After repeated attempts to conquer the Volga Bulgaria, which dragged on for 13 years, in 1236, the army of Batu Khan still occupied the country. Attempts to restore independence, which were undertaken by the inhabitants of the country, were brutally suppressed by the new - the imperial authorities.
Despite the most severe terror, destruction of the main economic and political centers, Bulgaria retained its position in international trade, which is why Batu chose Bulgaria as the place of his initial rate, the city of Bolgar on the Middle Volga, became the first capital of the new state.
The crisis that shook the state led to the fact that up to the end of the XIII century. Volga Bulgaria developed slowly, gradually restoring its economic and cultural potential, pre-Mongol traditions prevailed in crafts, construction, and culture of this period. Since the beginning of the XIV century. on the territory of the Volga Bulgaria, urban planning begins to revive, the economy is intensively developing, and the cultural level is growing.
The attitude of the Imperials to the cities is peculiar - the city fortifications were destroyed, and their restoration was prohibited. This was done in order to suppress uprisings and manifestations of separatism. Despite this, in the first half of the XIV century. in Bolgar, a new powerful defensive line was built, which surrounded not only the central part, but also most of the city's trade and craft townships. The perimeter of the city fortifications of the imperial period was almost seven times the length of the outer line of the fortifications of the end of the pre-Mongol period and 35 times the length of the fortifications of the 10th century. The fortifications of Bolgar represented an elaborate system that included a powerful rampart with 17 towers, bridgeheads, a deep ditch with an established system of filling it with water from natural sources. The largest structuresThe defensive system of the Bolgar occupied one of the first places among the wooden and earth fortifications of Eastern Europe.
Some changes also took place in the handicraft production of the Bulgar cities. Iron processing continued to play a leading role. An important achievement was the development of the conversion process - iron began to be obtained through the production of cast iron. The idea of the redistribution process was brought to the Volga Bulgaria by metallurgists, whom the imperials drove from the Far East, presumably from Manchuria. It is noteworthy that subsequently the Bulgar metallurgists improved the process of iron smelting; if coal was used in the Far Eastern technology, charcoal was used in the Bulgar technology.
During archaeological excavations in Bolgar, cast iron furnaces of the 14th century were discovered. They are built of bricks and have more blowing nozzles than a blast furnace. In such furnaces, the higher temperature required for the smelting of pig iron was reached. It should be noted that these are the oldest cast iron furnaces in Europe (!).
To obtain iron, it was necessary to resort to the process of alteration of cast iron, which complicated the production cycle, but labor productivity increased, and the loss of iron to slag decreased. In general, a lot of cast iron was found on the territory of Bulgaria, the most common products were cast iron boilers.
Later, the improved technology of the Bulgar metallurgists was introduced in the imperial cities of the Lower Volga region.
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Ceramic production in the Bulgarian cities developed on the basis of local traditions, with the use of innovations. In imperial times, home pottery and custom work sharply declined, and the pottery market dominated. Along with the production of traditional tableware and kitchen utensils of traditional forms of red, beautifully fired, with a glossy polished surface, pots and crusts are used more, clay household items for special purposes have appeared: boilers with three-fingered handles, lamps, ladles, bowls, glass-shaped vessels, irrigation ceramics.
Other traditional handicrafts also developed; jewelry, leather, bone carving, woodworking. Glass making developed more intensively, but ceremonial glassware, as before, came from the traditional centers of glass making in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Stone construction is expanding in Bolgar, monumental architectural structures appear, and the main cathedral mosque is under construction. The cult complex in Bolgar, a white-stone mosque with a high minaret, will for a long time become a standard for similar structures in other cities of Ulus Jochi. From the last quarter of the XIII century. a number of stone mausoleums of noble families are being built next to the cathedral mosque.
Raw bricks were used in residential construction. The houses were supplied with a heating system, in which chimneys were located along the walls of the rooms. Dwelling houses were supplemented by buildings for servants, utility rooms and were palace complexes. The facades of stone buildings were decorated with carvings. Among the buildings studied in Bolgar, public baths made according to Byzantine models are of interest, which were supplied with hot and cold water, sewerage and heated rooms with the help of hypocaust.
The bulk of the townspeople, as in the pre-Mongol period, settled in five-walled log houses with two rooms and obligatory stoves. Slaves, who made up a noticeable part of the population of the Bulgar cities of the Horde period, huddled in semi-dugouts and dugouts with open hearths.
The Mongol invasion, which covered vast territories, raised the mass of the multi-ethnic population of Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, Rus, the Desht-i-Kipchak steppes, some of them settled on the territory of the Middle Volga region and the Urals. However, the anthropological type of the population of the Volga Bulgaria practically did not change (!).
By and large, the invasion of the XIII century can be compared with the triumph of ideology, like the one that occurred in 1917 - the “Reds” came, defeated the “Whites,” although both of them consisted of the same ethnic groups. Therefore, both in scale and in coverage of ethnic groups of different origins, the invasion of the 13th century was a kind of medieval revolution, with similar socio-economic processes that shook the entire society. Accordingly, there were no large-scale assimilations, the percentage of mixing of various ethnic groups was insignificant, and if attempts were made to ethnocide, they all turned out to be ineffectual. Similar processes have taken place and continue to occur at all times in different regions of the planet.
Regarding our Ural-Volga region, neither the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, nor the expansion of Russians in the middle of the 16th century, nor the revolution of the beginning of the 20th century, led to the emergence of new peoples or new languages (!). Nevertheless, many researchers and ordinary people lose sight of this indisputable fact, in the naive fantasies of these people, some peoples easily replace each other in an unimaginable leapfrog, the languages and anthropology of these peoples are radically changing, but all these purely speculative assumptions have a certain boundary - by According to the ethnolukhs, until the middle of the 16th century, ethnic processes were actively seething like a brew in a cauldron, and after the Russian expansion they suddenly interrupted or slowed down significantly. Logic?.. No, you haven't heard …
There is one more moment when someone tells us about the mass Kipchakization, which supposedly suddenly intensified during the time of Ulus Jochi, the logic starts to fail again. Indeed, in order for this process to become possible in a couple of centuries, the notorious Kipchaks, who even never had their own state (note "Desht-i-Kipchak" is a conventional designation of the steppe zone of Asia, adopted in the Arab-Persian literature), had to build tens of thousands of schools on vast territories, in which one single language would be systematically taught, the Kypchaks should have had mass media (mass media) broadcasting exclusively in one language, but neither one nor the other was done, otherwise there would be that variety of Türkic languages included in one subgroup, which was conventionally (!) called "Kypchak", and at the same time, there would be no Finno-Ugric,Iranian and Slavic languages, whose representatives have lived side by side among the Turks since ancient times. Everything indicates that the proximity of the Türkic languages of the "Kypchak" subgroup existed long before the appearance of Ulus Jochi, which is confirmed by the words of Mahmud Kashgari, who lived in the century.
As an example; the state created as a result of Russian expansion, for centuries of existence, was unable to eliminate the non-Russian languages, and this despite the fact that the Russians have those instruments that neither the Kipchaks, nor even the Mongols, had. We are talking about the education system and the media, which are introducing one language - Russian. It must be admitted that the Russification of non-Russian peoples takes place, but this phenomenon has sharply intensified only under the Soviet regime, and then only thanks to the tools mentioned above. Now answer your question; even if the Russians fail to eradicate the languages of those peoples that are subject to them, then why are you still sure that other conquerors would have succeeded?..