Poland, the Mongol Empire and the Golden Horde in the Years 1241–1502

Abstract

The army of Batu Khan’s 1241 invasion of Central and Eastern Europe was the first, highly unfortunate encounter between Poland and the Mongol empire. The defeat at Legnica, the death of Prince Henry the Pious, and the collapse of his line’s reign in the Duchy of Silesia not only delayed the unifica­tion of Poland by decades, but in practice it also eliminated the Silesian Piasts from effective competition for the future Polish union. It was only the death of Ögedei Khan that forced Batu Khan to return with his army to Mongolia and that saved Poland and Hungary from a prolonged enslavement that was the fate of Ruthenian duchies. The subsequent Mongol invasions of Poland at the turn of 1260 and 1288 only deepened the process of economic decline and destruction of Poland.
The defeat suffered by the Mongols in the battles with the Egyptian Mam­luks and the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 made the West lose interest in establishing political relations with the Mongols. In Eastern Europe, the western domain of the Mongol Empire, the so-called Golden Horde, grew in strength, and began playing a significant role in the politi­cal life of the entire region. The peak of its power was in the first half of the fourteenth century during the reign of Öz Beg and Jani Beg khans. From the second half of the fourteenth century faltering of the Golden Horde began. In the fifteenth century it was transformed into the so-called Great Horde. The Grand Prince Ivan III of Muscovy’s Great Stand on the Ugra River against Khan Akhmat’s Great Horde in 1480 was a Muscovite triumph. Poland, how­ever, lost one of its few allies in the east. The Polish King Alexander Jagiellon’s failure in 1502 to support the last Khan of the Great Horde, Shah-Akhmad, made way for the destruction of the Great Horde by Ivan III’s ally, the ruler of the Crimean Khanate, Meñli I Giray.
The fall of the Great Horde meant a symbolic end of shared history between Poland and Mongolia, which had begun with the invasion Mongol in 1241. For Russia, it was the final confirmation of its dropping its sovereignty to the Tatars. For the Crimean Khanate, which de facto broke off previous relations with the former Mongol empire by destroying the Great Horde, meant, however, that it become part of a new, emerging political and economic governance in Eastern Europe.