Golden Horden.

Etymology: < golden adj. + horde n., after German Goldene Horde (1776 in the passage translated in quot. 1780), itself after Russian Zolotaja Orda , denoting the khanate of the descendants of Batu, also used as a name of its capital city (c1565 in Old Russian, as a historical term) < zolotoj golden, adjectival derivative of zoloto gold (see gold n.¹) + orda horde n. Compare French horde d'or (1776 in a French translation of the German source translated in quot. 1780).The motivation of the Russian phrase is uncertain. Although the Turkic and Mongolic words for ‘yellow’ are also commonly used in those languages in the sense ‘central’, the late date of the first attestation in Old Russian (a few generations after the Golden Horde had ceased to exist) makes it unlikely that the Old Russian name results from reinterpretation of a name with this meaning in a Turkic or Mongolic language. (No equivalent of ‘yellow horde’ is apparently attested in Old Russian, and although Old Russian sources follow the Turkic usage of ‘blue’ in the sense ‘east’ and ‘white’ in the sense ‘west’ when referring to the subdivisions of the khanate, those terms are not found in the source of c1565.) The author of the Old Russian chronicle where the term Zolotaja Orda is first found claims to have lived for about twenty years in the capital of the Kazan Khanate (a later offshoot of the Golden Horde). Therefore, the term may ultimately reflect Mongolian use of an equivalent phrase with reference to the colour of khan's tent (compare discussion in H. Serruys ‘Mongol Altan "Gold" = "Imperial"’ in Monumenta Serica 21 (1962) 375–7). References to such use in Turkic or Middle Mongolian are found in Persian and early Western European sources; compare (in a translation of a Latin source from 1247):1598 R. Hakluyt tr. J. de Plano Carpini in Princ. Navigations (new ed.) I. xxvii. 68 The foresaid tent or court is called by them Syra Orda [L. statio siue Curia nominatur ab eis Syra orda]...there was another tent erected, which was called the golden Orda [L. quod apud ipsos appellatur Orda aurea]. For there was Cuyne to be placed in the throne Emperiall.With Syra Orda in this passage (distinguished by de Plano Carpini from Orda aurea ‘golden Orda’, for which he does not provide an Asian-language equivalent) compare Middle Mongolian ṣira yellow (Mongolian šar; < a Turkic language: compare Old Uighur sariğ, Kipchak sari, ṣārū yellow). However, even if the Old Russian phrase was modelled on the 16th-cent. Turkic usage in the Kazan Khanate, it remains unclear how or when a term for a khan's tent had come to designate the khanate of the descendants of Batu.