In 1235, Ogedei called a meeting of his relatives and nokors at the new Mongol capital of Karakorum. The Mongols were preparing to fight on several fronts. In the southwest, Chaghatai wanted to strengthen Mongol control over the lands Chinggis had conquered almost 15 years before. In the east, Ogedei sought to extend the empire into Song China. And the general Subedei supported Batu’s call for a new campaign in Russia, which could eventually take the Mongols into Europe.
The advance into the Russian steppes was the Mongols’ next major military action. Batu and Subedei led the campaign, with the general providing most of the strategy. Starting in the spring of 1236, Batu began assembling his army, with Ogedei’s help. The commanders featured several of Chinggis’s grandsons, including Berke (d. 1267), Batu’s brother; Ogedei’s son Guyuk; and Tolui’s son Mongke. The army eventually had about 150,000 soldiers, which included Mongols, Turks, and other residents of the empire, with Chinese and Persian engineers building siege engines and other weapons of war.
The Mongols’ first targets were the peoples who lived along the Volga River. Subedei’s forces destroyed the Bulghars, while Mongke
Attacked the Kipchak nomads, a numerous Turkic people who lived on the steppes from Kazakhstan to Romania. When the Mongols captured the Kipchak ruler, he refused to bow down to Mongke. The Mongol prince then ordered that the ruler’s body be split in two.
The lands controlled by Batu and his Golden Horde were sometimes called the Kipchak Khanate. Batu centered his forces in the Kipchaks’ former homeland, where he founded his capital of Saray, near present-day Leninsk, Russia.
In Russia, the Mongols faced a series of small states ruled by princes. The first principality to fall was Riazan. Inside the city, the Mongols showed particular cruelty. They cut off all the limbs of one prince and speared some residents with large wooden stakes, leaving them to die. In The History of the Mongol Conquests, J. J. Saunders quotes a Russian writer who described similar brutality in nearby Kolomna, where “no eye remained open to weep for the dead" The Mongols hoped tales of their violence would spread to the other Russian principalities, so that they would surrender without a fight.
A Prayer for Victory
In this illustrated Moghul book (c. 1590) History of the Mongols, Chinas Khan (top left) prays to the sun on the Kipchak steppes before battle.
Some of the princes, however, were willing to combat the Mongols. Such key cities as Suzdal, Vladimir, and Kiev resisted, but the Mongols swept through them on their march west. As the Mongols advanced, drummers on camels beat a rhythm, and the sounds of marching animals and shouting soldiers filled the air. Although the Russians resisted, they were unwilling to unite against the superior army of their common enemy. Their ruling princes had often argued with one another and competed for power. The threat of defeat did not end these quarrels, and the Mongols controlled the Russian cities by the winter of 1240.
In some places, the Mongols completely destroyed Russian cities and the people who lived there. Father Giovanni DiPlano Carpini, in his
Account of the Mongols, noted that when he traveled through Kiev several years after the Mongol invasion, it was “reduced to almost nothing.” The priest also described seeing “countless human skulls and bones from the dead scattered over the field.” Some modern historians, however, say that some Russian cities escaped the Mongol assault or managed to rebuild soon after the Mongols moved on.
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