the golden horde and the black sea 201
travel to tabriz,235 and in 1346 we have the last recorded instance of the
Venetian Senate sending ships to trebizond to take the caravan route to
azerbaijan.236
from Sarai’s point of view, the transmontane situation not only made
post-Ilkhanid persia finally ripe for a campaign with some chance of vic-
tory: it was in fact a positive invitation to conquest. right from the begin-
ning of his reign, these conditions had brought Janibek closer than any
of his predecessors had ever been to achieving the great transcaucasian
goal, and he restructured Golden horde foreign policy accordingly.
once convinced that he could recover the territories from an enfeebled
persia by the strength of his own armies, Janibek immediately concluded
that the Mamluk alliance was no longer the Golden horde’s primary
interest. after 1335, the alliance with egypt against the Ilkhanate lost any
meaning for the Jochid state.
the political/military purpose of the alliance had always been the driv-
ing force behind Sarai’s relations with egypt, and now that it had van-
ished, the lesser, economic side of the relationship was also thrown into
question. the Jochid khans had always considered the export of slaves as
a necessary sacrifice to keep friendly relations with egypt, but it was also
a plague which had exhausted the Golden horde for a century. thus with
no further need for the sultan’s friendship, Janibek saw that unlike his
predecessors, there was nothing to stop him from staunching the chronic
demographic outflow.
a further factor, also unknown to his predecessors, had appeared a few
years after the khan took the throne, strengthening demographic con-
cerns and adding to the arguments for stopping the slave trade: this was
plague in the full, biological sense of the word.237 although the extent of
its ravages in the Golden horde are not known, it was certainly one cause
235 See above, pp. 138 ff. and cf. Lopez, “Documents,” p. 454, Bautier, “relations,” p. 277,
Balard, Romanie, II, p. 720; all scholars agree that the two republics turned once more to
egypt when they lost this source of imports, particularly spices.
236 cf. Karpov, Impero, pp. 84–85, and above, pp. 138 ff.
237 During the siege of 1345, Janibek catapulted the corpses of Jochid soldiers who had
died of the plague over the walls of caffa to spread the epidemic (heyd, Histoire, II, 196,
Grousset, Empire, p. 483, Skržinskaja, Storia, pp. 64–65, petti Balbi, “città,” p. 175, Spinei,
Moldova, p. 268, Basso, Genova, p. 98); according to Ibn al-Wardī (poliak, “caractère,”
p. 231), the plague only reached the ulus of Jochi from the far east in 1346/7. this biologi-
cal warfare had unexpected effects: caffa resisted, but ships from its port carried infected
passengers, and their pathogens, to egypt and Western europe, where they caused the
Black Death (cf. Zakirov, Otnosheniya, p. 91, and more generally hecker, Volkskrankheiten,
and Gasquett, Death).