If you remove all the lies from history, this does not mean at all that only the truth will remain - as a result, there may be nothing left at all.

Stanislav Jerzy Lec

The Tatar-Mongol invasion began in 1237 with the invasion of Batu's cavalry into the Ryazan lands, and ended in 1242. The result of these events was a two-century yoke. This is what the textbooks say, but in reality the relationship between the Horde and Russia was much more complicated. In particular, the famous historian Gumilyov speaks about this. In this material we will briefly consider the issues of the invasion of the Mongol-Tatar army from the point of view of the generally accepted interpretation, and also consider controversial issues this interpretation. Our task is not to offer fantasy on the topic of medieval society for the thousandth time, but to provide our readers with facts. And conclusions are everyone’s business.

Beginning of the invasion and background

For the first time, the troops of Rus' and the Horde met on May 31, 1223 in the battle of Kalka. Russian troops led Kyiv prince Mstislav, and they were opposed by Subedey and Jube. The Russian army was not only defeated, it was actually destroyed. There are many reasons for this, but all of them are discussed in the article about the Battle of Kalka. Returning to the first invasion, it occurred in two stages:

• 1237-1238 - campaign against the eastern and northern lands of Rus'.
• 1239-1242 - a campaign against the southern lands, which led to the establishment of the yoke.

Invasion of 1237-1238

In 1236, the Mongols began another campaign against the Cumans. In this campaign they achieved great success and in the second half of 1237 they approached the borders of the Ryazan principality. The Asian cavalry was commanded by Khan Batu (Batu Khan), the grandson of Genghis Khan. He had 150 thousand people under his command. Subedey, who was familiar with the Russians from previous clashes, took part in the campaign with him.

Map of the Tatar-Mongol invasion

The invasion took place in the early winter of 1237. It is impossible to establish the exact date here, since it is unknown. Moreover, some historians say that the invasion did not take place in winter, but late autumn the same year. With tremendous speed, the Mongol cavalry moved across the country, conquering one city after another:

• Ryazan fell at the end of December 1237. The siege lasted 6 days.
• Moscow - fell in January 1238. The siege lasted 4 days. This event was preceded by the battle of Kolomna, where Yuri Vsevolodovich and his army tried to stop the enemy, but was defeated.
• Vladimir - fell in February 1238. The siege lasted 8 days.

After the capture of Vladimir, virtually all the eastern and northern lands fell into the hands of Batu. He conquered one city after another (Tver, Yuryev, Suzdal, Pereslavl, Dmitrov). At the beginning of March, Torzhok fell, thereby opening the way for the Mongol army to the north, to Novgorod. But Batu made a different maneuver and instead of marching on Novgorod, he deployed his troops and went to storm Kozelsk. The siege lasted for 7 weeks, ending only when the Mongols resorted to cunning. They announced that they would accept the surrender of the Kozelsk garrison and release everyone alive. People believed and opened the gates of the fortress. Batu did not keep his word and gave the order to kill everyone. Thus ended the first campaign and the first invasion of the Tatar-Mongol army into Rus'.

Invasion of 1239-1242

After a break of one and a half years, in 1239, a new invasion of Rus' by the troops of Batu Khan began. This year based events took place in Pereyaslav and Chernigov. The sluggishness of Batu’s offensive is due to the fact that at that time he was actively fighting the Polovtsians, in particular in the Crimea.

Autumn 1240 Batu led his army to the walls of Kyiv. The ancient capital of Rus' could not resist for long. The city fell on December 6, 1240. Historians note the particular brutality with which the invaders behaved. Kyiv was almost completely destroyed. There is nothing left of the city. The Kyiv that we know today no longer has anything in common with the ancient capital (except for its geographical location). After these events, the army of invaders split:

• Some went to Vladimir-Volynsky.
• Some went to Galich.

Having captured these cities, the Mongols went on a European campaign, but it interests us little.

Consequences of the Tatar-Mongol invasion of Rus'

Historians describe the consequences of the invasion of the Asian army into Rus' unambiguously:

• The country was cut up and became completely dependent on the Golden Horde.
• Rus' began to annually pay tribute to the victors (money and people).
• The country has fallen into a stupor in terms of progress and development due to the unbearable yoke.

This list can be continued, but, in general, it all comes down to the fact that all the problems that existed in Rus' at that time were attributed to the yoke.

This is exactly what the Tatar-Mongol invasion seems to be, in short, from the point of view of official history and what we are told in textbooks. In contrast, we will consider Gumilyov’s arguments, and also ask a number of simple but very important questions for understanding the current issues and the fact that with the yoke, as with the Rus-Horde relations, everything is much more complex than is commonly said.

For example, it is absolutely incomprehensible and inexplicable how a nomadic people, who several decades ago lived in a tribal system, created a huge empire and conquered half the world. After all, when considering the invasion of Rus', we are considering only the tip of the iceberg. The Empire of the Golden Horde was much larger: from Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic, from Vladimir and to Burma. Giant countries were conquered: Rus', China, India... Neither before nor after no one was able to create war machine, which could conquer so many countries. But the Mongols were able...

To understand how difficult it was (if not to say impossible), let's look at the situation with China (so as not to be accused of looking for a conspiracy around Rus'). The population of China at the time of Genghis Khan was approximately 50 million people. No one conducted a census of the Mongols, but, for example, today this nation has 2 million people. If we take into account that the number of all peoples of the Middle Ages is increasing to the present day, then the Mongols were less than 2 million people (including women, old people and children). How were they able to conquer China with 50 million inhabitants? And then also India and Russia...

The strangeness of the geography of Batu’s movement

Let's return to the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Rus'. What were the goals of this trip? Historians talk about the desire to plunder the country and subjugate it. It also states that all these goals have been achieved. But this is not entirely true, because in ancient Rus' there were 3 richest cities:

• Kyiv is one of the largest cities in Europe and the ancient capital of Rus'. The city was conquered by the Mongols and destroyed.
• Novgorod is the largest trading city and the richest in the country (hence its special status). Didn't suffer from the invasion at all.
• Smolensk is also a trading city and was considered equal in wealth to Kyiv. The city also did not see the Mongol-Tatar army.

So it turns out that 2 of the 3 largest cities were not affected by the invasion at all. Moreover, if we consider plunder as a key aspect of Batu’s invasion of Rus', then the logic cannot be traced at all. Judge for yourself, Batu takes Torzhok (he spends 2 weeks on the assault). This is the poorest city, whose task is to protect Novgorod. But after this, the Mongols do not go to the North, which would be logical, but turn to the south. Why was it necessary to spend 2 weeks on Torzhok, which no one needs, in order to simply turn to the South? Historians give two explanations, logical at first glance:

• Near Torzhok, Batu lost many soldiers and was afraid to go to Novgorod. This explanation could well be considered logical if not for one “but”. Since Batu lost a lot of his army, then he needs to leave Rus' to replenish the army or take a break. But instead, the khan rushes to storm Kozelsk. There, by the way, the losses were huge and as a result the Mongols hastily left Rus'. But why they didn’t go to Novgorod is unclear.
• The Tatar-Mongols were afraid of the spring flooding of the rivers (this happened in March). Even in modern conditions, March in the north of Russia is not characterized by a mild climate and you can easily move around there. And if we talk about 1238, then that era is called by climatologists the Little Ice Age, when winters were much harsher than modern ones and in general the temperature was much lower (this is easy to check). That is, it turns out that in the era of global warming, Novgorod can be reached in March, but in the era of the Ice Age everyone was afraid of river floods.

With Smolensk, the situation is also paradoxical and inexplicable. Having taken Torzhok, Batu sets off to storm Kozelsk. This is a simple fortress, a small and very poor city. The Mongols stormed it for 7 weeks and lost thousands of people killed. Why was this done? There was no benefit from the capture of Kozelsk - there was no money in the city, and there were no food warehouses either. Why such sacrifices? But just 24 hours of cavalry movement from Kozelsk is Smolensk, the richest city in Rus', but the Mongols don’t even think about moving towards it.

Surprisingly, all these logical questions are simply ignored by official historians. Standard excuses are given, like, who knows these savages, this is what they decided for themselves. But this explanation does not stand up to criticism.

Nomads never howl in winter

There is one more remarkable fact that official history simply ignores, because... it is impossible to explain. Both Tatar-Mongol invasions took place in Rus' in winter (or began in late autumn). But these are nomads, and nomads begin to fight only in the spring in order to finish the battles before winter. After all, they travel on horses that need to be fed. Can you imagine how you can feed a Mongolian army of thousands in snowy Russia? Historians, of course, say that this is a trifle and that such issues should not even be considered, but the success of any operation directly depends on the support:

• Charles 12 was unable to provide support for his army - he lost Poltava and the Northern War.
• Napoleon was unable to organize supplies and left Russia with a half-starved army that was absolutely incapable of combat.
• Hitler, according to many historians, managed to establish support only by 60-70% - he lost the Second World War.

Now, understanding all this, let's look at what the Mongol army was like. It is noteworthy, but there is no definite figure for its quantitative composition. Historians give figures from 50 thousand to 400 thousand horsemen. For example, Karamzin talks about Batu’s 300 thousand army. Let's look at the provision of the army using this figure as an example. As you know, the Mongols always went on military campaigns with three horses: a riding horse (the rider moved on it), a pack horse (it carried the rider’s personal belongings and weapons) and a fighting horse (it went empty, so that it could go into battle fresh at any time). That is, 300 thousand people are 900 thousand horses. To this add the horses that transported ram guns (it is known for certain that the Mongols brought the guns assembled), horses that carried food for the army, carried additional weapons, etc. It turns out, according to the most conservative estimates, 1.1 million horses! Now imagine how to feed such a herd in a foreign country in a snowy winter (during the Little Ice Age)? There is no answer, because this cannot be done.

So how much army did Dad have?

It is noteworthy, but the closer to our time the study of the invasion of the Tatar-Mongol army occurs, the smaller the number is. For example, historian Vladimir Chivilikhin speaks of 30 thousand who moved separately, since they could not feed themselves in a single army. Some historians lower this figure even lower – to 15 thousand. And here we come across an insoluble contradiction:

• If there really were so many Mongols (200-400 thousand), then how could they feed themselves and their horses in the harsh Russian winter? The cities did not surrender to them peacefully in order to take food from them, most of the fortresses were burned.
• If there were really only 30-50 thousand Mongols, then how did they manage to conquer Rus'? After all, every principality fielded an army of about 50 thousand against Batu. If there really were so few Mongols and they acted independently, the remnants of the horde and Batu himself would have been buried near Vladimir. But in reality everything was different.

We invite the reader to look for conclusions and answers to these questions on their own. For our part, we did the most important thing - we pointed out facts that completely refute the official version of the Mongol-Tatar invasion. At the end of the article, I would like to note one more important fact, which the whole world has recognized, including official history, but this fact is hushed up and is rarely published anywhere. The main document by which the yoke and invasion were studied for many years is the Laurentian Chronicle. But, as it turned out, the truth of this document raises big questions. Official history admitted that 3 pages of the chronicle (which speak of the beginning of the yoke and the beginning of the Mongol invasion of Rus') have been changed and are not original. I wonder how many more pages from Russian history have been changed in other chronicles, and what really happened? But it is almost impossible to answer this question...

Whatever one may say, history was, is, and also remains quite illusory and unreliable, and those facts that we are accustomed to taking at face value often turn out to be, upon closer examination, foggy and vague. Who exactly, and most importantly, why, is rewriting that very objective information is often simply impossible to identify, due to the lack of eyewitnesses who can either confirm or refute it. However, it is worth saying that there are inconsistencies, outright absurdity, as well as blunders that are striking and worth discussing in more detail, because among the huge amount of chaff, it is quite possible that the truth will be found. Moreover, in the history of our country there is also enough such goodness, for example, you can discuss the Tatar Mongol yoke briefly, without wandering into the dark jungle of a flighty girl named Clio.

Official version: when the Mongol yoke was formed and who might need it

First of all, we need to find out what the official version of history, which we studied very successfully at school, says about the Mongol-Tatar yoke of 1237-1480. It is this version that is considered correct, so we must proceed from this. Fans of this version believe, based on available sources, that in early spring 1237, that is, at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan unexpectedly appeared at the helm of nomadic tribes living communally and scattered at that time. In just a couple of years, this truly talented leader, and roughly speaking, a real, brilliant leader, gathered such a colossal army that he was immediately able to set out on his, which turned out to be actually victorious, campaign to the north-west.

Although no, everything was somewhat not so fast, because at first, a hastily cobbled together state, which previously consisted of completely disparate tribes and communities, conquered China, which was quite strong at that time, and at the same time its closest neighbors. Only after all this, the Golden Horde, like an endless sea, rushed towards us, jingling with spears and playing with long beards, riding on dashing horses, intending to impose the Tatar-Mongol yoke on Mother Rus', which is what we are talking about.

Tatar-Mongol yoke: start and end dates, according to the official version, dates and numbers

Horror, fear, horror gripped all of ancient Rus', from edge to edge, when millions of troops entered our lands. Burning everything in its path, killing and also maiming the population, leaving behind only ashes, the “Horde” walked across the steppes and plains, capturing everything large areas, horrifying everyone who crossed their path.

Absolutely no one could prevent this incredible avalanche, fragrant with fat and soot, and our epic good fellows and heroes, apparently, were just lying on the stoves, ripening for their allotted thirty-three years. Having reached the Czech Republic and Poland itself, the victorious campaign, for completely unknown reasons, suddenly choked and stood rooted to the spot, and the Tatar-Mongol yoke stopped, splashed in place, like a real sea, establishing its own order, as well as a fairly harsh regime on the conquered people. amazing lightness of the territories.

It was then that the Russian princes received special letters, as well as labels from the khan for governance. That is, the country, in fact, simply continued to live its usual, everyday life. To make it clearer, it is worth saying that in Ancient Rus', a yoke was the name given to a yoke placed on powerful animals, oxen, pulling an unbearable burden, for example, a cart loaded with salt. True, the Mongols and Tatars, at times, apparently to further intimidate and prevent outrage against the regime, destroyed several small villages or towns.

The khan had to pay tribute regularly and very carefully, in order to avoid unnecessary conflicts, and the establishment of the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' went simply with a bang. Mongols are oriental people - quick-tempered and hot-tempered, why tempt fate? This went on for about three hundred years, until Dmitry Donskoy finally showed the handsome Horde, Khan Mamai, where these domestic crayfish spend the winter, which mortally frightened the invaders, who seemed completely fearless and invincible.

Around the same time, in the middle of the fourteenth century AD, on the Ugra River, Prince Ivan the Third and the Tatar Akhmat, after standing against each other for several days, for some reason simply separated, without even entering into battle. Moreover, the Horde’s “staring contest” clearly lost. This time is considered the official end of the Mongol-Tatar yoke. These events date back to approximately 1380.

The period of the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus': years and key dates

However, the invaders remained angry and rampant for several more decades, and the consequences for the country were simply catastrophic; the horde managed to quarrel the Russian princes, so much so that they were ready to tear each other’s throats for labels and petitions from the khan. At that time, the son of the notorious Genghis Khan, the elderly young man Batu, became the head of the Horde, and he surrendered his position to the enemy.

Thus, it turns out that the Tatar-Mongol yoke, which lasted about two to three hundred years, ended in nothing. Moreover, the official version of history also offers the dates of the Mongol-Tatar yoke, which are key. How long did the Tatar-Mongol yoke last in Rus'? Do the math for yourself, it’s not at all difficult, because specific numbers are given, and then – pure mathematics.

• The Mongol-Tatar yoke, which we briefly talk about, began in 1223, when a countless horde approached the borders of Rus'.
• Even the date of the first battle, which marked the beginning of the Mongol-Tatar yoke, is known : May 31 of the same year.
• Tatar-Mongol yoke: the date of the massive attack on Rus' is the winter of 1237.
• In the same year, the Mongol yoke in Rus', in short, reigned; Kolomna and Ryazan were captured, and after them the entire Palo-Ryazan principality.
• In the early spring of 1238, at the very beginning of March, the city of Vladimir was captured, which later became the center from which the Tatar-Mongols ruled, and Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich was killed.
• A year later, the horde also captured Chernigov.
• Kyiv fell in 1240, and this was a complete collapse for Rus' at that time.
• By 1241, the Principality of Galicia-Volyn was captured, after which the activity of the Horde clearly stopped.

However, the Tatar-Mongol yoke did not end there, and for another forty years the Russians paid tribute to the Horde khan, because official history says that it ended only in 1280. To get a clearer idea of ​​the events taking place, it is worth considering the map of the Tatar-Mongol yoke; everything there is quite transparent and simple, if you take everything on faith.

Tatar-Mongol yoke: historical fact or fiction

What do alternative sources say, so to speak, did the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' really exist, or was it specially invented for some specific purpose? Let's start with Genghis Khan himself, an extremely interesting and, one might even say, entertaining personality. Who was this “Comanche leader”, the most talented of all existing rulers, leaders and organizers, who probably surpassed Adolf Hitler himself? A mysterious phenomenon, but the Mongol by family and tribe, it turns out, was completely European in appearance! A Persian historian, a contemporary of the Mongol-Tatar campaigns, named Rashidad-Din, frankly writes in his chronicles:

“All the children from the clan of Genghis Khan were born with blond hair, and also gray eyes. The Great One himself had the yellow-green gaze of a wild puma.”

It turns out that he is not a Mongol at all, a great Mongol! For starters, there is also information, quite reliable: In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the invasion took place, the Mongolian and Tatar peoples simply did not have a written language! Therefore, they could not write down their own sources, purely physically. Well, they didn’t know how to write, and that’s all! It’s a pity, because their words would be useful to us in establishing the truth.

These peoples learned to write as many as five centuries later, that is, much later than the Tatar-Mongol yoke supposedly existed in Rus', and even that’s not all. If you thoroughly delve into the historical reports of other nations, then nothing is written about the black-eyed and black-haired invaders of vast territories, from China to the Czech Republic and Poland. The trail has been lost and it is impossible to find it.

The Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' lasted for a long time, but left no traces behind it

When Russian travelers, exploring more and more new lands, set their feet to the east, to the Urals and Siberia, then on their way they would certainly have encountered at least some traces of the presence of a once multimillion-strong army. After all, the Tatar-Mongols, according to legend, were supposed to “hold” these territories too. Moreover, no burials more or less reminiscent of Turkic ones were discovered. It turns out that no one has died in three hundred years? Cossack travelers did not even find a hint of cities or any kind of “decent” infrastructure for their time. But it was here that the very road along which tribute was brought from all over Rus' should have passed. A strange forgetfulness was observed among the people who occupied these lands for centuries - they knew neither in sleep nor in spirit about any yoke.

In addition to the complete “lack of presence,” as everyone’s favorite humorist Mikhail Zadornov would say, one can also note the elementary impossibility of existence, much less the victorious march of an army of half a million people in those ancient times! According to the same evidence on which official history is based, it turns out that each nomad had at least two horses at his disposal, and sometimes even three or four. It is difficult to imagine this herd of several million horses, and even more difficult to figure out how to feed such a host of hungry animals. In one day, these countless hordes of ungulates should have devoured all the greenery within a radius of several hundred kilometers and left behind a landscape most reminiscent of the consequences of a nuclear attack or a zombie invasion.

Perhaps, under the attack and rule of the Mongols, someone skillfully disguised something else, completely unrelated to the poor nomadic peoples? It is difficult to imagine that they, accustomed to life in a fairly warm steppe, felt calm in the severe Russian frosts, but even the more persistent and hardy Germans could not withstand them, although they were equipped with the latest equipment and weapons. And the very fact of such a well-coordinated and clearly functioning control mechanism is quite strange to expect from nomads. The most interesting thing is that completely wild people were sometimes depicted in early paintings dressed in armor and chain mail, and during military operations they could easily roll out a battering ram to the city gates. These facts somehow do not fit at all with the idea of ​​the Tatar-Mongols of that time.

Such inconsistencies, large and small, can be found if you dig into more than one volume of scientific work. Who and why needed to falsify history, “fooling lies” on the poor Mongols and Tatars, who were not even aware of something like that? To be honest, we must admit that these peoples learned about their heroic past much later, and most likely, already from the words of Europeans. It's funny, isn't it? What did they want to hide from their descendants, placing responsibility for the destruction and years of unbearable tribute on Genghis Khan? So far, all this is just theory and guesswork, and it is not at all a fact that the objective truth will ever be clarified.

There are a large number of facts that not only clearly refute the hypothesis of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, but also indicate that history was distorted deliberately, and that this was done for a very specific purpose... But who and why deliberately distorted history? Which real events did they want to hide and why?

If we analyze the historical facts, it becomes obvious that the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” was invented in order to hide the consequences of “baptism”. After all, this religion was imposed in a far from peaceful way... In the process of “baptism”, most of the population of the Kyiv principality was destroyed! It definitely becomes clear that those forces that were behind the imposition of this religion subsequently fabricated history, juggling historical facts to suit themselves and their goals...

These facts are known to historians and are not secret, they are publicly available, and anyone can easily find them on the Internet. Skipping scientific research and justifications, which have already been described quite widely, let us summarize the main facts that refute the big lie about the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.”

1. Genghis Khan

Previously, in Rus', 2 people were responsible for governing the state: Prince And Khan. was responsible for governing the state in peacetime. The khan or “war prince” took the reins of control during war; in peacetime, the responsibility for forming a horde (army) and maintaining it in combat readiness rested on his shoulders.

Genghis Khan is not a name, but a title of “military prince”, who, in modern world, close to the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Army. And there were several people who bore such a title. The most outstanding of them was Timur, it is he who is usually discussed when they talk about Genghis Khan.

In surviving historical documents, this man is described as a tall warrior with blue eyes, very white skin, powerful reddish hair and a thick beard. Which clearly does not correspond to the signs of a representative of the Mongoloid race, but completely fits the description of the Slavic appearance (L.N. Gumilyov - “Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe.”).

French engraving by Pierre Duflos (1742-1816)

In modern “Mongolia” there is not a single folk epic that would say that this country once in ancient times conquered almost all of Eurasia, just as there is nothing about the great conqueror Genghis Khan... (N.V. Levashov “Visible and invisible genocide").

Reconstruction of the throne of Genghis Khan with the ancestral tamga with a swastika.

2. Mongolia

The state of Mongolia appeared only in the 1930s, when the Bolsheviks came to the nomads living in the Gobi Desert and told them that they were the descendants of the great Mongols, and their “compatriot” had created the Great Empire in his time, which they were very surprised and happy about. . The word "Mughal" is of Greek origin and means "Great". The Greeks used this word to call our ancestors – the Slavs. It has nothing to do with the name of any people (N.V. Levashov “Visible and Invisible Genocide”).

3. Composition of the “Tatar-Mongol” army

70-80% of the army of the “Tatar-Mongols” were Russians, the remaining 20-30% were made up of other small peoples of Rus', in fact, the same as now. This fact is clearly confirmed by a fragment of the icon of Sergius of Radonezh “Battle of Kulikovo”. It clearly shows that the same warriors are fighting on both sides. And this battle is more like a civil war than a war with a foreign conqueror.

4. What did the “Tatar-Mongols” look like?

Pay attention to the drawing of the tomb of Henry II the Pious, who was killed on the Legnica field.

The inscription is as follows: “The figure of a Tatar under the feet of Henry II, Duke of Silesia, Krakow and, placed on the grave in Breslau of this prince, killed in the battle with the Tatars at Liegnitz on April 9, 1241.” As we see, this “Tatar” has a completely Russian appearance, clothes and weapons. The next image shows “the Khan’s palace in the capital of the Mongol Empire, Khanbalyk” (it is believed that Khanbalyk is supposedly Beijing).

What is “Mongolian” and what is “Chinese” here? Once again, as in the case of the tomb of Henry II, before us are people of a clearly Slavic appearance. Russian caftans, Streltsy caps, the same thick beards, the same characteristic blades of sabers called “Yelman”. The roof on the left is an almost exact copy of the roofs of old Russian towers... (A. Bushkov, “Russia that never existed”).

5. Genetic examination

According to the latest data obtained as a result of genetic research, it turned out that Tatars and Russians have very close genetics. While the differences between the genetics of Russians and Tatars from the genetics of the Mongols are colossal: “The differences between the Russian gene pool (almost entirely European) and the Mongolian (almost entirely Central Asian) are really great - it’s like two different worlds..." (oagb.ru).

6. Documents during the period of the Tatar-Mongol yoke

During the period of existence of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, not a single document in the Tatar or Mongolian language has been preserved. But there are many documents from this time in Russian.

7. Lack of objective evidence confirming the hypothesis of the Tatar-Mongol yoke

On this moment there are no originals of any historical documents that would objectively prove that there was a Tatar-Mongol yoke. But there are many fakes designed to convince us of the existence of a fiction called the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.” Here is one of these fakes. This text is called “The Word about the Destruction of the Russian Land” and in each publication it is announced as “an excerpt from a poetic work that has not reached us intact... About the Tatar-Mongol invasion”:

“Oh, bright and beautifully decorated Russian land! You are famous for many beauties: you are famous for many lakes, locally revered rivers and springs, mountains, steep hills, high oak forests, clean fields, wondrous animals, various birds, countless great cities, glorious villages, monastery gardens, temples of God and formidable ones, honest boyars and nobles by many. You are filled with everything, Russian land, O Orthodox faith Christian!..»

There is not even a hint of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” in this text. But this “ancient” document contains the following line: “You are filled with everything, Russian land, O Orthodox Christian faith!”

Before Nikon’s church reform, which was carried out in the mid-17th century, Christianity in Rus' was called “orthodox.” It began to be called Orthodox only after this reform... Therefore, this document could have been written no earlier than the mid-17th century and has nothing to do with the era of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke”...

On all maps that were published before 1772 and were not subsequently corrected, you can see the following.

The western part of Rus' is called Muscovy, or Moscow Tartary... This small part of Rus' was ruled by the Romanov dynasty. Until the end of the 18th century, the Moscow Tsar was called the ruler of Moscow Tartaria or the Duke (Prince) of Moscow. The rest of Rus', which occupied almost the entire continent of Eurasia in the east and south of Muscovy at that time, is called the Russian Empire (see map).

In the 1st edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1771 the following is written about this part of Rus':

“Tartaria, a huge country in the northern part of Asia, bordering Siberia in the north and west: which is called Great Tartary. Those Tartars living south of Muscovy and Siberia are called Astrakhan, Cherkasy and Dagestan, those living in the northwest of the Caspian Sea are called Kalmyk Tartars and which occupy the territory between Siberia and the Caspian Sea; Uzbek Tartars and Mongols, who live north of Persia and India, and, finally, Tibetans, living northwest of China..."(see website “Food RA”)…

Where does the name Tartary come from?

Our ancestors knew the laws of nature and the real structure of the world, life, and man. But, as now, the level of development of each person was not the same in those days. People who went much further than others in their development, and who could control space and matter (control the weather, heal diseases, see the future, etc.) were called Magi. Those Magi who knew how to control space at the planetary level and above were called Gods.

That is, the meaning of the word God among our ancestors was completely different from what it is now. The gods were people who went much further in their development than the vast majority of people. For ordinary person their abilities seemed incredible, however, the gods were also people, and the capabilities of each god had their own limits.

Our ancestors had patrons - God, he was also called Dazhdbog (the giving God) and his sister - the Goddess Tara. These Gods helped people solve problems that our ancestors could not solve on their own. So, the gods Tarkh and Tara taught our ancestors how to build houses, cultivate the land, write and much more, which was necessary in order to survive after the disaster and eventually restore civilization.

Therefore, quite recently our ancestors told strangers “We are Tarha and Tara...”. They said this because in their development, they really were children in relation to Tarkh and Tara, who had significantly advanced in development. And residents of other countries called our ancestors “Tarkhtars”, and later, due to the difficulty of pronunciation, “Tartars”. This is where the name of the country came from - Tartaria...

Baptism of Rus'

What does the baptism of Rus' have to do with it? – some may ask. As it turned out, it had a lot to do with it. After all, baptism did not take place in a peaceful way... Before baptism, people in Rus' were educated, almost everyone knew how to read, write, and count (see article). Let us remember from the school history curriculum, at least, the same “ Birch bark letters“- letters that peasants wrote to each other on birch bark from one village to another.

Our ancestors had a Vedic worldview, as I wrote above, it was not a religion. Since the essence of any religion comes down to the blind acceptance of any dogmas and rules, without a deep understanding of why it is necessary to do it this way and not otherwise. The Vedic worldview gave people precisely an understanding of real nature, an understanding of how the world works, what is good and what is bad.

People saw what happened after the “baptism” in neighboring countries, when, under the influence of religion, a successful, highly developed country with an educated population, in a matter of years, plunged into ignorance and chaos, where only representatives of the aristocracy could read and write, and not all of them. ..

Everyone understood perfectly well what the “Greek Religion” carried, into which the Bloody One and those who stood behind him were going to baptize Kievan Rus. Therefore, none of the residents of the then Kyiv principality (a province that broke away from Great Tartaria) did not accept this religion. But Vladimir had great forces behind him, and they were not going to retreat.

In the process of “baptism” over 12 years of forced Christianization, almost the entire adult population was destroyed, with rare exceptions Kievan Rus. Because such a “teaching” could be imposed only on the unreasonable, who, due to their youth, could not yet understand that such a religion turned them into slaves in both the physical and spiritual sense of the word. Everyone who refused to accept the new “faith” was killed. This is confirmed by the facts that have reached us. If before the “baptism” there were 300 cities and 12 million inhabitants on the territory of Kievan Rus, then after the “baptism” only 30 cities and 3 million people remained! 270 cities were destroyed! 9 million people were killed! (Diy Vladimir, “Orthodox Rus' before the adoption of Christianity and after”).

But despite the fact that almost the entire adult population of Kievan Rus was destroyed by the “holy” baptists, the Vedic tradition did not disappear. On the lands of Kievan Rus, the so-called dual faith was established. Most of the population formally recognized the imposed religion of the slaves, and they themselves continued to live according to the Vedic tradition, although without flaunting it. And this phenomenon was observed not only among the masses, but also among part of the ruling elite. And this state of affairs continued until the reform of Patriarch Nikon, who figured out how to deceive everyone.

conclusions

In fact, after baptism in the Principality of Kiev, only children and a very small part of the adult population remained alive, which accepted the Greek religion - 3 million people out of a population of 12 million before baptism. The principality was completely devastated, most of the cities, towns and villages were plundered and burned. But the authors of the version about the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” paint exactly the same picture for us, the only difference is that these same cruel actions were allegedly carried out there by “Tatar-Mongols”!

As always, the winner writes history. And it becomes obvious that in order to hide all the cruelty with which the Principality of Kiev was baptized, and in order to suppress all possible questions, the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” was subsequently invented. The children were raised in the traditions of the Greek religion (the cult of Dionysius, and later Christianity) and history was rewritten, where all the cruelty was blamed on the “wild nomads”...

The famous statement of President V.V. Putin about, in which the Russians allegedly fought against the Tatars and Mongols...

The Tatar-Mongol yoke is the biggest myth in history.

So was there a Tatar-Mongol yoke in Rus'?

A passing Tatar. Hell will truly consume these.

(Pass.)

From Ivan Maslov’s parody theatrical play “Elder Paphnutius”, 1867.

The traditional version of the Tatar-Mongol invasion of Rus', the “Tatar-Mongol yoke,” and liberation from it is known to the reader from school. As presented by most historians, the events looked something like this. At the beginning of the 13th century in the steppes Far East The energetic and brave tribal leader Genghis Khan gathered a huge army of nomads, welded together by iron discipline, and rushed to conquer the world - “to the last sea.” Having conquered its closest neighbors, and then China, the powerful Tatar-Mongol horde rolled to the west. Having traveled about 5 thousand kilometers, the Mongols defeated Khorezm, then Georgia, and in 1223 they reached the southern outskirts of Rus', where they defeated the army of Russian princes in the battle on the Kalka River. In the winter of 1237, the Tatar-Mongols invaded Rus' with all their countless troops, burned and destroyed many Russian cities, and in 1241 they tried to conquer Western Europe, having invaded Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, reached the shores of the Adriatic Sea, but turned back because they were afraid to leave Rus' in their rear, devastated, but still dangerous for them. The Tatar-Mongol yoke began.

The great poet A.S. Pushkin left heartfelt lines: “Russia was destined for a high destiny... its vast plains absorbed the power of the Mongols and stopped their invasion at the very edge of Europe; The barbarians did not dare to leave enslaved Russia in their rear and returned to the steppes of their East. The resulting enlightenment was saved by a torn and dying Russia...”

The huge Mongol power, stretching from China to the Volga, hung like an ominous shadow over Russia. The Mongol khans gave the Russian princes labels to reign, attacked Rus' many times to plunder and plunder, and repeatedly killed Russian princes in their Golden Horde.

Having strengthened over time, Rus' began to resist. In 1380 Grand Duke Moscow's Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Horde Khan Mamai, and a century later, in the so-called “stand on the Ugra”, the troops of Grand Duke Ivan III and the Horde Khan Akhmat met. The opponents camped for a long time on opposite sides of the Ugra River, after which Khan Akhmat, finally realizing that the Russians had become strong and he had little chance of winning the battle, gave the order to retreat and led his horde to the Volga. These events are considered the “end of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.”

But in recent decades this classic version has been called into question. Geographer, ethnographer and historian Lev Gumilev convincingly showed that relations between Russia and the Mongols were much more complex than the usual confrontation between cruel conquerors and their unfortunate victims. Deep knowledge in the field of history and ethnography allowed the scientist to conclude that there was a certain “complementarity” between the Mongols and Russians, that is, compatibility, the ability for symbiosis and mutual support at the cultural and ethnic level. The writer and publicist Alexander Bushkov went even further, “twisting” Gumilyov’s theory to its logical conclusion and expressing a completely original version: what is commonly called the Tatar-Mongol invasion was in fact a struggle of the descendants of Prince Vsevolod the Big Nest (son of Yaroslav and grandson of Alexander Nevsky ) with their rival princes for sole power over Russia. Khans Mamai and Akhmat were not alien raiders, but noble nobles who, according to the dynastic ties of the Russian-Tatar families, had legally valid rights to the great reign. Thus, the Battle of Kulikovo and the “stand on the Ugra” are not episodes of the struggle against foreign aggressors, but pages of the civil war in Rus'. Moreover, this author promulgated a completely “revolutionary” idea: under the names “Genghis Khan” and “Batu” the Russian princes Yaroslav and Alexander Nevsky appear in history, and Dmitry Donskoy is Khan Mamai himself (!).

Of course, the publicist’s conclusions are full of irony and border on postmodern “banter,” but it should be noted that many facts of the history of the Tatar-Mongol invasion and “yoke” really look too mysterious and need closer attention and unbiased research. Let's try to look at some of these mysteries.

Let's start with a general note. Western Europe in the 13th century presented a disappointing picture. The Christian world was experiencing a certain depression. The activity of Europeans shifted to the borders of their range. German feudal lords began to seize the border Slavic lands and turn their population into powerless serfs. The Western Slavs who lived along the Elbe resisted German pressure with all their might, but the forces were unequal.

Who were the Mongols who approached the borders of the Christian world from the east? How did the powerful Mongol state appear? Let's take an excursion into its history.

At the beginning of the 13th century, in 1202–1203, the Mongols defeated first the Merkits and then the Keraits. The fact is that the Keraits were divided into supporters of Genghis Khan and his opponents. The opponents of Genghis Khan were led by the son of Van Khan, the legal heir to the throne - Nilha. He had reasons to hate Genghis Khan: even at the time when Van Khan was an ally of Genghis, he (the leader of the Keraits), seeing the undeniable talents of the latter, wanted to transfer the Kerait throne to him, bypassing his own son. Thus, the clash between some of the Keraits and the Mongols occurred during Wang Khan’s lifetime. And although the Keraits had a numerical superiority, the Mongols defeated them, as they showed exceptional mobility and took the enemy by surprise.

In the clash with the Keraits, the character of Genghis Khan was fully revealed. When Wang Khan and his son Nilha fled from the battlefield, one of their noyons (military leaders) with a small detachment detained the Mongols, saving their leaders from captivity. This noyon was seized, brought before the eyes of Genghis, and he asked: “Why, noyon, seeing the position of your troops, did not you leave? You had both time and opportunity.” He replied: “I served my khan and gave him the opportunity to escape, and my head is for you, O conqueror.” Genghis Khan said: “Everyone must imitate this man.

Look how brave, faithful, valiant he is. I can’t kill you, noyon, I’m offering you a place in my army.” Noyon became a thousand-man and, of course, served Genghis Khan faithfully, because the Kerait horde disintegrated. Van Khan himself died while trying to escape to the Naiman. Their guards at the border, seeing Kerait, killed him, and presented the old man’s severed head to their khan.

In 1204, there was a clash between the Mongols of Genghis Khan and the powerful Naiman Khanate. And again the Mongols won. The vanquished were included in the horde of Genghis. In the eastern steppe there were no longer any tribes capable of actively resisting the new order, and in 1206, at the great kurultai, Chinggis was again elected khan, but of all Mongolia. This is how the pan-Mongolian state was born. The only tribe hostile to him remained the ancient enemies of the Borjigins - the Merkits, but by 1208 they were forced out into the valley of the Irgiz River.

The growing power of Genghis Khan allowed his horde to assimilate different tribes and peoples quite easily. Because, in accordance with Mongolian stereotypes of behavior, the khan could and should have demanded humility, obedience to orders, and fulfillment of duties, but forcing a person to renounce his faith or customs was considered immoral - the individual had the right to his own choice. This state of affairs was attractive to many. In 1209, the Uighur state sent envoys to Genghis Khan with a request to accept them into his ulus. The request was naturally granted, and Genghis Khan gave the Uyghurs enormous trading privileges. A caravan route passed through Uyghuria, and the Uyghurs, once part of the Mongol state, became rich by selling water, fruit, meat and “pleasures” to hungry caravan riders at high prices. The voluntary union of Uighuria with Mongolia turned out to be useful for the Mongols. With the annexation of Uyghuria, the Mongols went beyond the boundaries of their ethnic area and came into contact with other peoples of the ecumene.

In 1216, on the Irgiz River, the Mongols were attacked by the Khorezmians. Khorezm by that time was the most powerful of the states that arose after the weakening of the power of the Seljuk Turks. The rulers of Khorezm turned from governors of the ruler of Urgench into independent sovereigns and adopted the title of “Khorezmshahs”. They turned out to be energetic, enterprising and militant. This allowed them to conquer most of Central Asia and southern Afghanistan. The Khorezmshahs created a huge state in which the main military force were Turks from the adjacent steppes.

But the state turned out to be fragile, despite the wealth, brave warriors and experienced diplomats. The regime of the military dictatorship relied on tribes alien to the local population, who had a different language, different morals and customs. The cruelty of the mercenaries caused discontent among the residents of Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv and other Central Asian cities. The uprising in Samarkand led to the destruction of the Turkic garrison. Naturally, this was followed by a punitive operation of the Khorezmians, who brutally dealt with the population of Samarkand. Other large and wealthy cities in Central Asia were also affected.

In this situation, Khorezmshah Muhammad decided to confirm his title of “ghazi” - “victor of the infidels” - and become famous for another victory over them. The opportunity presented itself to him in the same year 1216, when the Mongols, fighting with the Merkits, reached Irgiz. Having learned about the arrival of the Mongols, Muhammad sent an army against them on the grounds that the steppe inhabitants needed to be converted to Islam.

The Khorezmian army attacked the Mongols, but in a rearguard battle they themselves went on the offensive and severely battered the Khorezmians. Only the attack of the left wing, commanded by the son of the Khorezmshah, the talented commander Jalal ad-Din, straightened the situation. After this, the Khorezmians retreated, and the Mongols returned home: they did not intend to fight with Khorezm; on the contrary, Genghis Khan wanted to establish ties with the Khorezmshah. After all, the Great Caravan Route went through Central Asia and all the owners of the lands along which it ran grew rich due to the duties paid by merchants. Merchants willingly paid duties because they passed on their costs to consumers without losing anything. Wanting to preserve all the advantages associated with the existence of caravan routes, the Mongols strove for peace and quiet on their borders. The difference of faith, in their opinion, did not give a reason for war and could not justify bloodshed. Probably, the Khorezmshah himself understood the episodic nature of the clash on the Irshza. In 1218, Muhammad sent a trade caravan to Mongolia. Peace was restored, especially since the Mongols had no time for Khorezm: shortly before this, the Naiman prince Kuchluk began a new war with the Mongols.

Once again, Mongol-Khorezm relations were disrupted by the Khorezm Shah himself and his officials. In 1219, a rich caravan from the lands of Genghis Khan approached the Khorezm city of Otrar. The merchants went to the city to replenish food supplies and wash themselves in the bathhouse. There the merchants met two acquaintances, one of whom reported to the ruler of the city that these merchants were spies. He immediately realized that there was an excellent reason to rob travelers. The merchants were killed and their property was confiscated. The ruler of Otrar sent half of the loot to Khorezm, and Muhammad accepted the loot, which means he shared responsibility for what he had done.

Genghis Khan sent envoys to find out what caused the incident. Muhammad became angry when he saw the infidels, and ordered some of the ambassadors to be killed, and some, stripped naked, to be driven out to certain death in the steppe. Two or three Mongols finally made it home and told about what had happened. Genghis Khan's anger knew no bounds. From the Mongolian point of view, two of the most terrible crimes occurred: the deception of those who trusted and the murder of guests. According to custom, Genghis Khan could not leave unavenged either the merchants who were killed in Otrar, or the ambassadors whom the Khorezmshah insulted and killed. Khan had to fight, otherwise his fellow tribesmen would simply refuse to trust him.

In Central Asia, the Khorezmshah had at his disposal a regular army of four hundred thousand. And the Mongols, as the famous Russian orientalist V.V. Bartold believed, had no more than 200 thousand. Genghis Khan demanded military assistance from all allies. Warriors came from the Turks and Kara-Kitai, the Uyghurs sent a detachment of 5 thousand people, only the Tangut ambassador boldly replied: “If you don’t have enough troops, don’t fight.” Genghis Khan considered the answer an insult and said: “Only the dead could I bear such an insult.”

Genghis Khan sent assembled Mongolian, Uighur, Turkic and Kara-Chinese troops to Khorezm. Khorezmshah, having quarreled with his mother Turkan Khatun, did not trust the military leaders related to her. He was afraid to gather them into a fist in order to repel the onslaught of the Mongols, and scattered the army into garrisons. The best commanders of the Shah were his own unloved son Jalal ad-Din and the commandant of the Khojent fortress Timur-Melik. The Mongols took the fortresses one after another, but in Khojent, even after taking the fortress, they were unable to capture the garrison. Timur-Melik put his soldiers on rafts and escaped pursuit along the wide Syr Darya. The scattered garrisons could not hold back the advance of Genghis Khan's troops. Soon all the major cities of the sultanate - Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, Herat - were captured by the Mongols.

Regarding the capture of Central Asian cities by the Mongols, there is an established version: “Wild nomads destroyed the cultural oases of agricultural peoples.” Is it so? This version, as L.N. Gumilev showed, is based on the legends of court Muslim historians. For example, the fall of Herat was reported by Islamic historians as a disaster in which the entire population of the city was exterminated, except for a few men who managed to escape in the mosque. They hid there, afraid to go out into the streets littered with corpses. Only wild animals roamed the city and tormented the dead. After sitting for some time and coming to their senses, these “heroes” went to distant lands to rob caravans in order to regain their lost wealth.

But is this possible? If the entire population of a large city was exterminated and lay on the streets, then inside the city, in particular in the mosque, the air would be full of corpse miasma, and those hiding there would simply die. No predators, except jackals, live near the city, and they very rarely penetrate into the city. It was simply impossible for exhausted people to move to rob caravans several hundred kilometers from Herat, because they would have to walk, carrying heavy loads - water and provisions. Such a “robber”, having met a caravan, would no longer be able to rob it...

Even more surprising is the information reported by historians about Merv. The Mongols took it in 1219 and also allegedly exterminated all the inhabitants there. But already in 1229 Merv rebelled, and the Mongols had to take the city again. And finally, two years later, Merv sent a detachment of 10 thousand people to fight the Mongols.

We see that the fruits of fantasy and religious hatred gave rise to legends of Mongol atrocities. If you take into account the degree of reliability of sources and ask simple but inevitable questions, it is easy to separate historical truth from literary fiction.

The Mongols occupied Persia almost without fighting, pushing the Khorezmshah's son Jalal ad-Din into northern India. Muhammad II Ghazi himself, broken by the struggle and constant defeats, died in a leper colony on an island in the Caspian Sea (1221). The Mongols made peace with the Shiite population of Iran, which was constantly offended by the Sunnis in power, in particular the Baghdad Caliph and Jalal ad-Din himself. As a result, the Shia population of Persia suffered significantly less than the Sunnis of Central Asia. Be that as it may, in 1221 the state of the Khorezmshahs was ended. Under one ruler - Muhammad II Ghazi - this state achieved both its greatest power and its destruction. As a result, Khorezm, Northern Iran, and Khorasan were annexed to the Mongol Empire.

In 1226, the hour struck for the Tangut state, which, at the decisive moment of the war with Khorezm, refused to help Genghis Khan. The Mongols rightly viewed this move as a betrayal that, according to Yasa, required vengeance. The capital of Tangut was the city of Zhongxing. It was besieged by Genghis Khan in 1227, having defeated the Tangut troops in previous battles.

During the siege of Zhongxing, Genghis Khan died, but the Mongol noyons, by order of their leader, hid his death. The fortress was taken, and the population of the “evil” city, which suffered the collective guilt of betrayal, was executed. The Tangut state disappeared, leaving behind only written evidence of its former culture, but the city survived and lived until 1405, when it was destroyed by the Chinese of the Ming Dynasty.

From the capital of the Tanguts, the Mongols took the body of their great ruler to their native steppes. The funeral rite was as follows: the remains of Genghis Khan were lowered into a dug grave, along with many valuable things, and all the slaves who performed funeral work were killed. According to custom, exactly one year later it was necessary to celebrate the wake. In order to later find the burial place, the Mongols did the following. At the grave they sacrificed a little camel that had just been taken from its mother. And a year later, the camel herself found in the vast steppe the place where her cub was killed. Having slaughtered this camel, the Mongols performed the required funeral ritual and then left the grave forever. Since then, no one knows where Genghis Khan is buried.

IN last years In his life he was extremely concerned about the fate of his state. The khan had four sons from his beloved wife Borte and many children from other wives, who, although they were considered legitimate children, had no rights to their father’s throne. The sons from Borte differed in inclinations and character. The eldest son, Jochi, was born shortly after the Merkit captivity of Borte, and therefore not only gossips, but his younger brother Chagatai also called him a “Merkit degenerate.” Although Borte invariably defended Jochi, and Genghis Khan himself always recognized him as his son, the shadow of his mother’s Merkit captivity fell on Jochi with the burden of suspicion of illegitimacy. Once, in the presence of his father, Chagatai openly called Jochi illegitimate, and the matter almost ended in a fight between the brothers.

It is curious, but according to the testimony of contemporaries, Jochi’s behavior contained some stable stereotypes that greatly distinguished him from Chinggis. If for Genghis Khan there was no concept of “mercy” in relation to enemies (he left life only for small children adopted by his mother Hoelun, and valiant warriors who went into Mongol service), then Jochi was distinguished by his humanity and kindness. So, during the siege of Gurganj, the Khorezmians, completely exhausted by the war, asked to accept surrender, that is, in other words, to spare them. Jochi spoke out in favor of showing mercy, but Genghis Khan categorically rejected the request for mercy, and as a result, the garrison of Gurganj was partially slaughtered, and the city itself was flooded by the waters of the Amu Darya. The misunderstanding between the father and the eldest son, constantly fueled by the intrigues and slander of relatives, deepened over time and turned into the sovereign's mistrust of his heir. Genghis Khan suspected that Jochi wanted to gain popularity among the conquered peoples and secede from Mongolia. It is unlikely that this was the case, but the fact remains: at the beginning of 1227, Jochi, who was hunting in the steppe, was found dead - his spine was broken. The details of what happened were kept secret, but, without a doubt, Genghis Khan was a person interested in the death of Jochi and was quite capable of ending his son’s life.

In contrast to Jochi, Genghis Khan's second son, Chaga-tai, was a strict, efficient and even cruel man. Therefore, he received the position of "guardian of the Yasa" (something like an attorney general or chief judge). Chagatai strictly observed the law and treated its violators without any mercy.

The third son of the Great Khan, Ogedei, like Jochi, was distinguished by his kindness and tolerance towards people. The character of Ogedei is best illustrated by this incident: one day, on a joint trip, the brothers saw a Muslim washing himself by the water. According to Muslim custom, every believer is obliged to perform prayer and ritual ablution several times a day. Mongolian tradition, on the contrary, forbade a person to wash throughout the summer. The Mongols believed that washing in a river or lake causes a thunderstorm, and a thunderstorm in the steppe is very dangerous for travelers, and therefore “calling a thunderstorm” was considered an attempt on people’s lives. Nuker vigilantes of the ruthless zealot of the law Chagatai captured the Muslim. Anticipating a bloody outcome - the unfortunate man was in danger of having his head cut off - Ogedei sent his man to tell the Muslim to answer that he had dropped a gold piece into the water and was just looking for it there. The Muslim said so to Chagatay. He ordered to look for the coin, and during this time Ogedei’s warrior threw the gold into the water. The found coin was returned to the “rightful owner.” In parting, Ogedei, taking a handful of coins from his pocket, handed them to the rescued person and said: “The next time you drop gold into the water, don’t go after it, don’t break the law.”

The youngest of Genghis' sons, Tului, was born in 1193. Since Genghis Khan was in captivity at that time, this time Borte’s infidelity was quite obvious, but Genghis Khan recognized Tuluya as his legitimate son, although he did not outwardly resemble his father.

Of Genghis Khan's four sons, the youngest had the greatest talents and showed the greatest moral dignity. A good commander and an outstanding administrator, Tuluy was also a loving husband and distinguished by his nobility. He married the daughter of the deceased head of the Keraits, Van Khan, who was a devout Christian. Tuluy himself did not have the right to accept Christian faith: Like Genghisid, he had to profess the Bon religion (paganism). But the khan’s son allowed his wife not only to perform all Christian rituals in a luxurious “church” yurt, but also to have priests with her and receive monks. The death of Tuluy can be called heroic without any exaggeration. When Ogedei fell ill, Tuluy voluntarily took a powerful shamanic potion in an effort to “attract” the disease to himself, and died saving his brother.

All four sons had the right to succeed Genghis Khan. After Jochi was eliminated, there were three heirs left, and when Genghis died and a new khan had not yet been elected, Tului ruled the ulus. But at the kurultai of 1229, the gentle and tolerant Ogedei was chosen as the Great Khan, in accordance with the will of Genghis. Ogedei, as we have already mentioned, had a kind soul, but the kindness of a sovereign is often not to the benefit of the state and his subjects. The management of the ulus under him was carried out mainly thanks to the severity of Chagatai and the diplomatic and administrative skills of Tuluy. The Great Khan himself preferred wanderings with hunts and feasts in Western Mongolia to state concerns.

The grandchildren of Genghis Khan were allocated various areas of the ulus or high positions. Jochi's eldest son, Orda-Ichen, received the White Horde, located between the Irtysh and the Tarbagatai ridge (the area of ​​​​present-day Semipalatinsk). The second son, Batu, began to own the Golden (Great) Horde on the Volga. The third son, Sheibani, received the Blue Horde, which roamed from Tyumen to the Aral Sea. At the same time, the three brothers - the rulers of the uluses - were allocated only one or two thousand Mongol soldiers, while the total number of the Mongol army reached 130 thousand people.

The children of Chagatai also received a thousand soldiers, and the descendants of Tului, being at court, owned the entire grandfather’s and father’s ulus. So the Mongols established a system of inheritance called minorat, in which younger son received all the rights of his father as an inheritance, and his older brothers received only a share in the common inheritance.

The Great Khan Ogedei also had a son, Guyuk, who claimed the inheritance. The expansion of the clan during the lifetime of Chingis’s children caused the division of the inheritance and enormous difficulties in managing the ulus, which stretched across the territory from the Black to the Yellow Sea. In these difficulties and family scores were hidden the seeds of future strife that destroyed the state created by Genghis Khan and his comrades.

How many Tatar-Mongols came to Rus'? Let's try to sort this issue out.

Russian pre-revolutionary historians mention a “half-million-strong Mongol army.” V. Yang, author of the famous trilogy “Genghis Khan”, “Batu” and “To the Last Sea”, names the number four hundred thousand. However, it is known that a warrior of a nomadic tribe goes on a campaign with three horses (minimum two). One carries luggage (packed rations, horseshoes, spare harness, arrows, armor), and the third needs to be changed from time to time so that one horse can rest if it suddenly has to go into battle.

Simple calculations show that for an army of half a million or four hundred thousand soldiers, at least one and a half million horses are needed. Such a herd is unlikely to be able to effectively move a long distance, since the leading horses will instantly destroy the grass over a vast area, and the rear ones will die from lack of food.

All the main invasions of the Tatar-Mongols into Rus' took place in winter, when the remaining grass was hidden under the snow, and you couldn’t take much fodder with you... The Mongolian horse really knows how to get food from under the snow, but ancient sources do not mention the horses of the Mongolian breed that existed “in service” with the horde. Horse breeding experts prove that the Tatar-Mongol horde rode Turkmens, and this is a completely different breed, looks different, and is not capable of feeding itself in the winter without human help...

In addition, the difference between a horse allowed to wander in winter without any work and a horse forced to make long journeys under a rider and also participate in battles is not taken into account. But in addition to the horsemen, they also had to carry heavy booty! The convoys followed the troops. The cattle that pull the carts also need to be fed... The picture of a huge mass of people moving in the rearguard of an army of half a million with convoys, wives and children seems quite fantastic.

The temptation for a historian to explain the Mongol campaigns of the 13th century by “migrations” is great. But modern researchers show that the Mongol campaigns were not directly related to the movements of huge masses of the population. Victories were won not by hordes of nomads, but by small, well-organized mobile detachments returning to their native steppes after campaigns. And the khans of the Jochi branch - Batu, Horde and Sheybani - received, according to the will of Genghis, only 4 thousand horsemen, i.e. about 12 thousand people settled in the territory from the Carpathians to Altai.

In the end, historians settled on thirty thousand warriors. But here, too, unanswered questions arise. And the first among them will be this: isn’t it enough? Despite the disunity of the Russian principalities, thirty thousand cavalry is too small a figure to cause “fire and ruin” throughout Rus'! After all, they (even supporters of the “classical” version admit this) did not move in a compact mass. Several detachments scattered in different directions, and this reduces the number of “innumerable Tatar hordes” to the limit beyond which elementary mistrust begins: could such a number of aggressors conquer Rus'?

It turns out a vicious circle: a huge Tatar-Mongol army, purely physical reasons It would hardly be able to maintain combat capability in order to move quickly and deliver the notorious “indestructible blows.” A small army would hardly have been able to establish control over most of the territory of Rus'. To get out of this vicious circle, we have to admit: the Tatar-Mongol invasion was in fact only an episode of the bloody civil war that was going on in Rus'. The enemy forces were relatively small; they relied on their own forage reserves accumulated in the cities. And the Tatar-Mongols became an additional external factor, used in the internal struggle in the same way as the troops of the Pechenegs and Polovtsians had previously been used.

The chronicle information that has reached us about the military campaigns of 1237–1238 depicts the classically Russian style of these battles - the battles take place in winter, and the Mongols - the steppe inhabitants - act with amazing skill in the forests (for example, the encirclement and subsequent complete destruction on the City River of a Russian detachment under the command of the great Prince of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich).

Having taken a general look at the history of the creation of the huge Mongol power, we must return to Rus'. Let us take a closer look at the situation with the Battle of the Kalka River, which is not fully understood by historians.

It was not the steppe people who represented the main danger to Kievan Rus at the turn of the 11th–12th centuries. Our ancestors were friends with the Polovtsian khans, married “red Polovtsian girls”, accepted baptized Polovtsians into their midst, and the descendants of the latter became Zaporozhye and Sloboda Cossacks, it is not for nothing that in their nicknames the traditional Slavic suffix of affiliation “ov” (Ivanov) was replaced by the Turkic one - “ enko" (Ivanenko).

At this time, a more formidable phenomenon emerged - a decline in morals, a rejection of traditional Russian ethics and morality. In 1097, a princely congress took place in Lyubech, marking the beginning of a new political form of existence of the country. There it was decided that “let everyone keep his fatherland.” Rus' began to turn into a confederation of independent states. The princes swore to inviolably observe what was proclaimed and kissed the cross in this. But after the death of Mstislav, the Kiev state began to quickly disintegrate. Polotsk was the first to settle down. Then the Novgorod “republic” stopped sending money to Kyiv.

A striking example of the loss of moral values ​​and patriotic feelings was the act of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky. In 1169, having captured Kyiv, Andrei gave the city to his warriors for three days of plunder. Until that moment, in Rus' it was customary to do this only with foreign cities. During any civil strife, such a practice was never extended to Russian cities.

Igor Svyatoslavich, a descendant of Prince Oleg, the hero of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” who became the Prince of Chernigov in 1198, set himself the goal of dealing with Kiev, a city where the rivals of his dynasty were constantly strengthening. He agreed with the Smolensk prince Rurik Rostislavich and called on the Polovtsians for help. Prince Roman Volynsky spoke in defense of Kyiv, the “mother of Russian cities,” relying on the Torcan troops allied to him.

The plan of the Chernigov prince was implemented after his death (1202). Rurik, Prince of Smolensk, and the Olgovichi with the Polovtsy in January 1203, in a battle that was fought mainly between the Polovtsy and the Torks of Roman Volynsky, gained the upper hand. Having captured Kyiv, Rurik Rostislavich subjected the city to a terrible defeat. The Tithe Church and the Kiev Pechersk Lavra were destroyed, and the city itself was burned. “They have created a great evil that has not existed since baptism in the Russian land,” the chronicler left a message.

After the fateful year of 1203, Kyiv never recovered.

According to L.N. Gumilyov, by this time the ancient Russians had lost their passionarity, that is, their cultural and energetic “charge”. In such conditions, a clash with a strong enemy could not but become tragic for the country.

Meanwhile, the Mongol regiments were approaching the Russian borders. At that time, the main enemy of the Mongols in the west was the Cumans. Their enmity began in 1216, when the Cumans accepted the blood enemies of Genghis - the Merkits. The Polovtsians actively pursued their anti-Mongol policy, constantly supporting the Finno-Ugric tribes hostile to the Mongols. At the same time, the Cumans of the steppe were as mobile as the Mongols themselves. Seeing the futility of cavalry clashes with the Cumans, the Mongols sent an expeditionary force behind enemy lines.

Talented commanders Subetei and Jebe led a corps of three tumens across the Caucasus. Georgian king Georgy Lasha tried to attack them, but was destroyed along with his army. The Mongols managed to capture the guides who showed the way through the Daryal Gorge. So they went to the upper reaches of the Kuban, to the rear of the Polovtsians. They, having discovered the enemy in their rear, retreated to the Russian border and asked for help from the Russian princes.

It should be noted that the relations between Rus' and the Polovtsians do not fit into the scheme of irreconcilable confrontation “sedentary - nomadic”. In 1223, the Russian princes became allies of the Polovtsians. The three strongest princes of Rus' - Mstislav the Udaloy from Galich, Mstislav of Kiev and Mstislav of Chernigov - gathered troops and tried to protect them.

The clash on Kalka in 1223 is described in some detail in the chronicles; In addition, there is another source - “The Tale of the Battle of Kalka, and of the Russian Princes, and of the Seventy Heroes.” However, the abundance of information does not always bring clarity...

Historical science has long not denied the fact that the events on Kalka were not the aggression of evil aliens, but an attack by the Russians. The Mongols themselves did not seek war with Russia. The ambassadors who arrived to the Russian princes quite friendly asked the Russians not to interfere in their relations with the Polovtsians. But, true to their allied obligations, the Russian princes rejected peace proposals. At the same time they committed fatal mistake which had bitter consequences. All the ambassadors were killed (according to some sources, they were not just killed, but “tortured”). At all times, the murder of an ambassador or envoy was considered a serious crime; According to Mongolian law, deceiving someone who trusted was an unforgivable crime.

Following this Russian army goes on a long journey. Having left the borders of Rus', it first attacks the Tatar camp, takes booty, steals cattle, after which it moves outside its territory for another eight days. A decisive battle takes place on the Kalka River: the eighty-thousandth Russian-Polovtsian army attacked the twenty-thousandth (!) detachment of the Mongols. This battle was lost by the Allies due to their inability to coordinate their actions. The Polovtsy left the battlefield in panic. Mstislav Udaloy and his “younger” prince Daniil fled across the Dnieper; They were the first to reach the shore and managed to jump into the boats. At the same time, the prince chopped up the rest of the boats, fearing that the Tatars would be able to cross after him, “and, filled with fear, I reached Galich on foot.” Thus, he doomed his comrades, whose horses were worse than princely ones, to death. The enemies killed everyone they overtook.

The other princes are left alone with the enemy, fight off his attacks for three days, after which, believing the assurances of the Tatars, they surrender. Here lies another mystery. It turns out that the princes surrendered after a certain Russian named Ploskinya, who was in the enemy’s battle formations, solemnly kissed the pectoral cross that the Russians would be spared and their blood would not be shed. The Mongols, according to their custom, kept their word: having tied up the captives, they laid them on the ground, covered them with planks and sat down to feast on the bodies. Not a drop of blood was actually shed! And the latter, according to Mongolian views, was considered extremely important. (By the way, only the “Tale of the Battle of Kalka” reports that the captured princes were put under planks. Other sources write that the princes were simply killed without mockery, and still others that they were “captured.” So the story with a feast on the bodies is just one version.)

Different peoples perceive the rule of law and the concept of honesty differently. The Russians believed that the Mongols, by killing the captives, broke their oath. But from the point of view of the Mongols, they kept their oath, and the execution was the highest justice, because the princes committed terrible sin murder of the trustee. Therefore, the point is not in deceit (history provides a lot of evidence of how the Russian princes themselves violated the “kiss of the cross”), but in the personality of Ploskini himself - a Russian, a Christian, who somehow mysteriously found himself among the warriors of the “unknown people”.

Why did the Russian princes surrender after listening to Ploskini’s entreaties? “The Tale of the Battle of Kalka” writes: “There were also wanderers along with the Tatars, and their commander was Ploskinya.” Brodniks are Russian free warriors who lived in those places, the predecessors of the Cossacks. However, establishing Ploschini's social status only confuses the matter. It turns out that the wanderers in a short time managed to come to an agreement with the “unknown peoples” and became so close to them that they jointly struck at their brothers in blood and faith? One thing can be stated with certainty: part of the army with which the Russian princes fought on Kalka was Slavic, Christian.

The Russian princes do not look their best in this whole story. But let's return to our riddles. For some reason, the “Tale of the Battle of Kalka” that we mentioned is not able to definitely name the enemy of the Russians! Here is the quote: “...Because of our sins, unknown peoples came, the godless Moabites [symbolic name from the Bible], about whom no one knows exactly who they are and where they came from, and what their language is, and what tribe they are, and what faith. And they call them Tatars, while others say Taurmen, and others say Pechenegs.”

Amazing lines! They were written much later than the events described, when it was supposed to be known exactly who the Russian princes fought on Kalka. After all, part of the army (albeit small) nevertheless returned from Kalka. Moreover, the victors, pursuing the defeated Russian regiments, chased them to Novgorod-Svyatopolch (on the Dnieper), where they attacked the civilian population, so that among the townspeople there should have been witnesses who saw the enemy with their own eyes. And yet he remains “unknown”! This statement further confuses the matter. After all, by the time described, the Polovtsians were well known in Rus' - they lived nearby for many years, then fought, then became related... The Taurmen - a nomadic Turkic tribe that lived in the Northern Black Sea region - were again well known to the Russians. It is curious that in the “Tale of Igor’s Campaign” certain “Tatars” are mentioned among the nomadic Turks who served the Chernigov prince.

One gets the impression that the chronicler is hiding something. For some reason unknown to us, he does not want to directly name the Russian enemy in that battle. Maybe the battle on Kalka is not a clash with unknown peoples at all, but one of the episodes of the internecine war waged among themselves by Russian Christians, Polovtsian Christians and the Tatars who got involved in the matter?

After the Battle of Kalka, some of the Mongols turned their horses to the east, trying to report on the completion of the assigned task - the victory over the Cumans. But on the banks of the Volga, the army was ambushed by the Volga Bulgars. The Muslims, who hated the Mongols as pagans, unexpectedly attacked them during the crossing. Here the victors at Kalka were defeated and lost many people. Those who managed to cross the Volga left the steppes to the east and united with the main forces of Genghis Khan. Thus ended the first meeting of the Mongols and Russians.

L.N. Gumilyov collected a huge amount of material, clearly demonstrating that the relationship between Russia and the Horde CAN be described by the word “symbiosis”. After Gumilev, they write especially a lot and often about how Russian princes and “Mongol khans” became brothers-in-law, relatives, sons-in-law and fathers-in-law, how they went on joint military campaigns, how (let’s call a spade a spade) they were friends. Relations of this kind are unique in their own way - the Tatars did not behave this way in any country they conquered. This symbiosis, brotherhood in arms leads to such an interweaving of names and events that sometimes it is even difficult to understand where the Russians end and the Tatars begin...

author

2. The Tatar-Mongol invasion as the unification of Rus' under the rule of the Novgorod = Yaroslavl dynasty of George = Genghis Khan and then his brother Yaroslav = Batu = Ivan Kalita Above, we have already begun to talk about the “Tatar-Mongol invasion” as the unification of the Russian

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2. The Tatar-Mongol invasion as the unification of Rus' under the rule of the Novgorod = Yaroslavl dynasty of George = Genghis Khan and then his brother Yaroslav = Batu = Ivan Kalita Above, we have already begun to talk about the “Tatar-Mongol invasion” as a process of unification of the Russian

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3. The Tatar-Mongol yoke in Rus' is a period of military control in the United Russian Empire 3.1. What is the difference between our version and the Miller-Romanov version? The Miller-Romanov story paints the era of the 13th–15th centuries in the dark colors of a fierce foreign yoke in Rus'. WITH

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Chapter X “Tatar-Mongol yoke” - how it was There was no so-called Tatar yoke. The Tatars never occupied Russian lands and did not keep their garrisons there... It is difficult to find parallels in history for such generosity of the victors. B. Ishboldin, honorary professor

It is noteworthy that the epithet “established” is most often applied to myths.
This is where the root of evil lurks: myths take root in the mind as a result of a simple process - mechanical repetition.

ABOUT WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS

The classical version, that is, recognized by modern science, of the “Mongol-Tatar invasion of Rus'”, the “Mongol-Tatar yoke” and “liberation from the Horde tyranny” is quite well known, but it would be useful to refresh your memory once again. So... At the beginning of the 13th century, in the Mongolian steppes, a brave and devilishly energetic tribal leader named Genghis Khan put together a huge army of nomads, welded together with iron discipline, and set out to conquer the whole world, “to the last sea.” Having conquered their closest neighbors, and then captured China, the mighty Tatar-Mongol horde rolled west. Having traveled about five thousand kilometers, the Mongols defeated the state of Khorezm, then Georgia, and in 1223 they reached the southern outskirts of Rus', where they defeated the army of the Russian princes in the battle on the Kalka River. In the winter of 1237, the Mongol-Tatars invaded Rus' with their entire innumerable army, burned and destroyed many Russian cities, and in 1241, in fulfillment of the behests of Genghis Khan, they tried to conquer Western Europe - they invaded Poland, the Czech Republic, and reached shores of the Adriatic Sea, however, they turned back because they were afraid to leave Russia in their rear, devastated, but still dangerous for them. And the Tatar-Mongol yoke began. The huge Mongol empire, stretching from Beijing to the Volga, hung like an ominous shadow over Russia. The Mongol khans gave the Russian princes labels to reign, attacked Rus' many times to plunder and plunder, and repeatedly killed Russian princes in their Golden Horde. It should be clarified that there were many Christians among the Mongols, and therefore some Russian princes established rather close, friendly relations with the Horde rulers, even becoming their brothers-in-arms. With the help of the Tatar-Mongol detachments, other princes were kept on the “table” (i.e. on the throne), solved their purely internal problems, and even collected tribute for the Golden Horde on their own.

Having strengthened over time, Rus' began to show its teeth. In 1380, the Grand Duke of Moscow Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Horde Khan Mamai with his Tatars, and a century later, in the so-called “stand on the Ugra” the troops of the Grand Duke Ivan III and the Horde Khan Akhmat met. The opponents camped for a long time on opposite sides of the Ugra River, after which Khan Akhmat, finally realizing that the Russians had become strong and he had every chance of losing the battle, gave the order to retreat and led his horde to the Volga. These events are considered the “end of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.”

VERSION
All of the above is a brief summary or, speaking in a foreign manner, a digest. The minimum that “every intelligent person” should know.

...I am close to the method that Conan Doyle gave to the impeccable logician Sherlock Holmes: first, the true version of what happened is stated, and then the chain of reasoning that led Holmes to the discovery of the truth.

This is exactly what I intend to do. First, present your own version of the “Horde” period of Russian history, and then, over the course of a couple of hundred pages, methodically substantiate your hypothesis, referring not so much to your own feelings and “insights,” but to the chronicles, the works of historians of the past, which turned out to be undeservedly forgotten.

I intend to prove to the reader that the classical hypothesis briefly outlined above is completely wrong, that what actually happened fits into the following theses:

1. No “Mongols” came to Rus' from their steppes.

2. The Tatars are not aliens, but residents of the Volga region, who lived in the neighborhood of the Russians long before the notorious invasion."

3. What is commonly called the Tatar-Mongol invasion was in fact a struggle between the descendants of Prince Vsevolod the Big Nest (son of Yaroslav and grandson of Alexander) with their rival princes for sole power over Russia. Accordingly, Yaroslav and Alexander Nevsky perform under the names of Genghis Khan and Batu.

4. Mamai and Akhmat were not alien raiders, but noble nobles, who, according to the dynastic ties of the Russian-Tatar families, had the right to a great reign. Accordingly, “Mamaevo’s Massacre” and “Standing on the Ugra” are not episodes of the fight against foreign aggressors, but of another civil war in Rus'.

5. To prove the truth of all of the above, there is no need to turn the historical sources we currently have on their heads. It is enough to re-read many Russian chronicles and the works of early historians thoughtfully. Weed out frankly fabulous moments and draw logical conclusions instead of thoughtlessly accepting the official theory, whose weight lies mainly not in evidence, but in the fact that the “classical theory” has simply been established over many centuries. Having reached the stage at which any objections are interrupted by a seemingly iron argument: “For mercy, but EVERYONE KNOWS this!”

Alas, the argument only looks ironclad... Just five hundred years ago, “everyone knew” that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Sciences, in an official paper, ridiculed those who believed in stones falling from the sky. Academicians, in general, should not be judged too harshly: and in fact, “everyone knew” that the sky is not the firmament, but air, where stones have nowhere to come from. One important clarification: no one knew that stones fly outside the atmosphere and can often fall to the ground...

We should not forget that many of our ancestors (more precisely, all of them) had several names. Even simple peasants bore at least two names: one - secular, by which everyone knew the person, the second - baptismal.

One of the most famous statesmen of Ancient Rus', the Kiev prince Vladimir Vsevolodich Monomakh, it turns out, is familiar to us under worldly, pagan names. In baptism he was Vasily, and his father was Andrey, so his name was Vasily Andreevich Monomakh. And his grandson Izyaslav Mstislavich, according to his and his father’s baptismal names, should be called Panteleimon Fedorovich!) The baptismal name sometimes remained a secret even for loved ones - cases were recorded when in the first half of the 19th (!) century, inconsolable relatives and friends only found out after the death of the head of the family , that a completely different name should be written on the tombstone, with which the deceased, it turns out, was baptized... In church books, he was, say, listed as Ilya - meanwhile, all his life he was known as Nikita...

WHERE ARE THE MONGOLS?
In fact, where is the “better half” of the phrase “Mongol-Tatar” horde that has stuck in the teeth? Where are the Mongols themselves, according to other zealous authors, who constituted a kind of aristocracy, the cementing core of the army that rolled into Rus'?

So, the most interesting and mysterious thing is that not a single contemporary of those events (or who lived in fairly close times) is able to find the Mongols!

They simply don’t exist - black-haired, slant-eyed people, those whom, without further ado, anthropologists call “Mongoloids.” No, even if you crack it!

It was possible to trace only the traces of two who certainly came from Central Asia Mongoloid tribes - Jalairs and Barlases. But they didn’t come to Rus' as part of Genghis’s army, but to... Semirechye (a region of present-day Kazakhstan). From there, in the second half of the 13th century, the Jalairs migrated to the area of ​​present-day Khojent, and the Barlases to the valley of the Kashkadarya River. From Semirechye they...came to some extent Turkified in the sense of language. In the new place they were already so Turkified that in the 14th century, at least in the second half, they considered the Turkic language their native language" (from the fundamental work of B.D. Grekov and A.Yu. Yakubovsky "Rus and Golden Horde" (1950).

All. Historians, no matter how hard they try, are unable to discover any other Mongols. Among the peoples who came to Rus' in the Batu Horde, the Russian chronicler puts in first place the “Cumans” - that is, the Kipchaks-Polovtsians! Who lived not in present-day Mongolia, but practically next to the Russians, who (as I will prove later) had their own fortresses, cities and villages!

Arab historian Elomari: “In ancient times, this state (Golden Horde of the 14th century - A. Bushkov) was the country of the Kipchaks, but when the Tatars took possession of it, the Kipchaks became their subjects. Then they, that is, the Tatars, mixed and became related to them, and they all definitely became Kipchaks, as if they were of the same kind as them.”

The fact that the Tatars did not come from anywhere, but from time immemorial lived close to the Russians, I will tell you a little later, when I explode, honestly, a serious bomb. In the meantime, let us pay attention to an extremely important circumstance: there are no Mongols. The Golden Horde is represented by Tatars and Kipchaks-Polovtsians, who are not Mongoloids, but of the normal Caucasoid type, fair-haired, light-eyed, not at all slanted... (And their language is similar to Slavic.)

Like Genghis Khan and Batu. Ancient sources depict Genghis as tall, long-bearded, with “lynx-like” green-yellow eyes. Persian historian Rashid
ad-Din (a contemporary of the “Mongol” wars) writes that in the family of Genghis Khan, children “were mostly born with gray eyes and blond hair.” G.E. Grumm-Grzhimailo mentions a “Mongolian” (is it Mongolian?!) legend, according to which Genghis’s ancestor in the ninth tribe, Boduanchar, is blond and blue-eyed! And the same Rashid ad-Din also writes that this very family name Borjigin, assigned to the descendants of Boduanchar, just means... Gray-eyed!

By the way, Batu’s appearance is depicted in exactly the same way - fair hair, light beard, light eyes... The author of these lines lived his entire adult life not so far from the places where Genghis Khan allegedly “created his innumerable army.” I’ve already seen enough of the original Mongoloid people - Khakassians, Tuvinians, Altaians, and even the Mongols themselves. None of them are fair-haired or light-eyed, a completely different anthropological type...

By the way, there are no names “Batu” or “Batu” in any language of the Mongolian group. But “Batu” is in Bashkir, and “Basty,” as already mentioned, is in Polovtsian. So the very name of Genghis’s son definitely did not come from Mongolia.

I wonder what his fellow tribesmen in the “real”, present-day Mongolia wrote about their glorious ancestor Genghis Khan?

The answer is disappointing: in the 13th century, the Mongolian alphabet did not yet exist. Absolutely all chronicles of the Mongols were written no earlier than the 17th century. And therefore, any mention of the fact that Genghis Khan actually came out of Mongolia will be nothing more than a retelling of ancient legends written down three hundred years later... Which, presumably, the “real” Mongols really liked - undoubtedly, it was very pleasant to suddenly find out that your ancestors, it turns out, once walked with fire and sword all the way to the Adriatic...

So, we have already clarified a rather important circumstance: there were no Mongols in the “Mongol-Tatar” horde, i.e. black-haired and narrow-eyed inhabitants of Central Asia, who in the 13th century, presumably, peacefully roamed their steppes. Someone else “came” to Rus' - fair-haired, gray-eyed, blue-eyed people of European appearance. But in fact, they came not from so far away - from Polovtsian steppes, no further.

HOW MANY "MONGOLO-TATAR" WERE THERE?
In fact, how many of them came to Rus'? Let's start finding out. Russian pre-revolutionary sources mention a “half-million-strong Mongol army.”

Sorry for the harshness, but both the first and second numbers are bullshit. Because they were invented by townspeople, armchair figures who saw the horse only from afar and had absolutely no idea what kind of care it takes to maintain a fighting, as well as a pack and marching horse in working condition.

Any warrior of a nomadic tribe goes on a campaign with three horses (the bare minimum is two). One carries luggage (small "packed rations", horseshoes, spare straps for a bridle, all sorts of small things like spare arrows, armor that does not need to be worn on the march, etc.). From the second to the third you need to change from time to time so that one horse is a little rested all the time - you never know what happens, sometimes you have to enter into battle “from the wheels”, i.e. from the hooves.

A primitive calculation shows: for an army of half a million or four hundred thousand soldiers, about one and a half million horses are needed, in extreme cases - a million. Such a herd will be able to advance at most fifty kilometers, but will not be able to go further - the front ones will instantly destroy the grass over a huge area, so that the rear ones will die from lack of food very quickly. Store as much oats for them in toroks (and how much can you store?).

Let me remind you that the invasion of the “Mongol-Tatars” into Rus', all the main invasions unfolded in the winter. When the remaining grass is hidden under the snow, and grain has yet to be taken from the population - in addition, a lot of fodder perishes in burning cities and villages...

It may be objected: the Mongolian horse is excellent at getting food for itself from under the snow. Everything is correct. "Mongolians" are hardy creatures, capable of living the entire winter on "self-sufficiency." I saw them myself, I rode a little once on one, although there was no rider. Magnificent creatures, I am forever fascinated by horses of the Mongolian breed and with great pleasure would exchange my car for such a horse if it were possible to keep it in the city (which, alas, is not possible).

However, in our case the above argument does not work. Firstly, ancient sources do not mention the horses of the Mongolian breed that were “in service” with the horde. On the contrary, horse breeding experts unanimously prove that the “Tatar-Mongolian” horde rode Turkmens - and this is a completely different breed, and looks different, and is not always capable of surviving the winter without human help...

Secondly, the difference between a horse allowed to wander in the winter without any work, and a horse forced to make long journeys under a rider and also participate in battles, is not taken into account. Even the Mongolians, if there were a million of them, with all their fantastic ability to feed themselves in the middle of a snow-covered plain, would die of hunger, interfering with each other, beating each other's rare blades of grass...

But in addition to the horsemen, they were also forced to carry heavy booty!

But the “Mongols” also had rather large convoys with them. The cattle that pull the carts also need to be fed, otherwise they won’t pull the cart...

In a word, throughout the twentieth century, the number of “Mongol-Tatars” who attacked Rus' dried up, like the famous shagreen skin. In the end, the historians, gnashing their teeth, settled on thirty thousand - the remnants of professional pride simply do not allow them to go lower.

And one more thing... Fear of allowing heretical theories like mine into Big Historiography. Because even if we take the number of “invading Mongols” to be thirty thousand, a series of malicious questions arise...

And the first among them will be this: isn’t it enough? No matter how you refer to the “disunity” of the Russian principalities, thirty thousand cavalry is too meager a figure to cause “fire and ruin” throughout Rus'! After all, they (even supporters of the “classical” version admit this) did not move in a compact mass, falling en masse one by one on Russian cities. Several detachments scattered in different directions - and this reduces the number of “innumerable Tatar hordes” to the limit, beyond which elementary mistrust begins: well, such a number of aggressors could not, no matter what discipline their regiments were welded together (and, moreover, cut off from supply bases, as if a group of saboteurs behind enemy lines), to “capture” Rus'!

It turns out to be a vicious circle: a huge army of “Mongol-Tatars”, for purely physical reasons, would not be able to maintain combat effectiveness, move quickly, or deliver those same notorious “indestructible blows.” A small army would never have been able to establish control over most of the territory of Rus'.

Only our hypothesis can get rid of this vicious circle - that there were no aliens. Was walking Civil War, the enemy forces were relatively small - and they relied on their own forage reserves accumulated in the cities.

By the way, it is completely unusual for nomads to fight in winter. But winter is a favorite time for Russian military campaigns. From time immemorial, they went on campaigns, using frozen rivers as “travel roads” - the most optimal way of waging war in a territory almost entirely overgrown with dense forests, where it would be damn difficult for any large military detachment, especially cavalry, to move.

All the chronicle information that has reached us about the military campaigns of 1237-1238. they depict the classic Russian style of these battles - the battles take place in winter, and the “Mongols,” who seem to be supposed to be classic steppe inhabitants, act with amazing skill in the forests. First of all, I mean the encirclement and subsequent complete destruction on the City River of the Russian detachment under the command of the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich... Such a brilliant operation could not have been carried out by the inhabitants of the steppes, who simply had no time, and there was no place to learn how to fight in the thicket .

So, our piggy bank is gradually replenished with weighty evidence. We found out that there are no “Mongols”, i.e. For some reason there were no Mongoloids among the “horde”. They found out that there could not have been many “aliens”, that even that tiny number of thirty thousand, on which historians settled, like the Swedes near Poltava, could not in any way ensure the “Mongols” establishing control over all of Russia. They found out that the horses under the “Mongols” were not Mongolian at all, and for some reason these “Mongols” fought according to Russian rules. And they were, curiously enough, blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Not too little to begin with. And I warn you, we are just getting the taste...

WHERE DID THE "MONGOLS" COME WHEN COME TO Rus'?
That's right, I didn't mess anything up. And very quickly the reader learns that the question in the title appears to be nonsense only at first glance...

We have already talked about a second Moscow and a second Krakow. There is also a second Samara - “Samara Grad”, a fortress on the site of the current city of Novomoskovsk, 29 kilometers north of Dnepropetrovsk...

In a word, the geographical names of the Middle Ages did not always coincide with what we understand today as a certain name. Today, for us, Rus' means the entire land of that time inhabited by Russians.

But the people of that time thought somewhat differently... Every time you read about the events of the 12th-13th centuries, you must remember: then “Rus” was the name given to part of the regions populated by Russians - the Kiev, Pereyaslav and Chernigov principalities. More precisely: Kyiv, Chernigov, the Ros River, Porosye, Pereyaslavl-Russky, Seversk land, Kursk. Quite often in ancient chronicles it is written that from Novgorod or Vladimir... “we went to Rus'”! That is, to Kyiv. Chernigov cities are “Russian”, but Smolensk cities are already “non-Russian”.

Historian of the 17th century: "...Slavs, our ancestors - Moscow, Russians and Others..."

Exactly. It is not for nothing that on Western European maps for a very long time Russian lands were divided into “Muscovy” (north) and “Russia” (south). Last title
lasted an extremely long time - as we remember, the inhabitants of those lands where “Ukraine” is now located, being Russian by blood, Catholics by religion and subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (as the author calls the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is more familiar to us - Sapfir_t), called themselves “Russian gentry."

Thus, chronicle messages like “such and such a year a horde attacked Rus'” should be treated taking into account what is said above. Remember: this mention does not mean aggression against all of Rus', but an attack on a specific area, strictly localized.

KALKA - A BALL OF RIDDLES
The first clash between the Russians and the “Mongol-Tatars” on the Kalka River in 1223 is described in some detail in ancient Russian chronicles - however, not only in them, there is also the so-called “Tale of the Battle of the Kalka, and about the Russian princes, and about seventy heroes."

However, the abundance of information does not always bring clarity... In general, historical science has long no longer denied the obvious fact that the events on the Kalka River were not an attack of evil aliens on Rus', but Russian aggression against their neighbors. Judge for yourself. The Tatars (in the descriptions of the Battle of Kalka the Mongols are never mentioned) fought with the Polovtsians. And they sent ambassadors to Rus', who rather friendly asked the Russians not to interfere in this war. The Russian princes... killed these ambassadors, and according to some old texts, they didn’t just kill them - they “tortured them.” The act, to put it mildly, is not the most decent - at all times, the murder of an ambassador was considered one of the most serious crimes. Following this, the Russian army sets out on a long march.

Having left the borders of Rus', it first attacks the Tatar camp, takes booty, steals cattle, after which it moves deeper into foreign territory for another eight days. There, on Kalka, the decisive battle takes place, the Polovtsian allies flee in panic, the princes are left alone, they fight back for three days, after which, believing the assurances of the Tatars, they surrender. However, the Tatars, angry at the Russians (it’s strange, why would this be?! They didn’t do any particular harm to the Tatars, except that they killed their ambassadors, attacked them first...) kill the captured princes. According to some sources, they kill simply, without any pretense, but according to others, they pile them on tied boards and sit on top to feast, the scoundrels.

It is significant that one of the most ardent “Tatarophobes,” the writer V. Chivilikhin, in his almost eight-hundred-page book “Memory,” oversaturated with abuse against the “Horde,” somewhat embarrassedly avoids the events on Kalka. He mentions it briefly - yes, there was something like that... It seems like they fought a little there...

You can understand him: the Russian princes in this story do not look the best. I’ll add on my own behalf: the Galician prince Mstislav Udaloy is not just an aggressor, but also a downright bastard - however, more on that later...

Let's get back to the riddles. For some reason, that same “Tale of the Battle of Kalka” is not able to... name the Russian enemy! Judge for yourself: "... because of our sins, unknown peoples came, godless Moabites, about whom no one knows exactly who they are and where they came from, and what their language is, and what tribe they are, and what faith. And they call them Tatars , and some say - Taurmen, and others - Pechenegs."

Extremely strange lines! Let me remind you that they were written much later than the events described, when it was supposed to be known exactly who the Russian princes fought on Kalka. After all, part of the army (albeit small, according to some sources - one tenth) nevertheless returned from Kalka. Moreover, the victors, in turn, pursuing the defeated Russian regiments, chased them to Novgorod-Svyatopolch (not to be confused with Veliky Novgorod! - A. Bushkov), where they attacked the civilian population - (Novgorod-Svyatopolch stood on the banks of the Dnieper) so and among the townspeople there must be witnesses who saw the enemy with their own eyes.

However, this enemy remains “unknown.” Those who came from unknown places, speaking God knows what language. It's your choice, it turns out to be some kind of incongruity...

Either the Polovtsians, or the Taurmen, or the Tatars... This statement confuses the matter even more. By the time described, the Polovtsians were well known in Rus' - they lived side by side for so many years, sometimes fought with them, sometimes went on campaigns together, became related... Is it conceivable not to identify the Polovtsians?

The Taurmen are a nomadic Turkic tribe that lived in the Black Sea region in those years. Again, they were well known to the Russians by that time.

The Tatars (as I will soon prove) by 1223 had already lived in the same Black Sea region for at least several decades.

In short, the chronicler is definitely disingenuous. The complete impression is that for some extremely compelling reasons he does not want to directly name the Russian enemy in that battle. And this assumption is not at all far-fetched. Firstly, the expression “either Polovtsy, or Tatars, or Taurmen” is in no way consistent with the life experience of Russians at that time. Both of them, and the others, and the third were well known in Rus' - everyone except the author of the "Tale" ...

Secondly, if the Russians had fought on Kalka with an “unknown” people they saw for the first time, the subsequent picture of events would have looked completely different - I mean the surrender of the princes and the pursuit of the defeated Russian regiments.

It turns out that the princes, who were holed up in a fortification made of “tine and carts”, where they fought off enemy attacks for three days, surrendered after... a certain Russian named Ploskinya, who was in the enemy’s battle formations, solemnly kissed his pectoral cross on what had been captured will not cause harm.

I deceived you, you bastard. But the point is not in his deceit (after all, history provides a lot of evidence of how the Russian princes themselves violated the “kiss of the cross” with the same deceit), but in the personality of Ploskini himself, a Russian, a Christian, who somehow mysteriously found himself among the warriors of the "unknown people". I wonder what fate brought him there?

V. Yan, a supporter of the “classical” version, portrayed Ploskinia as a kind of steppe vagabond, who was caught on the road by “Mongol-Tatars” and, with a chain around his neck, led to the Russian fortifications in order to persuade them to surrender to the mercy of the winner.

This is not even a version - this is, excuse me, schizophrenia. Put yourself in the place of a Russian prince - a professional soldier, who during his life fought a lot with both Slavic neighbors and nomadic steppe people, who went through fires and waters...

You are surrounded in a distant land by warriors of a completely unknown tribe. For three days you have been fighting off the attacks of this adversary, whose language you do not understand, whose appearance is strange and disgusting to you. Suddenly, this mysterious adversary drives some ragamuffin with a chain around his neck to your fortification, and he, kissing the cross, swears that the besiegers (again and again I emphasize: hitherto unknown to you, strangers in language and faith!) will spare you if you surrender. ..

So, will you give up under these conditions?

Yes to completeness! Not a single normal person with more or less military experience will surrender (besides, you, let me clarify, just recently killed the ambassadors of this very people and plundered the camp of their fellow tribesmen to their heart’s content).

But for some reason the Russian princes surrendered...

However, why “for some reason”? The same “Tale” writes quite unambiguously: “There were wanderers along with the Tatars, and their governor was Ploskinya.”

Brodniks are Russian free warriors who lived in those places. Predecessors of the Cossacks. Well, this changes things somewhat: it was not the bound captive who persuaded him to surrender, but the governor, almost an equal, such a Slav and a Christian... One can believe this - which is what the princes did.

However, establishing Ploschini's true social position only confuses the matter. It turns out that the Brodniki managed to come to an agreement with the “unknown peoples” in a short time and became so close to them that they jointly attacked the Russians? Your brothers by blood and faith?

Something doesn't work out again. It is clear that the wanderers were outcasts who fought only for themselves, but all the same, they somehow very quickly found a common language with the “godless Moabites”, about whom no one knows where they came from, what language they are, and what faith they are.. .

As a matter of fact, one thing can be stated with certainty: part of the army with which the Russian princes fought on Kalka was Slavic, Christian.

Or maybe not part? Maybe there were no “Moabites”? Maybe the battle on Kalka is a “showdown” between Orthodox Christians? On the one hand, several allied Russian princes (it must be emphasized that for some reason many Russian princes did not go to Kalka to rescue the Polovtsians), on the other, the Brodniks and Orthodox Tatars, neighbors of the Russians?

Once you accept this version, everything falls into place. And the hitherto mysterious surrender of the princes - they surrendered not to some unknown strangers, but to well-known neighbors (the neighbors, however, broke their word, but it depends on your luck...) - (About the fact that the captured princes were “thrown under the boards” , only “The Tale” reports. Other sources write that the princes were simply killed without mockery, and still others that the princes were “taken captive.” So the story of the “feast on the bodies” is just one of the options). And the behavior of those residents of Novgorod-Svyatopolch, who for some unknown reason came out to meet the Tatars pursuing the Russians fleeing from Kalka... with a procession of the cross!

This behavior again does not fit into the version with the unknown “godless Moabites.” Our ancestors can be reproached for many sins, but excessive gullibility was not among them. In fact, what normal person would go out to honor a religious procession for some unknown alien, whose language, faith and nationality remain a mystery?!

However, once we assume that the fleeing remnants of the princely armies were being chased by some of their own, long-time acquaintances, and, what is especially important, fellow Christians, the behavior of the city residents instantly loses all signs of madness or absurdity. From their long-time acquaintances, from fellow Christians, there was indeed a chance to defend themselves with a procession of the cross.

The chance, however, did not work this time - apparently, the horsemen, heated by the pursuit, were too angry (which is quite understandable - their ambassadors were killed, they themselves were attacked first, chopped down and robbed) and immediately flogged those who came out to meet them with the cross. Let me especially note that similar things happened during purely Russian internecine wars, when the enraged victors cut right and left, and the raised cross did not stop them...

Thus, the battle on Kalka is not at all a clash with unknown peoples, but one of the episodes of the internecine war waged among themselves by Russian Christians, Polovtsian Christians (it is curious that the chronicles of that time mention the Polovtsian khan Basty, who converted to Christianity), and Christian-Russians. Tatars. A Russian historian of the 17th century summarizes the results of this war as follows: “After this victory, the Tatars completely destroyed the fortresses and cities and villages of the Polovtsians. And all the lands near the Don, and the Meot Sea (Sea of ​​Azov), and Taurica Kherson (which, after digging up the isthmus between the seas, today it is called Perekop), and around the Pontus Evkhsinsky, that is, the Black Sea, the Tatars took their hand and settled there."

As we see, the war was fought over specific territories, between specific peoples. By the way, the mention of “cities, and fortresses, and Polovtsian villages” is extremely interesting. We were told for a long time that the Polovtsians are steppe nomads, but nomadic peoples have neither fortresses nor cities...

And finally - about the Galician prince Mstislav the Udal, or rather, about why he deserves the definition of “scum”. A word to the same historian: “...The brave prince Mstislav Mstislavich of Galicia... when he ran to the river to his boats (immediately after the defeat from the “Tatars” - A. Bushkov), having crossed the river, he ordered all the boats to be sunk and chopped , and set fire, fearing the Tatar pursuit, and, filled with fear, reached Galich on foot. Most of the Russian regiments, running, reached their boats and, seeing them sunk and burned to a man, from sadness and need and hunger could not swim across the river , they died and perished there, except for some princes and warriors, who swam across the river on wicker sheaves of meadowsweet.”

Like this. By the way, this scum - I'm talking about Mstislav - is still called Daredevil in history and literature. True, not all historians and writers admire this figure - a hundred years ago D. Ilovaisky listed in detail all the mistakes and absurdities committed by Mstislav as the Prince of Galicia, using the remarkable phrase: “Obviously, in his old age Mstislav finally lost his common sense.” On the contrary, N. Kostomarov, without any hesitation, considered Mstislav’s act with the boats to be completely self-evident - Mstislav, they say, “prevented the Tatars from crossing.” However, excuse me, they still somehow crossed the river, if “on the shoulders” of the retreating Russians they reached Novgorod-Svyatopolch?!

Kostomarov’s complacency towards Mstislav, who essentially destroyed most of the Russian army with his act, is, however, understandable: Kostomarov had only “The Tale of the Battle of Kalka” at his disposal, where the death of soldiers who had nothing to cross is not mentioned at all . The historian I just quoted is definitely unknown to Kostomarov. Nothing strange - I will reveal this secret a little later.

SUPERMEN FROM THE MONGOLIAN STEPPE
Having accepted the classic version of the “Mongol-Tatar” invasion, we ourselves do not notice what a collection of illogicalities, and even outright stupidity, we are dealing with.

To begin with, I will quote an extensive piece from the work of the famous scientist N.A. Morozova (1854-1946):

“Nomadic peoples, by the very nature of their life, should be widely scattered over large uncultivated areas in separate patriarchal groups, incapable of general disciplined action, requiring economic centralization, i.e., a tax with which it would be possible to maintain an army of adult single people. Among all nomads peoples, like clusters of molecules, each of their patriarchal groups pushes away from the other, thanks to the search for more and more new grass to feed their herds.

Having united together in the number of at least several thousand people, they must also unite with each other several thousand cows and horses and even more sheep and rams belonging to different patriarchs. As a result of this, all the nearby grass would be quickly eaten up and the entire company would have to scatter again in the same patriarchal small groups in different directions in order to be able to live longer without moving their tents to another place every day.

That is why, a priori, the very idea of ​​the possibility of organized collective action and a victorious invasion of settled peoples by some widely scattered nomadic people, feeding from herds, such as the Mongols, Samoyeds, Bedouins, etc., should be rejected a priori with the exception of the case when some gigantic, natural catastrophe, threatening general destruction, drives such a people from the dying steppe entirely to a settled country, just as a hurricane drives dust from the desert to the adjacent oasis.

But even in the Sahara itself, not a single large oasis was forever covered with the surrounding sand, and after the end of the hurricane it was again revived to its former life. Likewise, throughout our reliable historical horizon we do not see a single victorious invasion of wild nomadic peoples into sedentary cultural countries, but just the opposite. This means that this could not have happened in the prehistoric past. All these migrations of peoples back and forth on the eve of their appearance in the field of view of history should be reduced only to the migration of their names or, at best, rulers, and even then from more cultured countries to less cultured ones, and not vice versa."

Gold words. History really does not know of cases when nomads scattered over vast spaces suddenly created, if not a powerful state, then a powerful army capable of conquering entire countries.

With one single exception - when it comes to the “Mongol-Tatars”. We are asked to believe that Genghis Khan, who supposedly lived in what is now Mongolia, by some miracle, in a matter of years created from scattered uluses an army that was superior in discipline and organization to any European...

It would be interesting to know how he achieved this? Despite the fact that the nomad has one undoubted advantage that protects him from any quirks of sedentary power, the power that he did not like at all: mobility. That's why he's a nomad. The self-proclaimed khan did not like it - he assembled a yurt, loaded horses, seated his wife, children and old grandmother, waved his whip - and moved to distant lands, from where it was extremely difficult to get him. Especially when it comes to the endless Siberian expanses.

Here is a suitable example: when in 1916 the tsarist officials especially annoyed the Kazakh nomads with something, they calmly withdrew and migrated from Russian Empire to neighboring China. The authorities (and we are talking about the beginning of the twentieth century!) simply could not stop them and prevent them!

Meanwhile, we are invited to believe in the following picture: the steppe nomads, free as the wind, for some reason meekly agree to follow Genghis “to the last sea.” Given Genghis Khan’s complete lack of means of influencing the “refuseniks”, it would be unthinkable to chase them across steppes and thickets stretching for thousands of kilometers (certain clans of the Mongols lived not in the steppe, but in the taiga).

Five thousand kilometers - approximately this distance was covered by the troops of Genghis to Rus' according to the “classical” version. The armchair theorists who wrote such things simply never thought about what it would cost in reality to overcome such routes (and if we remember that the “Mongols” reached the shores of the Adriatic, the route increases by another one and a half thousand kilometers). What force, what miracle could force the steppe inhabitants to go to such a distance?

Would you believe that Bedouin nomads from the Arabian steppes would one day set out to conquer South Africa, reaching the Cape of Good Hope? And the Alaska Indians one day showed up in Mexico, where for unknown reasons they decided to migrate?

Of course, all this is pure water nonsense. However, if we compare the distances, it turns out that from Mongolia to the Adriatic the “Mongols” would have to travel about the same distance as the Arabian Bedouins to Cape Town or the Alaska Indians to the Gulf of Mexico. Not just to pass, let us clarify - along the way you will also capture several of the largest states of that time: China, Khorezm, devastate Georgia, Rus', invade Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary...

Are historians asking us to believe this? Well, so much the worse for historians... If you don't want to be called an idiot, don't do idiotic things - an old everyday truth. So supporters of the “classical” version are running into insults themselves...

Not only that, the nomadic tribes, who were at the stage of not even feudalism - the clan system - for some reason suddenly realized the need for iron discipline and dutifully trudged after Genghis Khan for six and a half thousand kilometers. The nomads, in a short (damnly short!) timeframe, suddenly learned to use the best military equipment of that time - battering machines, stone throwers...

Judge for yourself. According to reliable data, Genghis Khan made his first major campaign outside the “historical homeland” in 1209. Already in 1215 he allegedly
captures Beijing, in 1219, using siege weapons, takes the cities of Central Asia - Merv, Samarkand, Gurganj, Khiva, Khudzhent, Bukhara - and another twenty years later, with the same battering machines and stone throwers, destroys the walls of Russian cities.

Mark Twain was right: ganders don’t spawn! Well, rutabaga does not grow on trees!

Well, a steppe nomad is not capable of mastering the art of taking cities using battering machines in a couple of years! Create an army superior to the armies of any states of that time!

First of all, because he doesn’t need it. As Morozov rightly noted, there are no examples in world history of the creation of states by nomads or the defeat of foreign states. Moreover, in such a utopian time frame, as official history palms off on us, uttering pearls like: “After the invasion of China, Genghis Khan’s army adopted the Chinese military equipment- battering machines, stone-throwing and flame-throwing weapons."

This is nothing, there are even cleaner pearls. I happened to read an article in an extremely serious, academic journal: it described how the Mongolian (!) navy in the 13th century. fired at the ships of the ancient Japanese... with combat missiles! (The Japanese, presumably, responded with laser-guided torpedoes.) In a word, navigation should also be included among the arts mastered by the Mongols over the course of a year or two. Well, at least it’s not flying on heavier-than-air vehicles...

There are situations when common sense stronger than all scientific constructions. Especially if scientists are led into such labyrinths of fantasy that any science fiction writer would open his mouth in admiration.

By the way, an important question: How did the wives of the Mongols let their husbands go to the ends of the earth? The vast majority of medieval sources describe
"Tatar-Mongol horde" as an army, and not a migrating people. No wives or small children. It turns out that the Mongols wandered in foreign lands until their death, and their wives, never seeing their husbands, managed the herds?

Not book nomads, but real nomads always behave completely differently: they wander peacefully for hundreds of years (occasionally attacking their neighbors, not without this), and it never occurs to them to conquer some nearby country or go halfway around the world to look for the “last sea.” It would simply not occur to a Pashtun or Bedouin tribal leader to build a city or create a state. How can a whim about the “last sea” not occur to him? There are enough purely earthly, practical matters: you need to survive, prevent the loss of livestock, look for new pastures, exchange fabrics and knives for cheese and milk... Where can one dream of an “empire halfway around the world”?

Meanwhile, we are seriously assured that for some reason the nomadic steppe people suddenly became imbued with the idea of ​​a state, or at least a grandiose campaign of conquest to the “limits of the world.” And at the right time, by some miracle he united his fellow tribesmen into a powerful organized army. And over the course of several years I learned how to handle machines that were quite complex by the standards of that time. And he created a navy that fired missiles at the Japanese. And he compiled a set of laws for his huge empire. And he corresponded with the Pope, kings and dukes, teaching them how to live.

The late L.N. Gumilyov (not one of the last historians, but sometimes overly carried away by poetic ideas) seriously believed that he had created a hypothesis that could explain such miracles. We are talking about the “theory of passionarity”. According to Gumilyov, this or that people at a certain moment receives some mysterious and semi-mystical energy blow from Space - after which they calmly move mountains and achieve unprecedented achievements.

There is a significant flaw in this beautiful theory, which benefits Gumilyov himself, but, on the contrary, complicates the discussion to the limit for his opponents. The fact is that “manifestation of passionarity” can easily explain any military or other success of any people. But it is almost impossible to prove the absence of a “passionary blow”. Which automatically puts Gumilyov’s supporters in better conditions than their opponents - since there are no reliable scientific methods, as well as equipment capable of recording the “flow of passionarity” on paper or paper.

In a word - frolic, soul... Let's say, the Ryazan governor Baldokha, at the head of a valiant army, flew into the Suzdal people, instantly and cruelly defeated their army, after which the Ryazan people shamelessly abused the Suzdal women and girls, robbed all the reserves of salted saffron milk caps, squirrel skins and honey supplied , gave a final blow to the neck of an inopportunely turned up monk and returned home victorious. All. You can, meaningfully narrowing your eyes, say: “The people of Ryazan received a passionary impulse, but the people of Suzdal had lost their passionarity by that time.”

Six months passed - and now the Suzdal prince Timonya Gunyavy, burning with a thirst for revenge, attacked the Ryazan people. Fortune turned out to be fickle - and this time the “Ryazan with a squint” broke in on the first day and took away all the goods, and the women and girls had their hems torn off, as for the governor Baldokha, they mocked him to their hearts’ content, shoving his bare backside at an inopportunely turned up hedgehog. The picture for the historian of the Gumilev school is completely clear: “The people of Ryazan have lost their former passionarity.”

Perhaps they did not lose anything - it was simply that the hungover blacksmith did not shoe Baidokha's horse in time, he lost the horseshoe, and then everything went in accordance with the English song translated by Marshak: there was no nail, the horseshoe was gone, there was no horseshoe, the horse went lame. .. And the main part of Baldokhin’s army did not take part in the battle at all, since they were chasing the Polovtsy about a hundred miles from Ryazan.

But try to prove to the faithful Gumilevite that the problem is the nail, and not the “loss of passionarity”! No, really, take a risk for the sake of curiosity, but I’m not your friend here...

In a word, the “passionary” theory is not suitable for explaining the “Genghis Khan phenomenon” due to the complete impossibility of both proving and disproving it. Let's leave mysticism behind the scenes.

There is one more piquant moment here: the Suzdal chronicle will be compiled by the same monk whom the Ryazan people so imprudently kicked in the neck. If he is especially vindictive, he will present the Ryazan people... and not the Ryazan people at all. And by some “filthy”, evil Antichrist horde. Moabites emerged out of nowhere, devouring foxes and gophers. Subsequently, I will give some quotes showing that in the Middle Ages this was sometimes approximately the situation...

Let's return to the other side of the coin of the "Tatar-Mongol yoke." The unique relationship between the “Horde” and the Russians. Here it is worth paying tribute to Gumilyov, in this area he is worthy not of ridicule, but of respect: he collected enormous material that clearly demonstrates that the relationship between “Rus” and the “Horde” cannot be described in any other word other than symbiosis.

To be honest, I don’t want to list this evidence. Too much and often was written about how Russian princes and “Mongol khans” became brothers-in-law, relatives, sons-in-law and fathers-in-law, how they went on joint military campaigns, how (let’s call a spade a spade) they were friends. If desired, the reader himself can easily familiarize himself with the details of Russian-Tatar friendship. I will focus on one aspect: that this kind of relationship is unique. For some reason, the Tatars did not behave like this in any country they defeated or captured. However, in Rus' it reached the point of incomprehensible absurdity: let’s say, the subjects of Alexander Nevsky one fine day beat the Horde tribute collectors to death, but the “Horde Khan” reacts to this somehow strangely: upon news of this sad event, no
only he does not take punitive measures, but gives Nevsky additional privileges, allows him to collect tribute himself, and in addition, frees him from the need to supply recruits for the Horde army...

I am not fantasizing, but just retelling Russian chronicles. Reflecting (probably contrary to the “creative intent” of their authors) the very strange relations that existed between Russia and the Horde: a formal symbiosis, brotherhood in arms, leading to such an interweaving of names and events that you simply cease to understand where the Russians end and the Tatars begin. ..

And nowhere. Rus' is the Golden Horde, haven’t you forgotten? Or, more precisely, the Golden Horde is a part of Rus', the one that is under the rule of the Vladimir-Suzdal princes, the descendants of Vsevolod the Big Nest. And the notorious symbiosis is just an incompletely distorted reflection of events.

Gumilyov never dared to take the next step. And I'm sorry, I'll take a risk. If we have established that, firstly, no “Mongoloids” came from anywhere, that, secondly, the Russians and Tatars were on uniquely friendly relations, logic dictates to go further and say: Rus' and the Horde are simply one and the same thing. And the tales about the “evil Tatars” were composed much later.

Have you ever wondered what the word “horde” means? In search of an answer, I first dug into the depths Polish language. For a very simple reason: it was in Polish that quite a lot of words were preserved that disappeared from Russian in the 17th-18th centuries (once both languages ​​were much closer).

In Polish "Horda" means "horde". Not a “crowd of nomads”, but rather a “large army”. Numerous army.

Let's move on. Sigismund Herberstein, the "Tsar's" ambassador, who visited Muscovy in the 16th century and left the most interesting "Notes", testifies that in the "Tatar" language "horde" meant "multiple" or "assembly". In Russian chronicles, when talking about military campaigns, they calmly insert the phrases “Swedish horde” or “German horde” in the same meaning - “army”.

Academician Fomenko points to the Latin word “ordo”, meaning “order”, and the German word “ordnung” - “order”.

To this we can add the Anglo-Saxon "order", which again means "order" in the sense of "law", and in addition - military formation. The expression “marching order” still exists in the navy. That is, building ships on a voyage.

In modern Turkish, the word "ordu" has meanings that again correspond to the words "order", "pattern", and not so long ago (from a historical point of view) in Turkey there was a military term "orta", meaning a Janissary unit, something in between between battalion and regiment...

At the end of the 17th century. on the basis of written reports from explorers, Tobolsk serviceman S.U. Remezov, together with his three sons, compiled the “Drawing Book” - a grandiose geographical atlas covering the territory of the entire Moscow kingdom. The Cossack lands adjacent to the North Caucasus are called... "Land of the Cossack Horde"! (Like many other old Russian maps.)

In a word, all the meanings of the word “horde” revolve around the terms “army”, “order”, “law” (in modern Kazakh “Red Army” sounds like Kzyl-Orda!). And this, I am sure, is not without reason. The picture of the “horde” as a state that at some stage united the Russians and Tatars (or simply the armies of this state) fits much more successfully into reality than the Mongol nomads, who were surprisingly inflamed with a passion for battering machines, the navy and campaigns of five or six thousand kilometers.

Simply, once upon a time, Yaroslav Vsevolodovich and his son Alexander began a fierce struggle for dominance over all Russian lands. It was their horde army (which actually contained enough Tatars) that served later falsifiers to create a terrible picture of a “foreign invasion.”

There are several more similar examples where, with a superficial knowledge of history, a person is quite capable of drawing false conclusions - in the event that he is only familiar with the name and does not suspect what is behind it.

In the 17th century In the Polish army there were cavalry units called “Cossack banners” (“banner” is a military unit). There were not a single real Cossacks there - in this case the name only meant that these regiments were armed according to the Cossack model.

During Crimean War The Turkish troops that landed on the peninsula included a unit called “Ottoman Cossacks.” Again, not a single Cossack - only Polish emigrants and Turks under the command of Mehmed Sadyk Pasha, also former cavalry lieutenant Michal Tchaikovsky.

And finally, we can remember the French Zouaves. These parts received their name from the Algerian Zuazua tribe. Gradually, not a single Algerian remained in them, only purebred French, but the name was preserved for subsequent times, until these units, a kind of special forces, ceased to exist.

I stop there. If you're interested, read on here