MICHAEL KHODARKOVSKY (Chicago, IL, U. S. A.)

TAMING THE "WILD STEPPE": MUSCOVY'S SOUTHERN FRONTIER, 1480-1600

The history of Muscovy, like that of its predecessor, Kievan Rus', was in- timately bound with the history of its steppe neighbors. South of Moscow across the uncertain divide lay the vast expanses of the Eurasian steppe, populated at different times by various nomadic peoples. Our story begins in the late fifteenth century, when the demise of the turned Mus- covy into a frontier society par excellence, where. porous frontiers and poorly defined political and territorial boundaries served as an invitation to continu- _ ous raids by one side and expansion and colonization by the other. Three cen- turies later the borders of the in the south and southeast had - become contiguous with those of-the Ottoman, Persian, and Chinese empires, and the Russian colonists, forts, and towns had irreversibly changed the steppe landscape. , Throughout this period, Russian policies evolved from the defense of its vulnerable steppe frontiers to a deliberate and conscious aggrandizement and transformation of the new territories and subjects. Diplomatic pressure, trade ' privileges, economic and military aid, debt forgiveness, political manipula- tion, military threat, ability to insinuate itself into the local politics and to en- courage rivalry and civil wars among the local rulers - all the traditional tools in the arsenal of the modem colonial empires - were effectively used by Moscow vis-ei-vis the steppe societies as early as the sixteenth century. We shall see below that the collapse of the Golden Horde notwithstanding, Moscow's sovereignty was initially little more than rhetorical. Unable to dis- entangle itself from the complex web of burdensome economic ties with the Golden Horde's numerous successors, Moscow continued to submit a dizzy- ing array' of tributes, payments, and taxes to the , Kazan' and, the Nogays. While de facto Moscow grew apart from its steppe neighbors, de jure it remained within the Golden Horde's traditional political system and , thus was considered to be a subservient tributary state to the Crimea. . ` Moscow found it neither easy nor expedient to extricate itself from the po- litical legacy of the Golden Horde. Instead, Moscow's claim to be one of the successors to the Golden Horde served both to justify its expansion south- ward and eastward and to legitimize its conquest. In a remarkable blend, 242

Moscow derived its legitimacy simultaneously from two different traditions: the Christian tradition of Byzantium and the secular political tradition of the Golden Horde. The latter became obsolete only with the ascension to the throne of the Romanov dynasty as the Russian state reemerged from the Time of Troubles with a renewed and accentuated sense of Christian identity. Throughout the sixteenth century Moscow faced an uphill battle to rede- fine its traditional relationship with the successors to the Golden Horde, to be recognized as a sovereign power, to reverse its tributary payments, and to transform nomadic rulers into Moscow's subjects. In a long contest over the steppe and its inhabitants, the sixteenth century was dominated by Moscow's s struggle to eliminate the growing disparity between the old political forms and the new reality.

Moscow and the Great Horde: The "Ugra Standoff" Reconsidered Throughout more than two hundred years of its history, the Golden Horde, a powerful confederation of nomadic and seminomadic tribes dominating the vast territory from western Siberia to Moscow, withstood numerous chal- lenges from various comers of this enormous empire as well as from rivals outside. But by the late 1470s the Golden Horde was in irreversible decline. It had become irreparably split between warring members of the Chinggisid rul- ing families. The rivals. were based in the peripheral regions of the Golden Horde's territory: in the khanates of Kazan' and ' on the Volga, the Crimea, and Tiumen' in Siberia. The core of the Golden Horde remained a nomadic confederation known as the Greater (Bol'shaia) Horde, which roamed the steppe between the Don and Iaik Rivers. The khans of the Great Horde, who considered themselves successors to the khans of the Golden to reassert their over other entities of Horde, continuously attempted authority ' the former Golden Horde. It was at this time, in 1474, that a departing envoy of the grand prince of Moscow, Ivan III, was given detailed instructions as to how to respond to various issues which the Crimean khan, Mengli Giray, might raise. In antici- ¡ pation of Mengli Giray's insistence on Moscow's help against Ahmad khan of the Great Horde, the envoy was directed to reply that Moscow could not break relations with Ahmad because "the patrimonial lands [votchina] of the Grand Prince and Ahmad khan have a common steppe frontier, and every year Ahmad khan has his pastures near my sovereign's lands."' When in the

1. SbomikImperatorskogo Russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (hereafter'cited as SIRIO) . 148 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1867-1916), 41 [Pamiatnikidiplomaticheskikh snoshenii Mosk- ovskogogosudarstva s Krymskoiui Nagaiskoiuordami i Turtsieiu,t. I, C 1474 po 1505 g., epokhasverzheniia mongol'skogo iga v Rossii] 4: (no. 1). Such a frontier,separating the landsof the Russianprinces from the lands of the Golden Horde,existed alreadyin the thirteenthcen-