The Tatar-Mongol yoke is the most controversial period in Russian history. For example, in Russia, people learned about it only in the 19th century. How did this happen?
The first to write about Rus being under the yoke was in 1479 by the Polish chronicler, Archbishop of Lvov Jan Dlugosz. He mentioned the Moscow Grand Prince Ivan Vasilyevich, who "overthrew the barbarian yoke of slavery, which had long pressed upon all of Muscovy."
But the stand on the Ugra River, which marked the overthrow of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, took place in the autumn of 1480. In this case, the authenticity of Dlugosz's records is in doubt...
The official term "Mongol-Tatar yoke" first home owner database only in 1817 in a multi-volume atlas of world history prepared in Leipzig by Christian Kruse. In the same year, Nikolai Karamzin's "History of the Russian State" was published, in which the author did not use this term.
True, the events described correspond to this concept. In the fourth volume, Nikolai Mikhailovich tells about Russian princes who "solemnly renounced the rights of an independent people and bowed their necks under the yoke of barbarians."
Was it or wasn't it?
x Miechowski, a professor at the University of Krakow. In 1517, he published the "Treatise on Two Sarmatias".
The historian distinguished between Russia and Muscovy. Russia included the lands of today's Ukraine around Kyiv (it was also attacked by the Tatars). Muscovy was a powerful state that was never subordinate to the Tatars.
Dlugosz's follower, the Austrian ambassador to Russia, Prince Daniel of Bukhov, wrote a historical work, The Beginning and Rise of Muscovy. In it, the author uses the word "yoke" only once, when he talks about Ivan III's wife, Princess Sophia - she "never stopped urging her husband to overthrow this Scythian yoke someday."