the golden horde and the black sea 265
the two states was a fatal weakness in the history of the Bulgarian empire
even in the first half of the fourteenth century.
comparing the information from sources about Bulgarian dependence
on its steppeland hegemon, we learn not only that the state was “the slave
of the tartars” but that the khan “held the tsar by the throat,” indeed that
the empire had become a mere province of the Golden horde. this is
the only way to explain repeated assertions in Mamluk sources that the
Golden horde bordered on Byzantium. for abu ’l-fidā’, there was only
one country, inhabited by Bulgarian and tartars.496 We might conjecture
that egyptian and Syrian scholar-secretaries were unfamiliar with the geo-
politics of South-east europe and made mistakes, but this does not take
into account the Muslim traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who crossed the Balkan
peninsula in the early 1320s. even for him, who had eye-witness knowl-
edge of the realities on the ground, Bulgaria has no place on the political
map of the region: ‘Baba Sultaq’—Babadag—is the last city governed by
the turks, after which comes a desert which takes 18 days to cross before
the first Byantine fort.497
the arab view of the region is perfectly matched in the data from medi-
eval Western cartographers. the map by the Mallorcan angelino Dulcert
of 1339 carries a revealing inscription which is taken over word-for-word
by other portolans: the great empire of Özbek finit in provincia Burgaria
versus occidentem.498 any remaining doubts about Bulgaria’s incorpora-
tion by the Golden horde vanish when we see that the country’s status
is unequivocally specified as ‘provincia’ and that the eastern border of
the tartar state is described with the same words and formula, and that
both phrases carry the same inclusive meaning: finit in Organcium versus
orientem.499 urgench, the commercial centre on the lower amu Darya, is
well-known to have belonged to the Golden horde.500
496 abu ’l-fidā’/Guyard, II/2, p. 318.
497 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa/Defrémery, Sanguinetti, II, pp. 417–418. Ibn Duqmāq/tiesenhausen,
Sbornik, I, p. 316, provides an interesting note on Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s travelling companion, the
princess Bayalun, which seems to have escaped scholars (cited at CSŢR, I, p. 4 note 2) seek-
ing to identify her: “he [Özbek] married Bayalun-khatun, the [former] wife of his [spiri-
tual] father, who had helped him [take the throne]. he [= ‛Imād al-Dīn, son of Maskīrī,
an Islamic jurist] had allowed this since his father [toqta] had been an infidel and thus
the marriage was not legal. thus [Özbek] took her for his own.” thus Bayalun is Maria,
illegitimate dauther of andronikos II, who had been sent to toqta as a bride in summer
of 1297 (Dölger, Regesten, IV, p. 27).
498 Grămadă, “Vicina,” pp. 444–447, and Brătianu, Vicina, pp. 64–65.
499 Ibid.
500 cf. Grekov, Yakubovskiy, Orda, p. 467, and above, pp. 42 ff.