Oz Beg Khan
Oz Beg Khan made the Golden Horde a Muslim state and made Moscow rich by using it as a tax collector. He took the throne in 1313 and imposed Islam on the Mongol aristocracy, reportedly executing the princes and shamans who refused. The horde had been religiously mixed for eighty years; under him it became Muslim permanently, which separated it from the Mongol courts in China and Persia and aligned it with the Mamluks of Egypt against the Ilkhans. His twenty-eight years were the horde's peak. He led the largest army it ever put in the field, took tribute from the Rus princes, the Genoese colonies in the Crimea and the Byzantines, and ran a court wealthy enough that Ibn Battuta, who saw a great many courts, described the reception tents and the wagon-borne city that moved with the season. His policy in the Rus lands was to prevent any one prince becoming strong and it produced the opposite. He granted the title of grand prince and the right to collect the tribute to Ivan Kalita of Moscow in the late 1320s, after Moscow helped him crush a rising in Tver that had killed his envoy. Moscow kept a share of everything it gathered, absorbed the neighbouring principalities, and became the centre the horde was eventually destroyed by. He died in 1341. Within a decade the plague came up the caravan routes his peace had secured, killing perhaps a third of the horde's population, and within twenty years the succession collapsed into two decades of civil war. The city of Uzbekistan's name and the Uzbek people take their name from him.
- Lived: 1282 CE – 1341 CE
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
