the golden horde and the black sea 167
appear unconvincing, but they do reveal that scholars feel the need to
find law-enforcement reasons for toqta’s actions, and an immediate cause
which led to the expulsion. Such explanatory surplus is indeed indispens-
able in this case, since the Genoese slave trade was certainly no more
“illegal” in 1307 than in the preceding years, and would not justify the blow
that the khan dealt.
the extended military effort, stretching over several months, that was
required for the Mongols to dislodge the Italians from caffa also shows
that toqta’s decision was not a whim but the result of unusually compel-
ling circumstances. the same well-informed Mamluk sources describe the
critical situation which may have strained Mongol-Genoese relations to
the breaking point: in the years leading up to toqta’s fateful decision, the
Golden horde had suffered successive calamities—the wars, a prolonged
drought, a famine—which could in and of themselves, or by their second-
ary effects in boosting slave exports,94 have sapped the human capital of
the ulus to an even more dangerous extent than usual, thus necessitating
the khan’s protectionist measure.
toqta’s radical step was incontestably also aimed at correcting the two
Genoese offences—their erosion of the Jochid demographic base, and the
caffans’ increasing separatist tendencies—but the decisive impulse for
the great expulsion came from elsewhere, and aimed at another end.
the khan could not have been ignorant of the fact that although the
interruption of the steppe slave trade affected the Genoese by depriving
them of one of their richest sources of income,95 it had a much greater
effect on their principal customers, the Mamluks of egypt, for whom it
was not simply a matter of material loss but rather of the very existence
between cooling Jochid-Mamluk relations and the expulsion of the Genoese, an act which
she calls a “response” to the cooling-off.
94 the two great battles between toqta and Noghai at the end of the thirteenth century
led to very high mortality on the battlefield (Veselovsky, Khan, pp. 45 ff., and below, pp.
252 ff.); to these must be added the number of prisoners-of-war sold as slaves to egypt,
in quantities which impressed the Mamluk chroniclers (Baybars/tiesenhausen, Sbornik,
I, pp. 191, 197, Ibn Khaldūn, ibid., p. 370, ‛umarī/Lech, p. 300). the other misfortunes are
described by al-‛aynī/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, p. 483: “In the year 702 [= 1302/3] there was
a drought, famine and high prices in the Northern kingdom, toqta’s realm. the people
sowed for three years on end without bringing in a harvest, and the horses and cattle died.
the famine was so great that they offered their children and wives for sale in the market-
places. the franks and [Muslim] merchants bought them and took them away to every
country, but most of all to egypt” (cf. also ‛umarī/Lech, p. 299).
95 Starting from 1270–1275, “slaves are first and foremost among oriental trade goods”
shipped by the Genoese (Balard, Romanie, II, p. 785).