Collapse
former country
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Nogai Horde (also spelled Nogay) was a confederation founded by the Nogais that occupied the Pontic–Caspian steppe from about 1500 until they were pushed west by the Kalmyks and south by the Russians in the 17th century. The Mongol tribe called the Manghuds constituted a core of the Nogai Horde.
From the 1250s to about 1300, the Golden Horde's kingmaker Nogai Khan (a direct descendant of Genghis Khan through Jochi) formed an army of the Manghits joined by numerous Turkic tribes. Around a century later in the 1390s, the Nogays were led by Edigu, a commander of Manghit paternal origin and Jochid maternal origin, who founded the Nogai dynasty.
In 1557, Nogai Nur-al-Din Qazi Mirza quarreled with Ismael Beg and founded the Lesser Nogai Horde on the steppe of the North Caucasus. The Nogais north of the Caspian were thereafter called the Great Nogai Horde. In the early 17th century, the Horde broke down further under the onslaught of the Kalmyks.
The Nogais north of the Black Sea were nominally subject to the Crimean Khanate rather than the Nogai Bey. They were divided into the following groups: Budjak (from the Danube to the Dniester), Yedisan (from the Dniester to the Bug), Jamboyluk (Bug to Crimea), Yedickul (north of Crimea) and Kuban. In particular, the Yedisans are mentioned as a distinct group, and in various locations.
There were two groups of Nogais: those north of the Caspian Sea under their own Bey (leader), and those north of the Black Sea nominally subject to the Crimean Khan. The first group was broken up circa 1632 by the Kalmyks. The second shared the fate of the Khanate of Crimea.
The Nogai language was a form of Kypchak Turkic, the same language group as that of the neighboring Kazakhs, Bashkirs and Crimean and Volga Tatars. They were mostly Sunni Muslims, but their religious institutions were not centralised and the Nogais strongly opposed any efforts to do so. When the Ottomans tried to impose their control over the Nogai Horde, they heavily supported the creation of new mosques and madrassas as they served as the instrument of political legitimisation for the Ottoman sultan who also served as the Caliph. However, those attempts were mostly unsuccessful and the Ottomans failed to demolish the authority of the tribe leaders and centralize their rule over the Nogais.
They were pastoral nomads grazing sheep, horses, and camels. Outside goods were obtained by trade (mostly horses and slaves), raiding, and tribute. There were some subject peasants along the Yaik river. One of the main sources of income for the Nogais was raiding for slaves, who were sold in Crimea and Bukhara. Hunting, fishing, caravan taxation, and seasonal agricultural migration also played a role, although this is poorly documented.
The basic social unit was the semi-autonomous ulus or band. Aristocrats were called mirza. The ruler of the Nogais was the Bey. The capital or winter camp was at Saraychik, a caravan town on the lower Yaik. From 1537 the second in rank was the Nur-al-Din, usually the Bey's son or younger brother and expected successor. The Nur-al-Din held the right bank along the Volga. From the 1560s there was a second Nur-al-Din, a sort of a war chief. Third in rank was the Keikuvat, who held the Emba.
Political organization was fluid and much depended on personal prestige since as nomads, the Nogai subjects could simply move away from a leader who was disliked. Ambassadors and merchants were regularly beaten and robbed. Stealing horses, looked down upon in many cultures, was an important part of social and economic life on the steppe. Beys and mirzas would often declare themselves vassals of some outside power, but such declarations had little meaning.
The Nogai Horde along with the Crimean Khanate raided settlements in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Poland. The slaves were captured in southern Russia, Poland-Lithuania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Circassia by Tatar horsemen in a trade known as the "harvesting of the steppe". In Podolia alone, about one-third of all the villages were destroyed or abandoned between 1578 and 1583. Some researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate.
After the Mongols managed to destroy the Cuman-Kipchak Confederation and conquered its lands, they established the Golden Horde also known as Ulus Juchi. At its peak it dominated most of the land area between Volga and Danube rivers. During this time Manghit Edigu Bey (Edigu) rose to power and managed to reorganize the various Manghit tribes into the Nogai Horde. Due to his role in defeating and killing Tokhtamysh he was granted a great measure of independence to the Nogai Horde and giving him control over much of the western territories of the Golden Horde. However, soon after his death, at the beginning of the 15th century the Golden Horde had entered a period of internal decline due to struggle for power between Crimea and Nogais and eastern Khanates. Additionally the consequences of Tamerlane’s fatal expeditions, and the rising power of Lithuania and Muscovy also led to diminishing power of the Golden Horde and eventual collapse in 1501, when the Crimeans sacked the capital city of the Golden Horde – Sarai.
Due to the decentralised nature of the Golden Horde, the Nogais were relatively independent of their overlords in Sarai and thus didn't oppose the Crimeans in their fight with the Golden Horde. However, after the sack of Sarai and the collapse of the Golden Horde, the Crimeans started to claim legitimacy as the successors of the Golden Horde and thus wanted to expand their rule over the Nogais. They justified their expansion, by invoking the title of "Khan" which showed their connection to Chingissids. But, as the Nogais were one of a few tribes whose rulers descended not from the Chingissids but from their own dynasty, they rejected any authority of Crimean Khan, which eventually led to clashes and conflicts between them. The first and most important attempt of Crimean Khanate to subjugate the Nogais ended when the Nogais killed the Crimean Khan Mehmed I Giray, near Astrakhan.
Such hostilities resulted in the tension between the two nations and thus many Nogai and Crimean sources from that period started depicting their opponents in a very negative light which was then heavily exaggerated in the folklore and other fictional stories of that, which created a sense of heavy anomicity and hostility between the two people.
This data is from the English-language sources below. A long list of Nogai raids on Russia and Poland, from Russian sources, can be found at Crimean-Nogai raids.
During the next 150 years, Black Sea grain ports assist massive southward expansion of Russian agriculture and population.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Nogai Horde”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.