LAWRENCE N. LANGER (Storrs, CT, USA)

MUSCOVITE TAXATION AND THE PROBLEM OF MONGOL RULE IN RUS'*

In 1408, Edigei with an army reputed to number 30,000 (according to the re- constructed Trinity Chronicle) established his headquarters at Kolomenskoe selo and lay siege to . For three weeks Tatar troops ringed the city, and, while the grand prince decamped to with his family, the defenses were left to his two brothers, Andrei and Petr Dmitrievich, and to Prince Vladi- mir Andreevich of . The Tatars carved a wide swath of destruction, burning Pereiaslavl', , Dmitrov, Serpukhov, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Gorodets, while occupying Klin in the ' principality and Riazan'. Moscow's s posad was also torched -'perhaps deliberately by the Muscovites - but political upheavals at the Horde forced Edigei to abandon his siege; not before, however, a ransom (okup) of 3,000 rubles was extorted and an extraordinary number of captives taken off into slavery. Each Tatar warrior was said to have charge of forty Christians. The disaster of 1408 deepened as plague swept through the northeast and a harsh winter set in bringing famine. Blood, it was said, ran from icons in Kostroma where Grand Prince Vasilii Dmitrievich remained in safe- I keeping The Novgorod IV Chronicle contains an epistle purportedly written from Edigei, the leader of the four Mongol qaraci beys (heads of the four leading clans), to Vasilii. The epistle, though not of Tatar origin, is thought to date no later than the first half of the fifteenth century.2 The epistle implies that Rus' was once part of the Horde's ulus (patrimony or domain) and makes the com- plaint that the Horde's emissaries (posoly) and merchants (gosti) are no longer honored, and taxes (poshlina) no longer collected. Vasilii is taken to task for not appearing at the Horde; for the last eleven years he is accused of not sending his

* An earlierversion of this article,"The MongolTribute and the Developmentof Muscovite Taxation,"was presentedat the 35th NationalConvention of the AmericanAssociation for the Ad- vancementof SlavicStudies, November 20-23, 2003. My thanksto DonaldOstrowski for his con- structiveremarks. I willuse the term Hordefor the morecommonly employed Golden Horde, which wascoined in the latesixteenth or seventeenthcentury. 1. Troitskaialetopis' [hereafterTL], ed. M. D. Priselkov(Moscow-Leningrad: Akademii nauk, 1950),467-70; Polnoe sobranierusskikh letopisi [hereafter PSRLI, 42 vols. to date, (Moscow-St. Petersburg/L.eningrad:Arkheograficheskaia komissiia, Akademiia nauk, 1841-2002), XXV: 183. 2. CharlesHalperin, The Tatar Yoke(Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1986), 131. 102

princes, senior or lesser boiars (ni stareishi boliar ni menshikh), his son or brothers to the courts of Khan Shadibek and his successor, Khan Bulat. Rela- tions between Moscow and the Horde were once good, particularly during the time of Fedor Koshka and his son, Ivan, the treasurer (kaznachei), who was be- loved and senior (liubovnik i staeishina) and who worked well with the Horde (kotoryi dobryi dela ordin'skii). The epistle further notes that Vasilii has been collecting a tribute at a rate of one ruble per two sokhas, and Edigei protests that the tribute (vykhod) should be sent as in the old way.3 The epistle refers to a well-established system of tribute payments to the Horde that, at least since 1396-97, had become frayed and no doubt reflected the decline of the Horde fol- lowing Tamerlane's defeat of Tokhtamysh and the destruction of Horde cities in 1395-96. It also highlights a long-standing problem concerning the impact of Mongol rule upon the financial system and administrative institutions of Muscovite Rus'. Donald Ostrowski was quite right to wonder at and then reject the argument that Muscovy adopted Mongol institutions largely in the sixteenth century, when such institutions, dating from the thirteenth century, were effectively defunct.4 Paradoxically, George Vemadsky thought Mongol influence attained its greatest impact precisely when the Horde broke up into separate khanates. As Moscow emancipated itself from Mongol rule, Tatars entered into Muscovite service bringing with them their traditional administrative practices - what Vemadsky termed "influence through delayed action."5 But why this delayed influence oc- curred at all, particularly when Moscow was no longer under Mongol control, has, according to Ostrowski, never been satisfactorily explained. If the Mongols influenced and shaped Muscovite institutions, it' ought to have occurred earlier in the fourteenth century when Moscow emerged as the preeminent power in the northeast, which is what Ostrowski has attempted to demonstrate. He has in fact offered a very creative alternative model: namely, that during the reigns of Ivan I Kalita (r. 1325-41) and Semen (r. 1341-53) Moscow borrowed the Mongol dual administrative structure for tax collection and governance, when both princes frequented the Horde. For the decades 1240-1300, when Rus' ?was di- rectly under basqaq (governor) administration of the Horde, Ostrowski finds the evidence meager and he draws no firm conclusion concerning institutional bor- rowing.6 On the other hand, Muscovite institutions began to follow a pseudo-

3.PSRL,IV:no-H. 4. DonaldOstrowski, "The MongolOrigins of MuscovitePolitical Institutions," Slavic Review, 49 (1990):527. , 5. GeorgeVemadsky, A Historyof .Vol. III: TheMongols and Russia(New Haven, CT: YaleUniv. Press, 1953), 335. 6. DonaldOstrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols:Cross-Cultural Influences on the SteppeFron- tier, 1304-1589(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1 998), 44;idem, "Mongol Origins," 527.