Urganch ranch texnologiya Universiteti Iqtisodiyot va ishlab chiqarishni tashkil qilish fakulteti

To the Northeast and East: the steppes

To the northeast and east of Europe, beyond the Baltic Sea, lay the expanses of Russia and central Asia. From here, various steppe peoples invaded and settled central Europe. Some – the Bulgars and Magyars formed Christian kingdoms (Bulgaria and Hungary respectively); others (the Pechenegs) conducted destructive raids. 
From the 9th century Scandinavian sailors, traders and settlers explored the river systems of western Russia, pioneering trade routes between the Baltic Sea and Black Sea. In the wake of these expeditions they established trading settlements, which grew into towns from which the Rus (as these Scandinavians were called) gained control over neighboring Slavic tribes. They thus established extensive principalities, which came under the control of the Grand Principality of Kiev. In the 11th century these joined Christendom by adopting Christianity, in its Orthodox, Byzantine form. 
Kiev soon lost its primacy, but then, in the 13th century, the Mongols occupied the Russian principalities. They went on to launch extraordinarily destructive raids into eastern Europe, making short work of all European armies sent against them. For the remainder of the Medieval period the Mongols – known in Russia as the Golden Horde – were a looming presence in the east.
The Mongol domination of much of Asia had the immensely beneficial effect of fostering greater contact between west and east. The peace which their conquests brought allowed the Silk Road to flourish as a trade route as never before. This in turn enabled the Venetian merchant Marco Polo to travel around Asia from the 1260s to the 1290s, spending many years in China but also visiting South East Asia, Sri Lanka, India and the Middle East. 
More importantly, the Pax Mongolica allowed innovations which originated in China, most notably gunpowder, but also, quite probably, printing, to travel from China to Europe. Here they would help to bring about transformations which would lead to the rise of modern Europe.
We have seen above that medieval kingdoms were not unified states in the modern sense, but were more like federations, with the monarch being the “first amongst equals” when it came to his magnates. We have also seen elsewhere that the feudal system opened the way for towns to gain a large measure of self-government.
A town’s rights to self-government were usually embodied in its charter, granted by a king, feudal lord or bishop. This also specified that the citizens of the town were free from feudal obligations.
Many towns and cities throughout western Europe ran their own affairs, but some actually became independent states in their own right. This was nowhere more true than within the Holy Roman Empire, which covered Germany, much of northern and central Italy, and other lands. The sheer size of this realm made it very hard for Holy Roman emperors to impose their will upon all their subjects, given the very underdeveloped governing institutions at their disposal, and a series of civil wars – often fomented by the papacy, undermined what authority they were able to muster. The draining away of the emperor’s power opened up opportunities for cities to assert their de facto independence. The commercial power of the north Italian cities gave them the military capability to keep the emperor’s forces at bay, and from the late 13th century they were recognized as being independent city-states (they had been functioning as such since the 12th century). North of the Alps, the free imperial cities of Germany were not officially independent, but were effectively self-governing.
The actual structures by which towns – whether completely independent or merely self-governing – were governed varied from place to place, but there were common elements. Most towns and cities had a chief magistrate (called by different names, such as mayor, doge or consul) responsible for the day-to-day affairs in the community. There was also at least one council, often more. A common arrangement was for there to be a large council, composed of many citizens and meeting on infrequent occasions to endorse major decisions; and a much smaller council, which would meet more frequently, often on a daily basis, and would make routine decisions. It would put major decisions for the larger council to vote on.
The members of the town’s council, or, where there were more than one, members of the smaller councils, were the power-brokers in the towns. Although they were often elected to their positions by the citizens at large (usually by lot), these elections were very commonly manipulated so that important offices tended to be filled by wealthier citizens. The chief magistrates were elected from amongst such councillors.