Comments by "George Carty" (@GCarty80) on "Russia is Prepared to Destroy Kherson City" video.

  1. I suspect that if the Muscovites were using the two-headed eagle on their 14th-century coins, they were far more likely to have adopted it from the Byzantines (who also used such a symbol) than from the Golden Horde. Especially when the Horde adopted the Islamic faith which of course frowns upon any kind of figurative art! The same could be of the Muscovite tradition of absolute autocracy: while we don't have much evidence of how the Golden Horde actually functioned (because most of their cities were obliterated by Timur), the khans of its Crimean successor state apparently had rather limited powers, more like the rulers of Kyiv or Novgorod rather than Muscovy.
    1