KOVALEV - Archivum Eurasiae Medio Aevi

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ARCHIVUM EURASIAE
MEDII AEVI
edited by
P. B. Golden, R. K. Kovalev,
A. P. Martinez, J. Skaff, A. Zimonyi
21 (2014–2015)
Festschrift for Thomas T. Allsen

in Celebration of His 75th Birthday
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ISSN 0724-8822
CONTENTS
CHRISTOPHER P. ATWOOD
Chikü Küregen and the Origins of the Xiningzhou Qonggirads ………………. 7
MICHAL BIRAN
Encounters Among Enemies: Preliminary Remarks
on Captives in Mongol Eurasia ….…………………………………………….. 27
STEPHEN F. DALE
Ibn Khaldun, the Yüan and Îl-Khân Dynasties ………………………………… 43
DEVIN DEWEESE
Khāns and Amīrs in the Qalandar-Nāma of Abū Bakr Rūmī:
Praise of the Islamizing Jochid Elite in a Persian Sufi Work
From Fourteenth-Century Crimea …………………………………………….. . 53
NICOLA DI COSMO
Why Qara Qorum?
Climate and Geography in the Early Mongol Empire ……......……………….. 67
MIHÁLY DOBROVITS
On the Titulature of the Western Turkic Chieftains ………………………….... 79
RUTH DUNNELL
Xili Gambu and the Myth of Shatuo Descent:
Genealogical Anxiety and Family History in Yuan China …………………….. 83
ELIZABETH ENDICOTT
The Role of Poison in Mongolian History …………………………………...… 103
PETER B. GOLDEN
Comestibles in Maḥmûd al-Kašġarī ……………………………….…………... 111
CHARLES J. HALPERIN
The Image of the Mongols (Tatars) as Kipchaks (Polovtsy)
in Russian Sources, Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries ……………….………..… 137
HODONG KIM
Qubilai’s Commanders (Amīrs): A Mongol Perspective ……….……………... 147
ROMAN K. KOVALEV
Where Did Rus’ Grand Princess Olga’s Falcon Find its Cross? ……….…….... 161
XINRU LIU
Naga and Dragon: An Animal Cult in Ancient India and Central Asia ……….. 183
6 CONTENTS
RUTH I. MESERVE
The Dhole (Genus Cuon) and Mongolian Čögebüri:
A Tangled History of Identity …………………………………………….….… 199
SVAT SOUCEK
The Historical Significance of the Battle of Merv (1510) ……………………... 211
VICTOR SPINEI
Hunting in the Mongol Society During
The Great Expansion Age in Eurasia ………………………………………….. 215
OLEKSANDR SYMONENKO
Sarmatian-Age Helmets From Eastern Europe ………………………………... 277
THE IMAGE OF THE MONGOLS (TATARS) AS KIPCHAKS
(POLOVTSY) IN RUSSIAN SOURCES,
THIRTEENTH-SIXTEENTH CENTURIES
CHARLES J. HALPERIN
In 1223 the Kievan Rus’ princes were informed by their Kipchak (Polovtsy) neigh-
bors of the incursion into the Ukrainian steppe of a new nomadic people. According
to the version of the “Tale of the Battle on the River Kalka” in the Novgorod First
Chronicle, “they are called Tatars but some say they are Taurmens, and others
Pechenegs.” The Laurentian Chronicle contained the same passage but the Hypatian
Chronicle reduced the mystery, simply writing that the newcomers were Moabites
called Tatars and that they then returned to the “Kipchak Land” (Polovetskaia zem-
lia); we will return to that expression momentarily.1 The author of the “Tale” ad-
dressed the Mongols as “Tatars,” which became the standard name of the Mongols
in Rus’ sources for the next several hundred years beginning with the narratives of
the Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities and city-states in 1237-1240. Neither
the chronicler nor any of his informants called the Mongols “Kipchaks” in 1223,
which would have been quite illogical. It was the Kipchaks who had conveyed news
of the arrival of the Mongols to the Rus’, it was the Kipchaks whom the Mongols
had already defeated. Yet approximately a century and a half later Russian sources
about the Mongols did refer to them directly or indirectly as Kipchaks in a variety
of ways. How and why this “ethnic” confusion arose sheds light upon the Musco-
vite perception of the Mongols.
The western Eurasian steppe occupied by the Kipchaks was called the “Kipchak
steppe” in Turkic, Arabic and Persian, but the Rus’ sources called it the “Kipchak
Land,” a designation that was retained for much of the Mongol period. The Rus’
were projecting their own system of territorial and political terminology, “lands,”
on to their nomadic neighbors, or, perhaps translating the Turkic concept into Slav-
ic. “Land” was not a nomadic concept. The ulus was social or political. Although
nomads were very protective of grazing land rights, they did not perceive geograph-
ic boundaries the way the East Slavs did. The Rus’ systematically employed terms
like “the Rus’ Land,” the “Riazan’ Land,” and so forth. However, the Rus’ term
paid homage to the dominant demographic element on the steppe at the time of the
1 Charles J. Halperin, The Tatar Yoke: The Image of the Mongols in Medieval Russia
(Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009), p. 24; Novgorodskaia pervaia letopis’
starshego i mladshego izvodov (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR,
1950), pp. 264-66, 61-63; Polnoe Sobranie Russkikh Letopisei [hereafter PSRL] 1 (Mos-
cow: Izdatel’stvoVostochnoi literatury, 1962), p. 445; PSRL 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
Vostochnoi literatury, 1962), p. 740. On Kievan Rus’ and steppe nomads, see Halperin,
Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 10-20.
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138 CH.J. HALPERIN
Mongol invasion and, once the Kipchaks were conquered, even thereafter. 2
The narratives of the Mongol conquest of Rus’ did not as a rule confuse the
Mongols with the Kipchaks.3 For example, the “Tale of the Destruction of Riazan’
by Batu” (Povest’ o razorenii Riazani Batyem) recorded that Prince Ingvar Ingvare-
vich of Riazan’ had previously fought the pagan Kipchaks and was now fighting the
Tatars.4 It identified Kipchaks who converted to Orthodox Christianity after the
Mongol conquest of their territory, a development confirmed by the Dominican
Plano Carpini who mentioned a converted Kipchak in the service of Grand Prince
Yaroslav of Vladimir-Suzdal’ in northeast Rus’, the northern neighbor of the
Riazan’ principality.5 Nevertheless in a manuscript culture in which manuscripts
often date centuries later than the events they described, anomalies occur. The mid
fifteenth-century Novgorod Fourth Chronicle reported under the year 1238, that is,
after the Mongol campaign against northeastern Rus’, that the Kipchaks took the
border city of Torzhok while en route to the northwest city of Novgorod, but turned
back.6 Of course this seemingly aborted attempt to attack Novgorod was conducted
by Mongols, not Kipchaks, but the mistake of the compiler of the Novgorod Fourth
Chronicle seems more like a mistake of carelessness than a reflection of the deliber-
ate confusion of Kipchaks and Monogols of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-
century Muscovite sources. The same Novgorod Fourth Chronicle also noted that
after Batu took the city of Kozel’sk in the southwest, he returned to the “Kipchak
Land.”7 This description of the Pontic and Caspian steppe as the “Kipchak Land”
also occurred in the thirteen-century vita of Grand Prince Mikhail of Chernigov
(Chernihiv), martyred by the Tatars in 1246.8 Despite using the Kipchaks to denote
the territory on which the Mongols nomadized, the Rus’ sources maintained the
“ethnic” distinction between the Tatars and the Kipchaks for over a century.
In 1380 a largely Muscovite army led by Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich rode
into the steppe and defeated a Tatar army led by the Emir Mamai at the battle of
2 Charles J. Halperin: “The Concept of the Russian Land from the Ninth to the Fourteenth
Century,” Russian History 2 (1975), pp. 29-38; “Tverian Political Thought in the Fifteenth
Century,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 18 (1977), pp. 267-73; and “Novgorod
and the ‘Novgorodian Land’,” Cahiers du monde russe 40 (1999), pp. 345-64.
3 On these sources see Halperin, The Tatar Yoke, pp. 23-67.
4 When referring to the Rus’ sources I will follow their terminology and refer to “Tatars,”
not “Mongols.” In Rus’ religious invective “pagan” applied not only to polytheists, idola-
ters, shamanists, and ancestor-worshipers, the native religions of the Uralo-Altaic pastoral
nomads of the Eurasian steppe, but also to Muslims. Rus’ sources described the Mongols
of the thirteenth century as “pagans” but also the Mongols of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries who were Muslims. This practice reveals more about Rus’ religious prejudice
than Mongol religious practice. Therefore I will forgo citing allusions to the Kipchaks or
Mongols as “pagans.”
5 Voinskie povesti drevnei Rusi (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR,
1949), p. 18; Halperin, The Tatar Yoke, pp. 38, 40, 54.
6 PSRL 4 (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), p. 221.
7 PSRL 4, p. 222.
8 PSRL 10 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 237.

THE IMAGE OF THE MONGOLS 139
Kulikovo Field on the Don River, for which Dmitrii Ivanovich acquired the sobri-
quet by which he is still best known, Donskoi. This was the first successful Russian
incursion into the steppe since the Mongol conquest. While Donskoi’s victory did
not “liberate” Russia from the “Tatar Yoke,” as neither concept existed at that time,
the battle did become the subject of a trilogy of literary works, denoted the “Kuli-
kovo cycle,” which celebrated Russian military prowess.9 In these works the Tatars
directly or indirectly were associated with the Kipchaks.10
This literary “fusion” of the Tatars and the Kipchaks can be found in narratives
about events immediately before the battle of Kulikovo written in later periods. The
mid-fifteenth century Novgorod Fourth Chronicle noted that by defeating a Tatar
force on the Vozha River in 1378 Grand Prince Dmitrii had expelled the Tatars
from his domain and that the Kipchaks were compelled to return home without suc-
cess and in disgrace.11 The sixteenth-century Nikon Chronicle described the 1378
itinerary of the cleric Mitiai from Russia to Constantinople, where he intended to
seek appointment as metropolitan (head) of the Rus’ Orthodox Church. After cross-
ing the Riazan’ Land Mitiai came to “the Horde” (Orda), to the “Kipchak place”
(mesto polovetskoe) within the “Tatar boundaries” (predely tatarskie).12 What geo-
graphic locale the author of the narrative meant by this confused phrasing remains
elusive but clearly the Tatars and the Kipchaks overlapped territorially.
The first member of the Kulikovo cycle is the epic poem the “Beyond the Don”
(Zadonshchina) which only indirectly called the Tatars “Kipchaks.”13 The Mongols
were “Tatars,” or maybe Huns, but their homeland was the “Kipchak Land.” The
wife of warrior Mikula Vasil’evich importuned the Don River to bring her husband
back safely from the “Kipchak Land” and the women of Kolomna lamented that
9 On the significance of the battle and the literary works it inspired see Halperin: “The Rus-
sian Land and the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 1380-1408,”
Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 23 (1976), pp. 7-103; “The Six-Hundredth
Anniversary of the Battle of Kulikovo Field, 1380-1980, in Soviet Historiography,” Ca-
nadian-American Slavic Studies 18 (1984), pp. 298-310, reprinted in Russia and the Mon-
gols. Slavs and the Steppe in Medieval and Early Modern Russia, ed. Victor Spinei and
George Bilavschi (Bucharest: Editura Academiae Romane, 2007), pp. 156-67 [the pagina-
tion in the “Table of Contents is incorrect]; Russia and the Golden Horde, pp. 68-70; The
Tatar Yoke, pp. 103-55.
10 Halperin, The Tatar Yoke, p. 106.
11 PSRL 4, p. 310.
12 PSRL 11 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), p. 39. The term “the Golden Horde” (Zolotaia orda) by
which the Juchid ulus is now commonly referenced is a mid sixteenth-century Muscovite
invention a half century after that successor state of the Grand Mongol Empire had ceased
to exist. Rus’ sources contemporary to the Juchid ulus used different and often vaguer
terminology, usually just “the Horde” or perhaps the “Volga Horde” or the “horde” of a
specific khan such as the “Horde of Uzbek.”
13 Text: Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1959), pp.
9-17. Discussion: Halperin: “The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar,” pp. 9-22; The Ta-
tar Yoke, pp. 116-22. Tatars as Kipchaks: Halperin: “The Russian Land and the Russian
Tsar,” p. 13, somewhat misstated in The Tatar Yoke, p. 118.

140 CH.J. HALPERIN
their husbands had been laid to rest in the “Kipchak Land.”14 On the other hand the
author of the epic contrasted the Rus’ defeat by the Kipchaks on the Kaiala or Kalka
River, probably intentionally subsuming the defeat of Prince Igor Sviatoslavovich
by the Kipchaks in 1186 and the defeat of the Rus’ by the Tatars in 1223, with the
Russian victory of the Tatars on the Kulikovo River, which in some fashion distin-
guished the Kipchaks and the Tatars.15
In the remaining members of the Kulikovo cycle Muscovite authors indiscrimi-
nately referred to the Tatars as Kipchaks (Polovtsy), Pechenegs (Patzinaks, a no-
madic predecessor of the Kipchaks in Kievan Rus’), Hagarenes (descendants of
Hagar) and Ishmaelites (descendants of Ishmael), the latter two generic terms for
nomads.16
The second text of the Kulikovo trilogy was the so-called “Chronicle Tale” (le-
topisnaia povest’) of Kulikovo, so-called because it was preserved within the corpus
of the Russian chronicles.17 In its narrative again of course the Mongols were pri-
marily designated as “Tatars” but in addition to gathering Tatar troops, Mamai also
mobilized “Kipchak forces” (polovetskaia sila, literally: Kipchak “strength”) and
Donskoi and the Russians fought not only Tatars but Kipchaks.18 It is also curious
that while the Long Redaction of the “Chronicle Tale” described Mamai as fleeing
after his defeat to “his land,” where one might have expected the author to write the
“Kipchak Land,” the short version of the “Chronicle Tale,” preserved in the late
fifteenth-century Simeonov chronicle, described the defeated Mamai as fleeing to
the “Tatar Land.”
The final entry in the Kulikovo trilogy is the “Narration of the Battle with
Mamai” (Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche), the longest text and the one with the
richest literary history.19 Tracing the evolution of the Kipchak theme in its four
main redactions – Basic, Chronicle, Expanded and Zabelin – reveals some interest-
ing variations. One shared thread is reference to the Tatars as speaking the “Hel-
14 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy pp. 11 (Huns), 14 (“Kipchak Land”).

15 I follow the reconstruction of this passage in V.P. Adrianova-Peretts, “Zadonshchina.
Opyt rekonstruktsii avtorskogo tektsa,” in Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 6 (1948),
pp. 201-55, here 223 rather than that in Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, p. 9. Halperin, The
Tatar Yoke, p. 120 mistakenly attributed this passage in the “Beyond the Don” to Grand
Princess Evdokiia, wife of Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi, rather than the author because
the words of the author of the “Beyond the Don” were attributed to her in the “Narration
of the Battle with Mamai,” discussed below.
17 Text: Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 29-40. Discussion: Halperin: “The Russian Land
and the Russian Tsar,” pp. 39-44; The Tatar Yoke, pp. 108-16; “Text and Textology: Sal-
mina’s Dating of the ‘Chronicle Tales’ about Dmitry Donskoy,” Slavonic and East Euro-
pean Review 79 (2001), pp. 248-63.
18 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 29, 35.
19 Texts by redaction in Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy will be cited individually below. Discus-
sion: Halperin: “The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar,” pp. 23-37; “Some Observations
on Interpolations in the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche,” International Journal of
Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 23 (1981) [1982], pp. 93-112; The Tatar Yoke, pp. 122-31.

lenic tongue” or professing the “Hellenic faith.” “Hellenic” here meant ancient
Greek; the Rus’ sources called Byzantine Orthodox Christian Greeks just “Greeks.”
This is entirely a literary conceit based upon the Rus’ equation of Muslims with
pagans mentioned above. The term “the Hellenic language” alternated with “the
Kipchak language” in different versions of the “Narration,” so we will track this
particular passage.
The “Basic” (Osnovnaia) redaction is the earliest version of the text.20 We will
skip commonplace allusions to the Tatars. The text described Mamai as professing
the Hellenic faith. Donskoi assigned his envoy Zakharii Tiutchev two interpreters
who knew the Kipchak language. While visiting the Trinity-Sergius Monastery,
Donskoi learned from a messenger sent by Tiutchev that the Kipchaks were ap-
proaching Muscovy. St. Sergius urged Donskoi to ride out against the Kipchaks.
Donskoi prays to the Mother of God to prevent the Kipchaks from destroying Rus’
cities. The Kipchaks are the enemies of Rus’. Donskoi announced that his army
would set out against the Pechenegs and the Tatars. Metropolitan Kiprian dis-
patched Donskoi against the Tatars.21 Evdokiia lamented the Kalka (meaning also
Kaiala) defeat of Rus’ by the Kipchaks and Hagarenes, also bewailing that Rus’ had
not yet recovered from that great battle with the Tatars. Prince Dmitrii Bobrok Vol-
ynskii, a military commander with prophetic abilities, compared the noise arising
from the Tatar regiments in the Hellenic tongue to the silence emanating from the
Russian camp. Peresvet, supposedly a monk sent by St. Sergius to assist Donskoi,
died in personal combat against a Pecheneg who resembled Goliath; both perished.
Peresvet’s body was later found together with that of the Pecheneg, also referred to
twice as a Tatar. Donskoi celebrated his defeat of the Kipchaks.22 No redaction of
the “Narration” and no other text of the Kulikovo cycle propagates the confusion of
the Tatars with the Kipchaks as frequently as the Basic Redaction of the “Narra-
tion.”
The Basic Redaction’s allusions to the Tatars as Kipchaks were sometimes re-
tained, sometimes dropped, and sometimes altered in subsequent redactions of the
“Narration.” The Chronicle Redaction combined the “Narration” with the “Chroni-
cle Tale” of the battle of Kulikovo and is preserved in the Nikon Chronicle.23 The
Chronicle Redaction omitted all reference to the Tatars as Kipchaks but retained the
Hellenic and Pecheneg allusions. The passages on the Kipchak “strength” and bat-
tling the Kipchaks disappear. Tiutchev’s interpreters speak Hellenic, Evdokiia
summarized the battle on the river Kalka as between Christians and Hellenes.
Donskoi informed his cousin the appanage Prince Vladimir Andreevich of Serpu-
20 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 41-76.

21 Metropolitan Kiprian of Moscow was in fact not in Moscow in 1380 and was feuding with
Donskoi at that time; Donskoi had expelled him from Moscow. Therefore Kiprian’s role
in the battle of Kulikovo was invented by the author of the “Narration.” The role of St.
Sergius was either exaggerated or totally invented, but at least he was available in 1380 to
encourage Donskoi.
22 Povesti o Kulikovksoi bitvy pp. 41, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 64, 68-69, 74.

142 CH.J. HALPERIN
khov that they should depart to fight the Pechenegs, which is obviously a new
speech; had its prototype been found in the “Basic Redaction” it which would men-
tioned the Kipchaks instead of the Tatars. Bobrok Volynskii hears mourning by a
widow and a maid from the two armed camps but named no language. Peresvet
fought a Pecheneg. Fleeing Tatars berate Mamai in the Hellenic tongue. After the
battle Donskoi found next to Peresvet’s body not the corpse of the Pecheneg he
fought but that of the famous or noble (narochityi?) [Russian?] bogatyr’ (folk hero)
Grigorii Kapustin.24 The introduction of a Russian folk hero into the narrative illus-
trates the contamination of the “Narration” not only by the “Chronicle Tale” but
also by Russian folklore.
The Expanded Redaction is obviously from its name the longest. It might have
been composed as late as the seventeenth century.25 The redactor chose not to men-
tion Kipchaks or Pechenegs but allusions to the Hellenes were retained, even ampli-
fied. Tiutchev’s interpreters specialize in the Hellenic tongue, but the expanded
narrative of his encounters with Mamai mentioned “Hellenic” only once, when
Donskoi declared that all Rus’ princes descend from the nest of St. Vladimir of Ki-
ev who had abandoned “Hellenic passions” (strasti), meaning paganism.26 The Ex-
panded Redaction did not contain St. Sergius’s allusions to the Pechenegs or Kip-
chaks. Evdokiia’s lament contrasts Christians and Hellenes without mentioning Ha-
garenes. Bobrok Volynskii’s prophesy did not name languages but relied upon the
contrasting voices of a widow and a maid. Peresvet’s opponent was not identified as
a Pecheneg and Peresvet’s body was found lying next to a famous or noble (naro-
chityi?) but unnamed Tatar bogatyr’.27 What motivated the idiosyncratic identifica-
tion of Peresvet’s opponent remains mysterious but there is nothing particularly
peculiar in a Russian source discussing a Tatar bogatyr’; the word, after all, is of
Turkic origin, bahadur. The redactor of the Expanded Redaction might have no-
ticed the contradiction between Peresvet’s fatal fight with a Pecheneg and his rest-
ing dead next to a Russian and decided to rectify the confusion. The knowledge that
“folk heroes” transcended the Russian-steppe divide should not have been esoteric.
The revision of this passage also suggests continuing folkloric influence on the
“Narration.”
The Zabelin Redaction drew eclectically from previous versions of the “Narra-
tion.”28 It retained two evocations of the Kipchaks, first referring to Mamai’s mobi-
lization of Tatar and Kipchak forces, second in the language specialization of
Tiutchev’s interpreters. Donskoi rode out to fight the Pechenegs, but Peresvet
fought a Tatar and in death lay next to the Tatar Tavrul.29 The source of the Tatar’s
name is unknown but ethnically and linguistically it does fit. Other references re-
24 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 84, 89, 91, 97-98, 101, 103, 105.
26 In Halperin, “The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar,” pp. 32 translated strasti as “hor-
rors.”
27 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy pp. 119, 124, 129, 152.
29 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, 165, 172, 194, 200.

treat to the concept of Hellenes and the Hellenic language, although Evdokiia’s re-
marks were directed against the Hagarenes and somehow the two Orthodox Chris-
tian sons of Grand Prince Olgerd (Algirdas) of Lithuania who fought on Donskoi’s
side at the battle of Kulikovo had supposedly fought against the Danube Hagarenes
(Ottomans?).30
The “Narration” treated Kipchaks and Tatars as well as Pechenegs as synony-
mous terms. How else could Evdokiia describe a Rus’ defeat by the Kipchaks as a
“great Tatar battle”?31 This identification of the Tatars with pre-Tatar Turkic no-
mads of the western Eurasian steppe resonates with Muscovite familiarity with the
history of the Kipchaks and their language. For example, the “Tale of Timur”
(Povest’ o Temir-Aksake), a narrative of Tamerlane’s campaign against Rus’ in
1395, noted that Temir-Aksak’s name in the Kipchak language, meaning Turkic,
Timur-i lenk, meant “Iron Lame,” because of his injury.32 A treatise on how to con-
duct foreign policy with nomads responding to the siege of Moscow in 1408 by
Emir Edigei accused him of fostering enmity between Grand Prince Vasilii I of
Moscow and his father-in-law Grand Prince Vitovt (Vytautus) of Lithuania just as
the Kipchaks had pursued a divide-and-conquer policy against Rus’ by turning the
princes of Kiev and Chernigov against one another.33 Even as late as 1480 Bishop
Vassian of Rostov in his famous “Epistle to the Ugra River” encouraging Grand
Prince Ivan III to stand up to Khan Akhmet of the Great Horde invoked the prece-
dent of the battles fought by the twelfth-century Grand Prince of Kiev Vladimir
Monomakh against the Kipchaks.34
Even when Muscovite book-men deliberately equated Tatars and Kipchaks they
must have known better. The bulk of the indigenous nomadic population of the Pon-
tic and Caspian steppe on the eve of the Mongol conquest were Kipchaks. By the
second half of the fourteenth century the Mongols living in the Kipchak Steppe had
by and large assimilated their subject Kipchaks, although discerning observers
could still distinguish the two, and in all likelihood were well-along in acquiring the
Kipchak form of the Turkic language. The Mongol language, if used at all by the
Mongols of the Juchid ulus at this time, showed up in diplomatic correspondence.35
These facts of life induced Arabic and Persian sources to continue to refer to the
territory of the Juchid ulus as the “Kipchak steppe” (Desht-i Kipchak) and to dis-
cuss the Kipchak ethnic contribution to the Juchid ulus quite accurately. The Juchid
ulus sold Kipchaks to the Mamlukes as slaves to become Mamlukes and the Kip-
chaks were a formidable presence not only in the Juchid ulus but throughout the
30 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 176, 179, 189-90, 197.

33 PSRL 15, 1st edition (St. Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia, 1863), pp. 475-77,
2nd edition (Petrograd: Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia, 1922), pp. 177-80; Halperin:
“The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar,” p. 54; The Tatar Yoke, p. 150.
35 On the evolution of the Juchid ulus see the synopsis in Halperin, Russia and the Golden
Horde, pp. 25-32.

144 CH.J. HALPERIN
Mongol Empire.36 The “Kipchak Land” of the Rus’ sources was an adaptation of the
Turkic designation of the territory on which the Kipchaks nomadized accommodat-
ed to the Rus’ system of naming polities as “lands.” Rus’ sources did not refer to or
translate the term “the Kipchak steppe” (polovetskoe pole). Beginning in the late
fourteenth century Muscovite sources began referring to “the steppe” (literally the
“field”) without an ethnic adjective.37 What would have been the accurate contem-
porary adaptation, the “Tatar steppe” (tatarskoe pole), was cited only rarely. 38 “The
Tatar steppe” was truer to the Kipchak geographic term than the earlier, equally
rare, adaptation to the “land” system of nomenclature derived from Kievan Rus’
times, the “Tatar Land.”
Still and all, then, the Mongols were still Mongols, not Kipchaks, not Pechenegs.
The dynasty ruling the Juchid ulus was Mongol, the Chingissids, and its ancestor
was the Great Mongol Empire, not the Kipchak confederation. Thus the geographic
and linguistic continuity between the Kipchaks and the Mongols is insufficient to
explain the identification of Mongols as Kipchaks in early Muscovite sources.
Neither does the obvious stylistic element provide an adequate explanation. The
desire for literary variety existed. Muscovite authors used allusions to the Kipchaks
or Pechenegs as literary decorations, just as they used invocations of the Hellenes, a
purely bookish analogy because no Rus’ had ever met a Classical Greek. But the
ebbs and flows of the Tatar-Kipchak analogy cannot be ascribed to changing liter-
ary taste.
To be sure, at best the deliberate confusion of Tatars and Kipchaks was a minor
chord in Muscovite sources which overwhelmingly call the Mongols “Tatars,” but it
was neither a gratuitous nor a meaningless note. Rather, it was an echo of the Rus’
ambivalence about admitting that the Mongols had conquered Rus’. Rus’ sources
knew the Mongols had conquered Rus’ and sometimes said so, usually in retrospect,
but mostly they described the realia of Mongol rule without correlating the presence
of Mongol officials in the Russian forest zone collecting taxes with the narrative of
the Mongol conquests from 1237 to 1240, a cultural pattern unique among other
36 Halperin, “The Kipchak Connection: the Ilkhans, the Mamluks, and Ayn Jalut,” Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63:2 (2000), pp. 229-45, whose errors were
corrected in the revised, corrected and authorized translation, Vladimir Kostiukov, tr.,
“Kipchakskii faktor: il’khany, mamliuki i Ain-Dzhalut,” Stepi Evropii v epokhu sred-
nevekov’ia = Trudy po arkheologii, v. 6 Zolotoordynskoe vremia. Sbornik nauchnykh
rabot (Donetsk: Institut arkheologii NAN Ukrainy, Donetsk natsional’nyi universitet,
2008), pp. 385-400.
37 PSRL 11, pp. 77; PSRL 12 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), pp. 6, 61, 63, 75, 76, 113, 141, 197,
199.
38 Offhand the only instance I have found is PSRL, 4, p. 354, the Novgorod Fourth Chronicle
version of the so-called Vita of Dmitrii Donskoi, the “Oration on the Life and Death of
Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich, Tsar of Rus’” (Slovo o zhitii i prestavlenii velikogo knia-
zia Dmitriia Ivanovicha, tsaria ruskogo) that Donskoi met Mamai in battle in the “Tatar
steppe” (Tatarskoe pole). On this text see Halperin, “The Russian Land and the Russian
Tsar,” pp. 69-78.

frontier societies which practiced the “ideology of silence” to deal with unflattering
aspects of confessionally unacceptable foreign rule.39 Labeling the Mongols with
the designations of nomadic tribes during the Kievan period who had not conquered
Rus’ resonated with the Muscovite ideological insistence on direct continuity be-
tween Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy without an intervening period in which “national”
political independence had been lost, a major element of mid sixteenth-century
Muscovite thought.
What stands out in the history of equation of the Mongols (Tatars) and the Kip-
chaks (Polovtsy) is the relative concentration of this conceit in one redaction of one
text about the battle of Kulikovo, the Basic Redaction of the “Narration of the Tale
of Mamai,” which developed the imagery far more, relatively speaking, than any
other source. Surely this must have some connection to its date of composition. Un-
fortunately scholars have not reached any consensus on that date or, for that matter,
the dates of composition of any of the works of the Kulikovo cycle.40 The earliest
versions of each of the three texts are dated anywhere from 1380 into the early six-
teenth century. The Basic Redaction of the “Narrative” is dated anywhere from the
second decade of the fifteenth century to the third decade of the sixteenth century.
But some textual relationships, despite the later incestuous connections in seven-
teenth-century manuscripts, among the three texts, are relatively clear. Most schol-
ars agree that the epic “Beyond the Don” and the “Chronicle Tale,” regardless of
which came first, both predate the earliest version of the “Narration.” It is also clear
from the above analysis that later redactions of the “Narration” devoted less space,
if any, to the Kipchak/Polovtsy connection to the Mongols/Tatars than the Basic
Redaction, although whether this is due to external textual influences – major in the
case of the Chronicle Redaction by the “Chronicle Tale,” minor in the case of late
manuscripts of all redactions by the “Beyond the Don” – is an open question. These
patterns suggest, however speculatively, that for some time after the battle the
Mongol presence was still too strong to historicize them very much as a continua-
tion of the Kipchaks. Then there was some intermediate period in the literary histo-
39 Halperin: Russia and the Golden Horde, especially pp. 61-74; The Tatar Yoke; “Russia
and the ‘Mongol Yoke’: Concepts of Conquest, Liberation and the Chingissid Idea,” Ar-
chivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 2 (1982), pp. 99-107; “The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice
and Pragmatism on the Medieval Religious Frontier,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 26:3 (1984), pp. 442-66, reprinted in Russia and the Mongols., pp. 132-55 [the
pagination in the “Table of Contents is incorrect]; “The East Slavic Response to the Mon-
gol Conquest,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 10 (1998-1999), pp. 98-117, reprinted in
Russia and the Mongols, pp. 201-18 [the pagination in the “Table of Contents is incor-
rect]; “Rewriting History: The Nikon Chronicle on Rus’ and the Horde,” Archivum Eura-
siae Medii Aevi 17 (2010), pp. 11-26, recommended instead of its earlier version,
“Perepisyvaia istoriiu: Nikonovskaia letopis’ o vzaimootnosheniiakh Rusi s Ordoi,” Vitaly
G. Anan’ev, tr., Rossica Antiqua (St. Petersburg), 2010, 2, pp. 149-170.
40 For the latest survey of opinions on times of composition see A. O. Amel’kin and Iu. V.
Seleznev, Kulikovskaia bitva v sviditel’stvakh sovremennikov i pamiati potomkov (Mos-
cow: Kvadriga, 2011), pp. 8-93, 266-377.

146 CH.J. HALPERIN
ry of the Kulikovo cycle when the weakening of Horde authority and mental dis-
tance from the battle of Kulikovo Field permitted the literary license of the author
of the Basic Redaction of the “Narration” to develop the tenuous identification of
the Kipchaks and Mongols into a genuinely serious theme. That moment passed,
and the intellectual equation of the two steppe peoples became irrelevant. I would
suggest that the intermediary period coincided with the middle and second half of
the fifteenth century, when the fragmentation of the Juchid ulus into its eventual
successor states gave Russian book-men the freedom to create texts which treated
even the great Batu, hitherto untouchable as the founder of Mongol authority over
the Rus’, the conqueror par excellence, into a figure of fiction and fantasy devoid of
invincibility or dignity.41
In conclusion, then, examining the literary device of characterizing Mongols as
Kipchaks sheds light not only on Rus’-Tatar relations but on Rus’ and Muscovite
intellectual, literary and cultural history.
41 Charles J. Halperin: “The Defeat and Death of Batu,” Russian History 10 (1983), pp. 50-
65 reprinted in Russia and the Mongols, pp. 99-113 [the pagination in the “Table of Con-
tents is incorrect] and “Paradigms of the Image of the Mongols in Medieval Russia,” in
Volker Rabatzii, Alessandra Pozzi, Peter W. Geier, and John R. Krueger, ed., The Early
Mongols: Language, Culture and History. Tümen tümen nasulatugai. Studies in Honor of
Igor de Rachewiltz on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday (Indiana University Uralic and
Altaic Series vol. 173; Bloomington, IN: 2009), pp. 53-62, here 60.


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Festschrift for Thomas T. Allsen

Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

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14 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy pp. 11 (Huns), 14 (“Kipchak Land”).

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20 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 41-76.

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30 Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitvy, pp. 176, 179, 189-90, 197.

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