the golden horde and the black sea 271
decision to shift Bulgaria’s Northern border be properly attributed. cer-
tainly, the newly-enthroned tsar can hardly be suspected of having cho-
sen to cut away some of his own territory: this would have been going
entirely against type. Nor is his neighbour on the left bank of the Danube,
Basarab, the founder of the Wallachian principality, likely to have shifted
the border at the expense of the tsar at tarnovo, firstly because at the
time romanian-Bulgarian relations were not merely amicable but closely
intertwined, as manifested by joint political and military initiatives. hav-
ing ruled out these possibilities, our attention naturally turns to the only
person capable of changing the status of Bujak, a zone of the utmost geo-
political significance: khan Özbek.
thus in 1323 the sovereign of the Golden horde oversaw a reallocation
of part of the tartar hegemony, with the obvious goal of bringing the mass
of romanians North of the Danube under one leader in order to promote
Sarai’s interests in the carpathian-Balkan region. he made good the loss
of Bujak to the Bulgarian empire through an uncommonly adroit political
move, promoting Michael Shishman to the imperial throne at tarnovo
and thus awarding him and his dynasty a boost which greatly compen-
sated for the loss of territory.
chronologically, the earliest common denominator for these two neigh-
bouring dynasties was their role in defending the far West of the tartar
hegemony against the king of hungary’s expansionist impulses. the first
of the angevin kings coveted the Severin-Vidin region, just as the arpads
had earlier and as his successors later would, a region of uncommon stra-
tegic significance,524 so much so that the name of a relatively tiny area,
the Iron Gates on the Danube, was known as far afield as egypt as the
Westernmost limit of Noghai’s lands. the same Mamluk sources that note
this geographical term also report that toqta, victorious, took over his
defeated rival’s territory on the Lower Danube and appointed princes
from his own family to administer it.
None of toqta’s kinsmen named as governor here distinguished himself
as a guardian of the Western frontier, since for as long as he governed the
region, the hungarian kingdom had not yet recovered sufficiently from the
collapse at the end of the thirteenth century to make any move. the new
king, the angevin charles I, made no attempt to restore the hegemony of
524 cf. achim, Politica, passim.