262 chapter four
with Noghai’s son turai. toqta set off with his guards straight away. he
sent out men who brought him [the plotters] and ordered them killed.
Both were killed before his eyes. he set his son in the place that he had
given to Sarai Bugha. When toqta killed turai, chaka’s son, Qara Kishek,
Noghai’s grandson, fled. two of his kinsmen fled with him, cherik temür
and Yulukutlu (?). Bürlük sent [troops] to follow them, though he [Qara
Kishek] had fled with those two into the lands of tsar [Michael] Shishman,
to a place called Vidin, near the king. around 3,000 cavalry had fled with
him. Shishman sheltered them, and they stayed there, raiding here and
there and living off what they could claim by the sword, until the end of
toqta’s life.”481
the fragments of narrative from Mamluk and Byzantine sources clearly
reflect the military upheavals and political instability in the realm which
Noghai in his time had ruled alone, with an iron hand. the temptation
to restore the former khanate, free from Sarai’s rule, was so strong that
not only Noghai’s heirs chaka and turai yielded to the urge, but even
Sarai Bugha, whose brother had charged him to bring the rebel provinces
of the lower Danube back under central authority. another indication of
the Volga khans’ difficulties in attempting to control the Jochid far West
is the unusually high number of governors toqta appointed to the task.482
the last scion of the ruling house to be sent to the region, his son Ilbasar,483
called from his fief on the river ural, was also an insignificant figure, dying
before his father, in 1307/8484 or 1309/10.485 the times were past when
news of the Danube khan’s doings would echo through the four corners
of the known world.
though toqta’s operations succeeded at great cost, the centrifugal ten-
dencies which had so gravely threatened the unity of the Jochid state could
481 al-Nuwayrī/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, pp. 139–140; toqta entrusted his sons with rule
over two branches of the Noghaid clan, which later became known as the Great Noghai
horde and the Lesser Noghai. tukul Bugha (whose real name seems to have been Mengli
Bugha, according to the account in Ibn Khaldūn/ibid., p. 371) was appointed in the Danube
region, whence in all probability the Noghaids spread out all along the Northern Black Sea
coast), while Ilbasar was appointed in the steppes around the lower ural basin (Vernadsky,
Mongols, p. 190, though both he and Spuler, Horde, p. 79 note 10, are mistaken in thinking
that Qara Kishek’s 3,000 cavalry took refuge around Kraków).
482 the text of the chronicle is obviously abridged and does not present these tartar
governors in succession, but rather gives the probably misleading impression that toqta
sent his kinsmen to rule the Danube by committee.
483 Baybars/tiesenhausen, Sbornik, I, p. 94: “In the year 704 [= 4th august 1304–23rd July
1305], toqta sent his son Ilbasar to the place which earlier he had given to Sarai Bugha.”
484 al-Nuwayrī/ibid., p. 140.
485 Baybars/ibid., p. 98.