One of Batu’s first moves was to summon the Russian princes to Sarai to swear an oath of allegiance to the Mongol khan. These trips became a regular phenomenon, for no prince could rule without a patent (yarlyk) from the khan. The prince was forced to dress in Mongol clothes and undergo a ritual that involved passing between flames and kneeling at the feet of his sovereign to beg for his patent. If there was more than one candidate, the yarlyk would be given to the prince who promised the most revenue, offered the most soldiers for the Mongol army and gave the best assurance of maintaining order over his people. To fix the tax and number of recruits from each region the Mongols instituted censuses – a practice they had learned from the Chinese – which the baskaki and their military units oversaw. The general Mongol practice was to take one-tenth of everything, ‘men and girls as well as possessions’, according to a papal missionary who passed through Russia on his way to Karakorum in 1245-6.
The Russian princes and boyars went along with the Mongol system, helping it to carry out the censuses and enforce the taxation. To resist meant inviting destruction. Their collaboration posed difficulties for the Russian chroniclers, who told a story of the saintly princes as the helpless victims of the infidels (almost all the princes killed in battle by the Mongols were later canonised). The most problematic example was Alexander Nevsky, prince of Novgorod and Pskov. Nevsky was a Russian hero for his leading role in the defeat of the Swedes on the Neva River (from which he received his name Nevsky) in 1240. Two years later, he defeated the Teutonic Knights, German crusaders, in a battle on the ice of Lake Chud near Livonia – a victory that looms large in the national consciousness because it forms the central episode of Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein’s great patriotic film, which was seen by millions in the Soviet Union during the war against Hitler.
In 1252, Nevsky travelled to Sarai, where Batu Khan appointed him the grand prince of Vladimir, the most senior of the princes following the fall of Kiev. He acted as the Mongols’ loyal servant, suppressing a rebellion in Novgorod and other towns against their census officials. Nevsky’s collaboration was no doubt motivated by his mistrust of the West, which he regarded as a greater threat to Orthodox Russia than the Golden Horde, generally tolerant of religions. He recognised the Mongols as powerful protectors of the lucrative north Russian trade with the Baltic Germans and Sweden. But Nevsky’s realpolitik caused a problem for the chroniclers, particularly after he was made a saint by the Russian Church in 1547, for in their terms he had colluded with the infidel. They got around the issue by presenting his collusion as a gracious sacrifice—imitating Christ in his humility—to save Holy Russia from an all-conquering ‘Eastern tsar’ sent by God to punish Russians for their sins. Nevsky’s sacrifice would also feed into the myth of Russia saving Christendom. By placating the Mongols, he had stopped them from progressing further west.
The Church too collaborated with the Golden Horde. The khan exempted it from taxation, protected its property and outlawed the persecution of all Christians, on condition that its priests said prayers for him, meaning that they upheld his authority. These dispensations allowed the Church to thrive. Under the Mongols it made its first real inroads into the pagan countryside. Peasants flocked to the church lands where they were free from Mongol taxes and military service. It was at this time that the most used word in Russian for a peasant changed from liudi, a general term for ‘people’, to krestianin, derived from khristianin, meaning a Christian. Monasteries grew as landowners bestowed estates on them in the belief that it would save their souls—and save themselves from the infidels. Around thirty monasteries were founded during the first century of Mongol rule, and five times that number in the second century.
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