Batu Khan
Batu Khan conquered the Russian principalities and founded the state that ruled them for two hundred and forty years. He was a grandson of Genghis Khan through Jochi, the eldest son whose paternity was doubted and whose line was therefore given the westernmost lands - everything as far as Mongol hooves had trodden, which was an invitation to keep riding. The great western campaign was launched at the assembly of 1235 and Batu held the nominal command with Subutai, the empire's best general, doing the planning. They crossed the Volga in 1236, destroyed the Volga Bulgars, and in the winter of 1237 turned on the Rus. Winter was chosen deliberately: frozen rivers were roads for cavalry through a country whose forests and marshes were otherwise impassable. Ryazan fell in five days, Vladimir in February 1238, and Kiev in December 1240 after a siege that left it, by the account of a papal envoy who rode through six years later, a town of two hundred houses among fields of skulls. The Rus princes had not combined; they were beaten one principality at a time. Batu then rode into Hungary and Poland, won at Legnica and Mohi in the same week of 1241, and turned back the following year on news of the Great Khan's death. He did not return east to contest the succession, settling instead on the lower Volga at Sarai and ruling the western half of the empire as an increasingly independent khanate - the state the Russians called the Golden Horde. He left the Rus princes on their thrones as tax-collecting vassals, which is the arrangement that made Moscow.
- Lived: 1207 CE – 1255 CE
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: ruler, military
