Mamai
Mamai ruled the western half of the Golden Horde for twenty years without ever being able to call himself khan, and lost it at Kulikovo. He was a beklarbek, the commander-in-chief and chief minister, and he was not descended from Genghis Khan - which under Mongol law barred him from the throne absolutely, no matter what he actually controlled. So he ruled through a succession of puppet khans of the right blood, installing and discarding them as the quarrel required, during the two decades the Russians called the great troubling, when the Horde had more than twenty khans in as many years. His authority ran over the steppe west of the Volga, the Crimea and the Russian tribute, and it depended entirely on being able to collect. When Moscow stopped paying and beat his force at the Vozha in 1378, he had to answer or lose everything. He assembled a large army in 1380, hired Genoese infantry from the Crimean ports, and arranged for the Lithuanians and the prince of Ryazan to join him. Dmitry moved first and fought him alone at Kulikovo before the allies arrived. The defeat was total in political terms rather than military: Tokhtamysh, a genuine Genghisid backed by Tamerlane, crossed the Volga while Mamai was rebuilding, and Mamai's own troops changed sides at the Kalka rather than fight a legitimate khan. He fled to the Genoese at Caffa, who killed him for his money. Ironically, his descendants prospered: his son took refuge in Lithuania and founded the Glinski family, and Ivan the Terrible was Mamai's great-great-great-grandson through his mother Elena Glinskaya. Contemporary Russian chronicles treat him as the enemy of God, which is what a defeated opponent in a holy war becomes. He is not the same person as any khan, and the sources that call him one are wrong.
- Lived: 1335 CE – 1380 CE
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: military, ruler
