“The impure and proud Mamai, Lord of the Volga Horde, ruled over the entire Horde, and he slew many lords and khans and he set  up a khan according to his own will. He was, however, in great confusion, and everybody distrusted him because he killed many lords and nobles in his Horde. He even killed his own khan, and although he had a khan, this khan of the Horde was ruler in name only, for it was he, himself, who was ruler and master of all. When he learned that the Tatars loved their khan he became afraid that the khan would assume the power from him. Therefore he killed him and all who were faithful to him and those who loved him.”   So the Rus’ Nikonian Chronicle describes the situation in the Golden Horde at the end of the 1370s. Thirty years after the death of Özbeg Khan, the Golden Horde underwent another, much more violent transformation. During the reign of Özbeg’s son Jani Beg from 1342 to 1357, he had kept the Golden Horde sailing through rough waters as the overland Asian trade began to unravel and the Black Death ravaged his cities.  But with Jani Beg’s death in 1357, possibly at the hands of his own son Berdi Beg, the good fortune of the Golden Horde came to a sudden and bloody end. Now the Horde was to enter two decades of anarchy; the bulghaq, the topic of today’s episode. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   In 1357, Jani Beg had just returned from his successful conquest of what is now Azerbaijan, when he suddenly died. According to a contemporary writer, al-Ahari, his son Berdi Beg was, at the time of his father’s death, still in the Azerbaijani lands. But sources such as the later Nikonian Chronicle have Berdi Beg convinced by a cunning emir to strangle his father himself after bringing numerous princes into an alliance with him. The widespread impression seems to have been that he organized his father’s murder, even if the most contemporary sources do not place Berdi Beg there himself. After Berdi Beg left Azerbaijan, the region was lost, seized by the Jalayirids of Baghdad.    Berdi Beg in quick order, with the backing of his grandmother Taydula, was proclaimed Khan of the Golden Horde. But feeling he faced threats, real or imagined, the new khan’s first actions were violence. Echoing his father and grandfather, Berdi Beg had his brothers murdered: 12 of them, by one count. For one infant brother, Berdi Beg is alleged to have done the deed with his own bare hands, despite the pleadings of grandmother Taydula Khatun. A number of other high ranking princes and officials too met their deaths on Berdi Beg’s order.   Berdi Beg’s actions did little to engender love to the new monarch, for whom Heaven seemed to show little favour. The Horde’s trade had declined tremendously in these years. Cities starved and shrunk, as they lost access to international trade, were depopulated by the Black Death and local farmland suffered. The mid-fourteenth century saw the Little Ice Age strike  and undo the system built up by the Jochids over the last century. Decreased rainfall over much of the steppe, and likely over-grazing from ever larger herds needed to support cities, when combined resulted in the rapid aridisation across the region. Much of the grassland simply could not sustain the great herds any longer. Almost paradoxically, the Caspian Sea was rising and causing increased flooding along the lower reaches of the Volga, which inundated cities and farmland in the Horde’s most densely populated region.    The great cities of the Horde saw their population drop rapidly, and the material wealth evaporated without the trade or population to sustain it. The Horde’s elites who had enriched themselves off it were frightened, angered and uncertain. Berdi Beg’s efforts did little to improve things; he is known, for instance, to have raised trade duties on imports to their highest level ever recorded in the Golden Horde: 5%. And an especially virulent wave of the plague in 1359 really topped t