White Horde

The White Horde was the eastern wing of the Golden Horde, the Mongol state founded by Genghis Khan's eldest son Jochi and his descendants. Its lands lay on the steppes of what is now Kazakhstan, east of the Ural river and north of the Syr Darya. Its later khans briefly reunited the Golden Horde, and its successors included the Kazakh Khanate.

Medieval sources use colour names, white, blue and grey, for different parts of Jochi's realm, but they do not always agree on which was which, and historians have argued about the terms ever since. In most English-language histories, which follow Persian usage, the White Horde, in Turkic Aq Orda, is the eastern, or left, wing, given to Jochi's eldest son Orda, while the western wing, often called the Blue Horde, was ruled by Batu and his line from Sarai on the Volga. Turkic sources reverse the colours, calling the eastern wing blue and the western part white. The people of the time usually called the whole state the Ulus of Jochi.

Orda and his descendants ruled the eastern steppe as junior partners of Batu's line. They sent troops on campaigns, such as the great western campaign of the late 1230s and early 1240s, in which Orda took part, but largely governed their own affairs. Their territory was mostly grassland and semi-desert, home to Kipchak and other Turkic pastoralists, with cities along the Syr Darya, such as Sighnaq, which became their capital. The Mongol ruling class gradually adopted the Turkic language and, in the fourteenth century, Islam.

In the 1350s and 1360s, the Golden Horde fell into civil war after the murder of Khan Berdibek in 1359. The White Horde khan Urus Khan, a descendant of Jochi, built up his power in the east and in the 1370s tried to take Sarai and reunite Jochi's realm. He also faced a rival from his own family, Tokhtamysh, whose father Urus had killed.

Tokhtamysh fled to Timur, who supported him with troops. After several defeats, Tokhtamysh took the White Horde in 1379, after Urus's death, and in 1380, after Mamai's defeat by Moscow at Kulikovo, took the western Golden Horde too, reuniting the Ulus of Jochi. In 1382 he sacked Moscow. He then turned against his patron Timur, invading Central Asia. Timur crushed him in two great campaigns, at the Kondurcha river in 1391 and the Terek river in 1395, then sacked Sarai and other cities of the Horde. Tokhtamysh fled and was killed around 1406.

In the fifteenth century the eastern steppe fragmented. The Shaybanid Abu'l-Khayr Khan united many nomads, the Uzbeks, from the 1420s. In the 1450s and 1460s, descendants of Urus Khan, Kerei and Janibek, broke away and founded the Kazakh Khanate. Abu'l-Khayr's grandson Muhammad Shaybani led the Uzbeks south, conquering Transoxiana around 1500. Shaybanid princes also ruled the Khanate of Sibir and the Tyumen region. The descendants of Urus Khan provided the khans of the Kazakhs until the nineteenth century, linking the Kazakh state to the White Horde.

Our maps show the White Horde on the 1400, 1492 and 1500 maps. Its largest outline, about 3.7 million square kilometres on the 1400 map, is 60 percent in today's Russia and most of the rest in Kazakhstan. Kazan's and Novosibirsk's sites lie inside it on the earlier maps, a wider area than most histories give it. On the 1530 map, the region belongs to the Kazakh Khanate.