In what year did the Mongol Tatars. Tatar-Mongol yoke: campaigns of conquest

How historiographies are written.

Unfortunately, there is no analytical review on the history of historiographies yet. It's a pity! Then we would understand how the historiography for the state’s toast differs from the historiography for its repose. If we want to glorify the beginning of the state, we will write that it was founded by hardworking and independent people who enjoy the well-deserved respect of their neighbors.
If we want to sing a requiem for him, then we will say that it was founded by wild people living in dense forests and impassable swamps, and the state was created by representatives of a different ethnic group, who came here precisely because of the inability of the local residents to establish a distinctive and independent state. Then, if we sing a eulogy, we will say that the name of this ancient formation was understood by everyone, and has not changed to this day. On the contrary, if we bury our state, we will say that it was named unknown what, and then changed its name. Finally, in favor of the state in the first phase of its development will be a statement of its strength. And vice versa, if we want to show that the state was so-so, we must show not only that it was weak, but also that it was able to be conquered by an unknown in ancient times, and very peace-loving and small people. It is this last statement that I would like to dwell on.

– This is the name of a chapter from Kungurov’s book (KUN). He writes: “The official version of ancient Russian history, composed by Germans discharged from abroad to St. Petersburg, is built according to the following scheme: a single Russian state, created by the alien Varangians, crystallizes around Kiev and the middle Dnieper region and bears the name of Kievan Rus, then from somewhere with Evil wild nomads come from the East, destroy the Russian state and establish an occupation regime called “yoke”. After two and a half centuries, the Moscow princes throw off the yoke, gather Russian lands under their rule and create a powerful Moscow kingdom, which is the legal successor of Kievan Rus and frees the Russians from the “yoke”; for several centuries in Eastern Europe there has been an ethnically Russian Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but politically it is dependent on the Poles, and therefore cannot be considered a Russian state, therefore, the wars between Lithuania and Muscovy should be considered not as civil strife between Russian princes, but as a struggle between Moscow and Poland for the reunification of Russian lands.

Despite the fact that this version of history is still recognized as official, only “professional” scientists can consider it reliable. A person who is accustomed to thinking with his head will very much doubt this, if only because the story of the Mongol invasion has been completely sucked out of thin air. Until the 19th century, Russians had no idea that they had allegedly once been conquered by Transbaikal savages. Indeed, the version that a highly developed state was completely destroyed by some wild steppe inhabitants, unable to create an army in accordance with the technical and cultural achievements of that time, looks delusional. Moreover, such a people as the Mongols were not known to science. True, historians were not at a loss and declared that the Mongols are the small nomadic Khalkha people living in Central Asia” (KUN: 162).

Indeed, all the great conquerors are known by comparison. When Spain had a powerful fleet, a great armada, Spain captured a number of lands in North and South America, and today there are two dozen Latin American states. Britain, as the mistress of the seas, also has or had a lot of colonies. But today we do not know a single colony of Mongolia or a state dependent on it. Moreover, except for the Buryats or Kalmyks, who are the same Mongols, not a single ethnic group in Russia speaks Mongolian.

“The Khalkhas themselves learned that they were the heirs of the great Genghis Khan only in the 19th century, but they did not object - everyone wants to have great, albeit mythical, ancestors. And in order to explain the disappearance of the Mongols after their successful conquest of half the world, a completely artificial term “Mongol-Tatars” is introduced into use, which means other nomadic peoples allegedly conquered by the Mongols, who joined the conquerors and formed a certain community among them. In China, foreign conquerors turn into Manchus, in India - into Mughals, and in both cases they form ruling dynasties. In the future, however, we do not observe any Tatar nomads, but this is because, as the same historians explain, the Mongol-Tatars settled on the lands they conquered, and partially went back to the steppe and disappeared there completely without a trace” (KUN: 162- 163).

Wikipedia about the yoke.

Here is how Wikipedia interprets the Tatar-Mongol yoke: “The Mongol-Tatar yoke is a system of political and tributary dependence of the Russian principalities on the Mongol-Tatar khans (before the early 60s of the 13th century, the Mongol khans, after the khans of the Golden Horde) in the 13th-15th century centuries. The establishment of the yoke became possible as a result of the Mongol invasion of Rus' in 1237-1241 and occurred for two decades after it, including in unravaged lands. In North-Eastern Rus' it lasted until 1480. In other Russian lands it was liquidated in the 14th century as they were absorbed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland.

The term “yoke,” meaning the power of the Golden Horde over Russia, does not appear in Russian chronicles. It appeared at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries in Polish historical literature. The first to use it were chronicler Jan Dlugosh (“iugum barbarum”, “iugum servitutis”) in 1479 and professor at the University of Krakow Matvey Miechowski in 1517. Literature: 1. Golden Horde // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: In 86 volumes (82 volumes. and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg: 1890-1907.2. Malov N. M., Malyshev A. B., Rakushin A. I. “Religion in the Golden Horde.” The word formation “Mongol-Tatar yoke” was first used in 1817 by H. Kruse, whose book was translated into Russian and published in St. Petersburg in the mid-19th century.”

So, this term was first introduced by the Poles in the 15th-16th centuries, who saw a “yoke” in the Tatar-Mongol relations with other peoples. The reason for this is explained by the second work of 3 authors: “Apparently, the Tatar yoke first began to be used in Polish historical literature of the late 15th - early 16th centuries. At this time, on the borders of Western Europe, the young Moscow state, freed from the vassal dependence of the Golden Horde khans, was pursuing an active foreign policy. In neighboring Poland, there is an increased interest in the history, foreign policy, armed forces, national relations, internal structure, traditions and customs of Muscovy. Therefore, it is no coincidence that for the first time the phrase Tatar yoke was used in the Polish Chronicle (1515-1519) by Matvey Miechowski, professor at the University of Krakow, court physician and astrologer of King Sigismund I. The author of various medical and historical works spoke enthusiastically about Ivan III, who threw off the Tatar yoke , considering this his most important merit, and apparently a global event of the era.”

Mention of the yoke by historians.

Poland's attitude towards Russia has always been ambiguous, and its attitude towards its own fate as extremely tragic. So they could completely exaggerate the dependence of some peoples on the Tatar-Mongols. And then 3 authors continue: “Later, the term Tatar yoke is also mentioned in notes on the Moscow War of 1578-1582, compiled by the secretary of state of another king, Stefan Batory, Reinhold Heidenstein. Even Jacques Margeret, a French mercenary and adventurer, an officer in Russian service and a person far from science, knew what was meant by the Tatar yoke. This term was widely used by other Western European historians of the 17th-18th centuries. In particular, the Englishman John Milton and the Frenchman De Thou were familiar with him. Thus, for the first time the term Tatar yoke was probably introduced into circulation by Polish and Western European historians, and not by Russian or Russian ones.”

For now, I will interrupt the quotation to draw attention to the fact that, first of all, foreigners write about the “yoke”, who really liked the scenario of weak Rus', which was captured by the “evil Tatars”. While Russian historians still knew nothing about this

"IN. N. Tatishchev did not use this phrase, perhaps because when writing Russian History he mainly relied on early Russian chronicle terms and expressions, where it is absent. I. N. Boltin already used the term Tatar rule, and M., M., Shcherbatov believed that liberation from the Tatar yoke was a huge achievement of Ivan III. N.M., Karamzin found in the Tatar yoke both negative aspects - the tightening of laws and morals, the slowdown in the development of education and science, and positive aspects - the formation of autocracy, a factor in the unification of Rus'. Another phrase, Tatar-Mongol yoke, also most likely comes from the vocabulary of Western rather than domestic researchers. In 1817, Christopher Kruse published an Atlas on European history, where he first introduced the term Mongol-Tatar yoke into scientific circulation. Although this work was translated into Russian only in 1845, it was already in the 20s of the 19th century. domestic historians began to use this new scientific definition. Since that time, the terms: Mongol-Tatars, Mongol-Tatar yoke, Mongol yoke, Tatar yoke and Horde yoke, have traditionally been widely used in Russian historical science. In our encyclopedic publications, the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' of the 13th-15th centuries is understood as: a system of rule by the Mongol-Tatar feudal lords, using various political, military and economic means, with the goal of regular exploitation of the conquered country. Thus, in European historical literature, the term yoke refers to domination, oppression, slavery, captivity, or the power of foreign conquerors over conquered peoples and states. It is known that the Old Russian principalities were subordinated to the Golden Horde economically and politically, and also paid tribute. The Golden Horde khans actively interfere in the politics of the Russian principalities, which they tried to strictly control. Sometimes, the relationship between the Golden Horde and the Russian principalities is characterized as a symbiosis, or a military alliance directed against the countries of Western Europe and some Asian states, first Muslim, and after the collapse of the Mongol Empire - Mongolian.

However, it should be noted that even if theoretically the so-called symbiosis, or military alliance, could exist for some time, it was never equal, voluntary and stable. In addition, even in the eras of the developed and late Middle Ages, short-term interstate unions were usually formalized by contractual relations. Such equal-allied relationships between the fragmented Russian principalities and the Golden Horde could not exist, since the khans of the Ulus of Jochi issued labels for the rule of the Vladimir, Tver, and Moscow princes. Russian princes were obliged, at the request of the khans, to send troops to participate in the military campaigns of the Golden Horde. In addition, using the Russian princes and their army, the Mongols carried out punitive campaigns against other rebellious Russian principalities. The khans summoned the princes to the Horde in order to issue one with a label to reign, and to execute or pardon those who were undesirable. During this period, the Russian lands were actually under the rule or yoke of the Ulus of Jochi. Although, sometimes the foreign policy interests of the Golden Horde khans and the Russian princes, due to various circumstances, could somewhat coincide. The Golden Horde is a chimera state in which the elite are conquerors, and the lower strata are conquered peoples. The Mongolian Golden Horde elite established power over the Cumans, Alans, Circassians, Khazars, Bulgars, Finno-Ugric peoples, and also placed the Russian principalities in strict vassalage. Therefore, it can be assumed that the scientific term yoke is quite acceptable to denote in historical literature the nature of the power of the Golden Horde established not only over the Russian lands.”

Yoke as Christianization of Rus'.

Thus, Russian historians actually repeated the statements of the German Christopher Kruse, while they did not read such a term from any chronicle. It was not only Kungurov who drew attention to the oddities in the interpretation of the Tatar-Mongol yoke. This is what we read in the article (TAT): “Such a nationality as the Mongol-Tatars does not exist, and never existed at all. The only thing the Mongols and Tatars have in common is that they roamed the Central Asian steppe, which, as we know, is large enough to accommodate any nomadic people, and at the same time give them the opportunity not to intersect on the same territory at all. The Mongol tribes lived at the southern tip of the Asian steppe and often raided China and its provinces, as the history of China often confirms to us. While other nomadic Turkic tribes, called from time immemorial in Rus' Bulgars (Volga Bulgaria), settled in the lower reaches of the Volga River. In those days in Europe they were called Tatars, or TatAryans (the most powerful of the nomadic tribes, unbending and invincible). And the Tatars, the closest neighbors of the Mongols, lived in the northeastern part of modern Mongolia, mainly in the area of ​​Lake Buir Nor and up to the borders of China. There were 70 thousand families, making up 6 tribes: Tutukulyut Tatars, Alchi Tatars, Chagan Tatars, Queen Tatars, Terat Tatars, Barkuy Tatars. The second parts of the names are apparently the self-names of these tribes. There is not a single word among them that sounds close to the Turkic language - they are more consonant with Mongolian names. Two related peoples - the Tatars and the Mongols - fought a war of mutual extermination for a long time with varying success, until Genghis Khan seized power throughout Mongolia. The fate of the Tatars was predetermined. Since the Tatars were the murderers of Genghis Khan’s father, exterminated many tribes and clans close to him, and constantly supported the tribes opposing him, “then Genghis Khan (Tey-mu-Chin) ordered a general massacre of the Tatars and not leave even one alive to that extent, which is determined by law (Yasak); so that women and small children should also be killed, and the wombs of pregnant women should be cut open in order to completely destroy them. …” That is why such a nationality could not threaten the freedom of Rus'. Moreover, many historians and cartographers of that time, especially Eastern European ones, “sinned” to call all indestructible (from the point of view of Europeans) and invincible peoples TatAriev or simply in Latin TatArie. This can be easily seen in ancient maps, for example, the Map of Russia 1594 in the Atlas of Gerhard Mercator, or the Maps of Russia and TarTaria by Ortelius. Below you can view these maps. So what can we see from the newfound material? What we see is that this event simply could not have happened, at least in the form in which it is conveyed to us. And before moving on to the narration of the truth, I propose to consider a few more inconsistencies in the “historical” description of these events.

Even in the modern school curriculum, this historical moment is briefly described as follows: “At the beginning of the 13th century, Genghis Khan gathered a large army of nomadic peoples, and, subordinating them to strict discipline, decided to conquer the whole world. Having defeated China, he sent his army to Rus'. In the winter of 1237, the army of “Mongol-Tatars” invaded the territory of Rus', and subsequently defeating the Russian army on the Kalka River, went further, through Poland and the Czech Republic. As a result, having reached the shores of the Adriatic Sea, the army suddenly stops and, without completing its task, turns back. From this period the so-called “Mongol-Tatar Yoke” over Russia began.
But wait, they were going to conquer the whole world... so why didn't they go further? Historians answered that they were afraid of an attack from behind, defeated and plundered, but still strong Rus'. But this is just funny. Will the plundered state run to defend other people's cities and villages? Rather, they will rebuild their borders and wait for the return of the enemy troops in order to fight back fully armed. But the weirdness doesn't end there. For some unimaginable reason, during the reign of the House of Romanov, dozens of chronicles describing the events of the “time of the Horde” disappear. For example, “The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land,” historians believe that this is a document from which everything that would indicate the Ige was carefully removed. They left only fragments telling about some kind of “trouble” that befell Rus'. But there is not a word about the “invasion of the Mongols.” There are many more strange things. In the story “about the evil Tatars,” the khan from the Golden Horde orders the execution of a Russian Christian prince... for refusing to bow to the “pagan god of the Slavs!” And some chronicles contain amazing phrases, for example: “Well, with God!” - said the khan and, crossing himself, galloped towards the enemy. So, what really happened? At that time, the “new faith” was already flourishing in Europe, namely Faith in Christ. Catholicism was widespread everywhere, and governed everything, from the way of life and the system, to the state system and legislation. At that time, crusades against infidels were still relevant, but along with military methods, “tactical tricks” were often used, akin to bribing authorities and inducing them to their faith. And after receiving power through the purchased person, the conversion of all his “subordinates” to the faith. It was precisely such a secret crusade that was carried out against Rus' at that time. Through bribery and other promises, church ministers were able to seize power over Kiev and nearby regions. Just relatively recently, by the standards of history, the baptism of Rus' took place, but history is silent about the civil war that arose on this basis immediately after the forced baptism.”

So, this author interprets the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” as a civil war imposed by the West, during the real, Western baptism of Rus', which took place in the 13th-14th centuries. This understanding of the baptism of Rus' is very painful for the Russian Orthodox Church for two reasons. The date of the baptism of Rus' is usually considered to be 988, and not 1237. Due to the shift in date, the antiquity of Russian Christianity is reduced by 249 years, which reduces the “millennium of Orthodoxy” by almost a third. On the other hand, the source of Russian Christianity turns out to be not the activities of Russian princes, including Vladimir, but the Western crusades, accompanied by mass protests of the Russian population. This raises the question of the legitimacy of the introduction of Orthodoxy in Rus'. Finally, responsibility for the “yoke” in this case is transferred from the unknown “Tatar-Mongols” to the very real West, to Rome and Constantinople. And official historiography turns out to be not science on this issue, but modern pseudo-scientific mythology. But let’s return to the texts of Alexei Kungurov’s book, especially since he examines in great detail all the inconsistencies with the official version.

Lack of writing and artifacts.

“The Mongols did not have their own alphabet and did not leave a single written source” (KUN: 163). Indeed, this is extremely surprising. Generally speaking, even if a people does not have its own written language, then for state acts it uses the writing of other peoples. Therefore, the complete absence of state acts in such a large state as the Mongol Khanate during its heyday causes not only bewilderment, but doubt that such a state ever existed. “If we demand to present at least some material evidence of the long existence of the Mongol Empire, then archaeologists, scratching their heads and grunting, will show a pair of half-rotten sabers and several women’s earrings. But don’t try to figure out why the remains of sabers are “Mongol-Tatar” and not Cossack, for example. Nobody can explain this to you for sure. At best, you will hear a story that the saber was dug up at the site where, according to an ancient and very reliable chronicle, there was a battle with the Mongols. Where is that chronicle? God knows, it has not survived to this day, but the historian N. saw it with his own eyes, who translated it from Old Russian. Where is this historian N.? Yes, it’s been two hundred years since he died - modern “scientists” will answer you, but they will certainly add that N’s works are considered classic and cannot be doubted, since all subsequent generations of historians wrote their works based on his works. I’m not laughing - this is approximately how things stand in the official historical science of Russian antiquity. Even worse - armchair scientists, creatively developing the legacy of the classics of Russian historiography, wrote in their plump volumes such nonsense about the Mongols, whose arrows, it turns out, pierced the armor of European knights, and battering guns, flamethrowers and even rocket artillery made it possible to take by storm for several days powerful fortresses, that this raises serious doubts about their mental capacity. It seems that they do not see any difference between a bow and a crossbow loaded with a lever” (KUN: 163-164).

But where could the Mongols encounter the armor of European knights and what do Russian sources say about this? “And the Vorogs came from overseas, and they brought faith in alien gods. With fire and sword they began to implant in us an alien faith, shower the Russian princes with gold and silver, bribe their will, and lead them astray from the true path. They promised them an idle life, full of wealth and happiness, and remission of any sins for their dashing deeds. And then Ros broke up into different states. The Russian clans retreated to the north to the great Asgard, and named their state after the names of their patron gods, Tarkh Dazhdbog the Great and Tara, his Sister the Light-Wise. (They called her the Great TarTaria). Leaving the foreigners with the princes purchased in the Principality of Kiev and its environs. Volga Bulgaria also did not bow to its enemies, and did not accept their alien faith as its own. But the Principality of Kiev did not live in peace with TarTaria. They began to conquer the Russian lands with fire and sword and impose their alien faith. And then the military army rose up for a fierce battle. In order to preserve their faith and reclaim their lands. Both old and young then joined the Ratniki in order to restore order to the Russian Lands.”

And so the war began, in which the Russian army, the land of the Great Arya (Army) defeated the enemy and drove him out of the primordially Slavic lands. It drove away the alien army, with their fierce faith, from its stately lands. By the way, the word Horde, translated according to the initial letters of the ancient Slavic alphabet, means Order. That is, the Golden Horde is not a separate state, it is a system. "Political" system of the Golden Order. Under which the Princes reigned locally, planted with the approval of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Defense, or in one word they called him KHAN (our defender).
This means that there were not more than two hundred years of oppression, but there was a time of peace and prosperity of the Great Aria or TarTaria. By the way, modern history also has confirmation of this, but for some reason no one pays attention to it. But we will definitely pay attention, and very closely...: Doesn’t it seem strange to you that the battle with the Swedes is taking place right in the middle of the “Mongol-Tatars” invasion of Rus'? Rus', blazing in fires and plundered by the “Mongols,” is attacked by the Swedish army, which safely drowns in the waters of the Neva, and at the same time the Swedish crusaders do not encounter the Mongols even once. And the Russians, who defeated the strong Swedish army, lose to the Mongols? In my opinion, this is just nonsense. Two huge armies are fighting on the same territory at the same time and never intersect. But if you turn to the ancient Slavic chronicles, then everything becomes clear.

From 1237, the Army of the Great TarTaria began to recapture their ancestral lands, and when the war was coming to an end, representatives of the church, losing power, asked for help, and the Swedish crusaders were sent into battle. Since they failed to take the country by bribery, it means they will take it by force. Just in 1240, the army of the Horde (that is, the army of Prince Alexander Yaroslavovich, one of the princes of the ancient Slavic family) clashed in battle with the army of the Crusaders, who came to the rescue of their minions. Having won the Battle of the Neva, Alexander received the title of Prince of the Neva and remained to rule Novgorod, and the Horde Army went further to drive the adversary out of the Russian lands completely. So she persecuted “the church and the alien faith” until she reached the Adriatic Sea, thereby restoring her original ancient borders. And having reached them, the army turned around and again went north. Establishing a 300-year period of peace” (TAT).

Fantasies of historians about the power of the Mongols.

Commenting on the lines quoted above (KUN: 163), Alexey Kungurov adds: “Here is what Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergei Nefyodov writes: “The main weapon of the Tatars was the Mongolian bow, “saadak,” - it was thanks to this New Weapon that the Mongols conquered most of the promised world. It was a complex killing machine, glued together from three layers of wood and bone and wrapped with sinew to protect it from moisture; gluing was carried out under pressure, and drying continued for several years - the secret of making these bows was kept secret. This bow was not inferior in power to a musket; an arrow from it pierced any armor 300 meters away, and it was all about the ability to hit the target, because bows did not have sights and shooting from them required many years of training. Possessing this all-destructive weapon, the Tatars did not like to fight hand-to-hand; they preferred to fire at the enemy with bows, dodging his attacks; This shelling sometimes lasted several days, and the Mongols took out their sabers only when the enemies were wounded and fell from exhaustion. The last, “ninth” attack was carried out by “swordsmen” - warriors armed with curved swords and, together with their horses, covered in armor made of thick buffalo leather. During major battles, this attack was preceded by shelling from “fire catapults” borrowed from the Chinese - these catapults fired bombs filled with gunpowder, which, when exploding, “burned through the armor with sparks” (NEF). – Alexey Kungurov comments on this passage as follows: “The funny thing here is not that Nefyodov is a historian (this brethren has the deepest idea of ​​natural science), but that he is also a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences. This is how much you have to degrade your mind to flog such nonsense! Yes, if a bow shot at 300 meters and at the same time pierced any armor, then firearms simply did not have a chance to appear. The American M-16 rifle has an effective firing range of 400 meters with a muzzle velocity of 1000 meters per second. Then the bullet quickly loses its damaging ability. In reality, aimed shooting from an M-16 with a mechanical sight is ineffective beyond 100 meters. Only a very experienced shooter can shoot accurately at 300 meters even from a powerful rifle without an optical sight. And the scientist Nefyodov weaves nonsense about the fact that Mongolian arrows not only flew accurately at a third of a kilometer (the maximum distance at which champion archers shoot in competitions is 90 meters), but also pierced any armor. Rave! For example, it will not be possible to pierce good chain mail even at point-blank range with the most powerful bow. To defeat a warrior in chain mail, a special arrow with a needle tip was used, which did not pierce the armor, but, under a successful combination of circumstances, passed through the rings.

In physics at school, I had grades no higher than three, but I know very well from practice that an arrow fired from a bow is imparted with the force that the arm muscles develop when it is pulled. That is, with approximately the same success, you can take an arrow with your hand and try to pierce at least an enamel basin with it. If you don't have an arrow, use any pointed object like half a pair of tailor's scissors, an awl or a knife. How is it going? Do you trust historians after this? If they write in their dissertations that short and thin Mongols pulled bows with a force of 75 kg, then I would award the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences only to those who can repeat this feat in defense. At least there will be fewer parasites with scientific titles. By the way, modern Mongols have no idea about any saadaks - a superweapon of the Middle Ages. Having conquered half the world with them, for some reason they completely forgot how to do it.

It’s even easier with battering machines and catapults: you just have to look at the drawings of these monsters, and it becomes clear that these multi-ton colossuses cannot be moved even a meter, since they will get stuck in the ground even during construction. But even if in those days there were asphalt roads from Transbaikalia to Kyiv and Polotsk, how would the Mongols drag them thousands of kilometers, how would they transport them across large rivers like the Volga or Dnieper? Stone fortresses ceased to be considered impregnable only with the invention of siege artillery, and in previous times well-fortified cities were only taken by starvation” (KUN: 164-165). – I think this criticism is excellent. I will also add that, according to the works of Ya.A. Koestler, there were no reserves of saltpeter in China, so they had nothing to stuff gunpowder bombs with. In addition, gunpowder does not create a temperature of 1556 degrees, at which iron melts in order to “burn through armor with sparks.” And if he could create such a temperature, then the “sparks” would primarily burn through cannons and rifles at the moment of firing. It is also very funny to read that the Tatars shot and shot (the number of arrows in their quiver, apparently, was not limited), and the enemy was exhausted, and the skinny Mongol warriors fired the tenth and hundredth arrow with the same fresh strength as the first, without getting tired at all. Surprisingly, even rifle shooters get tired when shooting while standing, and this condition was unknown to the Mongol archers.

At one time I heard the expression from lawyers: “He lies like an eyewitness.” Now, probably, using Nefyodov’s example, we should suggest the addition: “He lies like a professional historian.”

Mongols-metallurgists.

It would seem that we can put an end to this, but Kungurov wants to consider several more aspects. “I don’t know much about metallurgy, but I can still very roughly estimate how many tons of iron are needed to arm at least a 10,000-strong Mongol army” (KUN: 166). Where did the figure of 10 thousand come from? – This is the minimum size of the army with which you can go on a campaign of conquest. Guy Julius Caesar with such a detachment was unable to capture Britain, but when he doubled the number, the conquest of Foggy Albion was crowned with success. “In fact, such a small army could not have conquered China, India, Rus' and other countries. Therefore, historians, without trifling, write about Batu’s 30,000-strong cavalry horde sent to conquer Rus', but this figure seems completely fantastic. Even if we assume that the Mongol warriors had leather armor, wooden shields, and stone arrowheads, then iron is still required for horseshoes, spears, knives, swords, and sabers.

Now it’s worth thinking about: how did the wild nomads know the high iron-making technologies at that time? After all, the ore still needs to be mined, and for this to be able to find it, that is, to understand a little about geology. Are there many ancient ore mines in the Mongolian steppes? Do archaeologists find many remains of forges there? They, of course, are still magicians - they will find anything, wherever they need it. But in this case, nature itself made the task extremely difficult for archaeologists. Iron ore is not mined in Mongolia even today (although small deposits have recently been discovered)” (KUN: 166). But even if ore was found and smelting furnaces existed, the metallurgists would have to be paid for their work, and they themselves would have to live sedentary lives. Where are the former settlements of metallurgists? Where are the waste rock dumps (heap waste heaps)? Where are the remnants of finished product warehouses? None of this was found.

“Of course, weapons can be bought, but you need money, which the ancient Mongols did not have, at least they are completely unknown to world archeology. And they couldn’t have it, since their farm was not commercial. Weapons could be exchanged, but where, from whom and for what? In short, if you think about such little things, then Genghis Khan’s campaign from the Manchurian steppes to China, India, Persia, the Caucasus and Europe looks like complete fantasy” (KUN: 166).

This is not the first time I have come across this kind of “punctures” in mythological historiography. As a matter of fact, any historiographical myth is written in order to cover up the real fact like a smoke screen. This kind of camouflage works well in cases where secondary facts are masked. But it is impossible to disguise advanced technologies, the highest at that time. It’s the same as putting on someone else’s suit and mask for a criminal taller than two meters—he is identified not by his clothes or face, but by his exorbitant height. If in the indicated period, that is, in the 13th century, Western European knights had the best iron armor, then it will in no way be possible to attribute their urban culture to the steppe nomads. Just like the highest culture of Etruscan writing, where the Italic, Russian, stylized Greek alphabets and runitsa were used, it cannot be attributed to any small people such as the Albanians or Chechens, who, perhaps, did not yet exist in those days.

Forage for the Mongol cavalry.

“For example, how did the Mongols cross the Volga or the Dnieper? You can't swim through a two-kilometer stream, you can't wade it. There is only one way out - wait until winter to cross the ice. It was in winter, by the way, that in Rus' they usually fought in the old days. But in order to make such a long journey during the winter, it is necessary to prepare a huge amount of forage, since although the Mongolian horse is capable of finding withered grass under the snow, for this it needs to graze where there is grass. In this case, the snow cover should be small. In the Mongolian steppes, winters have little snow, and the grass stand is quite high. In Rus', the opposite is true - the grass is tall only in floodplain meadows, and in all other places it is very sparse. The snowdrifts are such that the horse, let alone finding grass under it, will not be able to move through the deep snow. Otherwise, it is not clear why the French lost all their cavalry during the retreat from Moscow. They ate it, of course, but they ate already fallen horses, because if the horses were well-fed and healthy, then the uninvited guests would use them to quickly escape” (KUN: 166-167). – Let us note that it is for this reason that summer campaigns have become preferable for Western Europeans.

“Oats are usually used as fodder, of which a horse needs 5-6 kg per day. It turns out that the nomads, in advance of preparing for a campaign to distant lands, sowed the steppe with oats? Or did they carry the hay with them on carts? Let's perform some simple arithmetic operations and calculate what preparations the nomads had to make in order to go on a long journey. Let's assume that they gathered an army of at least 10 thousand mounted soldiers. Each warrior needs several horses - one specially trained combatant for battle, one for marching, one for a convoy - to carry food, a yurt and other supplies. This is a minimum, but we must also take into account that some of the horses will fall along the way, and there will be combat losses, so a reserve is needed.

And if 10 thousand horsemen march in marching formation even across the steppe, then when the horses graze, where will the warriors live - rest in the snowdrifts, or what? On a long hike you cannot do without food, fodder and a convoy with warm yurts. You need more fuel to cook food, but where can you find firewood in the treeless steppe? The nomads drowned their yurts, sorry, with poop, because there was nothing else. It stank, of course. But they got used to it. You can, of course, fantasize about the strategic procurement of hundreds of tons of dried crap by the Mongols, which they took with them on the road when setting out to conquer the world, but I will leave this opportunity to the most stubborn historians.

Some clever people tried to prove to me that the Mongols did not have a convoy at all, which is why they were able to show phenomenal maneuverability. But how did they take the loot home in this case - in their pockets, or what? And where were their battering guns and other engineering devices, and the same maps and food supplies, not to mention their environmentally friendly fuel? Not a single army in the world could ever do without a convoy if it was going to make a transition lasting more than two days. The loss of a convoy usually meant the failure of a campaign, even if there was no battle with the enemy.

In short, according to the most conservative estimates, our mini-horde should have at its disposal at least 40 thousand horses. From the experience of mass armies of the 17th-19th centuries. it is known that the daily feed requirement of such a herd will be at least 200 tons of oats. This is just in one day! And the longer the journey, the more horses should be involved in the convoy. A medium-sized horse can pull a cart weighing 300 kg. This is on the road, but off-road in packs it’s half as much. That is, in order to provide for our 40,000-strong herd, we need 700 horses per day. A three-month campaign will require a convoy of almost 70 thousand horses. And this crowd also needs oats, and in order to feed 70 thousand horses carrying fodder for 40 thousand horses, more than 100 thousand horses with carts will be needed for the same three months, and these horses, in turn, want to eat - it turns out to be a vicious circle.” (KUN:167-168). – This calculation shows that intercontinental, for example, from Asia to Europe, trips on horseback with a full supply of provisions are fundamentally impossible. True, here are calculations for a 3-month winter campaign. But if the campaign is carried out in the summer, and you move in the steppe zone, feeding the horses with pasture, then you can advance much further.

“Even in the summer, the cavalry never did without forage, so the Mongol campaign against Rus' would still require logistical support. Until the twentieth century, the maneuverability of troops was determined not by the speed of horses' hooves and the strength of soldiers' legs, but by dependence on convoys and the capacity of the road network. A marching speed of 20 km per day was very good even for the average World War II division, and German tanks, when paved highways allowed them to carry out blitzkrieg, wound up on tracks at 50 km per day. But in this case, the rear inevitably lagged behind. In ancient times, in off-road conditions such indicators would have been simply fantastic. The textbook (SVI) reports that the Mongol army marched about 100 kilometers a day! Yes, it is hardly possible to find people who are the worst versed in history. Even in May 1945, Soviet tanks, making a forced march from Berlin to Prague along good European roads, could not break the “Mongol-Tatar” record” (KUN: 168-169). – I believe that the very division of Europe into Western and Eastern was made not so much for geographical, but for strategic reasons. Namely: within each of them, military campaigns, although they require supplies of fodder and horses, are within reasonable limits. And the transition to another part of Europe already requires the exertion of all state forces, so that a military campaign affects not only the army, but develops into a patriotic war, requiring the participation of the entire population.

Food problem.

“What did the riders themselves eat on the way? If you are chasing a flock of lambs, then you will have to move at their speed. During the winter there is no way to reach the nearest center of civilization. But nomads are unpretentious people; they made do with dried meat and cottage cheese, which they soaked in hot water. Whatever one may say, a kilogram of food a day is necessary. Three months of travel - 100 kg of weight. In the future, you can slaughter the baggage horses. At the same time, there will be savings on fodder. But not a single convoy can move at a speed of 100 km per day, especially off-road.” – It is clear that this problem mainly concerns uninhabited areas. In densely populated Europe, the winner can take food from the vanquished

Demographic problems.

“If we touch on demographic issues and try to understand how the nomads were able to field 10 thousand warriors, given the very low population density in the steppe zone, then we will run into another unsolvable mystery. Well, in the steppes there is no population density higher than 0.2 people per square kilometer! If we take the mobilization capabilities of the Mongols as 10% of the total population (every second healthy man from 18 to 45 years old), then to mobilize a horde of 10,000 people, it will be necessary to comb a territory of about half a million square kilometers. Or let's touch on purely organizational issues: for example, how the Mongols collected taxes on the army and recruited, how did military training take place, how was the military elite educated? It turns out that for purely technical reasons, the Mongol campaign against Rus', as described by “professional” historians, was impossible in principle.

There are examples of this from relatively recent times. In the spring of 1771, the Kalmyks, who were nomadic in the Caspian steppes, annoyed that the tsarist administration had significantly curtailed their autonomy, unanimously left their place and moved to their historical homeland in Dzungaria (the territory of the modern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China). Only 25 thousand Kalmyks who lived on the right bank of the Volga remained in place - they could not join the others due to the opening of the river. Of the 170 thousand nomads, only about 70 thousand reached the goal after 8 months. The rest, as you might guess, died on the way. The winter transition would be even more disastrous. The local population greeted the settlers without enthusiasm. Who will now find traces of Kalmyks in Xinjiang? And on the right bank of the Volga today live 165 thousand Kalmyks who switched to a sedentary lifestyle during the period of collectivization in 1929-1940, but who have not lost their original culture and religion (Buddhism)” (KUN: 1690170). – This last example is amazing! Almost 2/3 of the population, who walked slowly and with good convoys in the summer, died along the way. Even if the losses of the regular army were less than, say, 1/3, but then instead of 10 thousand troops, less than 7 thousand people would reach the target. It may be objected that they drove the conquered peoples ahead of them. So I only counted those who died from the difficulties of the transition, but there were also combat losses. Defeated enemies can be driven away when the victors are at least twice as numerous as the vanquished. So if half the army dies in battle (in fact, about 6 times more attackers die than defenders), then the remaining 3.5 thousand can drive in front of no more than 1.5 thousand prisoners, who will try in the first battle run over to the side of the enemies, strengthening their ranks. And an army of less than 4 thousand people is unlikely to be able to advance further into a foreign country - it’s time for him to return home.

Why is the myth of the Tatar-Mongol invasion needed?

“But the myth of the terrible Mongol invasion is cultivated for some reason. And for what, it’s not difficult to guess - virtual Mongols are needed solely to explain the disappearance of the equally phantom Kievan Rus along with its original population. They say that as a result of Batu’s invasion, the Dnieper region was completely depopulated. Why the hell, one might ask, did the nomads want to destroy the population? Well, they would have imposed tribute like everyone else - at least there would have been some benefit. But no, historians unanimously convince us that the Mongols completely devastated the Kiev region, burned the cities, exterminated the population or drove them into captivity, and those who were lucky enough to survive, having greased their heels with lard, fled without looking back into the wild forests to the northeast, where Over time they created a powerful Moscow kingdom. One way or another, the time before the 16th century seems to fall out of the history of Southern Rus': if historians mention anything about this period, it is the raids of the Crimeans. But who did they raid, if the Russian lands were depopulated?

It cannot be that for 250 years no events took place at all in the historical center of Rus'! However, no epochal events were noted. This caused heated debate among historians when disputes were still allowed. Some put forward hypotheses about the general flight of the population to the northeast, others believed that the entire population died out, and new ones came from the Carpathians in the following centuries. Still others expressed the idea that the population did not flee anywhere, and did not come from anywhere, but simply sat quietly in isolation from the outside world and did not show any political, military, economic, demographic or cultural activity. Klyuchevsky propagated the idea that the population, scared to death by the evil Tatars, left their inhabited places and went partly to Galicia, and partly to the Suzdal lands, from where they spread far to the north and east. Kyiv, as a city, according to the professor, temporarily ceased to exist, having shrunk to 200 houses. Solovyov argued that Kyiv was completely destroyed and for many years it was a pile of ruins where no one lived. In the Galician lands, then called Little Russia, refugees from the Dnieper region, they say, became slightly Polish, and when they returned several centuries later to their autochthonous territory as Little Russians, they brought there a peculiar dialect and customs acquired in exile” (KUN: 170-171).

So, from the point of view of Alexei Kungurov, the myth about the Tatar-Mongols supports another myth - about Kievan Rus. While I am not considering this second myth, I admit that the existence of a vast Kievan Rus is also a myth. However, let's listen to this author to the end. Perhaps he will show that the myth of the Tatar-Mongols is beneficial to historians for other reasons.

Surprisingly fast surrender of Russian cities.

“At first glance, this version looks quite logical: evil barbarians came and destroyed a flourishing civilization, killed everyone and dispersed them to hell. Why? But because they are barbarians. For what? And Batu was in a bad mood, maybe his wife cuckolded him, maybe he had a stomach ulcer, so he was angry. The scientific community is quite satisfied with such answers, and since I have nothing to do with this very community, I immediately want to argue with the luminaries of historical “science”.

Why, one wonders, did the Mongols completely clear out the Kiev region? It should be taken into account that the Kiev land is not some insignificant outskirts, but supposedly the core of the Russian state, according to the same Klyuchevsky. Meanwhile, Kyiv was surrendered to the enemy in 1240 a few days after the siege. Are there similar cases in history? More often we will see opposite examples, when we gave everything to the enemy, but fought for the core to the last. Therefore, the fall of Kyiv seems completely incredible. Before the invention of siege artillery, a well-fortified city could only be taken by starvation. And it often happened that the besiegers ran out of steam faster than the besieged. History knows cases of very long defense of the city. For example, during the Polish intervention during the Time of Troubles, the siege of Smolensk by the Poles lasted from September 21, 1609 to June 3, 1611. The defenders capitulated only when Polish artillery made an impressive opening in the wall, and the besieged were extremely exhausted by hunger and disease.

The Polish king Sigismund, amazed by the courage of the defenders, let them go home. But why did the Kievans so quickly surrender to the wild Mongols, who spared no one? The nomads did not have powerful siege artillery, and the battering guns with which they allegedly destroyed fortifications were stupid inventions of historians. It was physically impossible to drag such a device to the wall, because the walls themselves always stood on a large earthen rampart, which was the basis of the city fortifications, and a ditch was built in front of them. It is now generally accepted that the defense of Kyiv lasted 93 days. The famous fiction writer Bushkov is sarcastic about this: “Historians are a little disingenuous. Ninety-three days is not the period between the beginning and end of the assault, but the first appearance of the “Tatar” army and the capture of Kyiv. First, “Batyev Voivode” Mengat appeared at the Kyiv walls and tried to persuade the Kyiv prince to surrender the city without a fight, but the Kievans killed his ambassadors, and he retreated. And three months later “Batu” came. And in a few days he took the city. It is the interval between these events that other researchers call the “long siege” (BUSH).

Moreover, the story of the rapid fall of Kyiv is by no means unique. If you believe historians, then all other Russian cities (Ryazan, Vladimir, Galich, Moscow, Pereslavl-Zalessky, etc.) usually held out for no more than five days. It’s surprising that Torzhok defended itself for almost two weeks. Little Kozelsk allegedly set a record by holding out for seven weeks under siege, but falling on the third day of the assault. Who will explain to me what kind of superweapon the Mongols used to take fortresses on the move? And why was this weapon forgotten? In the Middle Ages, throwing machines - vices - were sometimes used to destroy city walls. But in Rus' there was a big problem - there was nothing to throw - boulders of the appropriate size would have to be dragged with you.

True, cities in Rus' in most cases had wooden fortifications, and theoretically they could be burned. But in practice, this was difficult to achieve in winter, because water was poured on the walls from above, as a result of which an ice shell formed on them. In fact, even if a 10,000-strong nomadic army had come to Rus', no catastrophe would have happened. This horde would simply melt away in a couple of months, taking a dozen cities by storm. The losses of the attackers in this case will be 3-5 times higher than those of the defenders of the citadel.

According to the official version of history, the northeastern lands of Rus' suffered much more severely from the adversary, but for some reason no one thought of running away from there. And vice versa, they fled to where the climate was colder and the Mongols were more outrageous. Where is the logic? And why was the “fleeing” population, until the 16th century, paralyzed by fear and did not try to return to the fertile lands of the Dnieper region? There was no trace of the Mongols long ago, and the frightened Russians, they say, were afraid to show their noses there. The Crimeans were not at all peaceful, but for some reason the Russians were not afraid of them - the Cossacks on their seagulls descended along the Don and Dnieper, unexpectedly attacked Crimean cities and carried out brutal pogroms there. Usually, if some places are favorable for life, then the struggle for them is especially fierce, and these lands are never empty. The vanquished are replaced by conquerors, who are ousted or assimilated by stronger neighbors - the issue here is not disagreements on some political or religious issues, but rather the possession of territory” (KUN: 171-173). “Indeed, this is a completely inexplicable situation from the point of view of the clash between steppe dwellers and townspeople.” It is very good for a denigrating version of the historiography of Rus', but is completely illogical. While Alexey Kungurov is noticing new aspects of the absolutely incredible development of events from the standpoint of the Tatar-Mongol invasion.

The unknown motives of the Mongols.

“Historians do not explain the motives of the mythical Mongols at all. Why did they participate in such grandiose campaigns? If in order to impose tribute on the conquered Russians, then why the hell did the Mongols raze 49 of 74 large Russian cities to the ground, and slaughter the population almost to the roots, as historians say? If they destroyed the aborigines because they liked the local grass and the milder climate than in the Trans-Caspian and Trans-Baikal steppes, then why did they go to the steppe? There is no logic in the actions of the conquerors. More precisely, it is not in the nonsense written by historians.

The root cause of the militancy of peoples in ancient times was the so-called crisis of nature and man. With the overpopulation of the territory, society seemed to push young and energetic people outside. If they conquer those lands of their neighbors and settle there - good. If they die in the fire, that’s also not bad, because there will be no “extra” population. In many ways, this is precisely what can explain the belligerence of the ancient Scandinavians: their stingy northern lands could not feed the increased population and they were left to live by robbery or be hired into the service of foreign rulers to engage in the same robbery. The Russians, one might say, were lucky - for centuries the excess population rolled back to the south and east, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently, the crisis of nature and man began to be overcome through qualitative changes in agricultural technologies and industrial development.

But what could have caused the belligerence of the Mongols? If the population density of the steppes exceeds acceptable limits (that is, there is a shortage of pastures), some of the shepherds will simply migrate to other, less developed steppes. If the local nomads are not happy with the guests, then a small massacre will arise in which the strongest will win. That is, in order to get to Kyiv, the Mongols would have to conquer vast areas from Manchuria to the northern Black Sea region. But even in this case, the nomads did not pose a threat to strong civilized countries, because not a single nomadic people ever created their own statehood or had an army. The maximum that the steppe inhabitants are capable of is to raid a border village for the purpose of robbery.

The only analogue to the mythical warlike Mongols is the Chechen cattle breeders of the 19th century. This people is unique in that robbery has become the basis of its existence. The Chechens did not even have rudimentary statehood, lived in clans (teips), did not practice agriculture, unlike their neighbors, did not possess the secrets of metal processing, and in general mastered the most primitive crafts. They posed a threat to the Russian border and communications with Georgia, which became part of Russia in 1804, only because they supplied them with weapons and supplies, and bribed local princes. But the Chechen robbers, despite their numerical superiority, could not oppose the Russians with anything other than the tactics of raids and forest ambushes. When the patience of the latter ran out, the regular army under the command of Ermolov quite quickly carried out a total “cleansing” of the North Caucasus, driving the abreks into the mountains and gorges.

I am ready to believe in many things, but I categorically refuse to take seriously the nonsense of the evil nomads who destroyed Ancient Rus'. All the more fantastic is the theory about the three-century “yoke” of wild steppe inhabitants over the Russian principalities. Only the STATE can exercise dominion over conquered lands. Historians generally understand this, and therefore they invented a certain fabulous Mongol Empire - the world’s largest state in the entire history of mankind, founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 and including the territory from the Danube to the Sea of ​​Japan and from Novgorod to Cambodia. All the empires known to us were created over centuries and generations, and only the greatest world empire was allegedly created by an illiterate savage literally with the wave of his hand” (KUN: 173-175). – So, Alexey Kungurov comes to the conclusion that if there was a conquest of Rus', it was carried out not by wild steppe inhabitants, but by some powerful state. But where was its capital?

Capital of the steppes.

“If there is an empire, then there must be a capital. The fantastic city of Karakorum was appointed as the capital, the remains of which were explained by the ruins of the Buddhist monastery Erdene-Dzu of the late 16th century in the center of modern Mongolia. Based on what? And that’s what historians wanted. Schliemann dug up the ruins of a small ancient city and declared that this was Troy” (KUN: 175). I showed in two articles that Schliemann excavated one of the temples of Yar and took its treasures as a trace of ancient Troy, although Troy, as one of the Serbian researchers showed, was located on the shores of Lake Skoder (the modern city of Shkoder in Albania).

“And Nikolai Yadrintsev, who discovered an ancient settlement in the Orkhon valley, declared it Karakorum. Karakorum literally means “black stones.” Since there was a mountain range not far from the place of discovery, it was given the official name Karakorum. And since the mountains are called Karakorum, then the city was given the same name. This is such a convincing rationale! True, the local population had never heard of any Karakorum, but called the ridge Muztag - Ice Mountains, but this did not bother the scientists at all” (KUN: 175-176). – And rightly so, because in this case the “scientists” were not looking for the truth, but confirmation of their myth, and geographical renaming greatly contributes to this.

Traces of a grandiose empire.

“The largest world empire left the least traces of itself. Or rather, none at all. It, they say, broke up in the 13th century into separate uluses, the largest of which became the Yuan Empire, that is, China (its capital Khanbalyk, now Aekin, was allegedly at one time the capital of the entire Mongol Empire), the state of the Ilkhans (Iran, Transcaucasia, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan), Chagatai ulus (Central Asia) and the Golden Horde (territory from the Irtysh to the White, Baltic and Black Seas). Historians cleverly came up with this. Now any fragments of ceramics or copper jewelry found in the expanses from Hungary to the coast of the Sea of ​​Japan can be declared traces of the great Mongolian civilization. And they find and announce. And they won’t blink an eye” (KUN:176).

As an epigraphist, I am primarily interested in written monuments. Did they exist in the Tatar-Mongol era? Here is what Nefyodov writes about this: “Having installed Alexander Nevsky as the Grand Duke of their own free will, the Tatars sent Baskaks and Chisniki to Rus' - “and the accursed Tatars began to ride through the streets, copying Christian houses.” This was a census carried out at that time throughout the vast Mongol Empire; Clerks compiled defter registers to collect taxes established by Yelu Chu-tsai: land tax, “kalan”, poll tax, “kupchur”, and tax on merchants, “tamga”” (NEF). True, in epigraphy the word “tamga” has a different meaning, “tribal signs of ownership,” but that’s not the point: if there were three types of taxes, drawn up in the form of lists, then something certainly had to be preserved. - Alas, there is none of this. It is not even clear in what font all this was written. But if there are no such special marks, then it turns out that all these lists were written in Russian script, that is, in Cyrillic. – When I tried to find articles on the Internet on the topic “Artifacts of the Tatar-Mongol Yoke,” I came across a judgment that I reproduce below.

Why are the chronicles silent?

“During the time of the mythical “Tatar-Mongol yoke,” according to official history, decline came to Rus'. This, in their opinion, is confirmed by the almost complete lack of evidence about that period. Once, while talking with a history buff of my native land, I heard him mention the decline that reigned in this area during the time of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.” As evidence, he recalled that a monastery once stood in these places. First, it should be said about the area: a river valley with hills in the immediate vicinity, there are springs - an ideal place for a settlement. And so it was. However, the chronicles of this monastery mention the nearest settlement only a few tens of kilometers away. Although you can read between the lines that people lived closer, only “wild ones”. Arguing on this topic, we came to the conclusion that, due to ideological motives, the monks mentioned only Christian settlements, or during the next rewriting of history, all information about non-Christian settlements was erased.

No, no, yes, sometimes historians excavate settlements that flourished during the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.” What forced them to admit that, in general, the Tatar-Mongols were quite tolerant of the conquered peoples... “However, the lack of reliable sources about general prosperity in Kievan Rus does not give reason to doubt the official history.

In fact, apart from the sources of the Orthodox Church, we have no reliable data about the occupation by the Tatar-Mongols. In addition, quite interesting is the fact of the rapid occupation of not only the steppe regions of Rus' (from the point of view of official history, the Tatar-Mongols are steppe dwellers), but also forested and even swampy territories. Of course, the history of military operations knows examples of the rapid conquest of the swampy forests of Belarus. However, the Nazis bypassed the swamps. But what about the Soviet army, which carried out a brilliant offensive operation in the swampy part of Belarus? This is true, however, the population in Belarus was needed to create a springboard for subsequent offensives. They simply chose to attack in the least expected (and therefore protected) area. But most importantly, the Soviet army relied on local partisans who thoroughly knew the terrain even better than the Nazis. But the mythical Tatar-Mongols, who did the unthinkable, immediately conquered the swamps - refused further attacks” (SPO). – Here the unknown researcher notes two curious facts: the monastery chronicle already considers as a populated area only the one where the parishioners lived, as well as the brilliant orientation of the steppe inhabitants among the swamps, which should not be characteristic of them. And the same author also notes the coincidence of the territory occupied by the Tatar-Mongols with the territory of Kievan Rus. Thus, he shows that in reality we are dealing with a territory that has undergone Christianization, regardless of whether it was in the steppe, in forests or in swamps. – But let’s return to Kungurov’s texts.

Religion of the Mongols.

“What was the official religion of the Mongols? - Choose any one you like. Allegedly, Buddhist shrines were discovered in the Karakorum “palace” of the Great Khan Ogedei (the heir of Genghis Khan). In the capital of the Golden Horde, Sarai-Batu, mostly Orthodox crosses and breastplates are found. Islam established itself in the Central Asian possessions of the Mongol conquerors, and Zoroastrianism continued to flourish in the South Caspian Sea. The Jewish Khazars also felt free in the Mongol Empire. A variety of shamanistic beliefs have been preserved in Siberia. Russian historians traditionally tell stories that the Mongols were idolaters. They say that they gave the Russian princes a “axe in the head” if they, coming for a label for the right to reign in their lands, did not worship their filthy pagan idols. In short, the Mongols did not have any state religion. All empires had one, but the Mongolian one did not. Anyone could pray to whomever they wanted” (KUN:176). – Let us note that there was no religious tolerance either before or after the Mongol invasion. Ancient Prussia with the Baltic people of the Prussians (relatives in language to the Lithuanians and Latvians) who inhabited it was wiped off the face of the earth by the German knightly orders only because they were pagans. And in Rus', not only the Vedists (Old Believers), but also the early Christians (Old Believers) began to be persecuted after Nikon’s reform as enemies. Therefore, such a combination of words as “evil Tatars” and “tolerance” is impossible, it is illogical. The division of the greatest empire into separate regions, each with its own religion, probably indicates the independent existence of these regions, united into a giant empire only in the mythology of historians. As for the finds of Orthodox crosses and breastplates in the European part of the empire, this suggests that the “Tatar-Mongols” implanted Christianity and eradicated paganism (Vedism), that is, forced Christianization took place.

Cash.

“By the way, if Karakorum was the Mongol capital, then there must have been a mint there. It is believed that the currency of the Mongol Empire was gold dinars and silver dirhams. For four years, archaeologists dug into the soil at Orkhon (1999-2003), but not like the mint, they didn’t even find a single dirham or dinar, but they dug up a lot of Chinese coins. It was this expedition that discovered traces of a Buddhist shrine under the Ogedei Palace (which turned out to be much smaller than expected). In Germany, a substantial tome “Genghis Khan and His Legacy” was published about the results of the excavations. This is despite the fact that archaeologists did not find any traces of the Mongol ruler. However, this does not matter, everything they found was declared the legacy of Genghis Khan. True, the publishers wisely kept silent about the Buddhist idol and Chinese coins, but filled most of the book with abstract discussions that are of no scientific interest” (KUN: 177). – A legitimate question arises: if the Mongols carried out three types of censuses, and collected tribute from them, then where was it stored? And in what currency? Was everything really translated into Chinese money? What could you buy with them in Europe?

Continuing the topic, Kungurov writes: “In general, IN ALL of Mongolia, only a few dirhams with Arabic inscriptions were found, which completely excludes the idea that this was the center of some kind of empire. “Scientific” historians cannot explain this, and therefore simply do not touch upon this issue. Even if you grab a historian by the lapel of his jacket and ask about it, looking intently into his eyes, he will act like a fool who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about” (KUN: 177). – I’ll interrupt the quotation here, because this is exactly how archaeologists behaved when I made my report at the Tver local history museum, showing that there was an INSCRIPTION on the stone cup donated to the museum by local historians. None of the archaeologists approached the stone and felt the letters cut out there. For to come up and touch the inscription meant for them to sign a long-standing lie about the lack of their own writing among the Slavs in the pre-Cyril era. This was the only thing they could do to protect the honor of the uniform (“I don’t see anything, I don’t hear anything, I won’t tell anyone anything,” as the popular song goes).

“There is no archaeological evidence of the existence of an imperial center in Mongolia, and therefore, as arguments in favor of a completely crazy version, official science can only offer a casuistic interpretation of the works of Rashid ad-Din. True, they quote the latter very selectively. For example, after four years of excavations on the Orkhon, historians prefer not to remember that the latter writes about the circulation of dinars and dirhams in Karakorum. And Guillaume de Rubruk reports that the Mongols knew a lot about Roman money, with which their budget bins were overflowing. Now they also have to keep quiet about this. You should also forget that Plano Carpini mentioned how the ruler of Baghdad paid tribute to the Mongols in Roman gold solidi - bezants. In short, all the ancient witnesses were wrong. Only modern historians know the truth” (KUN:178). – As we see, all the ancient witnesses indicated that the “Mongols” used European money that circulated in Western and Eastern Europe. And they didn’t say anything about the “Mongols” having Chinese money. Again, we are talking about the fact that the “Mongols” were Europeans, at least in economic terms. It would not occur to any cattle breeder to compile lists of landowners that the cattle breeders did not have. And even more so - to create a tax on traders, who in many eastern countries were wandering. In short, all these population censuses, very expensive actions, with the aim of collecting a STABLE TAX (10%) betray not greedy steppe dwellers, but scrupulous European bankers, who, of course, collected pre-calculated taxes in European currency. They had no use for Chinese money.

“Did the Mongols have a financial system, which, as you know, no state can do without? Did not have! Numismatists are not aware of any specific Mongolian money. But any unidentified coins can be declared as such if desired. What was the name of the imperial currency? It wasn't called anything. Where was the imperial mint and treasury located? And nowhere. It seems that historians wrote something about the evil Baskaks - tribute collectors in the Russian uluses of the Golden Horde. But today the ferocity of the Baskaks seems very exaggerated. It seems that they collected tithes (a tenth of the income) in favor of the khan, and recruited every tenth youth into their army. The latter should be considered a great exaggeration. After all, service in those days lasted not a couple of years, but probably a quarter of a century. The population of Rus' in the 13th century is usually estimated at at least 5 million souls. If 10 thousand recruits come to the army every year, then in 10 years it will swell to completely unimaginable sizes” (KUN: 178-179). – If you call up 10 thousand people annually, then in 10 years you will get 100 thousand, and in 25 years – 250 thousand. Was the state of that time able to feed such an army? - “And if you consider that the Mongols recruited not only Russians, but also representatives of all other conquered peoples into service, you will get a million-strong horde that no empire could feed or arm in the Middle Ages” (KUN: 179). - That's it.

“But where the tax went, how the accounting was carried out, who controlled the treasury, scientists cannot really explain anything. Nothing is known about the system of counting, weights and measures used in the empire. It remains a mystery for what purposes the huge Golden Horde budget was spent - the conquerors did not build any palaces, cities, monasteries, or fleets. Although no, other storytellers claim that the Mongols had a fleet. They, they say, even conquered the island of Java, and almost captured Japan. But this is such obvious nonsense that there is no point in discussing it. At least until at least some traces of the existence of steppe herder-seafarers on the earth are found” (KUN: 179). – As Alexei Kungurov considers various aspects of the activities of the Mongols, the impression arises that the Khalkha people, appointed by historians to the role of world conqueror, were minimally suitable for fulfilling this mission. How did the West make such a mistake? - The answer is simple. All of Siberia and Central Asia on European maps of that time was called Tartaria (as I showed in one of my articles, it was there that the Underworld, Tartarus, was moved). Accordingly, the mythical “Tatars” settled there. Their eastern wing extended to the Khalkha people, about whom at that time few historians knew anything, and therefore anything could be attributed to them. Of course, Western historians did not foresee that in a couple of centuries communications would develop so much that through the Internet it would be possible to receive any of the latest information from archaeologists, which, after analytical processing, would be able to refute any Western myths.

The ruling layer of the Mongols.

“What was the ruling class like in the Mongol Empire? Any state has its own military, political, economic, cultural and scientific elite. The ruling layer in the Middle Ages is called the aristocracy; today's ruling class is usually called the vague term “elite”. One way or another, there must be a government leadership, otherwise there is no state. And the Mongol occupiers had tensions with the elite. They conquered Rus' and left the Rurik dynasty to rule it. They themselves, they say, went to the steppe. There are no similar examples in history. That is, there was no state-forming aristocracy in the Mongol Empire” (KUN: 179). – The last one is extremely surprising. Let's take, for example, the previous huge empire - the Arab Caliphate. There were not only religions, Islam, but also secular literature. For example, tales of a thousand and one nights. There was a monetary system, and Arab money was long considered the most popular currency. Where are the legends about the Mongol khans, where are the Mongolian tales about the conquests of distant Western countries?

Mongolian infrastructure.

“Even today, any state cannot exist if it does not have transport and information connectivity. In the Middle Ages, the lack of convenient means of communication absolutely excluded the possibility of the functioning of the state. Therefore, the core of the state developed along river, sea, and, much less often, land communications. And the greatest Mongol Empire in the history of mankind did not have any means of communication between its parts and the center, which, by the way, did not exist either. More precisely, it seemed to exist, but only in the form of a camp where Genghis Khan left his family during campaigns” (KUN: 179-180). In this case, the question arises, how did state negotiations take place in the first place? Where did the ambassadors of sovereign states live? Is it really at military headquarters? And how was it possible to keep up with the constant transfers of these rates during combat operations? Where was the state chancellery, archives, translators, scribes, heralds, treasury, room for looted valuables? Did you also move with the Khan’s headquarters? – It’s hard to believe. – And now Kungurov comes to the conclusion.

Did the Mongol Empire exist?

“Here it is natural to ask the question: did this legendary Mongol Empire even exist? Was! - historians will shout in unison and, as evidence, will show a stone turtle of the Yuan dynasty in the vicinity of the modern Mongolian village of Karakorum or a shapeless coin of unknown origin. If this seems unconvincing to you, then historians will authoritatively add a couple more clay shards dug up in the Black Sea steppes. This will certainly convince the most inveterate skeptic” (KUN: 180). – Alexey Kungurov’s question has been asking for a long time, and the answer to it is quite natural. No Mongol Empire ever existed! – However, the author of the study is concerned not only about the Mongols, but also about the Tatars, as well as about the attitude of the Mongols to Rus', and therefore he continues his story.

“But we are interested in the great Mongol Empire because... Rus' was allegedly conquered by Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan and the ruler of the Jochi ulus, better known as the Golden Horde. From the possessions of the Golden Horde to Rus' is still closer than from Mongolia. During the winter, you can get from the Caspian steppes to Kyiv, Moscow and even Vologda. But the same difficulties arise. Firstly, horses need fodder. In the Volga steppes, horses can no longer dig up withered grass from under the snow with their hoofs. The winters there are snowy, and therefore local nomads stocked up hay in their winter huts in order to survive during the most difficult times. In order for an army to move in winter, oats are needed. No oats - no opportunity to go to Rus'. Where did nomads get their oats?

The next problem is roads. From time immemorial, frozen rivers have been used as roads in winter. But a horse must be shod in order to be able to walk on ice. On the steppe it can run unshod all year round, but an unshod horse, and even with a rider, cannot walk on ice, stone deposits or a frozen road. In order to shoe the hundred thousand war horses and baggage mares required for the invasion, more than 400 tons of iron alone is needed! And after 2-3 months you need to shoe the horses again. How many forests do you need to cut down in order to prepare 50 thousand sleighs for a convoy?

But in general, as we found out, even in the event of a successful march to Rus', an army of 10,000 would find itself in an extremely difficult situation. Supply at the expense of the local population is almost impossible; increasing reserves is absolutely unrealistic. We have to conduct grueling assaults on cities, fortresses and monasteries, and suffer irreparable losses while delving deeper into enemy territory. What is the point of this deepening if the occupiers left behind a devastated desert? What is the general purpose of war? Every day the invaders will become weaker, and by spring they must go to the steppes, otherwise the opened rivers will lock the nomads in the forests, where they will die of hunger” (KUN: 180-181). – As we see, the problems of the Mongol Empire are manifested on a smaller scale in the example of the Golden Horde. And then Kungurov considers the later Mongol state - the Golden Horde.

Capitals of the Golden Horde.

“There are two known capitals of the Golden Horde - Sarai-Batu and Sarai-Berke. Even their ruins have not survived to this day. Historians also found the culprit here - Tamerlane, who came from Central Asia and destroyed these most prosperous and populated cities of the East. Today, archaeologists are excavating on the site of the supposedly great capitals of the great Eurasian empire only the remains of adobe huts and the most primitive household utensils. Everything valuable, they say, was plundered by the evil Tamerlane. What is characteristic is that archaeologists do not find the slightest trace of the presence of Mongolian nomads in these places.

However, this does not bother them at all. Since traces of Greeks, Russians, Italians and others were found there, it means the matter is clear: the Mongols brought craftsmen from conquered countries to their capital. Does anyone doubt that the Mongols conquered Italy? Read carefully the works of “scientific” historians - it says that Batu reached the coast of the Adriatic Sea and almost to Vienna. Somewhere there he caught the Italians. And what does it mean that Sarai-Berke is the center of the Sarsk and Podonsk Orthodox diocese? This, according to historians, testifies to the phenomenal religious tolerance of the Mongol conquerors. True, in this case it is not clear why the Golden Horde khans allegedly tortured several Russian princes who did not want to renounce their faith. The Grand Duke of Kiev and Chernigov Mikhail Vsevolodovich was even canonized for refusing to worship the sacred fire, and was killed for disobedience” (KUN: 181). Again we see a complete inconsistency in the official version.

What was the Golden Horde?

“The Golden Horde is the same state invented by historians as the Mongol Empire. Accordingly, the Mongol-Tatar “yoke” is also a fiction. The question is who invented it. It is useless to look for mentions of the “yoke” or the mythical Mongols in Russian chronicles. “Evil Tatars” are mentioned in it quite often. The question is, who did the chroniclers mean by this name? Either this is an ethnic group, or a way of life or class (akin to the Cossacks), or this is a collective name for all Turks. Maybe the word “Tatar” means a mounted warrior? There are a great many Tatars known: Kasimov, Crimean, Lithuanian, Bordakovsky (Ryazan), Belgorod, Don, Yenisei, Tula... just listing all kinds of Tatars will take half a page. The chronicles mention service Tatars, baptized Tatars, godless Tatars, sovereign Tatars and Basurman Tatars. That is, this term has an extremely broad interpretation.

The Tatars, as an ethnic group, appeared relatively recently, about three hundred years ago. Therefore, an attempt to apply the term “Tatar-Mongols” to modern Kazan or Crimean Tatars is fraudulent. There were no Kazan Tatars in the 13th century; there were Bulgars, who had their own principality, which historians decided to call Volga Bulgaria. At that time there were no Crimean or Siberian Tatars, but there were Kipchaks, they are Polovtsians, they are Nogais. But if the Mongols conquered, partially exterminating, the Kipchaks and periodically fought with the Bulgars, then where did the Mongol-Tatar symbiosis come from?

No newcomers from the Mongolian steppes were known not only in Rus', but also in Europe. The term “Tatar yoke,” meaning the power of the Golden Horde over Russia, appeared at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries in Poland in propaganda literature. It is believed that it belongs to the pen of the historian and geographer Matthew Miechowski (1457-1523), a professor at the University of Krakow” (KUN: 181-182). – Above, we read news about this both on Wikipedia and in the works of three authors (SVI). His “Treatise on the Two Sarmatias” was considered in the West the first detailed geographical and ethnographic description of Eastern Europe to the meridian of the Caspian Sea. In the preamble to this work, Miechowski wrote: “The southern regions and coastal peoples up to India were discovered by the king of Portugal. Let the northern regions with the peoples living near the Northern Ocean to the east, discovered by the troops of the Polish king, now become known to the world" (KUN: 182-183). - Very interesting! It turns out that Rus' had to be discovered by someone, although this state existed for several millennia!

“How dashing! This enlightened man equates Russians with African blacks and American Indians, and attributes fantastic merits to the Polish troops. The Poles never reached the coast of the Arctic Ocean, long ago developed by the Russians. Only a century after the death of Mekhovsky during the Time of Troubles, individual Polish detachments scoured the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions, but these were not the troops of the Polish king, but ordinary gangs of robbers robbing merchants on the northern trade route. Therefore, one should not take seriously his insinuations about the fact that the backward Russians were conquered by completely wild Tatars” (KUN: 183) - It turns out that Mekhovsky’s writing was a fantasy that the West did not have the opportunity to verify.

“By the way, Tatars are the European collective name for all eastern peoples. Moreover, in the old days it was pronounced as “tartars” from the word “tartar” - the underworld. It is quite possible that the word “Tatars” came into the Russian language from Europe. At least, when European travelers called the inhabitants of the lower Volga Tatars in the 16th century, they did not really understand the meaning of this word, and even more so did not know that for Europeans it meant “savages who escaped from hell.” The association of the word “Tatars” by the Criminal Code with a specific ethnic group began only in the 17th century. The term “Tatars”, as a designation for the Volga-Ural and Siberian settled Turkic-speaking peoples, was finally established only in the twentieth century. The word formation “Mongol-Tatar yoke” was first used in 1817 by the German historian Hermann Kruse, whose book was translated into Russian and published in St. Petersburg in the mid-19th century. In 1860, the head of the Russian spiritual mission in China, Archimandrite Palladius, acquired the manuscript of “The Secret History of the Mongols,” making it public. No one was embarrassed that “The Tale” was written in Chinese. This is even very convenient, because any discrepancies can be explained by erroneous transcription from Mongolian to Chinese. Mo, Yuan is a Chinese transcription of the Chinggisid dynasty. And Shutsu is Kublai Khan. With such a “creative” approach, as you might guess, any Chinese legend can be declared either the history of the Mongols or a chronicle of the Crusades” (KUN: 183-184). – It is not for nothing that Kungurov mentions a clergyman from the Russian Orthodox Church, Archimandrite Palladius, hinting that he was interested in creating a legend about the Tatars based on Chinese chronicles. And it’s not for nothing that he builds a bridge to the Crusades.

The legend of the Tatars and the role of Kyiv in Rus'.

“The beginning of the legend about Kievan Rus was laid by the “Synopsis” published in 1674 - the first educational book on Russian history known to us. This book was reprinted several times (1676, 1680, 1718 and 1810) and was very popular until the middle of the 19th century. Its author is considered to be Innocent Gisel (1600-1683). Born in Prussia, in his youth he came to Kyiv, converted to Orthodoxy and became a monk. Metropolitan Peter Mohyla sent the young monk abroad, from where he returned an educated man. He applied his learning in a tense ideological and political struggle with the Jesuits. He is known as a literary theologian, historiographer and theologian” (KUN: 184). – When we talk about the fact that in the 18th century Miller, Bayer and Schlözer became the “fathers” of Russian historiography, we forget that a century earlier, under the first Romanovs and after Nikon’s reform, a new Romanov historiography under the name “Synopsis”, that is, the summary was also written by a German, so there was already a precedent. It is clear that after the eradication of the Rurikovich dynasty and the persecution of Old Believers and Old Believers, Muscovy needed a new historiography that would whitewash the Romanovs and denigrate the Rurikovichs. And it appeared, although it did not come from Muscovy, but from Little Russia, which since 1654 became part of Muscovy, although it was spiritually adjacent to Lithuania and Poland.

“Gisel should be considered not only a church figure, but also a political figure, for the Orthodox church elite in the Polish-Lithuanian state was an integral part of the political elite. As a protégé of Metropolitan Peter Mogila, he maintained active ties with Moscow on political and financial issues. In 1664 he visited the Russian capital as part of the Little Russian embassy of Cossack elders and clergy. Apparently, his works were appreciated, since in 1656 he received the rank of archimandrite and rector of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, retaining it until his death in 1683.

Of course, Innocent Gisel was an ardent supporter of the annexation of Little Russia to Great Russia, otherwise it is difficult to explain why Tsars Alexei Mikhailovich, Fyodor Alekseevich and ruler Sofya Alekseevna were very favorable to him and repeatedly presented him with valuable gifts. So, it is “Synopsis” that begins to actively popularize the legend of Kievan Rus, the Tatar invasion and the fight against Poland. The main stereotypes of ancient Russian history (the founding of Kyiv by three brothers, the calling of the Varangians, the legend of the baptism of Rus' by Vladimir, etc.) are arranged in an orderly row in the Synopsis and are precisely dated. Perhaps Gisel’s story “On Slavic Freedom or Liberty” may seem somewhat strange to today’s reader. - “The Slavs, in their bravery and courage, strive hard day by day, also fighting against the ancient Greek and Roman Caesars, and always receiving a glorious victory, in all freedom alive; It was also possible for the great King Alexander the Great and his father Philip to bring the power under the rule of this Light. To the same, glorious for the sake of military deeds and labors, Tsar Alexander granted the Slavs a letter on gold parchment, written in Alexandria, approving liberties and land to them, before the Nativity of Christ in the year 310; and Augustus Caesar (in his own Kingdom, the King of glory, Christ the Lord was born) did not dare to wage war with the free and strong Slavs" (KUN: 184-185). – I note that if the legend about the founding of Kiev was very important for Little Russia, which according to it became the political center of all ancient Rus', in light of which the legend about the baptism of Kiev by Vladimir grew to the statement about the baptism of All Russia, and both legends thus carried a powerful the political meaning of promoting Little Russia to first place in the history and religion of Russia, then the quoted passage does not carry such pro-Ukrainian propaganda. Here, apparently, we have an insertion of traditional views on the participation of Russian soldiers in the campaigns of Alexander the Great, for which they received a number of privileges. Here are also examples of interaction between Rus' and the politicians of late antiquity; later, the historiographies of all countries will remove any mention of the existence of Rus' in the specified period. It is also interesting to see that the interests of Little Russia in the 17th century and now are diametrically opposed: then Gisel argued that Little Russia is the Center of Rus', and all the events in it are epoch-making for Great Rus'; now, on the contrary, the “independence” of the Outskirts from Rus', the connection of the Outskirts with Poland are being proven, and the work of the first President of the Outskirts, Kravchuk, was called “The Outskirts is such a power.” Supposedly independent throughout its history. And the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Outskirts asks Russians to write “In the Outskirts”, and not “ON the Outskirts”, distorting the Russian language. That is, at the moment the Qiu power is more satisfied with the role of the Polish periphery. This example clearly shows how political interests can change the country’s position by 180 degrees, and not only abandon claims to leadership, but even change the name to a completely dissonant one. Modern Gisel would try to connect the three brothers who founded Kiev with Germany and the German Ukrainians, who had nothing to do with Little Russia, and the introduction of Christianity in Kiev with the general Christianization of Europe, which supposedly had nothing to do with Rus'.

“When an archimandrite, favored at court, undertakes to compose history, it is very difficult to consider this work as a model of unbiased scientific research. Rather, it will be a propaganda treatise. And a lie is the most effective method of propaganda if the lie can be introduced into the mass consciousness.

It is “Synopsis”, which was published in 1674, that has the honor of becoming the first Russian MASS print publication. Until the beginning of the 19th century, the book was used as a textbook on Russian history; in total, it went through 25 editions, the last of which was published in 1861 (the 26th edition was already in our century). From the point of view of propaganda, it does not matter how much Giesel’s work corresponded to reality, what is important is how firmly it was rooted in the consciousness of the educated layer. And it took root firmly. Considering that “Synopsis” was actually written by order of the ruling house of the Romanovs and was officially imposed, it could not have been otherwise. Tatishchev, Karamzin, Shcherbatov, Solovyov, Kostomarov, Klyuchevsky and other historians, brought up on the Giselian concept, simply could not (and hardly wanted) to critically comprehend the legend of Kievan Rus” (KUN: 185). – As we see, a kind of “Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” of the victorious pro-Western Romanov dynasty was the “Synopsis” of the German Gisel, who represented the interests of Little Russia, which had recently become part of Russia, which immediately began to claim the role of leader in the political and religious life of Rus'. So to speak, from rags to riches! It was this peripheral newly acquired part of Rus' that completely suited the Romanovs as a historical leader, as well as the story that this weak state was defeated by equally peripheral steppe inhabitants from the Underworld - Russian Tartaria. The meaning of these legends is obvious - Rus' was allegedly defective from the very beginning!

Other Romanov historians about Kievan Rus and the Tatars.

“The court historians of the 18th century, Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, August Ludwig Schlözer and Gerard Friedrich Miller, also did not contradict the Synopsis. Tell me, please, how could Bayer be a researcher of Russian antiquities and the author of the concept of Russian history (he gave rise to the Norman theory), when during the 13 years of his stay in Russia he did not even learn the Russian language? The last two were co-authors of the obscenely politicized Norman theory, which proved that Rus' acquired the features of a normal state only under the leadership of true Europeans, the Ruriks. Both of them edited and published Tatishchev’s works, after which it is difficult to say what remained of the original in his works. At least, it is known for sure that the original of Tatishchev’s “Russian History” disappeared without a trace, and Miller, according to the official version, used some “drafts” that are now also unknown to us.

Despite constant conflicts with colleagues, it was Miller who formed the academic framework of official Russian historiography. His most important opponent and ruthless critic was Mikhail Lomonosov. However, Miller managed to take revenge on the great Russian scientist. And how! “Ancient Russian History”, prepared by Lomonosov for publication, was never published through the efforts of his opponents. Moreover, the work was confiscated after the author’s death and disappeared without a trace. And a few years later, only the first volume of his monumental work was printed, prepared for publication, it is believed, by Muller personally. Reading Lomonosov today, it is completely impossible to understand what he argued so fiercely with the German courtiers - his “Ancient Russian History” was in the spirit of the officially approved version of history. There are absolutely no contradictions with Müller on the most controversial issue of Russian antiquity in Lomonosov’s book. Consequently, we are dealing with a forgery” (KUN: 186). - Brilliant conclusion! Although something else remains unclear: the Soviet government was no longer interested in exalting one of the republics of the USSR, namely the Ukrainian, and belittling the Turkic republics, which precisely fell under the understanding of Tartary or Tatars. It would seem that it was time to get rid of the forgery and show the true history of Rus'. Why, in Soviet times, did Soviet historiography adhere to the version pleasing to the Romanovs and the Russian Orthodox Church? – The answer lies on the surface. Because the worse the history of Tsarist Russia was, the better the history of Soviet Russia was. It was then, during the time of the Rurikovichs, that it was possible to call on foreigners to rule a great power, and the country was so weak that it could have been conquered by some Tatar-Mongols. In Soviet times, it seemed that no one was called up from anywhere, and Lenin and Stalin were natives of Russia (although in Soviet times no one would have dared to write that Rothschild helped Trotsky with money and people, Lenin was helped by the German general staff, and Yakov Sverdlov was responsible for communications with European bankers). On the other hand, one of the employees of the Institute of Archeology in the 90s told me that the flower of pre-revolutionary archaeological thought did not remain in Soviet Russia, Soviet-style archaeologists were very much inferior in their professionalism to pre-revolutionary archaeologists, and they tried to destroy pre-revolutionary archaeological archives. “I asked her in connection with archaeologist Veselovsky’s excavations of the Kamennaya Mogila caves in Ukraine, because for some reason all the reports about his expedition were lost. It turned out that they were not lost, but deliberately destroyed. For the Stone Grave is a Paleolithic monument in which there are Russian runic inscriptions. And according to it, a completely different history of Russian culture emerges. But archaeologists are part of the team of historians of the Soviet era. And they created no less politicized historiography than historians in the service of the Romanovs.

“It remains only to state that the edition of Russian history that is still in use today was compiled exclusively by foreign authors, mainly Germans. The works of Russian historians who tried to resist them were destroyed, and falsifications were published under their name. One should not expect that the gravediggers of the national historiographical school spared dangerous primary sources. Lomonosov was horrified when he learned that Schlözer had gained access to all the ancient Russian chronicles that had survived at that time. Where are those chronicles now?

By the way, Schlözer called Lomonosov “a rude ignorant who knew nothing except his chronicles.” It is difficult to say what there is more hatred for in these words - towards the stubborn Russian scientist who considers the Russian people to be the same age as the Romans, or towards the chronicles that confirmed this. But it turns out that the German historian who received the Russian chronicles at his disposal was not guided by them at all. He respected political order above science. Mikhail Vasilyevich, when it came to the hateful little thing, also did not mince words. About Schlözer we have heard the following statement of his: “... what kind of vile dirty tricks would such cattle, allowed to them, do in Russian antiquities” or “He is a lot like some idol priest who, having smoked himself with henbane and dope and spinning fast on one leg, spun his head, gives dubious, dark, incomprehensible and completely wild answers.”

How long will we dance to the tune of the “stoned idol priests”?” (KUN:186-187).

Discussion.

Although on the topic of the mythological nature of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, I read the works of L.N. Gumilyov, and A.T. Fomenko, and Valyansky and Kalyuzhny, but no one wrote so clearly, in detail and conclusively before Alexei Kungurov. And I can congratulate “our regiment” of researchers of non-politicized Russian history for having one more bayonet in it. I note that he is not only well-read, but also capable of a remarkable analysis of all the absurdities of professional historians. It is professional historiography that comes up with bows that shoot 300 meters with the lethal force of a modern rifle bullet; it is precisely this that calmly appoints backward herders who had no statehood as the creators of the largest state in the history of mankind; it is they who suck out huge armies of conquerors that are impossible to feed. , nor move several thousand kilometers. The illiterate Mongols, it turns out, compiled land and capitation lists, that is, they conducted a population census throughout this huge country, and also recorded trade income even from itinerant traders. And the results of this enormous work in the form of reports, lists and analytical reviews disappeared somewhere without a trace. It turned out that there is not a single archaeological confirmation of the existence of both the capital of the Mongols and the capitals of the uluses, as well as the existence of Mongol coins. And even today, Mongolian tugriks are a non-convertible monetary unit.

Of course, the chapter touches on many more problems than the reality of the existence of the Mongol-Tatars. For example, the possibility of masking the real forced Christianization of Rus' by the West due to the Tatar-Mongol invasion. However, this problem requires much more serious argumentation, which is absent in this chapter of Alexei Kungurov’s book. Therefore, I am in no hurry to draw any conclusions in this regard.

Conclusion.

Nowadays, there is only one justification for supporting the myth of the Tatar-Mongol invasion: it not only expressed, but also expresses today the Western point of view on the history of Russia. The West is not interested in the point of view of Russian researchers. It will always be possible to find such “professionals” who, for the sake of self-interest, career or fame in the West, will support a generally accepted myth fabricated by the West.

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 of 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. The Russian troops were led by the Kiev prince Mstislav, and they were opposed by Subedey and Juba. 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 took place not in winter, but in late autumn of 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 the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic, from Vladimir to Burma. Giant countries were conquered: Rus', China, India... Neither before nor after has anyone been able to create a military machine that 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 that the whole world has recognized, including official history, but this fact is hushed up and is rarely published. 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...

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? What 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: and Khan. The prince 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,” which, in the modern world, is close to the position 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. Whereas 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

At the 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 declared “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 Christian faith!..»

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 Tartaria. 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 in their development than others, 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 an 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 recall 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 Principality of Kyiv (a province that broke away from Great Tartary) accepted 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 of Kievan Rus was destroyed, with rare exceptions. 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.

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 of the 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.”

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

Having conquered their closest neighbors, and then China, the mighty Tatar-Mongol horde rolled 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 Russia with all their countless troops, burned and destroyed many Russian cities, and in 1241 they tried to conquer Western Europe, invading Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, reached the shores of the Adriatic Sea, but turned back because that they were afraid to leave Russia 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, the Grand Duke of Moscow Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Horde Khan Mamai, 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 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 - Nilkha. 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 informed the city ruler 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 Uighurs 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 its greatest power and perished. 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 ritual 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 the last years of 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 evil tongues, but also his younger brother Chagatai 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 only 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 the 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. Thus, the Mongols established a system of inheritance called minorat, in which the youngest son received all the rights of his father as an inheritance, and 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 to be a vicious circle: a huge Tatar-Mongol army, for purely physical reasons, 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 chronicles that have reached us about the military campaigns of 1237-1238 depict 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 Lay 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. The Georgian king George 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 “settled people - nomads”. 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. In doing so, they made a fatal mistake that 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, 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 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 the terrible sin of killing someone who trusted them. 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...

Therefore, the question of whether there was a Tatar-Mongol yoke in Rus' (in the classical sense of the term) remains open. This topic awaits its researchers.

When it comes to “standing on the Ugra”, we are again faced with omissions and omissions. As those who diligently studied a school or university history course will remember, in 1480 the troops of the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan III, the first “sovereign of all Rus'” (ruler of the united state) and the hordes of the Tatar Khan Akhmat stood on the opposite banks of the Ugra River. After a long “standing”, the Tatars fled for some reason, and this event marked the end of the Horde yoke in Rus'.

There are many dark places in this story. Let's start with the fact that the famous painting, which even found its way into school textbooks, “Ivan III tramples the Khan’s basma,” was written based on a legend composed 70 years after the “standing on the Ugra.” In reality, the Khan's ambassadors did not come to Ivan and he did not solemnly tear up any basma letter in their presence.

But here again an enemy is coming to Rus', an infidel who, according to contemporaries, threatens the very existence of Rus'. Well, everyone is preparing to fight back the adversary in a single impulse? No! We are faced with a strange passivity and confusion of opinions. With the news of Akhmat's approach, something happens in Rus' that still has no explanation. These events can be reconstructed only from scanty, fragmentary data.

It turns out that Ivan III does not at all seek to fight the enemy. Khan Akhmat is far away, hundreds of kilometers away, and Ivan’s wife, Grand Duchess Sophia, is fleeing Moscow, for which she receives accusatory epithets from the chronicler. Moreover, at the same time some strange events are unfolding in the principality. “The Tale of Standing on the Ugra” tells about it this way: “That same winter, Grand Duchess Sophia returned from her escape, for she fled to Beloozero from the Tatars, although no one was chasing her.” And then - even more mysterious words about these events, in fact the only mention of them: “And those lands through which she wandered became worse than from the Tatars, from the boyar slaves, from the Christian bloodsuckers. Reward them, Lord, according to the deceit of their actions, give them according to the works of their hands, for they loved wives more than the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy churches, and they agreed to betray Christianity, for their malice blinded them.”

What is it about? What was happening in the country? What actions of the boyars brought upon them accusations of “blood drinking” and apostasy from the faith? We practically do not know what was discussed. Some light is shed by reports about the “evil advisers” of the Grand Duke, who advised not to fight the Tatars, but to “run away” (?!). Even the names of the “advisers” are known: Ivan Vasilyevich Oshera Sorokoumov-Glebov and Grigory Andreevich Mamon. The most curious thing is that the Grand Duke himself does not see anything reprehensible in the behavior of his fellow boyars, and subsequently not a shadow of disfavor falls on them: after “standing on the Ugra” both remain in favor until their death, receiving new awards and positions.

What's the matter? It is completely dull and vague that it is reported that Oshera and Mamon, defending their point of view, mentioned the need to preserve a certain “antiquity”. In other words, the Grand Duke must give up resistance to Akhmat in order to observe some ancient traditions! It turns out that Ivan violates certain traditions by deciding to resist, and Akhmat, accordingly, acts in his own right? There is no other way to explain this mystery.

Some scientists have suggested: maybe we are facing a purely dynastic dispute? Once again, two people are vying for the Moscow throne - representatives of the relatively young North and the more ancient South, and Akhmat, it seems, has no less rights than his rival!

And here the Rostov Bishop Vassian Rylo intervenes in the situation. It is his efforts that turn the situation around, it is he who pushes the Grand Duke to go on a campaign. Bishop Vassian begs, insists, appeals to the prince’s conscience, gives historical examples, and hints that the Orthodox Church may turn away from Ivan. This wave of eloquence, logic and emotion is aimed at convincing the Grand Duke to come out to defend his country! What the Grand Duke for some reason stubbornly refuses to do...

The Russian army, to the triumph of Bishop Vassian, leaves for the Ugra. Ahead lies a long, several-month standstill. And again something strange happens. First, negotiations begin between the Russians and Akhmat. The negotiations are quite unusual. Akhmat wants to do business with the Grand Duke himself, but the Russians refuse. Akhmat makes a concession: he asks that the brother or son of the Grand Duke arrive - the Russians refuse. Akhmat concedes again: now he agrees to speak with a “simple” ambassador, but for some reason this ambassador must certainly become Nikifor Fedorovich Basenkov. (Why him? A mystery.) The Russians refuse again.

It turns out that for some reason they are not interested in negotiations. Akhmat makes concessions, for some reason he needs to come to an agreement, but the Russians reject all his proposals. Modern historians explain it this way: Akhmat “intended to demand tribute.” But if Akhmat was only interested in tribute, why such long negotiations? It was enough to send some Baskak. No, everything indicates that we are faced with some big and dark secret that does not fit into the usual patterns.

Finally, about the mystery of the retreat of the “Tatars” from the Ugra. Today, in historical science, there are three versions of not even a retreat - Akhmat’s hasty flight from the Ugra.

1. A series of “fierce battles” undermined the morale of the Tatars.

(Most historians reject this, rightly stating that there were no battles. There were only minor skirmishes, clashes of small detachments “in no man’s land.”)

2. The Russians used firearms, which sent the Tatars into panic.

(Hardly: by this time the Tatars already had firearms. The Russian chronicler, describing the capture of the city of Bulgar by the Moscow army in 1378, mentions that the residents “let thunder from the walls.”)

3. Akhmat was “afraid” of a decisive battle.

But here's another version. It is extracted from a historical work of the 17th century, written by Andrei Lyzlov.

“The lawless tsar [Akhmat], unable to endure his shame, in the summer of the 1480s gathered a considerable force: princes, and lancers, and Murzas, and princes, and quickly came to the Russian borders. In his Horde he left only those who could not wield weapons. The Grand Duke, after consulting with the boyars, decided to do a good deed. Knowing that in the Great Horde, from where the king came, there was no army left at all, he secretly sent his numerous army to the Great Horde, to the dwellings of the filthy. At their head were the service Tsar Urodovlet Gorodetsky and Prince Gvozdev, the governor of Zvenigorod. The king did not know about this.

They, in boats along the Volga, sailed to the Horde, saw that there were no military people there, but only women, old men and youths. And they began to captivate and devastate, mercilessly putting the filthy wives and children to death, setting their homes on fire. And, of course, they could kill every single one of them.

But Murza Oblyaz the Strong, Gorodetsky’s servant, whispered to his king, saying: “O king! It would be absurd to completely devastate and destroy this great kingdom, because this is where you yourself come from, and all of us, and here is our homeland. Let’s leave here, we’ve already caused enough destruction, and God may be angry with us.”

So the glorious Orthodox army returned from the Horde and came to Moscow with a great victory, having with them a lot of booty and a considerable amount of food. The king, having learned about all this, immediately retreated from Ugra and fled to the Horde.”

Does it not follow from this that the Russian side deliberately delayed the negotiations - while Akhmat was trying for a long time to achieve his unclear goals, making concession after concession, Russian troops sailed along the Volga to the capital of Akhmat and chopped down women, children and old people there, until the commanders woke up - like a conscience! Please note: it is not said that Voivode Gvozdev opposed the decision of Urodovlet and Oblyaz to stop the massacre. Apparently he was also fed up with blood. Naturally, Akhmat, having learned about the defeat of his capital, retreated from Ugra, hurrying home with all possible speed. So what is next?

A year later, the “Horde” is attacked with an army by the “Nogai Khan” named... Ivan! Akhmat was killed, his troops were defeated. Another evidence of the deep symbiosis and fusion of Russians and Tatars... The sources also contain another option for the death of Akhmat. According to him, a certain close associate of Akhmat named Temir, having received rich gifts from the Grand Duke of Moscow, killed Akhmat. This version is of Russian origin.

It is interesting that the army of Tsar Urodovlet, who carried out a pogrom in the Horde, is called “Orthodox” by the historian. It seems that we have before us another argument in favor of the version that the Horde members who served the Moscow princes were not Muslims at all, but Orthodox.

And one more aspect is of interest. Akhmat, according to Lyzlov, and Urodovlet are “kings”. And Ivan III is only the “Grand Duke”. Writer's inaccuracy? But at the time Lyzlov wrote his history, the title “tsar” was already firmly attached to the Russian autocrats, had a specific “binding” and precise meaning. Further, in all other cases Lyzlov does not allow himself such “liberties.” Western European kings are “kings”, Turkish sultans are “sultans”, padishahs are “padishahs”, cardinals are “cardinals”. Is it possible that the title of Archduke was given by Lyzlov in the translation “Artsyknyaz”. But this is a translation, not an error.

Thus, in the late Middle Ages there was a system of titles that reflected certain political realities, and today we are quite aware of this system. But it is not clear why two seemingly identical Horde nobles are called one “prince” and the other “Murza”, why “Tatar prince” and “Tatar khan” are by no means the same thing. Why are there so many holders of the title “tsar” among the Tatars, and why are Moscow sovereigns persistently called “grand princes?” Only in 1547, Ivan the Terrible for the first time in Rus' took the title “tsar” - and, as Russian chronicles extensively report, he did this only after much persuasion from the patriarch.

Couldn’t the campaigns of Mamai and Akhmat against Moscow be explained by the fact that, according to certain rules that were perfectly understood by contemporaries, the “tsar” was superior to the “grand duke” and had more rights to the throne? What did some dynastic system, now forgotten, declare itself to be here?

It is interesting that in 1501, the Crimean Tsar Chess, having been defeated in an internecine war, for some reason expected that the Kiev prince Dmitry Putyatich would come out on his side, probably due to some special political and dynastic relations between the Russians and Tatars. It is not known exactly which ones.

And finally, one of the mysteries of Russian history. In 1574, Ivan the Terrible divides the Russian kingdom into two halves; he rules one himself, and transfers the other to Kasimov’s Tsar Simeon Bekbulatovich - along with the titles of “Tsar and Grand Duke of Moscow”!

Historians still do not have a generally accepted convincing explanation for this fact. Some say that Grozny, as usual, mocked the people and those close to him, others believe that Ivan IV thus “transferred” his own debts, mistakes and obligations to the new tsar. Could we not be talking about joint rule, which had to be resorted to due to the same complicated ancient dynastic relations? Perhaps this is the last time in Russian history that these systems made themselves known.

Simeon was not, as many historians previously believed, a “weak-willed puppet” of Ivan the Terrible - on the contrary, he was one of the largest state and military figures of that time. And after the two kingdoms again united into one, Grozny by no means “exiled” Simeon to Tver. Simeon was granted the title of Grand Duke of Tver. But Tver in the time of Ivan the Terrible was a recently pacified hotbed of separatism, which required special supervision, and the one who ruled Tver certainly had to be Ivan the Terrible’s confidant.

And finally, strange troubles befell Simeon after the death of Ivan the Terrible. With the accession of Fyodor Ioannovich, Simeon was “removed” from the reign of Tver, blinded (a measure that in Rus' from time immemorial was applied exclusively to rulers who had rights to the table!), and was forcibly tonsured a monk of the Kirillov Monastery (also a traditional way to eliminate a competitor to the secular throne! ). But this turns out to be not enough: I.V. Shuisky sends a blind elderly monk to Solovki. One gets the impression that the Moscow Tsar was in this way getting rid of a dangerous competitor who had significant rights. A contender for the throne? Are Simeon's rights to the throne really not inferior to the rights of the Rurikovichs? (It is interesting that Elder Simeon survived his tormentors. Returned from Solovetsky exile by decree of Prince Pozharsky, he died only in 1616, when neither Fyodor Ioannovich, nor False Dmitry I, nor Shuisky were alive.)

So, all these stories - Mamai, Akhmat and Simeon - are more like episodes of a struggle for the throne, rather than a war with foreign conquerors, and in this respect they resemble similar intrigues around one or another throne in Western Europe. And those whom we have become accustomed to considering since childhood as “the deliverers of the Russian land”, perhaps, actually solved their dynastic problems and eliminated their rivals?

Many members of the editorial board are personally acquainted with the inhabitants of Mongolia, who were surprised to learn about their supposed 300-year rule over Russia. Of course, this news filled the Mongols with a sense of national pride, but at the same time they asked: “Who is Genghis Khan?”

from the magazine "Vedic Culture No. 2"

In the chronicles of the Orthodox Old Believers it is said unequivocally about the “Tatar-Mongol yoke”: “There was Fedot, but not the same one.” Let's turn to the Old Slovenian language. Having adapted runic images to modern perception, we get: thief - enemy, robber; Mughal - powerful; yoke - order. It turns out that the “Tata of the Aryans” (from the point of view of the Christian flock), with the light hand of the chroniclers, were called “Tatars”1, (There is another meaning: “Tata” is the father. Tatar - Tata of the Aryans, i.e. Fathers (Ancestors or older) Aryans) powerful - by the Mongols, and the yoke - the 300-year-old order in the State, which stopped the bloody civil war that broke out on the basis of the forced baptism of Russia - “holy martyrdom”. Horde is a derivative of the word Order, where “Or” is strength, and day is the daylight hours or simply “light.” Accordingly, the “Order” is the Power of Light, and the “Horde” is the Light Forces. So these Light Forces of the Slavs and Aryans, led by our Gods and Ancestors: Rod, Svarog, Sventovit, Perun, stopped the civil war in Russia on the basis of forced Christianization and maintained order in the State for 300 years. Were there dark-haired, stocky, dark-skinned, hook-nosed, narrow-eyed, bow-legged and very angry warriors in the Horde? Were. Detachments of mercenaries of different nationalities, who, as in any other army, were driven in the front ranks, preserving the main Slavic-Aryan Troops from losses on the front line.

Hard to believe? Take a look at the "Map of Russia 1594" in Gerhard Mercator's Atlas of the Country. All the countries of Scandinavia and Denmark were part of Russia, which extended only to the mountains, and the Principality of Muscovy is shown as an independent state not part of Rus'. In the east, beyond the Urals, the principalities of Obdora, Siberia, Yugoria, Grustina, Lukomorye, Belovodye are depicted, which were part of the Ancient Power of the Slavs and Aryans - Great (Grand) Tartaria (Tartaria - lands under the patronage of the God Tarkh Perunovich and the Goddess Tara Perunovna - Son and Daughter of the Supreme God Perun - Ancestor of the Slavs and Aryans).

Do you need a lot of intelligence to draw an analogy: Great (Grand) Tartaria = Mogolo + Tartaria = “Mongol-Tataria”? We do not have a high-quality image of the named painting, we only have the “Map of Asia 1754.” But this is even better! See for yourself. Not only in the 13th, but until the 18th century, Grand (Mogolo) Tartary existed as real as the faceless Russian Federation now.

The “history scribblers” were not able to distort and hide everything from the people. Their repeatedly darned and patched “Trishka caftan”, covering the Truth, is constantly bursting at the seams. Through the gaps, the Truth reaches the consciousness of our contemporaries bit by bit. They do not have truthful information, so they are often mistaken in the interpretation of certain factors, but the general conclusion they draw is correct: what school teachers taught to several dozen generations of Russians is deception, slander, falsehood.

Published article from S.M.I. “There was no Tatar-Mongol invasion” is a striking example of the above. Commentary on it from a member of our editorial board, Gladilin E.A. will help you, dear readers, dot the i's.
Violetta Basha,
All-Russian newspaper “My Family”,
No. 3, January 2003. p.26

The main source by which we can judge the history of Ancient Rus' is considered to be the Radzivilov manuscript: “The Tale of Bygone Years.” The story about the calling of the Varangians to rule in Rus' is taken from it. But can she be trusted? Its copy was brought at the beginning of the 18th century by Peter 1 from Konigsberg, then its original ended up in Russia. It has now been proven that this manuscript is forged. Thus, it is not known for certain what happened in Rus' before the beginning of the 17th century, that is, before the accession to the throne of the Romanov dynasty. But why did the House of Romanovs need to rewrite our history? Is it not to prove to the Russians that they have been subordinate to the Horde for a long time and are not capable of independence, that their destiny is drunkenness and obedience?

Strange behavior of princes

The classic version of the “Mongol-Tatar invasion of Rus'” has been known to many since school. She looks like this. At the beginning of the 13th century, in the Mongolian steppes, Genghis Khan gathered a huge army of nomads, subject to iron discipline, and planned to conquer the whole world. Having defeated China, Genghis Khan's army rushed to the west, and in 1223 it reached the south of Rus', where it defeated the squads of Russian princes on the Kalka River. In the winter of 1237, the Tatar-Mongols invaded Rus', burned many cities, then invaded Poland, the Czech Republic and reached the shores of the Adriatic Sea, but suddenly turned back because they were afraid to leave devastated, but still dangerous Rus' in their rear. The Tatar-Mongol yoke began in Rus'. The huge Golden Horde had borders from Beijing to the Volga and collected tribute from the Russian princes. The khans gave the Russian princes labels to reign and terrorized the population with atrocities and robberies.

Even the official version says that there were many Christians among the Mongols and some Russian princes established very warm relations with the Horde khans. Another oddity: with the help of the Horde troops, some princes remained on the throne. The princes were very close people to the khans. And in some cases, the Russians fought on the side of the Horde. Aren't there a lot of strange things? Is this how the Russians should have treated the occupiers?

Having strengthened, Rus' began to resist, and in 1380 Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Horde Khan Mamai on the Kulikovo Field, and a century later 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 the khan realized that he had no chance, gave the order to retreat and went to the Volga. These events are considered the end of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.”

Secrets of the disappeared chronicles

When studying the chronicles of the Horde times, scientists had many questions. Why did dozens of chronicles disappear without a trace during the reign of the Romanov dynasty? For example, “The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land,” according to historians, resembles a document from which everything that would indicate the yoke was carefully removed. They left only fragments telling about a certain “trouble” that befell Rus'. But there is not a word about the “invasion of the Mongols.”

There are many more strange things. In the story “about the evil Tatars,” the khan from the Golden Horde orders the execution of a Russian Christian prince... for refusing to worship the “pagan god of the Slavs!” And some chronicles contain amazing phrases, for example: “Well, with God!” - said the khan and, crossing himself, galloped towards the enemy.

Why are there suspiciously many Christians among the Tatar-Mongols? And the descriptions of princes and warriors look unusual: the chronicles claim that most of them were of the Caucasian type, had not narrow, but large gray or blue eyes and light brown hair.

Another paradox: why suddenly the Russian princes in the Battle of Kalka surrender “on parole” to a representative of foreigners named Ploskinia, and he... kisses the pectoral cross?! This means that Ploskinya was one of his own, Orthodox and Russian, and, moreover, of a noble family!

Not to mention the fact that the number of “war horses”, and therefore the warriors of the Horde army, was initially, with the light hand of historians of the House of Romanov, estimated at three hundred to four hundred thousand. Such a number of horses could neither hide in the copses nor feed themselves in the conditions of a long winter! Over the last century, historians have continually reduced the number of the Mongol army and reached thirty thousand. But such an army could not keep all the peoples from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in subjection! But it could easily perform the functions of collecting taxes and establishing order, that is, serving as something like a police force.

There was no invasion!

A number of scientists, including academician Anatoly Fomenko, made a sensational conclusion based on a mathematical analysis of the manuscripts: there was no invasion from the territory of modern Mongolia! And there was a civil war in Rus', the princes fought with each other. There were no traces of any representatives of the Mongoloid race who came to Rus'. Yes, there were individual Tatars in the army, but not aliens, but residents of the Volga region, who lived in the neighborhood of the Russians long before the notorious “invasion.”

What is commonly called the “Tatar-Mongol invasion” was in fact a struggle between the descendants of Prince Vsevolod the “Big Nest” and their rivals for sole power over Russia. The fact of war between princes is generally recognized; unfortunately, Rus' did not unite immediately, and quite strong rulers fought among themselves.

But who did Dmitry Donskoy fight with? In other words, who is Mamai?

Horde - the name of the Russian army

The era of the Golden Horde was distinguished by the fact that, along with secular power, there was a strong military power. There were two rulers: a secular one, called the prince, and a military one, he was called the khan, i.e. "military leader" In the chronicles you can find the following entry: “There were also wanderers along with the Tatars, and their governor was so-and-so,” that is, the Horde troops were led by governors! And the Brodniks are Russian free warriors, the predecessors of the Cossacks.

Authoritative scientists have concluded that the Horde is the name of the Russian regular army (like the “Red Army”). And Tatar-Mongolia is Great Rus' itself. It turns out that it was not the “Mongols,” but the Russians who conquered a vast territory from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Arctic to the Indian. It was our troops who made Europe tremble. Most likely, it was fear of the powerful Russians that became the reason that the Germans rewrote Russian history and turned their national humiliation into ours.

By the way, the German word “Ordnung” (“order”) most likely comes from the word “horde.” The word "Mongol" probably comes from the Latin "megalion", that is, "great". Tataria from the word “tartar” (“hell, horror”). And Mongol-Tataria (or “Megalion-Tartaria”) can be translated as “Great Horror.”

A few more words about names. Most people of that time had two names: one in the world, and the other received at baptism or a military nickname. According to the scientists who proposed this version, Prince Yaroslav and his son Alexander Nevsky act under the names of Genghis Khan and Batu. Ancient sources depict Genghis Khan as tall, with a luxurious long beard, and “lynx-like” green-yellow eyes. Note that people of the Mongoloid race do not have a beard at all. The Persian historian of the Horde, Rashid al-Din, writes that in the family of Genghis Khan, children “were mostly born with gray eyes and blond hair.”

Genghis Khan, according to scientists, is Prince Yaroslav. He just had a middle name - Genghis with the prefix “khan”, which meant “warlord”. Batu is his son Alexander (Nevsky). In the manuscripts you can find the following phrase: “Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky, nicknamed Batu.” By the way, according to the description of his contemporaries, Batu had fair hair, a light beard and light eyes! It turns out that it was the Horde khan who defeated the crusaders on Lake Peipsi!

Having studied the chronicles, scientists discovered that Mamai and Akhmat were also 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 episodes of the civil war in Rus', the struggle of princely families for power.

Which Rus' did the Horde go to?

The records do say; "The Horde went to Rus'." But in the 12th-13th centuries, Russia was the name given to a relatively small territory around Kyiv, Chernigov, Kursk, the area near the Ros River, and Seversk land. But Muscovites or, say, Novgorodians were already northern inhabitants who, according to the same ancient chronicles, often “traveled to Rus'” from Novgorod or Vladimir! That is, for example, to Kyiv.

Therefore, when the Moscow prince was about to go on a campaign against his southern neighbor, this could be called an “invasion of Rus'” by his “horde” (troops). 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).

Grand falsification

At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter 1 founded the Russian Academy of Sciences. Over the 120 years of its existence, there have been 33 academic historians in the historical department of the Academy of Sciences. Of these, only three are Russians, including M.V. Lomonosov, the rest are Germans. The history of Ancient Rus' until the beginning of the 17th century was written by the Germans, and some of them did not even know Russian! This fact is well known to professional historians, but they make no effort to carefully review what kind of history the Germans wrote.

It is known that M.V. Lomonosov wrote the history of Rus' and that he had constant disputes with German academics. After Lomonosov's death, his archives disappeared without a trace. However, his works on the history of Rus' were published, but under the editorship of Miller. Meanwhile, it was Miller who persecuted M.V. Lomonosov during his lifetime! The works of Lomonosov on the history of Rus' published by Miller are falsifications, this was shown by computer analysis. There is little left of Lomonosov in them.

As a result, we do not know our history. The Germans of the House of Romanov hammered into our heads that the Russian peasant was good for nothing. That “he doesn’t know how to work, that he’s a drunkard and an eternal slave.

The Mongol-Tatar yoke is the period of the capture of Rus' by the Mongol-Tatars in the 13th-15th centuries. The Mongol-Tatar yoke lasted for 243 years.

The truth about the Mongol-Tatar yoke

The Russian princes at that time were in a state of hostility, so they could not give a worthy rebuff to the invaders. Despite the fact that the Cumans came to the rescue, the Tatar-Mongol army quickly seized the advantage.

The first direct clash between the troops took place on the Kalka River, on May 31, 1223, and was lost quite quickly. Even then it became clear that our army would not be able to defeat the Tatar-Mongols, but the enemy’s onslaught was held back for quite some time.

In the winter of 1237, a targeted invasion of the main Tatar-Mongol troops into the territory of Rus' began. This time the enemy army was commanded by the grandson of Genghis Khan, Batu. The army of nomads managed to move quite quickly into the interior of the country, plundering the principalities in turn and killing everyone who tried to resist as they went along.

Main dates of the capture of Rus' by the Tatar-Mongols

• 1223 The Tatar-Mongols approached the border of Rus';
• May 31, 1223. First battle;
• Winter 1237. The beginning of a targeted invasion of Rus';
• 1237 Ryazan and Kolomna were captured. The Ryazan principality fell;
• March 4, 1238. Grand Duke Yuri Vsevolodovich was killed. The city of Vladimir is captured;
• Autumn 1239. Chernigov captured. The Principality of Chernigov fell;
• 1240 Kyiv is captured. The Principality of Kiev fell;
• 1241 The Galician-Volyn principality fell;
• 1480 Overthrow of the Mongol-Tatar yoke.

Reasons for the fall of Rus' under the onslaught of the Mongol-Tatars

• lack of a unified organization in the ranks of Russian soldiers;
• numerical superiority of the enemy;
• weakness of the command of the Russian army;
• poorly organized mutual assistance on the part of disparate princes;
• underestimation of enemy forces and numbers.

Features of the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus'

The establishment of the Mongol-Tatar yoke with new laws and orders began in Rus'.

Vladimir became the de facto center of political life; it was from there that the Tatar-Mongol khan exercised his control.

The essence of the management of the Tatar-Mongol yoke was that Khan awarded the label for reign at his own discretion and completely controlled all territories of the country. This increased the enmity between the princes.

Feudal fragmentation of territories was encouraged in every possible way, as this reduced the likelihood of a centralized rebellion.

Tribute was regularly collected from the population, the “Horde exit.” The collection of money was carried out by special officials - Baskaks, who showed extreme cruelty and did not shy away from kidnappings and murders.

Consequences of the Mongol-Tatar conquest

The consequences of the Mongol-Tatar yoke in Rus' were terrible.

• Many cities and villages were destroyed, people were killed;
• Agriculture, handicrafts and art fell into decline;
• Feudal fragmentation increased significantly;
• The population has decreased significantly;
• Rus' began to noticeably lag behind Europe in development.

The end of the Mongol-Tatar yoke

Complete liberation from the Mongol-Tatar yoke occurred only in 1480, when Grand Duke Ivan III refused to pay money to the horde and declared the independence of Rus'.