Thousand-man or thousand-man: the answer in one word
It's the winter of 1246. The Franciscan Giovanni del Plano Carpini, Pope Innocent IV's ambassador to the Mongols, is traveling through Kyiv, which Batu had burned six years earlier. In the city, he bargains with a local official: the latter needs gifts, while the ambassador needs horses and guards for the journey to the steppe. Carpini names this man by his Latin name. millenarius, "thousander." And here's the question on which the entire plot hinges: who stands before us, a Russian boyar or a khan's man?
The myth of tribute from afar
The school version of the Mongol yoke goes something like this: They came, burned everything, imposed tribute, and retreated to the steppe. The princes remained seated in their cities, the boyars served the princes, and the Horde authorities made their presence felt once a year, when they arrived for their "exit," the annual tribute. A sort of remote cash register somewhere beyond the horizon, not interfering in local affairs.
Support for this version can be found directly in the chronicle. The Galicia-Volyn Code, describing Kyiv in the autumn of 1245, dropped the phrase: the city then “I will support Kiev with Yaroslav as my boyar, Eikovich Dmitry”That is, Kiev was ruled by Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, and he ruled through his boyar, Dmitry Eikovich. The picture is familiar and understandable: the new prince received the throne, installed a trusted person, who governed in his name.
Let me clarify two things. Carpini was no random traveler, but an official Roman envoy, an observant man accustomed to recording details; his report surpasses any other accounts of the era in its abundance of detail. And the tysyatsky (commander) was a familiar figure in pre-Mongol Rus'. This was the name of the military-administrative head of the city and district: during war, the voivode of the city militia, and in peacetime, an administrator and judge. The tysyatsky was appointed by the prince, chosen from his inner circle or trusted boyars. This is precisely how, on the eve of the invasion, Prince Dmitriy Romanovich Galitsky appointed the tysyatsky (commander) of Kyiv, Dmitriy. (We will return to how Dmitriy later became "Yaroslav's boyar.")
It all seemed to fit together. There was a thousand-man named Dmitri, appointed by one prince. He became a boyar named Dmitri, serving another. The power at the top changed, and so did the overlord. The familiar mechanism of pre-Mongol Rus' worked like a clock. But by 1246, this clock was already telling a different time.
Two words, two systems of power
The whole point is that Russian tysyatsky and Mongolian thousander — the words are similar, but the authorities behind them are different.
The Mongols built their empire on the decimal principle. The population and army were divided into tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens. In Mongolian, this is arban, Jaun, mingan и TumenThe basic unit was the thousand, the mingan: simultaneously a cavalry regiment of approximately a thousand horsemen and a tax-paying district of approximately a thousand households. This system is associated with the reforms of Genghis Khan around 1206, and it reached its full development under Khan Ögedei, and its traces stretch from China to the Caspian region and the Caucasus. In scholarship, it has a conventional name: chiliarchy, from the Greek "thousand," meaning "rule of thousands." The term was coined by Mongolian scholar Igor de Rachewiltz. The Greek root shouldn't be misleading: the system has nothing in common with ancient Greece; the word was simply used as a convenient label.
And here's the key difference. The Russian tysyatsky was tied to the prince. As the prince changed, so did the tysyatsky's subordination. The Mongol tysyatsky, however, reported directly to the khan or to the temnik, the head of the darkness, appointed by the khan. The Mongol system knew no princes acting as intermediaries between the tysyatsky and the khan. It was a continuous chain of service, not a chain of personal vassal ties.
The difference was felt even by Russian scribes. When Horde scribes arrived in northeastern Rus' in the winter of 1257/58, the chronicler wrote dryly and matter-of-factly: “They plundered the whole land of Suzhal, Ryazan, and Murom, and appointed captains of tens, and hundreds, and thousands, and tyrants, and they went to the Vord”The scribe didn't use the familiar tysyatsky and sotsky, but rather forms closer to Mongol nomenclature: tysyatnik, sotnik, desyatnik. He also added a word entirely new to Rus': temnik, meaning "chief of darkness." There wasn't even a ready-made word for this position in pre-Mongol Rus'.
Witness Carpini
Let's return to the man who bargained with the ambassador in Kyiv. What do we know about him from the report?
Firstly, he had control over the horses and guards for the journey across the steppe. Carpini writes directly that he had to "to give a gift to the thousand-man, having earned his favor, so that he would give us draft horses and guards"This was no longer a collection of tribute from the city, but rather the management of roads and postal services between Kiev and the steppe.
Secondly, this commander had subordinates. Further along the road, at the headquarters of the ulus ruler of Kuremsa (according to Karpini, Korents), the ambassadors met the Kievan centurion Nongrot, who was accompanying them. The name is curious: with a different reading of the first letter, Khongrot instead of Nongrot, the result is the Mongol tribal name "khonkirat." Karpini refers to the centurion himself directly: Batu's manAt the same headquarters, the Franciscans were given three Tatars as guides, two foremen, and another one, also Batu's man.
It turns out this way. The Kievan commander of a thousand sends a centurion and his deputies to Kuremsa to warn them of the envoys. These same men then ride ahead to Batu to report the visit in advance. We have a complete hierarchy before us—commander of a thousand, centurion, deputies—and it's all subordinate to Batu, the ruler of the Ulus of Jochi. Carpini also mentions two more commanders of a thousand who controlled the banks of the Yaik River, today the Ural: "one on one bank of the river, and the other on the other"If the Kievan commander of a thousand held the western border of Batu's domain along the Dnieper, these two held the eastern, along the Yaik. It seems we are looking at two edges of a single power.
There's also an indirect argument. Throughout the entire Kiev episode, Carpini never refers to Yaroslav Vsevolodovich as a prince. The argument from silence alone is weak: the ambassador could have remained silent for other reasons, as Yaroslav was not in the city, and he saw him primarily as a Russian ruler under the Khan, not as an independent sovereign. But against the backdrop of the hierarchy discussed above, this silence fits into the overall picture: the commander of a thousand, the captain of a hundred, and the captains of tens do not serve the Russian prince.
Honesty is needed here: in science, the debate is not closed. A number of researchers, such as Alexey Kuzmin and Pavel Lukin, read the Kyiv millenarius As a Russian official who remained in the city after the conquest, they see him as the same "tysyatsky" Dmitry. The logic is as follows: there were supposedly no Mongol troops as far as Kaniv, over a hundred kilometers southeast of Kyiv, and since the Mongols weren't physically present in the city itself, the previous Russian commander remained. But this argument falls apart with Carpini's own text: on the Franciscans' return journey from the last Mongol outpost to Kyiv, they were accompanied for six whole days by Horde soldiers assigned to them at Kuremsa. The Mongols controlled all the roads connecting Kyiv with the empire. And the Kiev tysyatsky, who commanded the khan's horses, was part of this order, not a Russian boyar in charge of an absent prince.
The most striking feature here is the composition of the Kyivan chiliarchy. The commander of a thousand was almost certainly Russian and most likely identical to the Dmitri mentioned in the chronicles. And the centurion Nongrot, subordinate to him, judging by his name, was a Mongol. A Russian commander, likely a Mongol subordinate, served as the khan's unified service.
One sovereign power
So why did the chronicler write "Yaroslav's boyar"? Was he mistaken?
Yes and no. He described reality in familiar terms. According to pre-Mongol concepts, the transfer of the throne to a new prince automatically meant the subordination of the previous administrators, including the tysyatsky. Back in 1243, Batu recognized Yaroslav as the eldest among the Russian princes and effectively handed Kyiv over to him. For the chronicler, this was enough: a new prince meant that Dmitri was now his boyar. Moreover, Daniil Romanovich himself had traveled to Batu in the autumn of 1245 to swear allegiance, and it was neither the time nor the place to criticize someone's defection to Mongol service.
The problem with the old model was that it didn't take into account the new reality. After the conquest of southern Rus' and the adjacent steppes, there could be no sovereign power other than the Mongol one. Yaroslav, having received the Kyivan throne, was forced to acknowledge himself as the khan's vassal, which meant a complete loss of independence. The Mongol rulers now considered themselves entitled to dispose of not only his princely rights but also his very life.
How this turned out is well known. Batu's decision was preliminary and required confirmation by the Great Khan. Yaroslav traveled to the headquarters of the new Khan, Guyuk, in the summer of 1246 to obtain approval. He never returned: Guyuk's mother poisoned the prince, and he died soon after. Carpini, incidentally, knew Yaroslav personally, meeting him at Guyuk's court and witnessing his final days. Yet, in his report, he never once referred to him as the Prince of Kyiv.
A system that has survived a century
History The Kyivan thousand-mansion was not an isolated incident, but the first clearly discernible knot in the system. In southern Rus', the Mongols established decimal rule earlier than in the northeast: in Kyiv, it was already in effect by the mid-1240s, while the Suzdal and Ryazan lands were only censused in the winter of 1257/58.
And the system proved durable. A century later, on February 10, 1354, Khan Taydula issued a travel document to the Russian Metropolitan Alexy, who was traveling to Constantinople to be installed as metropolitan. The document was addressed "to the dark ones and to the thousands, to the prince, and to the centurion and to the tithe commander"Before us is the same decimal ladder: temniks, tysyaniks, sotniks, tiasniks. The word "prince" here is simply the Russian translation of the Turkic "bek" or the Arabic-Persian "emir," as in similar documents from other Mongol states. These officials were charged with ensuring the safety of the metropolitan and protecting the church's privileges.
It turns out that the heads of the decimal administration were present in the Russian lands for at least a century from the time of the first censuses in the mid-13th century. At least, this is how the network of temniks, tysyaniks, sotniks, and tyasyaniks (commanders of the temniks), tysyaniks (commanders of the thousand), and tyasyaniks (commanders of the hundred), from the headquarters of the Golden Horde khans, viewed the organization of the Russian lands a century after the first censuses.
The debate over who formally sat at the Kyivan throne is far less important than the question of who the leaders beneath it reported to. And they reported to the khan. Most curiously, the top of the Kyivan chiliarchy was apparently a Russian, and the centurion beneath him was likely a Mongol. The Mongol rulers were not interested in the blood of their servants, but in their willingness to serve the empire.
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