“Without Horde”
Spiritual certificate of the Grand Duke Dmitry Ivanovich.
April-May 1389
As it became relatively recently known, the term “Mongol-Tatar yoke” will disappear from school textbooks, according to which they will teach young “Russians”.
In itself, this fact would not have anything alarming or unpleasant - the term "yoke" is frankly unfortunate, humiliating and borrowed by the old historiography from the most murky source possible - the Polish historical essays.
The Poles considered themselves descendants of the ancient Sarmatians, everything that is located from them to the east - Tataria (recently this nonsense was revived in the writings of Fomenko-Nosovsky) and tried hard to instill this point of view on Russia in Western Europe. They regarded the Russians as “slaves by nature” and tried to designate the domination over them of the Horde by the offensive word from Roman historiography — iugum — yoke, yoke.
Every educated European, who knew Latin and read Titus Livius, immediately came to mind an episode in the Kavdinsky Gorge, when the Roman legions surrounded by Samnites were bound to go under the yoke for greater humiliation. However, the wise Samnite old men warned then: kill the Romans or let go in peace, but do not humiliate - they will return and take revenge. So it happened.
The disappearance of this emotionally loaded Polish borrowing from textbooks could only be welcomed, if not for one “but”. The causes and ideological context of this disappearance.
The seizure was made under the pressure of Tatar historians, who said that this term “kindles”, “does not contribute” and in general in the Republic of Tatarstan it is customary to consider Genghis Khan not as a bloody conqueror but as a great reformer.
“In Tatarstan itself, the Golden Horde is considered an empire, and Genghis Khan is not a conqueror, but a reformer,” said Rafael Khakimov, vice president of the Republican Academy of Sciences, who heads the Republican Institute of History. The Tatar historian motivates the removal of the term “Tatar-Mongol yoke” by the fact that Russia “should abandon the Eurocentric approach”, since it is a “Eurasian state”.
The deification of Genghis Khan and Batu in modern Tatarstan strikes me the most. It has nothing to do with either the “Russian” identity (with it, as we know, the authorities of Tatarstan have always had some difficulties) or with local nationalism.
The fact is that the title ethnos of modern Tatarstan are the descendants of the ancient people of the Volga Bulgars. It was a highly civilized sedentary people with a rich culture, controlling a significant part of the trade route “from the Varyag to the Persians”, which was the most important for the early Middle Ages.
One of the first in the territory of present-day Russia, the Bulgars accepted Islam, and this was the complex and cultural Islam of cities, akin to Islam of the Baghdad Caliphate, and not the simplified Islam of the steppe people.
In the 1236 year, Baty invaded Bulgaria, defeated it, interrupted a significant part of the population and plundered many cities. The Bulgars repeatedly rebelled against the power of the Golden Horde, and only the most brutal genocide broke their resistance. The winners were so cruel that they deprived the Bulgars of their name, they turned into "Tatars" - on behalf of the worst enemies of Genghis Khan, whom the Mongols subjected to systematic extermination.
The damage of the Bulgarians inflicted by the Mongols was much greater than the damage to Russia, and the cult of Genghis Khan or Batu for the people of Tatarstan is as strange as the cult of Sultan Murad I in Serbia or Adolf Hitler in Poland.
I personally have only one logical explanation. The chanting of the Golden Horde in Tatarstan is not so much a nationalistic as a neo-imperial character. The horde was a vast nomadic empire, stretching throughout the Volga region, the Don River, and even Transnistria.
And, perhaps, someone in Kazan is dreaming that one day this city will take the place of the ancient Saray, when the rule of the “Russian colonialists” will collapse. In this case, for the sake of such adventurist claims, inflate the cult of Genghis Khan and in fact is logical. For a life in the “multinational Russian Federation” or even for Tatar nationalism, such a cult is absurd. And for the descendants of the Bulgars, identifying oneself with the bloody steppe dwellers is simply humiliating.
Genghis Khan in general occupies too large a place in the history of Russia, inherited from the history of the USSR. It is possible that the great conqueror was indeed born on the territory of modern Russia, in a valley flowing between Mongolia and Buryatia of the Onon river, but this fact has not been established precisely - with equal probability he could have been born in Mongolia. However, all the historical activities of Temujin-Genghis Khan proceeded in Mongolia and China.
Surprisingly, Chingis himself did not make a single trip to the North. He personally commanded the invasion of Central Asia and the destruction of Khorezm, so his presence in the history books of the USSR was meaningful, but what he does in the history books of modern Russia as an independent character is not very clear. The invasion of Russia was not by Genghis Khan, not “the empire of Genghis Khan” (with it the Russians had only the tragic “airborne clash” on Kalka), but the Mongol empire created by Genghis Khan.
The decision to march on the West and the assignment of this march to Batu Khan was taken at a kurultai meeting after the death of the founder of the dynasty. If you follow the same methodology that Genghis Khan and his portrait got into our textbooks, in the sections on the 18th century, you need to give a detailed sketch of the Great French Revolution and put a portrait of Robespierre, since it was this Revolution that gave birth to Napoleon who invaded Russia in France.
Yes, and the history of the Great Patriotic War will have to start at least with the biography of Hitler's patron Field Marshal Ludendorff (the more so that the last one in the First World War had much more to do with Russian history).
The hypertrophied presence of Genghis Khan in our history is connected, first of all, with the dense ideological pressure in the XX – XXI centuries of the intellectual school of "Eurasians".
Gathered in Slavic-German Prague, seen from the Eurasian peoples except a janitor-tatar and a couple of Hungarians, Russian intellectuals tried to solve the problem: "how to justify the unity of the Russian Empire space in a condition when the king's power collapsed and the Third Rome lies in dust?".
That the great empire will be collected for a long time by communism or socialism, none of them believed, the West, as it was supposed to European intellectuals of the Spengler era, openly despised, and they decided to find an iron one, in the spirit of fashion in that era of geopolitics and historical geography, the solution: to declare Russia the historical successor of the empire of Genghis Khan and substantiate on this foundation the need for the unity of this space, the iron and aggressive imperial statehood with the "anti-Western" ideology.
Since the Eurasian movement was, first of all, political and only then historical and intellectual, then, speaking of history, we will find among the Eurasians the most traditional views. Let's say N.S. Trubetskoy speaks of the “Tatar-Mongol yoke”, which simultaneously both oppressed and “taught” the Russians to dominate Eurasia. True, the question arises, if we accept this concept, why only the Russians “learned” the Mongolian steppe, and where the steppek closer to them mostly learned nothing and were crushed and absorbed by the power of the Russian tsars?
The answer to this question is quite simple - no "Mongolian system" existed. There was a Chinese system borrowed by the Mongols, which was built, using the trust of Genghis Khan and especially Ogedei, a Chinese Khitan intellectual Ye-lii Chutsay. How the Mongols themselves ordered the lands they conquered is well known.
Noyons suggested that Ugedei cut the entire population of northern China, destroy cities and turn these lands into pastures. Ye-lii Chu-cai dissuaded Khan from this barbarism and proposed the creation of an administrative system, harmonious taxation, in general, everything that Eurasians liked so much in the Horde order. What the Russians learned from the Mongols in terms of state building (according to their own teachings of the Eurasians) (was there really such a “training” is a matter of long discussion) is not credit for Genghis Khan or Batu, but Ye-lii Chutsay.
One civilized sedentary book people — Russians — learned from another — Chinese. The role of the Mongols - the role of the communicator - here is similar to the one they played for the West, bringing Chinese paper, Chinese gunpowder and much more. However, unlike the West, which brought enormous benefits to the possibility of penetration along the Mongolian roads to China, Russia paid such a price for "training" that it was probably not necessary.
Eurasians, by the way, created a great deal from the bird language of the current semi-official ideology. Their texts are full of endless arguments about the "Eurasian brotherhood of nations", about the "multi-nation nation of Eurasia", in which the Russian people will have to act as a bond and cement. But if you look at their political program, expressed in the text “Eurasianism. The wording of 1927 of the Year ”, then we suddenly find there those Russian nationalist demands that even today many Russian nationalists formulate with caution:
“It is necessary that the current system in the USSR, imbued with the beginnings of internationalism and communism, be transformed into a supranational system on a national basis. A prerequisite for such a rebirth is the provision of opportunities for the Russian people to state-shaped national identity and the construction of a national state, the possibilities that they are actually deprived of at the present time. "
So modern Russophobia in the name of Eurasianism is a break with classical Eurasianism, which has never denied the state rights of the Russian people.
The next stage in the formation of our "Genghis Khan" was the work of a remarkable artist of the word and an outstanding thinker, the creator of the passionary theory of ethnogenesis Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov. I deliberately do not say “historian”, because Gumilev is exactly as a historian has always been presented, presented and will be numerous claims - for arbitrary treatment of facts, guessing of facts, the artist’s magnificent contempt for direct statements of sources in the name of the author’s “I see this.”
To the greatest extent, this concerns the large-scale historical myth created by Gumilyov about the relations between Russian and steppe peoples, about the anti-Western brotherhood of Russians and Mongols, about the almost non-conflict existence of peoples within the Golden Horde.
A detailed analysis of both the myth created by Gumilyov and the reasons that pushed him to do this is not necessary here - every reader can see the magnificent book by Sergey Belyakov “Gumilyov son of Gumilyov” - not only the fascinating biography of the learned son of two great poets, but also respectful, but strict and ruthless analysis of the "Mongolian myth."
Suffice it to say that it was Gumilev’s constructions that lay at the basis of the countless constructions of “Tatarstan historians”, “Eurasian historians” and banal metropolitan Russophobes, engaged not in research, but in the mystification of the relationship between Russia and the Mongols, Russia and the Horde.
Any indications of the enormous damage done to the Horde’s development of the Russian people, they categorically silence the “black legend” stub, launching explicit phantoms, such as the completely fictional “Mongolian detachment that determined the fate of the fateful Ice Massacre”, and reflections on the history of the Russian people are interrupted fictional Gumilyov design that Ancient Russia has no relation to Russia, and Russia and the Russian - this is a country and ethnicity, grown under the authority of the Horde.
In this paragraph, which represents a frank historical discrimination of the Russian people, both the “Eurasians” and the Ukrainian chauvinists, Russophobes, for whom the “Moskal” is not a Slav, but a Tatar and Finno-Ugr, and, paradoxically, the originators of the concept, fully agree. The new textbook, which gave the title of the first chapter of his essay with a light paraphrase of Gumilevsky's “From Russia to Russia”: “From Ancient Russia to the Russian State”.
The absurdity of these constructions is quite obvious. The history of Germany and the German people begin with Charlemagne, and even with Arminius, who beat the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. The French made tremendous efforts to assimilate into their history the ancient Gauls. In China, it is possible that you will be jailed if you begin to preach the Gumilyov theory of changing many unrelated Chinese ethnic groups.
In the Russian case, we have a single historical tradition, one continuously developing national language (I don’t know how you are, I understand the Old Russian chronicles without any tension, and experts who mastered archeography also easily cope not only with printed but also with handwritten text), a single self-name and self-awareness. The fact that the geographical center of Russia in the Moscow period moved to the northeast is also not surprising.
The lack of movement of the capital is characteristic only for a few countries - England and France. The capital of Spain today is not Toledo, the capital of Germany is not Aachen, Poland is not Krakow, Sweden is not Uppsala. After the NATO-Albanian aggression and the rejection of Kosovo, Serbia lost the core of its statehood.
Gumilyov built a strange scheme from Russia and Russia with his own good intentions. Within the framework of his theory, which strictly limited the life of the ethnic group 1200 for years, the Russians, who emerged in the 9th century, should have completed their existence with the hardest obscuration. And taking our birth to the XIV – XV centuries, the author gave us a long “golden autumn”. He could hardly have imagined that his constructions would be used in the dirty propaganda game of shortening Russian history and, in proportion to this shortening, detracting from Russian historical rights.
The controversy over the particulars of the history of Russian-Horde relations would make this already not short text completely dimensionless. Therefore, I will allow myself to choose a different path - as briefly as possible, to present a systematic vision of that period of Russian history, which they now propose not to call the “Mongol-Tatar yoke” of its causes, course and consequences. All particulars will be commented in the course of lighting the whole.
***
The history of the huge space, which has now become a custom to call the Great Steppe, has a great turning point - this is the 4th century of our era, when at the European end of the Great Steppe the Huns emerged from the historical fog. Prior to that, for several millennia, most of Northern Eurasia was dominated by Indo-Iranian peoples (“Aryans” - as they were designated before the profanation of this word by the Nazis).
They were formed somewhere in the Urals, in the same area in the Sintashta archaeological culture area they mastered the construction of cities and metallurgy. Then the part went to the south, to Central Asia, Iran, India. The other part remained in the steppe, perfectly mastered horse breeding and the art of horsemanship and acquired the name of the Scythians in history. Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans succeeded each other, first in the role of masters of all Eurasia, then only its Western part.
With all the uniqueness of their culture and love of raids, they very constructively communicated with highly developed agricultural peoples, in particular, the Greeks who appeared in the Black Sea region. At the junction of cultures and economic structures, peculiar states and vivid cultural monuments arose, such as the Scythian gold created by the Greeks for the Scythians.
At the same time, in the east of Eurasia, near the borders of China, peculiar traditions of the Turkic and Mongolian nomadic peoples were being formed, which China plundered, quarreled with it, received from it a military response (of which the Great Wall of China was a part) or, on the contrary, tried to assimilate it culture
When the Chinese defeated the people of the Huns, part of it submitted to the Chinese, and then arranged a bloody time of troubles in the 4th – 6th centuries, compared with which the horrors of our European Great Migration simply turned pale, the second part of the Huns went west, turned into the Huns and pushed the beginning Great Migration, defeating the state is ready in the Northern Black Sea region.
From that moment on, steppe Eurasia became the lot of the Turks, the Mongols, and the Ugrian nomads, who were often almost indistinguishable from them, who, however, migrating to Pannonia, parted and turned into the European nation of Hungarians. While at one end of Eurasia, the steppe people were tearing China apart, a short-lived, but Turu Khaganate that set the standard of the steppe empire was formed in the center, more and more wild people appeared on the borders of Europe — the Bulgarians were replaced by Bulgarians and obrens (impostors, who named themselves Avar "), Those - Khazars, Khazars - Pechenegs, and Pechenegs - Polovtsy.
Meanwhile, north of the Steppe, Russia began to develop in the forest-steppe and steppe zone. Historians and geographers of Eurasianism completely incorrectly determined the place of Russia in the geographical landscape of Eurasia, stating that the Russians were representatives of the “forest” in its imaginary centuries-old struggle with the “steppe”. The Russians lived in the forest because there it was easier to defend themselves from the steppe inhabitants, but the rivers were the true formative landscape of the Russian people.
The whole of northern Eurasia, from the source of the Neman to the mouth of the Amur, is a complex network of closely adjoining river basins, dragging ships between them without difficulty.
The Byzantines still noted among the ancient Slavs the tendency to live on rivers, lakes and swamps. However, in comparison with the Slavs, the Russian ethnos made an important adaptation discovery - the Russians learned not only to live comfortably in the flood plain, but also mastered long-distance strategic reconnaissance.
Most likely, we owe this Russian peculiarity to the combination of the Slavic and Varangian principles. Whether the Norsemen were Scandinavians, as the Normanists insist, or the Western Slavs, as the anti-Normanists claim, they were in any case representatives of the Baltic tradition of long-distance navigation, which experienced its golden age in the Viking Age. But if with the sea the Varangians were on “you”, so that they could even climb into Sicily, even into Iceland and America, then sailing along rivers with portages and rapids is a specific activity.
Therefore, the Vikings could not have mastered the route along the Russian Plain to Constantinople and Persia without the help of the local population. Thus arose the grandiose synthesis of the Slavic floodplain adaptation and the Varangian long voyages, which gave rise to the phenomenon of Russia.
Emperor Constantine Bagryanorodny left us a wonderful description of this synthesis, which turned the Russian rivers into the likeness of distant sea roads.
“Odnodorovki, coming to Constantinople from foreign Russia, come from Nevogardy, in which sat Svyatoslav, son of Russian prince Igor, as well as from the fortress Miliniski, from Teluits, Chernigogi and from Vysehrad. All of them go down the Dnieper River and gather in the Kiev fortress, called Samvat. Their Slavs, called Kriviteins and Lensanins, and other Slavs cut their trees in their mountains during the winter and, having discovered them, with the opening of the time when the ice melts, they enter the nearby lakes. Then, since they (the lakes) flow into the Dnieper River, from there they themselves enter the same river, come to Kiev, pull the boats ashore for rigging and sell Russam. The Russians, buying only the decks themselves, dismantle the old odnodretriki, take from them the oars, oarlocks and other gear and equip new ones. In the month of June, having moved along the Dnieper River, they descend into Vitchev, a fortress subservient to Russia. Having waited there for two or three days, until all odnodrevki approach, they move to the path and descend along the named river Dnieper ”.
Already from the beginning of the 9th century, long before the appearance of Rurik, the Khazars and Greeks felt the pressure of the aggressive river power of the Rus, perhaps already having the center of Kiev. The Khazars, who were then allies of Byzantium, asked the Greeks to send engineers to cover their northern borders along the Don. It was the lands around Kiev in the later tradition that were called “Rus”, and when they came to Kiev from Smolensk or Chernigov, they were said to “go to Russia”.
18 June 860, the Rus came under the walls of Constantinople (they were headed according to our chronicles Askold and Dir) and horrified its inhabitants. Deliverance was revered by a miracle. It is this event, and in no way the establishment of Ruriococracy in the north - the first significant event known to us in Russian history. It had countless consequences, like the beginning of the mission of Cyril and Methodius, which ended with the creation of Slavic writing.
The Byzantines were confident that they had succeeded in converting Christianity, and the greatest thinker, writer and orator - the father of Byzantine Christianity, Patriarch Photius, in his own way, glorified the appearance in the history of a new great people: “the so-called people who are many times famous and Growing up - those who, after enslaving the people who lived around them and, because they were too arrogant, raised a hand to the Romea power itself ... nowadays, however, they also changed the pagan and godless faith, which they had before, on a pure and Separate religion of Christians. "
Then, however, the Rurik dynasty that came from the north tried to appropriate the merit of the Tsargrad campaign to itself - a beautiful historiographic phantom appeared - Oleg's campaign against Tsargrad, incredibly successful, ending with nailing a shield on the gate, but ... for some reason not having any reflection in Byzantine sources.
The Byzantines not only did not hesitate to defeat themselves, but also described them with many details, and their silence speaks only about one thing: there was no campaign, it was composed to glorify Oleg compared to Askold and Dir and as a “preface” to trade agreements with the Greeks (Oleg, who was an outstanding politician, probably concluded these treaties).
The long period of military-trade relations of Russia with Byzantium through the Black Sea began, and the Arabs and Persians - through the Caspian Sea. Russia with great cruelty and aggression crushed obstacles in its path. The princes in Kiev subjugated the Slavic tribes (here, by the way, I must say a few words about the popular myth that “Kyiv princes sold their people into slavery” - princes sold not “their people” into slavery - living in Kiev and around it , for example, Vyatichi, who were considered tributaries, and not their people).
Svyatoslav defeated the Khazars, attacked the Volga Bulgars, defeated the Danube Bulgaria and threatened the Byzantine emperor that he would be thrown into Asia, leaving Europe alone (the first Russian European, whether someone likes it or not). But in the structure of the Russian expansion there was one really weak point - this is the steppe.
Just as not to beat each other to an elephant and a whale, it was just as difficult for a horse to cope with a horse. The Pechenegs cut the lower reaches of the Russian rivers, willingly working with chain dogs from the Greeks, who appreciated the fact that in the area of the rapids the Russians who left their rooks were defenseless.
Let us again give the floor to Constantine the Porphyrogenitus: “The Russians cannot come even to this royal city of Romeev, if they don’t live in peace with the Pechenegs, either for the sake of war or trade, since, having reached the rapids on ships, if they do not pull the ships out of the river and do not carry them on their shoulders; attacking them then, the Pecheneg people easily turn to flight and arrange a massacre, since they cannot perform two works at the same time. ”
The Dnieper rapids cost the lives of Svyatoslav, and his son Vladimir, having become friends with Byzantium, having accepted baptism, used this to declare a great war to the steppe heathen (what was the ratio of trade interests, revenge for the father, hostility of the steppe, interference of external forces from Byzantium to Khorezm - we hardly ever know for certain). Anyway, it was the war with the Pechenegs that occupied Prince Vladimir most of his reign.
South Russia was covered with fortified cities. The Russian warriors massively transferred horses and mastered the methods of the steppe war; the archaeological materials left over from the Scythian-Sarmatian time — the Zmiev ramparts, which were poured and fortified, were put into operation. Saying “it is not good that there are few cities near Kiev,” Vladimir began a massive migration of Slavs from the north to build new fortresses.
The most popular Russian legend of those years was the legend about the founding of Pereyaslavl after a duel between the Pecheneg warrior and Kozhemyak Yan Isomar. Yaroslav the Wise continued the fight. After the general march of Pechenegs to Russia in the 1036 year, accompanied by an attempt to seize Kiev, the Pecheneg star began to decline: the steppeters quarreled with Russia and Byzantium to their misfortune and eventually 29 of April 1091 of the year cut out after the defeat whole people.
“One could see an extraordinary spectacle: an entire people, who was considered not tens of thousands, but exceeding any number, with their wives and children, completely died on that day,” wrote Anna Comnina. The day of this massacre was celebrated in Constantinople as the "Day of the Pechenegs."
Russia by that time the Polovtsians were already more concerned. Beginning with the 1055 year, they are attacking Russia more and more often. Their danger was all the more so because part of the fighting princes (first of all, the famous Oleg Svyatoslavich) willingly used the Polovtsian help in internal strife. However, the threat posed by the Polovtsy was still so serious - they plundered the cities, massacred the population, killed the monks of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra in 1096, and Vladimir Monomakh, the brightest and far-sighted of the Russian politicians of that era (and one of the greatest people in general) in Russian history) it was possible to gather in one anti-Crimean coalition all, including Oleg.
Monomakh has developed a brilliant strategy to fight the steppe. First, instead of the traditional summer war, he proposed to strike at them in early spring, when horses, emaciated after the winter starter, were powerless. Secondly, Monomakh decided to use the traditionally strong side of the Russians and conduct a landing operation on the river - while the Russian cavalry marched across the steppe, the Russian boats reached the rapids and landed troops at Khortitsa, who went deep into the Polovtsian lands on foot.
4 April 1103, in the Battle of Soutine, the Polovtsy were defeated, and they were dealt a crushing strategic blow. However, the threat could be completely eliminated only by ruining the steppe camps. And in 1111, a real crusade began (in Russia they were very interested in the deeds of the Crusaders for the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher and just in 1104 – 1106 they sent Abbot Daniel there, who was friendly received by King Baldwin of Jerusalem).
They rode in a steppe in a sleigh, then abandoned carts and heavy armor and appeared lightly in front of the city of Sharukan. They carried a cross in front of the army, priests sang tropari and kondaks ... and the gates of the city opened. There were many Christians in Sharukan, most likely Alans, and they friendly met their fellow believers. The decisive battle took place on 27 March 1111, the Salnice River. It was a difficult, bloody battle, which ended in the complete defeat of the steppe men.
The crusade of Monomakh broke the back of the Polovtsian aggression, although, of course, could not stop it completely - som could not beat the horse in the steppe. But the Russians proved that they are not easy victims and can give change. A balance was established in which the Russian princes could marry their women, maintain a strong alliance with the khans.
A community of "their unclean" —Torks, Berendeis, Pechenegs — who played an important role in the struggle for the Kiev table, was formed around Kiev. However, in the second half of the 12th century, the generation of Polovtsy, frightened by Monomakh, grew up; they struck the most sensitive blow of the considerably weakened Russian lands - they tried to block the way from Varyag to the Greeks in its steppe section.
In 1167, they attacked the caravans of the merchants of the “buckwheat”. Kiev princes had to put cordons to protect the river path. And in 1170, Prince Mstislav Izyaslavich again went to the steppe to the Polovtsian camps and made a terrible defeat. But by that time, the star of the new Khan, whose name is known to almost every Russian - Konchak, has already risen over the Seversky Donets.
If the campaign against Prince Igor Svyatoslavich could be explained - the Chernigov princes always wanted to return part of the Polovtsian lands to their principality, then the unique failure of this campaign, which deserved the attention of the chroniclers and the epic poet, was due to the refusal of Monomakh tactics - the Russians moved deep into the steppe in May, when the Polovtsians were the strongest.
Konchak turned out to be a good tactician who defeated Igor on his head, and a cunning diplomat, after the union and marriage that bound him (however, did the captive Vladimir Igorevich want to marry Konchakovna and how warm were his feelings for the khan's daughter - the story, unlike the opera, is silent). But Konchak was inclined no more than other steppe people towards the “Eurasian brotherhood” - the tragic fate of the city of Rimova on the Sula River speaks of this. He was besieged by the Polovtsi, bravely defended, but all those who did not manage to escape through the "Roman Marsh" (oh, how would Fomenko’s fantasy play out!) Were completely cut out.
In the first third of the 13th century, the Polovtsi were familiar and familiar enemies for Russians, who were either reconciled, fought, or went on campaigns against other opponents - the Hungarians. This relationship can not be called good neighborliness. On the contrary, even numerous marriages with the Polovchanka, even the Christianization of the Polovtsian part of the hostile tone of the Russian chronicles and the Lay are not in the least diminishing.
How would the story develop further - would the Russians turn the strategic situation on the border with the Steppe and break the Polovtsy, or the strategic balance would continue for many centuries without leading, however, to any “Eurasian synthesis” - it is impossible to predict.
But in 1223, the Mongols appeared in the Polovtsian Steppe, Desht-i-Kipchak ...
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