This article analyses the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid- to late fourteenth century (1330s to 1390s) across Eurasia, looking at three facets of the Crisis: environmental—focusing on climate change; epidemiological—exploring the Black Death's impact on the fall of the Chinggisids; and political—mainly the dilution of the Chinggisid charisma due to the halt of expansion. We argue that the main facet of the Crisis was political, and that it derived from the nomadic culture of the Mongols. This was the same political culture that enabled them to establish their huge empire. However, an integral part of this political culture was the need to secure the support of the nomadic elites who were also the backbone of the Mongol army. This proved to be much harder in a reality of excessive natural disasters on the one hand and the erosion of the Chinggisid charisma due to the renunciation of the ideal of world conquest on the other. The result was a growing number of elite groups who contested for power while nominally retaining the framework of the Chinggisid principle, among whom the imperial sons-in-law played a significant part, as well as the shrink and fragmentation of the Chinggisid polities that survived the Crisis.

In the mid-fourteenth century, the Jochid ulus went through a phase of extreme political turbulence. Following the death of the last Batuid khan Berdibek (r. 1357–1359), during the next two decades, circa 1360–1380, a high number of power contenders rose at both the central and the local levels of the ulus. This article aims to map and exemplify those attempts as part of the broader theoretical discussion concerning the scope and depth of the khanate's crisis. It does so by combining an overall, bird's-eye perspective on the political history of the ulus by zooming in on the regional history, as well as through the analysis of both written primary and numismatic sources. None of the multiple patterns of reaction to the dying-out of the Batuid lineage clearly contradicted the idea of the khanate's unity and the overarching ‘Chinggisid principle’. At this point in time, the ulus still followed the centrifugal logic of the Chinggisid rule. At the same time, the crisis of the Jochid ulus of the mid-fourteenth century indeed prepared the very ground for the power division between the still-existing branches of the Jochid family and the break-up of the Jochid power domain of the fifteenth century that followed the last unification attempt of the ulus under Toqtamïsh (r. 1380–1406).