Batu Khan

Batu was the Mongol prince who led the great western campaign of 1236 to 1242, which devastated the Rus' principalities, crushed the Hungarian army and carried Mongol raiders to the edge of Austria. From his camps on the lower Volga he then founded the realm later called the Golden Horde, which dominated the Russian lands for some two and a half centuries. In the empire's politics he became a kingmaker, placing his cousin Möngke on the throne in 1251.

Batu was born around 1205, a son of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan, and of a wife from the Onggirat clan. Jochi died before his father, and Jochi's lands in the western steppe were divided among his sons. Although Batu was not the eldest, his older brother Orda accepted him as their father's successor; Orda took the eastern part, while Batu held the lands west of the Volga. Batu was later given estates in northern China and Khorasan as well, governed through imperial officials. Some sources say he took part in the war against the Jin dynasty in the early 1230s.

In 1235 the great khan Ögedei ordered a campaign into the west and put Batu in overall charge of a group of princes from every branch of the family, including the future great khans Güyük and Möngke. The veteran general Subutai directed operations in the field. The army crossed the Volga in 1236 and spent a year subduing Volga Bulgaria and the steppe peoples. In late 1237 it turned on the Rus', as recounted in our page on the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus'. Ryazan was destroyed after six days, Vladimir was stormed in February 1238, and the grand prince's army was wiped out on the Sit river in March. Smaller columns sacked many other towns; only distant Novgorod and Pskov, protected by marshes, escaped. Chernigov and Pereyaslav fell in 1239, and Kiev was stormed in December 1240.

Many Cumans had fled into Hungary, and King Béla IV ignored Batu's demands to hand them over; the khan's envoys were killed. In 1241 the Mongols struck central Europe in several columns. One defeated a Polish and German army at the Battle of Legnica, while Batu and Subutai destroyed Béla's army at the Battle of Mohi on the Sajó river on 11 April. The Mongols occupied the Hungarian plain and sent a force after the fleeing king, who took refuge in Croatia. But Ögedei died in December 1241, and in 1242 the army withdrew east, perhaps so that the princes could take part in choosing his successor.

Batu did not return to Mongolia. He set up his court on the Volga, at Sarai, and the Rus' princes now had to travel there to make their submission. He confirmed Yaroslav of Vladimir as senior prince, and in 1252 installed Yaroslav's son Alexander Nevsky as grand prince of Vladimir. Michael of Chernigov, who refused to bow before an image of Genghis Khan, was put to death on his orders, according to a later saint's life. The Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who met him on his way to Mongolia, found him kind to his own people but feared by them, and very cruel in war.

Batu was on poor terms with his cousin Güyük, who became great khan in 1246. When Güyük marched west in 1248, apparently against him, he died on the way. In 1250 Batu called an assembly that chose Möngke instead of a member of Ögedei's line, and sent his brothers to see Möngke proclaimed in Mongolia in 1251. Batu was then the most powerful prince in the west, sharing authority there with Möngke. He died in 1255. His son Sartaq survived him only briefly, and his brother Berke took the throne. Batu's descendants ruled until 1360, and the Horde itself outlasted the other Mongol khanates.

Our 1279 map shows the Golden Horde a generation after Batu's death, spread across the western steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian.