Law and judgment of the Ulus Dzhuchi (Golden Horde) in the notes of Catholic missionaries of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

Abstract

The article analyses the information of Catholic missionaries (Franciscans and Dominicans) as a source of information about the legal realities of the Golden Horde at the end of the 13th-14th centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach combining the methods of history and law, the reports of representatives of the Catholic clergy who had visited the Golden Horde during the period in question, as well as fragments of works by European authors based on information provided by such missionaries, were examined. The analysis reconstructs principles and norms of law regulating such spheres as relations between authorities and population, private (primarily family) relations, crimes and punishments, and procedural relations (investigation and trial). While demonstrating in their notes on law and justice in the Golden Horde a "Eurocentric approach" and being largely bound by the attitudes that emerged as a result of I. de Plano Carpini and W. de Rubruk's journeys to the Ulus Juchi, their followers nevertheless took into account, to a certain extent, the changing realities (the adoption of Islam, the winding down of large-scale conquests, etc.), which were reflected in new interpretations of legal principles and rules that were in force in the Ulus Juchi.