Nogai Horde

The kingmakers

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)formation

The most consequential rule in the post-Mongol steppe was that only a descendant of Chinggis Khan could be a khan. It decided who could found a state, who could only serve one — and it produced, in the Manghit, a power that was stronger than most khanates and could never become one.

Edigü

Idiku, or Edigü, was a beg of the Manghit clan who entered the service of Timur while Urus Khan and Toqtamish were fighting over the throne of the Kipchak. He went with Timur on the great campaign that broke Toqtamish, was rewarded with a jewelled girdle and a caparisoned horse, and asked leave to go home and gather up his own scattered clans. Timur gave it, along with a diploma exempting his people from capitation tax.

He spent the next twenty years making and unmaking khans of the Golden Horde. He put Timur Kutlugh on the throne, then Shadibek, then Puladbeg when Shadibek was deposed in 1407, then Chekre — and treated the khan at Sarai, Von Hammer says, rather as an equal than as a master. He invaded Russia. He fought Vytautas of Lithuania for a generation. He was finally killed in a battle with a son of Toqtamish; one account has him wounded and hiding in the reeds, where he was found.

He could not be khan, and did not try. What he left instead was a name: the hordes his descendants ruled came to be called after an earlier Jochid prince, Nogai, and the murzas of all of them traced themselves to Edigü.

The horde on the Yaik

When he fell, the greater part of his people went east of the Volga and camped on the Yaik and the Emba. Two of his sons went to Turan; one of them, Nur ad-Din, became the founder of the power of the Great Nogai. His son was Waqqas; Waqqas's sons were Musa, Yamgurchi, Hasan and a fourth killed in the Uzbek wars.

These men were subjects of Abu'l-Khayr while he lived. When he died they were among the leaders of the revolt against his house, and in 1481, allied with Ibak of Tyumen, they rode into the camp of Ahmad Khan of the Golden Horde — Yamgurchi's own brother-in-law — and killed him.

That is the horde announcing itself: not by taking a throne but by removing the man who sat on the senior one.

What they were for

Everything afterwards follows from the same position. The Nogai murzas had cavalry, pasture between three river systems and no dynastic claim, and their neighbours all had claims and needed cavalry.

So they married into Kazan and fought its wars; they dominated Astrakhan, and one of them boasted to Moscow that the children of Timur Kutlugh had submitted to him; they made and broke khans in the Crimea; they were the refuge and the executioners of the khans of Siberia. Ivan III let Musa marry his daughter to the khan of Kazan, and refused to let the khan's sister marry Yamgurchi's son, which is a precise measure of how the arrangement was understood in Moscow.

The Manghit were not a state with a dynasty. They were the thing dynasties had to come to terms with.

Three brothers

Drafted from Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851)expansion

Sigismund von Herberstein was at Moscow in 1517 and again in 1526, and the Nogai were the largest thing on the map his hosts could not draw. What he set down about them is short and almost entirely about how they were governed.

Dukes, not kings

They lived beyond the Volga, he writes, in the neighbourhood of the Caspian and chiefly by the river Yaik. They had no kings. They were ruled by chiefs, whom he renders as dukes and who are the murzas.

When he was in Russia three brothers held these duchies and had divided the provinces equally between them. Shidiak held the city of Saraychiq and the district along the Yaik. The second, whom Herberstein calls Cossum, had the country between the Kama, the Yaik and the Volga. The third, Sheikh Mamai, held a portion of Siberia and the land around it.

That is the whole constitution. A partible inheritance among brothers, no single head that anyone outside could treat with, and a territory stretching from the Kama to Siberia held by three men who were not required to agree.

Why it worked anyway

Because the horde's weight was applied through other people's thrones, and there were enough of those to go round.

Sheikh Mamai's daughter married Safa Giray of Kazan, and in 1530 he sent thirty thousand men to help his son-in-law resist a Russian attack. His brother Yusuf's daughter Söyembikä was married first to Jan Ali of Kazan and then, when Jan Ali was killed in a rising, to Safa Giray — and became the central figure of Kazan's last twenty years. Their cousin Aguish was fighting the Crimea alongside the khan of Astrakhan in 1509.

One family, in one generation, supplying queens to one khanate and armies against another.

Saraychiq

The senior brother's town was the one fixed point. Saraychiq stood on the lower Yaik on the caravan road from the Volga to Khwarazm, it held the graves of princes, and it was where envoys went — Russian agents, Bukharan matchmakers, Kazakh messengers — when they needed to speak to the Nogai rather than chase them.

It was not a capital in the sense Kazan had a capital. The horde lived in the open; the town was where its business was done and its dead were kept. Both facts mattered in 1580.

The Nogai century

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)peak

For roughly a hundred years, from the killing of Ahmad Khan to the burning of Saraychiq, no ruler on the western steppe could act without reference to the Manghit murzas. Two episodes show the range of what that meant.

1523: the conqueror at dinner

Mehmed Giray of the Crimea marched on Astrakhan in alliance with Sheikh Mamai and took it, and then quartered his army inside the walls.

His cousin Aguish put the case to Mamai in one sentence that is the entire political theory of the horde: What are we doing, idiots that we are, assisting a neighbouring and ambitious power whose aim it is to subdue us one after another?

Mamai listened. He advised the khan, out of concern for his soldiers' discipline, to camp outside the town in the Tatar manner; the khan agreed. Aguish came up with his own army. The two of them surrounded the tent while Mehmed Giray was at dinner, killed him and his son Bahadur and several of his grandees, fell on the camp, and chased the survivors to the Don, where many drowned. They then entered the Crimea, wasted it, and destroyed the twelve thousand men its chiefs raised to stop them.

The strongest ruler in the west, removed in a fortnight by allies, at no territorial gain to themselves. The Nogai wanted no delta and no peninsula. They wanted no neighbour strong enough to want theirs.

1555: Ismail kills Yusuf

The other episode is the same logic turned inward, and it destroyed the horde.

By the 1550s the murzas had divided over the largest question on the steppe. Yusuf, the senior prince, listened to Süleyman and to the khan of the Crimea, who urged him to rally to the threatened cause of Islam; he allied with Astrakhan, married his nephew into its royal house, and imprisoned a Russian envoy. His brother Ismail took the other side, offered Ivan IV his alliance, and became the patron of Dervish Ali, a claimant to the Astrakhan throne.

In December 1553 Ismail's envoys arranged at Moscow that a Russian army would come down the Volga with him to punish Astrakhan and Yusuf both. It did, in 1554, and put Dervish Ali on the throne.

In 1555 Ismail murdered his brother and wrote to the tsar from Saraychiq:

Your enemy no longer lives; my nephews and sons have unanimously put the reins of power in my hands. I rule over all the clans.

He did not. Yusuf's five sons crossed the Volga and beat him and killed his cousin; the sons of Sheikh Mamai turned on him too; at one point he was so hard pressed that he asked permission to take refuge in Kazan or Astrakhan — in Russian towns, from his own people. He killed another cousin, patched up a peace with Yusuf's family, and survived.

What it cost

Ismail asked Moscow to build a fort on the Volga delta and another on the Irgiz, to hold down murzas who would not submit to him. He asked the tsar to call him brother, and the tsar declined as beneath his dignity. He invited the Russians into the steppe as his guarantors and made his own succession a Russian interest.

He is in every sense the peak of the horde's power — no Nogai chief before him ruled all the clans, even briefly — and he reached it by handing the decision to somebody else.

Above one hundred thousand

Drafted from others, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia (1886)contraction

In 1558 an English merchant on his way to Bukhara spent part of the summer at Astrakhan and watched the Nogai die. He is the only eyewitness of it, and he is not a sympathetic one.

What he saw

Anthony Jenkinson was the Muscovy Company's agent. He recorded that the Nogai were all destroyed in the yeere 1558, at my being at Astracan, through ciuill warres among them, accompanyed with famine, pestilence, and such plagues, in such sort, that in the sayd yeere there was consumed of the people, in one sort and another, aboue one hundred thousand. The like plague, he says, was never seen in those parts. A country of great pasture remained unpeopled — to the great contentation of the Russes, who haue had cruell warres a long time together.

The survivors came into Astrakhan in great numbers to surrender to their enemies and beg relief, and were ill entertained. They died of hunger all over the island, lying in heaps, unburied and like beasts, very pittifull to beholde. Many were sold by the Russians and the rest were driven off. Jenkinson notes, with the detachment of a man pricing a commodity, that he could have bought as many Tatar children as he wanted from their own parents — a boy or a girl for a loaf of bread worth sixpence in England — but that his party had more need of victuals.

What was destroyed

He also wrote down how they had lived, in the past tense, because by the time he wrote it was past.

They were divided into companies called hordes, each under a ruler called a murza whom they obeyed as a king. They had no town and no house, but lived in the open field, each murza with his people, wives, children and cattle about him, moving when the pasture was consumed. When they moved they carried houses like tents set on wagons drawn by camels, and in them their wives, children and all their riches, which is very little. Every man had at least four or five wives besides concubines. They had no use of money at all, but bartered cattle for clothing and necessaries. They delighted in no art or science except war, at which they were expert, but were for the most part herdsmen, with great store of cattle, which was all their riches. They ate much flesh, especially horse, and drank mare's milk, and were often drunk on it.

That is a complete description of a mobile pastoral economy with no reserve. It explains the death toll. A horde that is fighting itself cannot move its herds to the right pasture at the right time, and a people whose entire capital is livestock has nothing to fall back on when the herds go.

The civil war

The war was Ismail's. He had killed his brother Yusuf in 1555 and spent the years after it fighting Yusuf's sons, the sons of Sheikh Mamai, and anyone who would not accept him; Moscow's armies were on the Volga throughout, taking Astrakhan in 1554 and annexing it in 1556, and the murzas were choosing sides in that quarrel as well as their own.

A hundred thousand dead is Jenkinson's figure and he was counting nothing. What is certain is that the power which had killed a Crimean khan in his own camp thirty-five years earlier was, after 1558, never able to threaten anybody again.

The Cossacks and the Kalmyks

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (1880)end

The horde was finished off from two directions by peoples who had not existed as powers when it was founded.

The Yaik

In 1580 Ivan IV sent an army under Ivan Murashkin against the Cossack bands who had been plundering the Volga since the taking of Astrakhan — robbing merchants and even the tsar's own envoys. Murashkin dispersed them, and they scattered in three directions. One body went north under Yermak and destroyed the khanate of Siberia. One went to the Terek. The third marched east along the Caspian shore to the mouth of the Yaik, where they heard from prisoners about a famous Nogai capital upriver.

They took Saraychiq, burned it, laid violent hands on the inhabitants and dragged the corpses out of their tombs. The details survive in the correspondence between the tsars and the murza Urus the following year.

Then they built a town of their own in the middle of the horde's country and called it Uralsk, and became, Karamzin says, the terror of the Nogai — of Urus above all, who never stopped complaining to Moscow about their brigandage. The tsar replied that they were vagabonds and fugitives beyond his control. Urus's answer deserves to be remembered:

A town of such importance, could it exist without your countenance? Some prisoners whom we have taken say they are subjects of the Tzar.

The oath

What the horde had left was arbitration. In November 1604 the boyar Simeon Godunov came to Astrakhan with full powers to settle the quarrels of the Nogai chiefs. They assembled, declared Ishterek the senior prince, and the Russian commissary put him on oath.

He and all the descendants of Ismail were to fight Russia's enemies to the death; to grant nobody the title of prince or regent without the tsar's confirmation; to stop the internal broils of the tribe; and to have no intercourse with the shah, the sultan, the khan of the Crimea, the rulers of Bukhara and Khiva, the Kazakhs, the shamkhal of the Kumyks or the Circassians. He was to camp where he was told — near the Caspian, on the Terek, the Kuma, and the Volga by Tsaritsyn — and to subdue the people of Kasai in Little Nogai, so that from the Black Sea to beyond the Caspian there should be one horde under one man answerable to Moscow.

He kept it long enough to harry the Azov Nogai into selling their children at Astrakhan, and broke it in 1613 by ravaging the Ukraine and riding to the neighbourhood of Moscow, because he disapproved of the election of Michael Romanov.

The Kalmyks

Then the Torghuts came. They crossed into the Tara district in 1606, were beaten back by degrees, and after a catastrophe at the hands of the Mongols around 1620 and pressure from the Kazakhs behind them they poured westward in numbers and settled on the Chumysh, the Ob and the Tobol.

They kept coming. Kalmyk chiefs began demanding the tribute the Bashkirs had paid the Nogai. In 1633 Kho-Urluk and his son marched against the Nogai chief Kanai with the help of a rebel murza and pressed him so hard that he appealed to Moscow; orders went to the commanders of Tobolsk, Tyumen and Tura to punish the Kalmyks, and those towns were much too far away to do anything at all.

In 1643 Kho-Urluk moved down to the neighbourhood of Astrakhan and tried to detach the Nogai princes from their Russian allegiance; the Russians marched out and killed him with some of his sons and grandsons. It made no difference. Not long after, his sons Yeldeng and Loosang crossed the Yaik into the Volga steppe and subdued the Nogai tribes of Kitai-Kipchak, Mailebash and Yedisan, and the Turkmen of the Red Camel Horde south of the Emba.

The greater part of the Volga Nogai became the Kalmyks' subjects and followed their fortunes. Howorth's summary of the whole process is four words long: the Kalmyks swept over the steppes of the Yaik, broke it to pieces, and scattered it hither and thither.

Between the Dniester and the Dnieper

Drafted from Tott, Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars (1786)afterlife

The hordes that would not live under the Kalmyks went west, and two centuries after Saraychiq burned a French officer found their descendants pasturing horses on the Black Sea steppe under a governor appointed from the Crimea.

The migration

Under Ayuka, who took the Kalmyk throne in 1672, the Great Horde Nogai were his subjects except a small group camped near Astrakhan, and most of them left the Yaik and the Volga altogether for the Kuban and the Kuma. When Ayuka died in 1724 and his people fell into confusion, the Yedisan and Yembulad tribes took the chance, crossed the Crimean steppes and joined the Tatars of Akkerman; the Kitai-Kipchaks followed them. Fear of the Kalmyks was one reason; being on bad terms with the Circassians and with the Little Nogai of Kasai was another.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Yedisan were camped between the Dniester and the Dnieper and the Yembulad between the Dnieper and Azov, the first under a seraskier and the second under a kaymakam, both appointed by the khan of the Crimea.

What de Tott found

The Baron de Tott, sent to reside with Maqsud Giray in the 1760s, travelled among them. They were governed by the khan's own son with the title of seraskier. They were extremely discontented, because the khan had recently transferred to the sultan the grain tax they paid. The pastures of the Yedisan were separated from Bessarabia by the Dniester.

They lived, he says, in tribes settled in valleys fifty or sixty feet deep that cut the plain from north to south.

That is the last position of the horde of Edigü: three or four clans in the ravines of the Pontic steppe, taxed by a Crimean prince on behalf of an Ottoman sultan, and cross about it.

The reversal

It is worth setting the two ends of the story beside each other.

The Manghit began as the power that made khans — that put four successive Chinggisids on the throne of Sarai, married its daughters into Kazan, decided who ruled at Astrakhan, and in 1523 killed the khan of the Crimea in his tent because he was becoming a nuisance.

They finished as the Crimean khan's tax base.

Nothing about that was a peculiar Nogai failure. It is what happened to mobile pastoral power everywhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when gunpowder states with rivers and forts began to be able to reach places cavalry had made unreachable. What is peculiar to the Nogai is how visible it is, because they never had walls to lose — only a name, a genealogy, and the ability to be somewhere a khan did not expect them.