Nogai Horde

The Nogai Horde was a confederation founded by the Nogais that occupied the Pontic-Caspian steppe from about 1500 until the seventeenth century, when it was pushed west by the Kalmyks and south by the Russians. Its core was the Mongol tribe known as the Manghuds, whose late-fourteenth-century leader Edigu, a commander of Manghit paternal and Jochid maternal descent, founded the Nogai dynasty after the earlier kingmaker Nogai Khan had built up the tribe's military strength within the Golden Horde in the late thirteenth century. In 1557 a succession dispute split the confederation into a Lesser Nogai Horde on the North Caucasus steppe and a Great Nogai Horde to its north, and the Nogais living north of the Black Sea became nominally subject to the Crimean Khanate rather than to the Nogai Bey.