the golden horde and the black sea 199
Golden horde—thus demonstrating by contrast how wise khan Özbek’s
Black Sea policy had been.
4.2.5 Janibek: The Great Rupture
after bloodily disposing of his brothers and taking the throne in Sarai in
1342,226 the new khan turned his attention to foreign policy with the same
vigour which had characterised his father at the beginning of his reign.
an obsessive concern to recover azerbaijan and the priceless city of
tabriz had governed Jochid foreign policy for nearly a century, and the
same concern sealed Janibek’s political fate. this was more evident in his
case than with any of his predecessors, however, since after a long line of
Jochid rulers had wasted their energies on the goal, he was the first actu-
ally to conquer the famous town. an anonymous persian chronicler of the
opposing camp summed up this absolute priority of his reign, in words at
once entirely objective and somewhat reproachful: “[although] his realm
flourished and his power grew, [Janibek] coveted persia.”227 If his achieve-
ment in conquering tabriz impressed contemporaries, it did the same to
later historians as well.228
Janibek did no more than attain a goal for which his predecessors
too had striven ceaselessly, yet the conditions for his brief, late success
in 1356229 were entirely different from conditions in their time. he was
single-minded in exploiting the opportunities presented by the geopoliti-
cal configuration which had taken shape during the last decade of Özbek’s
reign, which his father had not turned to Golden horde advantage either
because he was too weak or he no longer wished to.
the decisive factor which forced Janibek to reconsider Jochid policy was
the collapse of the Ilkhanate in 1335. When the Mongol state fell apart into
a multitude of quarrelsome rival fragments,230 it created a power vacuum
which sharpened the Jochid appetite for expansion, long kept in check.
When abū Sa‛īd died, and his dynasty with him, this left the steppe Mon-
gols as heirs to the Ilkhanate. though they thus had new legal grounds
226 cf. Spuler, Horde, pp. 99–109; hammer-purgstall, Geschichte, pp. 305–312, howorth,
History, II, pp. 249–256.
227 ‘history of Sheikh uwaisʼ/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, II, p. 101; cf. Grekov, Yakubovskiy,
Orda, p. 263.
228 cf. Spuler, Horde, p. 99, Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 263–266.
229 for the numismatic evidence for this date of the occupation of tabriz, cf. Grekov,
Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 264–266.
230 cf. Spuler, Horde, pp. 107–115.