ABSTRACT
The Rusiian sources provide testimony regarding the Ordu, not the Mongol Empire as a whole. Those Russian sources that carry testimony regarding the Ulus of Jochi and its successor states can be divided into three genres: chronicles, tales and saints’ vitae, and documents. Tales and saints’ vitae could be incorporated into a chronicle or be copied as stand-alone works. Initially, the chroniclers used pejorative language about the Mongols, drawing on Christian religious terminology. When the Mongols returned to the western steppe, the chroniclers used the same rhetorical tropes they had used to denigrate the Polovtsians earlier. After 1448, the chronicles in the area of the Rus' Church under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of All Rus', Iona, revert to the pre-1252 pejorative terminology about the Tatars. The chronicles also variously describe the so-called Stand on the Ugra of 1480.
