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Chapter 7 Conclusion Any extended study structured around the detailed analysis and interpretation of each of a series of texts runs the risk of losing sight of the forest for the trees. Unfortunately, it is only by examining each tree with great care that one can be confident that one’s conclusions about the shape of the forest will withstand criticism. Balancing micro-analysis of the trees with macro-analysis of the forest is always difficult and carries no guarantee of success. But the task cannot be ignored. Conclusions about the Mongol impact on Russian history rest upon studies of Russo-Tatar relations during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. These studies rest in turn upon conclusions about what the medieval Russian sources have to say about such relations. The sources themselves can only be meaningfully interpreted in the light of the conceptual framework that determined how medieval Russia’s scribes, redactors , and intellectuals thought and wrote about the Tatars. Failure to appreciate the perceptual approach of the medieval Russian bookmen, to analyze the world-view of our informants, can only result in erroneous conclusions concerning the Russian reaction to the Mongols, the nature of Russo-Tatar relations, and ultimately the entire impact of the Mongols on Russian history. That the Russians were hostile to the Tatars during the Mongol period is a conclusion so obvious that it can easily lead us astray. The Tatars, after all, laid waste the Russian cities and countryside at an incalculable cost in lives and property. They then settled in for centuries of ruthless economic exploitation interspersed with further military incursions as needed. The medieval Russian narrative sources graphically describe the cruelty of Tatar oppression, and it is natural to assume that the Russians hated their Mongol conquerors. But to go no further than this in analyzing Russian attitudes toward the Tatars would be a mistake. First of all, this conclusion is too vague. We must explore for exactly what reasons and in exactly what ways the Russians were hostile to the Tatars, no matter how obvious such an inquiry may seem. Second, by looking no further than Russian animosity we overlook several essential aspects of medieval Russian perceptions of the Mongols. Only a comprehensive 192 THE TATAR YOKE social and intellectual approach to Russian reactions to the conquest and the enduring Tatar presence can provide a solid basis for historical conclusions. Russian hostility toward the Mongols took a very specific form. With the exception of the fifth sermon of Serapion, the medieval sources unremittingly castigate the Tatars in religious terms. In all of the Old Russian literature concerning the Mongols there is not a single racial epithet. The Mongols are never attacked as “filthy Asiatics” or anything of the sort. It was not until the nineteenth century that Russia became infected with the racist ideology of the Yellow Peril, a concept imported from Western Europe. Nor are the Tatars lambasted as primitive pastoral nomads, and indeed references to the Tatars’ nomadic way of life are few and far between. Though the Russians knew that the Mongols were not Occidentals and that they were by and large nomadic, they never attacked them on ethnic or cultural grounds. The Tatars were hateful because they were not Orthodox Christians, but infidels, pagans, Muslims, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes, Besermeny. In the medieval devotional and confessional universe relations among peoples were defined in religious terms, and the fact that the Tatars were unbelievers outweighed all other considerations. The implications of the medieval Russian religious perception of the Tatars have not been fully appreciated. Religious exclusivism was the motive force of the ideology of silence characteristic of the medieval ethno-religious frontier. The pragmatic realities of existence required considerable peaceful cooperation between religious enemies. Yet at the same time ideological exigencies made it impossible to acknowledge any interactions other than hostile ones. The concept of peaceful cooperation with infidels called into question the militant religious values forming the very foundations of these societies. Consequently, Russian bookmen generally recorded only the incidents of hostility between Russians and Tatars, passing over in silence such common phenomena as trading and military alliances between the two peoples, and downplaying the familiarity with Tatar affairs and customs which would betray an unseemly intimacy. The bookmen spoke of the Tatars with hostility or not at all, and religion provided the vituperative vocabulary. This gambit for avoiding the awkward ideological problems of occasional peaceful cooperation with religious enemies was commonplace along the medieval ethno-religious frontier, and Russian bookmen...

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