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MongoliaThe Mongol Decline
Contributing to the eventual Mongol decline in Eurasia was a
bitter war with Timur, also known as Timur Lenk (or Timur the
Lame, from which Tamerlane is derived). He was a man of
aristocratic Transoxianian birth who falsely claimed descent from
Chinggis. Timur reunited Turkestan and the lands of the Ilkhans;
in 1391 he invaded the Eurasian steppes and defeated the Golden
Horde. He ravaged the Caucasus and southern Russia in 1395.
Timur's empire disintegrated, however, soon after his death in
1405.
The effects of Timur's victory, as well as those of
devastating drought and plague, were both economic and political.
The Golden Horde's central base had been destroyed, and trade
routes were moved south of the Caspian Sea. Political struggles
led to the split of the Golden Horde into three separate
khanates: Astrakhan, Kazan, and the Crimea. Astrakhan--the Golden
Horde itself--was destroyed in 1502 by an alliance of Crimean
Tatars and Muscovites. The last reigning descendant of Chinggis,
Shahin Girai, khan of the Crimea, was deposed by the Russians in
1783.
The Mongols' influence and their intermarriage with the
Russian aristocracy had a lasting effect on Russia. Despite the
destruction caused by their invasion, the Mongols made valuable
contributions to administrative practices. Through their
presence, which in some ways checked the influence of European
Renaissance ideas in Russia, they helped reemphasize traditional
ways. This Mongol--or Tatar as it became known--heritage has much
to do with Russia's distinctiveness from the other nations of
Europe.
There were a number of reasons for the relatively rapid
decline of the Mongols as an influential power. One important
factor was their failure to acculturate their subjects to Mongol
social traditions. Another was the fundamental contradiction of a
feudal, essentially nomadic, society's attempting to perpetuate a
stable, centrally administered empire. The sheer size of the
empire was reason enough for the Mongol collapse. It was too
large for one person to administer, as Chinggis had realized, yet
adequate coordination was impossible among the ruling elements
after the split into khanates. Possibly the most important single
reason was the disproportionately small number of Mongol
conquerors compared with the masses of subject peoples.
The change in Mongol cultural patterns that did occur
inevitably exacerbated natural divisions in the empire. As
different areas adopted different foreign religions, Mongol
cohesiveness dissolved. The nomadic Mongols had been able to
conquer the Eurasian land mass through a combination of
organizational ability, military skill, and fierce warlike
prowess, but they fell prey to alien cultures, to the disparity
between their way of life and the needs of empire, and to the
size of their domain, which proved too large to hold together.
The Mongols declined when their sheer momentum could no longer
sustain them.
Data as of June 1989
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