Edigu

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Edigu, or Edigey, also İdegäy (1352-1419) was an emir of the White Horde who founded the new political entity, which came to be known as the Nogai Horde. He is the national hero of Kazakhs, Tatars, and Crimean Tatars, as the memory of his exploits lives on in the epics of those peoples.

Edigu was from the Crimean Manghit tribe. He gained fame as a highly successful general of Tokhtamysh before turning the arms against his master. By 1396, he was a sovereign ruler of a large area stretching between the Volga and Yaik Rivers, which would later be called the Nogai Horde.

In 1397 Edigu allied himself with Timur-Qutlugh and was appointed commander-in-chief of the Golden Horde armies. In 1399 he inflicted a crushing defeat on Tokhtamysh and Vytautas of Lithuania at the Vorskla River. Thereupon he managed to unite under his rule all Jochi's lands, albeit for the last time in history.

In 1406 he tracked down his old enemy Tokhtamysh in Siberia and killed him. The following year he raided Volga Bulgaria. In 1408, he staged the last destructive Tatar invasion of Russia, which hadn't paid the tribute due to the horde for several decades. Edigu burnt Nizhny Novgorod, Gorodets, Rostov, and many other towns but failed to take Moscow.

Two years later Edigu was dethroned in the Golden Horde and had to seek refuge in Khwarezm. Shah Rukh of Herat expelled him back to Sarai, where he was assassinated by one of Tokhtamysh's sons in 1419. Edigu's dynasty in the Nogai Horde continued for about two centuries, until his last descendants moved to Moscow, where they converted to Orthodox Christianity and became known as Princes Urusov and Yusupov.