A Note on Recent Research on the Term the ‘Tatar Yoke’ (Tatarskoe igo)

Research objectives: This essay analyzes and critiques recent research on the genealogy of the expression “Tatar Yoke” (Tatarskoe igo), the standard term for the period of Mongol rule of Rus’, in both Slavic and Latin. Research materials: This essay is based upon publications from 1984 to the present by Halperin, Ostrowski, Keenan, Rudakov, and Seleznev. Results and novelty of research: In 1984, Halperin identified the discovery of the earliest appearance of Tatarskoe igo in Slavic dated to the second half of the seventeenth century, made by Lev Dmitriev who did not appreciate its significance. Therefore the term was an anachronism if projected onto thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Rus’. This conclusion remained unchallenged until now. At that time, Halperin did not address the genealogy of the expression in Latin. Ostrowski and Keenan found theoretically the earliest Latin usages (jugum tartarico) in foreign texts from 1521 and 1575. Apparently Ostrowski’s and Keenan’s contributions to the topic escaped the attention of historians in Russia. Rudakov himself found Keenan’s source but failed to notice that it referred not just to the “yoke” but the “Tatar Yoke.” Seleznev has discovered two Latin references from the thirteenth century, one supposedly a translation from a no longer extant Slavic text. Seleznev concludes that the expression “Tatar Yoke” was therefore known at the time and is not an anachronism. The present essay reinterprets the significance of Seleznev’s findings for our understanding of the Latin genealogy of “Tatar Yoke.” The existence of the term in Slavic is suspect, but in Latin clearly it is as old as Tatar rule. However, the significance of both Rudakov’s and Seleznev’s brilliant depiction of how writers both Catholic and Orthodox interpreted the Tatar conquest of Rus’ via analogy with Old Testament narrations of the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians and the Babylonian Captivity of the Hebrews lies elsewhere. This essay argues that we have to consider that any author familiar with Scripture could easily independently have made the leap from “Yoke” to “Tatar Yoke,” which renders a genealogy of the evolution of the term moot. Historians still need to address how Catholic writers in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries made that conceptual link, but no Rus’/Russian author did so until the second half of the seventeenth century.