Russians (East Slavs)
Nation | Active
1283 CE to 2057 CE
Russians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, vwho speak the Russian language and primarily live in Russia.
They are the most numerous ethnic group in Russia constituting more than 80% of the country's population according to the census of 2010, and the most numerous ethnic group in Europe.
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The Golden Horde of Batu has more time and more room for expansion of its territories than any other Mongol khanate.
The Mongols will maintain sovereignty over eastern Russia from 1240 to 1480, and they control the upper Volga area, the territories of the former Volga Bulgar state, Siberia, the northern Caucasus, Bulgaria (for a time), the Crimea, and Khwarezm.
By applying the principle of indirect rule, the Golden Horde Mongols will be able to preserve the Mongol ruling class and the local dynasties for more than two hundred years.
The influence that the Golden Horde Mongols come to have over medieval Russia and other area is immense and lasting.
They play a role in unifying the future Russian state, provide new political institutions, influence imperial visions, and, through indirect rule, facilitate the appearance of a Muscovite autocracy.
The development of the Russian state can be traced from Vladimir-Suzdal' through Muscovy to the Russian Empire.
Muscovy draws people and wealth to the northeastern periphery of Kievan Rus'; establishes trade links to the Baltic Sea, the White Sea, and the Caspian Sea and to Siberia; and creates a highly centralized and autocratic political system.
Muscovite political traditions, therefore, exert a powerful influence on Russian society.
The heartland of Rus', including Kiev, meanwhile becomes the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ruled by Gediminas and his successors, after the semi-legendary Battle on the Irpein River.
Following the 1386 Union of Krewo, a dynastic union between Poland and Lithuania, much of what will become northern Ukraine is ruled by the increasingly Slavicised local Lithuanian nobles as part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The so-called Galicia–Volhynia Wars end by 1392.
Polish colonizers of depopulated lands in northern and central Ukraine soon found or re-found many towns.
The Mongols' vast contacts open Russia to new influences, both Eastern and Western.
The reason the Mongols do not occupy Russia itself, but leave its administration to local princes, is not inability to administer a society that is both urban and agrarian, or Russian resistance.
Rather, some historians believe that Russia had little to offer the Mongols in terms of produce or trade routes, and even tax revenues were insignificant compared with the wealth of the southern realms under their control.
The inability of cavalry to operate in forests and swamps—a factor that limits the northward advance of the Mongols and largely determines the northern frontier of their empire—is undoubtedly a distinct disincentive as well.
The Golden Horde Mongols and the Mongol Tatars, although still nomads, lose their original identities over time and—as happens to Mongols in China and Iran—become largely synonymous with the local Turkic peoples, the Kipchaks.
Arabic and Tatar replace Mongol as the official language of the Golden Horde, and increasing political fragmentation occurs.
The power of the Golden Horde khans slowly declines, particularly as a powerful new state rises in central Russia.
The Golden Horde capital at Sarai becomes a prosperous center of commerce.
Here, as in China, Mongol rule means free trade, the exchange of goods between the East and the West, and also broad religious toleration.
The Golden Horde in the mid-thirteenth century had been administratively and militarily an integral part of the Mongol empire with its capital at Karakorum.
By the early fourteenth century, however, this allegiance has become largely symbolic and ceremonial.
Although certain Mongol administrative forms—such as census and postal systems—are maintained, other customs are not.
The Golden Horde embraces Islam as its state religion and, with it, adopts new and more complex administrative forms to replace those of the old regime that had been devised for conquest.
Even though most Mongols remain steppe nomads, new cities are founded, and a permanent urbanized bureaucracy and social structure takes shape at Sarai.
The Golden Horde allies itself with the Mamluks and negotiates with Constantinople to combat the Ilkhans in a struggle to control Azerbaijan.
Rather than isolating Russia, the Mongol presence and extensive diplomatic system brings envoys to Sarai from central and southern Europe, the Pope, Southwest Asia, Egypt, Iran, Inner Asia, China, and Mongolia.
The metropolitan of the Orthodox Church moves in 1299 to the city of Vladimir in the wake of the Mongol invasion, and Vladimir-Suzdal' replaces Kievan Rus as the religious center.
Historians have debated the long-term influence of Mongol rule on Russian society.
The Mongols have been blamed for the destruction of Kievan Rus', the breakup of the "Russian" nationality into three components, and the introduction of the concept of "oriental despotism" into Russia, but most historians agree that Kievan Rus' was not a homogeneous political, cultural, or ethnic entity and that the Mongols merely accelerated a fragmentation that had begun before the invasion.
Historians also credit the Mongol regime with an important role in the development of Muscovy as a state.
Under Mongol occupation, for example, Muscovy develops its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and military organization.
Kievan Rus' also leaves a powerful legacy.
The leader of the Rurik Dynasty has united a large territory inhabited by East Slavs into an important, albeit unstable, state.
After Vladimir accepts Eastern Orthodoxy, Kievan Rus' comes together under a church structure and develops a Byzantine-Slavic synthesis in culture, statecraft, and the arts.
On the northeastern periphery of Kievan Rus', those traditions are adapted to form the Russian autocratic state.
The principality of Galicia-Volhynia to the southwest has highly developed trade relations with its Polish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian neighbors and emerges as another successor to Kievan Rus'.
In the early thirteenth century, Prince Roman Mstislavich had united the two previously separate principalities, conquered Kiev, and assumed the title of grand duke of Kievan Rus'.
His son, Prince Daniil (Danylo; r. 1238-64), is the first ruler of Kievan Rus' to accept a crown from the Roman papacy, apparently doing so without breaking with Orthodoxy.
Early in the fourteenth century, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople grants the rulers of Galicia-Volhynia a metropolitan to compensate for the move of the Kievan metropolitan to Vladimir.
However, a long and unsuccessful struggle against the Mongols combine with internal opposition to the prince and foreign intervention to weaken Galicia-Volhynia.
With the end of the Mstislavich Dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century, Galicia-Volhynia cease to exist; Lithuania takes Volhynia, and Poland annexes Galicia.