The Golden Horde in the Catalan Atlas of 1375
The lands of the Golden Horde as a Mallorcan chart-maker drew them in 1375, with a crowned khan enthroned on the steppe between the Volga and the Caspian. Cresques worked from merchant reports, so the map records what western traders believed about Mongol authority — at the moment that authority was breaking apart.
The Catalan Atlas was made in Mallorca in 1375, at the end of two decades in which the Golden Horde had cycled through more than twenty khans. Its maker drew the steppe as western merchants understood it: a single enthroned ruler, named and crowned, presiding over the trade roads to the east. The image is a useful measure of the gap between reputation and reality, because by 1375 the throne it depicts had become the prize in a succession war rather than the seat of a working state. The atlas is held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. See how the Golden Horde's succession crisis fragmented Mongol rule.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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