ABSTRACT
It is owing to the Mongol conquest and to the awarding of the lands to the north of the Black Sea to a grandson of Chinggis Khan, Batu, that these became part of the political grouping that has been called the empire of the Golden Horde. The Mongols had arrived in this region from the east, and Batu’s descendants had thus to govern a vast area spanning both sides of the traditional boundary separating Asia from Europe. The first westerner to have given a description of it, Marco Polo, knew it already as comprising the empire of the ‘Tatars of the West’, giving its dependencies as Russia, Cumania, Alania, Circassia, Gothia, Khazaria, and the land of Lac (perhaps Lezghia), all of them conquered by the khan Batu, and also the ‘Land of Darkness’ neighbouring Russia and the Arctic Ocean, the world of furs and of sledges pulled by dogs; nevertheless he distinguishes from the empire of the Golden Horde the ‘region towards the north’ that corresponds to the territory of the khans of the White Horde, descendants of Batu’s brother, Orda, which is situated in southern Siberia and north of the Aral sea, and which Marco Polo regards as independent.1
