The Word That Was Demoted

In the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan stretched from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean. Like Alexander’s, it outlived its founder only briefly—but it came apart in two stages rather than one, which is one stage more than the textbooks usually allow it.

First, in Genghis’s lifetime and immediately after his death in 1227, the territories were parcelled out among his sons as uluses. The north-western share went to the heirs of Jochi, who had in fact predeceased his father, and grew into the Golden Horde. The Ilkhanate came thirty years later, founded by Hulagu—not Jochi’s brother, as one sometimes reads, but his nephew, a son of Tolui and a grandson of Genghis—after the sack of Baghdad in 1258.

At its height the Ulus of Jochi ran from the Danube to the Ob and from the Vyatka to the Amu Darya, with the fragmented Russian principalities, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Serbia, Georgia and the tribal confederations of the North Caucasus and southern Siberia attached to it as tributaries. The Ilkhanate ran from Anatolia to the Indus, taking in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Persia and what is now Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

The Instrument

Both ran on the same device: the yarlyk, a khan’s written patent. At Tabriz the Ilkhans issued them to the sultans of Rum, confirming their right to rule in Anatolia. At Sarai the Horde issued them to Russian princes—of Vladimir, of Moscow, of Ryazan. No patent, no power; and since the khan could always issue one to somebody else, the arrangement kept the recipients admirably attentive.

In the early thirteenth century the documents were written in Mongolian, the common language of the house of Genghis. Thereafter the two chanceries diverged: Turkic in the Golden Horde, and in Ilkhanid Iran, Persian, which established itself alongside Mongolian in daily life, in letters and in the offices of state.

A Word Reduced in Rank

The word itself repays attention, because something rather humiliating happened to it.

Old Russian yarlyk, “a khan’s charter,” is attested in a document of 1267. It came from Turkic: Chagatai and Turkish jarlyk, “a sultan’s decree, a patent of nobility”; Uyghur, Altai and Teleut jarlyk, “order, command.”

Beyond that the accounts differ. The standard one derives the Turkic word from Mongolian zarlig (Middle Mongolian ĵarliq), whose root zar means “announcement” and -lig is a suffix. Ervand Sevortyan objected that ĵar is a shared Turco-Mongolic-Manchu root of onomatopoeic origin, in which case the direction of borrowing is anybody’s guess. That the word reached Russian through Turkic rather than straight from Mongolian is suggested by its shape: Russian has an initial y-, as the Turkic languages do, rather than the j- of Mongolian.

Now the humiliating part. In Mongolian, zarlig still means a decree. In Russian, the khan’s command became a patent for a princedom, then any written order, then a label on a bottle, and finally the phrase “to hang a yarlyk on someone”—to stick a label on a person. The word that once conferred rule over Russia now spends its days on a price tag.

What Stayed in the Language

The traces of the period were left in different materials. In Anatolia, in stone: the Ilkhanid Yakutiye madrasa at Erzurum. In Russia, in vocabulary.

The layer is enormous—government, warfare and money (yamshchik “coachman,” kazna “treasury,” tamga “seal,” which gave tamozhnya, “customs house”), building, jewellery, drink, textiles, clothing, household goods and weather. English has its own thin version of the same phenomenon, mostly by later and more roundabout routes: horde, khan, caviar, kiosk, yoghurt, coffee.

T&Cs Apply

Calling all of it “Turkic vocabulary” is a simplification. A good part of the list consists of Greek, Persian and Arabic words that merely travelled through Turkic. Russian almaz, “diamond,” is Greek ἀδάμας, “unconquerable,” by way of Arabic almās. Izumrud, “emerald,” is Greek σμάραγδος by way of Persian zumurrud. Sarafan is Persian sarāpā, “head to foot.” Khozyain, “master, householder,” is Persian ḫʷāǰa, “lord, teacher”—the same title borne by the Hoja Yakut who built the madrasa.

The courier, however, tends to leave fingerprints.

Soft a. Arabic madrasa, whose three a‘s are soft ones, becomes Turkish medrese—and reaches Russian as medrese, not madrasa. Arabic qalam becomes Turkish kalem, as discussed elsewhere. Where a Russian word of Arabic or Persian root shows an e against the original a, it almost certainly came by way of Anatolia or the steppe.

The suffix -lık. The Turkic -lık/-lik is visible from a distance: yarlyk, bashlyk, balyk, shashlyk. Nothing with that tail is going to pass itself off as Greek.

The list, in other words, is less an inventory of Turkic words than an impression of a route. The words came by caravan, and their pronunciation records whose hands they passed through—rather like the stamps in an old passport.

We say them daily without reflecting that they are relics of the age of the Chinggisids, quite as much as the carved portals of Erzurum. The difference is that the portals have stayed where they were put, while the words have taken other employment: a khan’s decree now hangs on a carton of milk.