate peoples.
As you can see, this is very far from the current authoritarian and intolerant Russian regime.
You see that pastoralism is not a primitive stage on the road to modernization, can you explain the idea?
We are talking about a different kind of order here, not a stable empire but a nomadic empire operating with a different spatial logic.
Historians have only recently begun to realize that nomads can create complex political structures and that their ambitions can extend far beyond raiding and pillaging.
Old stereotypes of Bedouins and plunder influence Golden Horde scholarly efforts. Several prevailing paradigms continue to distort the work of historians: nationalist approaches with their teleological tendencies, a simplistic conception of Bedouin feudalism seen as a reactionary stage in human economic development, and the assumption that nomads are “imported” cultural” or, at best, “cultural mediators,” not the chief producers of their success, especially when it came to the administration for which they supposedly needed to rely on the expertise of their settled subjects.
So, yes, pastoralism is not a primitive stage on the road to modernization;
Pastoralism is a different option, one that enabled the Mughals to forge a unique imperial entity that did not emulate any stable model.
The Mangit, Nujis, Tatars, Uzbeks, Kazaks, and other heirs of the Golden Horde kept the Bedouin alive, and practiced their methods of consensus, lineage, hierarchical participation, and mobility;
Not because these peoples were traditionally bound or ignorant of the methods of the settled peoples, but because these methods proved to be effective.
A model of Saray Batu, the capital of the Golden Horde in Astrakhan, one of the cities of the Russian Federation (Shutterstock)
Where can we find the remains of the heritage of the Khans of the Golden Horde and its peoples?
Especially with the increasing talk about the Crimean Tatars in the context of the Russian war on Ukraine?
As I wrote in my book, if the Golden Horde was forgotten, it was also because it left so few obvious architectural traces.
Their numerous cities and religious buildings left only a few monuments that you can visit today mainly in Crimea, Tatarstan and Kazakhstan.
However, the Golden Horde's legacy was much deeper and much larger than that.
If the Khanate of the Golden Horde were projected onto today's map, it would extend across a region occupied by Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Russia.
Its diplomacy and trade exchanges reached Western Europe and North Africa;
Its history is therefore a common heritage that does not belong exclusively to the national narratives of any nation-state;
It belongs to world history.