Sarai

Sarai al-Jadid, the New Palace, was the capital of the Golden Horde in the age of Özbeg and Jani Beg, a city of the lower Volga beside the Akhtuba arm of the river. Italian sources say it was laid out shortly before 1338. Khans received Russian princes here and granted them their patents of rule, and the city had mosques, an Orthodox bishop, a mint and a large market. In the winter of 1356–57 Jani Beg's army took Tabriz, and in 1357 Metropolitan Alexius of Moscow made the long journey to Sarai to heal the khan's wife.

The prosperity ended in the Great Troubles that followed Jani Beg's death, when rival khans passed the city between them after 1361. Timur's army wrecked it in 1395. Coins were still struck in a small way in the early 15th century, and the traveller Afanasy Nikitin passed by around 1469, but river raiders from Viatka sacked it in 1471. In 1502 the Crimean khan Mengli I Giray, fresh from defeating the Great Horde on the Sula, destroyed it to show that he was the true heir of the Horde.