Russia and the Golden Horde - The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History

“Scratch a Russian and find a Tatar!” In the traditional view, reflected in this epigram, Russia’s supposed historical backwardness and isolation from the West are blamed largely on Russia’s domination by the Mongol Golden Horde from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. In a pathbreaking reinterpretation of the impact of the Mongol yoke on medieval Russian history, framed within the comparative context of the medieval ethnoreligious frontier, Charles J. Halperin shows the Russo-Tatar relationship to have been complex, multifaceted, and by no means always hostile. Alongside the religious prejudice and ideological enmity toward the Mongols expressed in the contemporary written sources on which the traditional view is based, Halperin points to countervailing evidence – philological, archaeological, and textual – of close and pragmatic relationships involving intermarriage, mutually profitable trade and commerce, borrowing of political institutions, assimilation of Mongols into Russian society, and alliances between Russian princes and Mongol khans that left a more positive legacy. This pioneering effort at reconstructing a realistic image of Russo-Tatar relations and assessing their impact on Russian history is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian, medieval, and inner Asian history.