264 chapter four
successors,492 this was the overriding thrust of toqta’s plan for external
affairs, and absorbed the greater part of the khan’s interest and strength,
to the detriment of the Balkan front.
the turmoil of these years led to a new political structure in the
carpathian-Balkan region. Where the Mongols had been directly present
and all-powerful in the 1280s and 1290s, they were now far removed from
the scene, replaced instead by local elements: although largely shaped by
tartar control, Bulgarian and romanian political life had entered a new
and much freer stage. this transfer was decisive for national forces to
develop their own organisational forms, and took place in the context of
a new variation of the tartar hegemony, which itself went unchallenged
until the mid-fourteenth century.
Several contemporary sources indicate that Bulgarian and romanian
political life underwent change once returned more closely to Sarai’s orbit.
thus al-Mufaḍḍal says that in 1307/8 toqta’s lordship extended “as far as
constantinople’s borders”, an expression used again in his chronicle for
1320/1, during Özbek’s time.493 al-‘umarī adds important details: “Byzan-
tium became a neighbour of the Golden horde. there was not a moment
in which the Byzantine emperor did not address his numerous wishes
and complaints [to the khan]. Despite his Greek fire, the multitude of his
troops and the number of his allies, [the emperor] went in fear of [the
khan] and tried to win him over to his side by flatteries so that he could
live in peace with him at all times. all the while that the khans of the
chinggisid dynasty ruled there, it was like this, and Byzantium’s attitude
did not change.”494 the Syrian scholar describes the Serbs and Bulgarians
as being in an even less enviable position: “they danced attendance on
the sultan of the cuman steppe, because of the power he had over them
and because he held them by the throat, being so close by them.”495
from these accounts it becomes clear that tartar strength was not
equally firm throughout the Balkans. It is quite credible though that com-
pared to Byzantium, better protected by geographical distance, direct
propinquity to the Golden horde and the imbalance of power between
Noghai (cf. Spuler, Horde, pp. 80–83, for the genesis and persistence of toqta’s Ilkhanid
policy, and above, pp. 168 ff.).
492 Spuler, Horde, pp. 79–80, ciocîltan, “Geneza,” pp. 85 ff., and above, chapters 3.1,
3.3.1.
493 tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, pp. 185, 186.
494 Ibid., p. 214.
495 Ibid., p. 141.