The Crimean Khanate and the Great Horde (1440s–1500s) A Fight for Primacy István Vásáry With the death of Edigü in 1419, the vision of a unified Golden Horde disappeared once and for all. The once mighty Tatar power, the Ulus of Jochi (Džučiev Ulus, in Russian), had sunk into internal anarchy between 1360 and 1380; resuscitated and reunified for a time by the ambitious Toktamış Khan, it received a mortal blow from Timur in the 1390s from which it could never recover. Even Edigü, the talented non- Genghisid head of the Mangıt tribe could only slow down but not halt the decentral- izing tendencies and economic decay of the empire. The century after 1419 witnessed the secession of the peripheral territories and their formation into new Tatar power centers. The new Tatar states were based around Kazan in the north, Crimea in the south, and Astrakhan and the Nogay Horde in the east. An additional Tatar statelet, Kasimov, was founded by secessionists from the Kazan Khanate. Paradoxically enough, the gradual disintegration of the great Tatar state did not loosen the ties of the Russian principalities, since each new Tatar state regarded itself as the legitimate successor to the Golden Horde’s heritage and tried to handle the Russians as subjects who were obliged to pay tribute. The only difference in comparison to earlier times was that the Russian principalities, especially the growing Muscovite principality, had ample opportunities for political maneuvering with the new Tatar states and its western political archenemy, the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom. While the peripheries gradually seceded, the center of the Golden Horde con- tinued to exist as a state, with its capital in Saray on the Lower Volga. Its territory consisted of all the central steppe regions of the Golden Horde, with the Dnieper (at times the Dniester) River in the west and the Volga in the east. Astrakhan and a narrow strip on the left bank of the Volga were parts of the Horde, but east of the Volga, the Nogay Horde (emerging from Edigü’s Mangıts) was formed. Until the 1420s, both the Tatars and the Russians called the state of the Golden Horde simply “Orda,” 1 but the term orda, in addition to designating the Tatar state, also preserved its original meaning of ‘the khan’s encampment; capital’ and it also meant ‘army.’ In times of anarchy, when several hordes came into existence, the name of the horde’s leader was used to make a distinction between the hordes, e.g., Orda Mamaeva 1 For data from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, see I. I. Sreznevskij, Materialy dlja slo- varja drevnerusskogo jazyka po pis’mennym pamjatnikam [Materials for a dictionary of the Old Russian language based on the written sources], 3+1 vols., St. Petersburg 1893–1903 [Dopol- nenija. St. Petersburg 1912], vol. 2, pp. 705–706.