While taking a class on Russian History, there was frequent mention of the Golden Horde, the group of Mongolian invaders that took over Kievian Russia along with other places in Asia. I can’t get a definitve answer about why they are called the Golden Horde. Some say it has to do with the tent of an early ruler, one said yellow was the color of the imperial center, and yet another source said it was because the Mongols took a lot of golden stuff. Which is it?
That is also what they are called in Medieval: Total War
I once read it was because the Mongols in Russia used yellow yurts. The word horde, or “orda,” comes from “yurt.” A yurt is a wool-felt tent on a latticed wooden frame. Some Mongols, in Mongolia and in China, still live in them.
A little background from Chamber’s Dictionary of World History
From the Library of Congress:
The term ‘Golden Horde’ comes from the Russian tradition and quite late - The first attested usage of the term ( as Zlataia orda ) is in thePolsanie na Ugru ( “Epistle of the Ugra” ) by Vassian, Bishop of Rostov, a confidant of Ivan III and obiously dates from after the 1480 “stand on the Ugra” when Ivan III faced down Khan Ahmad of the Great Horde ( one of the successor states of the Golden Horde ), ending the last pretext of Muscovite submission to the steppe states. By then, the Golden Horde had already been technically deceased for nearly 40 years ( first division in 1438 into Kazan and the Great Horde, then later further disintegration to produce the successor khanates of the Astrakhan and Crimea ), though the title continued to be claimed until 1499. It possibly did derive from stories of Batu’s tent, however a definitive derivation is probably lost to time ( it might very well refer to Sarai’s fabled wealth at it’s height, or to some combination of stories ).
In the east the usual name was ‘the Khantate of Qipchaq ( Kipchak )’ after the most important ethnic group in the central regions of the Horde.
I’d also somewhat dspute the notion of thwe Golden Horde as a feudal state - It was more tribal at its core, though it could probably said to have had at least quasi-feudal vassals and dependencies.
- Tamerlane
Khanate, drop the extra t. I’ll let the numerous other typing errors in my post go, but that one needs correcting.
- Tamerlane
I may not be as expert in historical studies as our esteemed Tamerlane, but one thing I do have going for me is Turkic linguistics. There is an error in the etymology above.
Ordu means ‘army’ in Turkish. (A variant spelling gave its name to the Urdu language in India, which is actually not Turkic at all, but Hindustani. In the 12th century, northern India was ruled by Turkic military dynasties.)
Yurt means ‘homeland, home, dwelling’ in general. To a nomad dweller in the steppes of Central Asia, their yurt might take the form of a round felt tent, but to an urbanite of Istanbul their yurt is most likely an apartment block.
The two words are separate words and are not derived from each other.
The Mongolian name for those felt nomad tents is ger. The Mongolian phrase altan ordo is an example of the many loanwords from Turkic used in Mongolian. While the top commanders of the Golden Horde were Mongols, the rank and file were largely Turks. The people of present-day Tatarstan in Russia are descended from the Golden Horde, and they are all ethnically Turks. The Mongol element there was totally assimilated way back in the 14th or 15th century and no trace remains. The name Tatar had originally belonged to a Mongol tribe, but became transferred to the Turkic infantry because of the multiethnic nature of these Central Asian steppe confederations, which accepted any soldiers who were willing to give allegiance to the commanders, didn’t matter what their ethnic group was. This is a pattern that was repeated often over the centuries as steppe kingdoms were built up, as Tamerlane could tell you. Genghis Khan’s empire and Golden Horde are just the best-known examples of this pattern.
Moreover, that Volga-Kama area of eastern Russia (including Bashqortostan, whose language is a variant of the Tatar language) had an interesting ethnically mixed history in early times.
The aboriginal inhabitants were speakers of Finno-Ugric languages of the Uralic family, related to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. What is now Bashqortostan was of old known as “Magna Hungaria” because a trace of the ancestors of the Magyar people still remained there in early medieval times. A Dominican monk from Hungary heard these legends and set out there in search of the Magyars’ ancestral homeland in the 13th century; unfortunately, he got there at the time of the Mongol invasion, which forced him to cancel his ethnographic quest.
There were Turkic peoples settled in the Volga-Kama region from as early as the 6th century AD. They were the original Bulgars. (This was even before some of them moved to the Balkan region and gave their name to Bulgaria.) The name Bulgar comes from a Turkic root meaning ‘mixed’. The Volga Bulgars, whom the Arab travelers Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Battuta wrote about, spoke an r-Turkic language that was very different from all the other groups of Turkic in the world; the only surviving representative of this branch of Turkic is the Chuvash language, which is spoken in Chuvashia, adjacent to Tatarstan.
When the Golden Horde came into this area in the 13th century, there had already been a Turkic civilization settled there for several centuries, so I think this goes toward explaining how Batu Khan’s largely Turkic horde wound up settling there and continuing it as a Qypchaq culture. What say you, O Tamerlane?
The famous Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was one of the Bashqort ethnic group; he came from Ufa, the capital of Bashqortostan, perhaps a descendant of the Golden Horde or of the ancient proto-Magyars.
The renowned historian Zeki Velidi Togan was also a Bashqort. As a young man, he fought in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks. Once his platoon was engaging Bolshevik forces in a cemetary, taking cover behind tombstones. One of Togan’s buddies saw him and said, “Come on, man, let’s clear out of here fast! The Russians are advancing!” Togan was busy scribbling notes. “Just a moment,” he said, “the inscriptions on these old tombstones are fascinating!” He was a better scholar than soldier. 
However Grousset also cites it as referring to ‘tented palaces’ ( as opposed to the more simple yurt ), when discussing the division of spoils after Chingiz’s death, specifically as part of Tolui’s position as regent until the new Great Khan ( Ogedei, in this case ) was formerly annointed. In this context it apparently was synonymous with the imperial court establishment, including the army. So perhaps a dual-meaning, with one coming to refer to the other?
Possibly even earlier. Coins minted as early as the reign of Tode-Mongke ( 1280-1287 ) replaced Mongolian with Turkish inscriptions. The actual number of “Mongols” ( some of them likely Turkic anyway ) that moved to the Pontic steppe was tiny. The 4,000 troops ( with families ) allocated to the sons of Jochi as part of Chingiz’s inheritance, plus many of the officers from the Imperial Army who had been assigned newly recruited local Turkic units during Subedei’s invasion and who stayed behind after the main army withdrew with the death of Ogedei.
There is in fact some speculation that the original Bulgars were actually the surviving rump of the old Hunnish state, though that remains unproven I believe.
Indeed. As noted many local Turks, most of them Qipchaqs ( Cumans, Polovsty ), as well as other groups, were in fact immediately recruited into the army of Batu and with the withdrawl of the Imperial Army after 1242, became the bulwark of Batu’s new state ( which was powerful enough based on this recruitment to feel fully capable of threatening civil war with Ogedei’s successor in China, Guyuk, and after Guyuk’s death helped Batu to function as a kingmaker in the internal politics of the greater Mongol Empire ).
- Tamerlane
OK, you made me do some work here. We will get to the root of the word horde. I pulled out Sir Gerard Clauson’s An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and looked up ordu. Here is what Sir Gerard has to tell us:
ordu: (ordo:) originally ‘a royal residence’, that is ‘palace’ or ‘royal camp’ as the circumstances demanded; in the religious (Buddhist and Manichean) texts also ‘a heavenly mansion’. An early loanword for ‘palace, royal camp’ as ordo in Mongolian. Survives in NE Tuvan ordu; SE Türki orda; NC Kirgiz ordo; SC Uzbek urda; NW Kazakh, Nogai orda; SW Azeri, Osmanli ordu, Türkmen orda.
In SW Azeri, Osmanli, it came to mean ‘a royal camp’, thence ‘any military camp’ and finally, in military terminology, the largest type of military formation, ‘army’. Elsewhere it retained its original meaning, but there are indications that in some languages it was reborrowed from Mongolian. Oguz yagï ordu:g basdï: ‘hostile Oguz attacked the royal camp’. ordu:g bérmedi: ‘he did not surrender the royal camp’ [… many other literary citations follow…]
OK, now on to the contrasting word, yurt. Sir Gerard tells us:
yurt (?yurd) very rare in the early period; Kashgari’s translation ‘an abandoned camping-site’ suits the early occurrences; but in the medieval period it came to mean ‘dwelling-place, abode’, without any implication of abandonment, and seen in all major language groups with the usual phonetic changes and a wide range of meanings ‘residence, a specific kind of felt tent, a community, a country, one’s own country’, etc. **Türkü VIII (the enemy attacked our camp (ordu:) but Kül Tégin refused to give it up. If he had, all you, my womenfolk, if you had survived would have become slaves, or) ölügi: yurtda: yolta: yatu: kaltaçï ertigiz ‘your corpses would have remained lying in the deserted camping-site or on the road’ *I N * 9; (I led the army into the Shantung plain and to the sea; it pillaged twenty-three towns) Usï:n buntatu: yurtda: kalu:r erti: (prob. a Chinese name and title, something like) 'Wu-hsin the pên-ta-tu remained lying in his deserted camping-site T 19:VIII ff. (a devout old woman) yurt(t)a: kalmi:sh ‘stayed behind in a deserted camp’ (she found a greasy spoon, and survived by licking it) [… many more literary citations follow…]
So while we can see that while ordu and yurt are definitely different etyma, in their earliest usages they happen to share the meaning of a camping site. By the way, Clauson uses the colon after a vowel to show that it’s a long vowel, as in IPA, in case you were wondering.
…And so I remain alone in the deserted camp of this thread, surviving by licking the grease of my etymological research.
Etymological Grease = Band Name
Or a nasty condition diagnosed by a gyno.
Seriously, I appreciate you. (And Tamerlane, too.)
Fine work JM :).
- Tamerlane
And in Europa Universalis, and EU2 of course.