the golden horde and the black sea 219
this inference reveals how gravely the Jochid state was generally
affected by the khan’s stubborn anti-Genoese fixation, which for a decade
and a half had been a principal obstacle to the conquest of tabriz—the
Golden horde’s absolute priority, as vital during his reign as it had been
for Berke-Khan at his coronation.
Janibek was only able to shake off his obsession too late, with fatal
consequences for himself and his successors. his victory in tabriz was
a last gasp, when the horde was exhausted by its many delays and pre-
vious attempts: it was compromised from the start, and could only be
a brief triumph. When the occupation forces withdrew abruptly,297 one
consequence was that the great Muslim merchants gave up any hope of a
restored Ilkhanate under Jochid rule.
Yet the gravest flaw at the end of Janibek’s reign was the internal situ-
ation in the ulus itself: the price of pursuing his idée fixe, the conquest
of caffa, combined with the effects of the plague to threaten the Golden
horde’s future. his successor Berdibek could only await the outcome.
4.2.6 Berdibek and Mamai: The Low Point
In Janibek’s time the decline was only obvious at the level of external
events, but during the next two decades it engulfed the interior of the
Jochid state as well. a new factor, unprecedented in Golden horde history,
was the crumbling of the central power. though such anarchic tenden-
cies were probably never absent in the cuman horde,298 before Berdibek’s
time, the khans had been able to reign them in. Warning signs of state
disintegration at the beginning of his short and violent reign299 were
confirmed by the end, with four further khans minting money alongside
Berdibek in 1361.300 Such pluralism was diametrically opposed to ching-
gisid governmental tradition, and marked the end of the Golden horde’s
existence as a centralised state for some time.
297 Spuler, Horde, pp. 108–109.
298 the most obvious and threatening example being the self-proclaimed Khan Noghai
on the Danube (cf. Veselovskiy, Khan, Decei, “horde,” and chapter 4.3.2); Özbek himself
did not come to the throne without first destroying rival factions in a bloodbath (Spuler,
Horde, p. 109, Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 270–271).
299 Nikonovskaya Letopis’, X, p. 229, records for 1357 that “in this year the quarrels
within the horde did not end, rather they became worse and spread;” for more on his
reign, Spuler, Horde, p. 109.
300 Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, pp. 270–271; Spuler, Horde, p. 109, dates his death ear-
lier, to 1359, on the basis of a late (probably mistaken) Mamluk source.