the golden horde and the black sea 269
for chaka’s organised resistance against toqta’s party,514 the Seljuks were
not only compromised but were probably suspected of being potential
partisans for Noghai’s heirs, given that they had served the Danubian-
tartar dynasty for a long time. Just as in the Seljuk case, in the absence of
other documentary proof it seems reasonable to suppose that theodore
Svetoslav played an essential role in the alan exodus from the east car-
pathian region. at least two arguments support such this presumption:
the parallelism of the situations, and the alans’ request for political asy-
lum in Byzantium rather than in neighbouring Bulgaria.
If it was the case that the tsar was not merely carrying out the khan’s
order but was persecuting Noghai’s men on his own initiative, this was
part of the normal order of things, starting with the assassination of
chaka, whereby the vassal in tarnovo sought to fulfil his lord’s wishes
even before they had been expressed. theodore Svetoslav’s zeal seems
to have gone against toqta’s expectations, and even worked against his
interests: his request that the alan refugees who had fled to Byzantium be
returned, suggests as much.515 tartar-Bulgarian relations were not affected
by this disjuncture, since it did not cast doubt on the tsar’s loyalty to the
khan: quite the opposite.
the support lent to theodore Svetoslav during toqta’s reign proved to
be such a good investment that his successor Özbek found it convenient
to maintain the policy unchanged until the tsar’s death in 1322. under the
new khan, the Golden horde reached the peak of its state development,516
on the basis of which he claimed the right to rule all europe,517 and it
is certain that after his faithful vassal at tarnovo died, Özbek continued
toqta’s political line on the lower Danube: the same underlying relation-
ship of strict dependency,518 the same discrete and almost imperceptible
514 cf. ciocîltan, “alanii,” p. 937.
515 Ibid., p. 940.
516 Spuler, Horde, pp. 87, 99.
517 Winterthur/Baethgen, pp. 162–163: Item fertur, quod in his temporibus imperator seu
rex magnus Tartarorum tam excellentis potentiae fuit, quod quingentos principatus con-
cedere habuit, quorum minimus regno Boemie veraciter comparari valebat. Qui ad merca-
tores solitus erat tunc temporis venientes de regionibus christicolis ad regiones imperii sui
causa mercacionis dicere: ‘Imperator Romanorum et Rex Francorum deberent de iure a se
in regnis suis infeodari et quia facere hoc contempnunt malo titulo ea possident cum injuria
mea magna.ʼ
518 al-‛umarī’s comments are very general in character and do not specify names, but
it is likely that the historian, who based his description of the Golden horde in great part
on reports by merchants who travelled the cuman steppe during Özbek’s reign, had the
latter in mind when he wrote that the khan had the Bulgarian and Serbian rulers by the
throat (see above, pp. 265 ff.).