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My work focuses on a period of instability in the Mongol-ruled Golden Horde (a successor khanate to the united Mongol Empire, ruling over present-day Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation) from about 280-1310. After years of relative stability, in this period the Golden Horde engaged in new rounds of military engagements with its neighbours (including new attacks on Hungary and Poland) while suffering coups and civil war. While previous research has focused more on the military angle (that is, attempting to reconstruct the course of the campaigns, and looking at the events more from the European context) or the political angle (ascribing the cause for all instability in the Golden Horde to machinations of a single Mongol prince), my work instead seeks a more ‘Eurasian approach:’ looking at relationship and influence of other Mongol khanates on the Golden Horde; incorporating new environmental proxy data corroborated by textual descriptions of an ecological crisis in the khanate at the time; and focusing on a competition between political
actors in the Horde for legitimacy, as new claimants to the position of khan sought to justify, through their unique Mongol imperial ideology, their rule in the face of how they came to power (through coups), and environmental stresses. After this period, a new Golden Horde emerges; one where most of the elite and much of the nomadic population has converted to Islam, and one where a greater number of cities have been established and grown in the khanate’s heartland in the steppe (the Volga-Ural River basins).