Sources on the Proceedings in the Golden Horde

Abstract

Law as a socio-cultural factor arises in certain historical conditions, reflecting them and being an integral part of them. Content of the law, the developer and owner of which becomes an ethnos, is due to the peculiarities of the historical community he lives and develops within. The Golden Horde is a state that was one of the heirs of the Great Mongol Empire, and therefore it is natural that the judicial system of the latter had a significant impact on the proceedings in Djuchi Ulus. Chingizids, establishing their system of state power in the conquered territories, introduced the norms of the «Great Yasa» of Genghis Khan as the main source of law, which increasingly came into conflict with the real conditions of society’s life, since the «Yasa» of Genghis Khan regulated only the norms of nomadic life. At the same time, the states conquered by the Mongols, in their majority, already had considerable historical experience of the activities of state institutions, including legal ones. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the judicial system and the judicial process basing on published documentary sources, as well as monographic research. The theoretical basis of this article was the monographic studies of both domestic and foreign historians, linguists, geographers and other scientists, who touched upon the problems of judicial organization and legal proceedings in the Golden Horde in their works. The empirical base was a complex of published sources translated into Russian. The lack of written sources originating from the Golden Horde itself is largely compensated by the sources originating from countries that submitted to the Golden Horde or were in diplomatic relations with it. The author used general and private methods of cognition in the course of the research. With the help of reconstructive and historico-political interpretation of the law, the sources containing the judicial system of the Golden Horde state were described, in their connection with socio-historical and political conditions in chronological order. Special attention is paid to the analysis of various sources of Mongolian, Persian and European origin, which allows us to conclude that the legal successors of the Mongol Empire inherited also the Mongolian legal and judicial system. The author concludes that in the process of historical development of the Golden Horde state in the conditions of a multiethnic and polyconfessional society, one of the main features of the judicial system of the Golden Horde was the peculiar legal awareness of its population due to the synthesis of nomadic traditions, the customary laws of Mongolian peoples and Muslim law related with the adoption of Islam as a state religion under the Uzbek Khan. The foregoing provision led to the coexistence and simultaneous operation of the judiciary of traditional Mongolian justice — the Zargo court — and the Muslim court of kadi.