Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

After the shock of the Mongol invasions had subsided, from the middle of the thirteenth century the Golden Horde and the native princes of the Rus’ dealt with one another relatively easily: the Mongols took tribute and military service, and in return they kept the peace among the princes, cut them in on their lucrative trade networks, and protected them from enemies in the west. By contrast, the khans of the Golden Horde spent much of the same period feuding and fighting with their Mongol cousins in the Ilkhanate, who presented a serious threat to their territorial ambitions in the Caucasus and were competitors for merchant traffic along their different sections of the Silk Roads. This curious state of affairs—in which Mongols fought Mongols and indulged princes of the outside world—was in many ways an exact inversion of everything that Genghis Khan had stood for. And slowly but surely, Mongol-on-Mongol violence would bring down the curtain on the empire that had once been the scourge of the world.