The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World.

• Author: Linantud, John

Favereau, Marie. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2021. 377 pages. Hardcover, $29.95

It has been years since scholars gained better access to Mongolia, and since geneticists made fantastic claims about Chinggis Khan's progeny. Battlefield reports from Ukraine, moreover, recall the trope that explains Russian brutality as a legacy of Russia's historical vassalage to the Mongols. These factors provide context to The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, the latest book by French historian Marie Favereau. Her general mandate is to augment and replace "dramatic and reassuringly familiar" narratives of war and conquest with new knowledge of the Golden Horde, one of four Mongol realms to form after the death of Chinggis Khan in 1227 (p. 30). By 1300, the Horde reigned over most of today's western Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea. The Ilkhanids, Chagatayids, and Great Khans dominated other parts of Asia. Europe lay to the west. It was the Horde that subjugated Kievan Rus and invaded Eastern Europe in pursuit of the Qipchaqs, a nomadic enemy from the steppe. Horde power crested in the mid-fourteenth century, then declined in the midst of the Black Death, infighting, and Ming victories against the Great Khans.

Favereau places the Horde at the fulcrum of a trade and communications system that joined Mongols with Russians, Venetians, Byzantines, Mamluks, and others (p. 210-11). As such she argues that the concept "Mongol exchange" better captures the dynamism of that era than Pax Mongolica, which underplays internal Mongol conflicts. In the process she challenges stereotypes of the Horde as irrational barbarians, and argues the Horde contributed to, rather than stunted, the political and economic development of Muscovite Russia.

The Horde includes maps, photographic illustrations, a glossary, reference notes, and an appendix. Favereau adapts to incomplete contemporary documentation by using a variety of evidence, including centuries-old texts, coins, arts, and crafts from Mongolia and elsewhere Favereau marshals more than enough evidence to persuade the reader that Horde elites developed and protected trade on the basis of strategic thinking, geopolitics, and political order. She traces the exchange to Chinggis eldest son Jochi, who suffered questionable parentage and lost his status as...