As noted in chapter 4, the rulers of the Golden Horde did not play a role in the everyday affairs of their Russian lands. Their most direct contact was with the Russian officials who collected taxes and the princes who ruled local areas. The Mongols’ greatest contact was with the Turkic people who had moved into Russia before the Mongol conquests.
The Russians in the towns of the east were Slavs, related to other Slavic people of Eastern Europe. For the average people of Slavic Russia, life did not change much under Mongol rule-unless they were forced into the military. Farming was never easy in the forests around the upper end of the Volga River. Peasants who cleared away trees then had to deal with short summers and bad soil. Families hunted and fished to make sure they had enough food, and lived in log cabins made from the trees they cut. A typical rural home included three generations of the same family: grandparents, their adult children, and the adults’ children.
Farther south along the river the farming was better, and the area where the Volga meets the Oka River, near Suzdal and Vladimir, drew many Russian settlers. That area remained a main source of wheat under Mongol rule. Land was the main source of wealth in the isolated regions of Russia, and families with large farms used slaves or peasants to work the land for them. In general, the peasants were not tied to one plot of land; they could move on and work for a different landowner if they chose. If they owed a landowner money, however, the peasants could not leave, and the owners tried to make sure the peasants remained in debt.
Novgorod, Russia’s only large city at the time, was a thriving trade center. At the city’s peak in the 13th century, its merchants traded furs and hemp in Europe for wine and cloth. The Mongol capital of Saray also developed a strong economy. Many city residents worked smelting iron and turning it into finished products. Remains of clothing shops and jewelers have also been found by archaeologists on the site of the city.
In some ways, Russians benefited under the Golden Horde. Foreign trade increased as Russia joined the international trade network the Mongols supported. The Mongol presence also helped unite the Russians and create a sense of being Russian, of having a national identity, and not merely being the subject of the local prince. The Russian Orthodox
Church played a part in creating this nationalism. It was the only native, central power in the land, and the people looked to church leaders and their own faith for the strength to endure the foreign invaders. Recent historians have also questioned the idea, held by earlier historians, that the Mongol conquests totally disrupted life across Russia. In The Crisis of Medieval Russia, John Fennell writes, “things returned to normal, or near-normal, in a remarkably short time.”
World History
