Daniel of Galicia drank the khan's mare's milk and was handed wine
Summoned in 1246 to the Golden Horde's capital on the Volga, Prince Daniel of Galicia was asked by Batu Khan whether he drank fermented mare's milk like the Mongols. Until now no, Daniel replied, but he would as commanded. You are one of ours now, said Batu, and, knowing the prince's fondness for wine, ordered him a goblet of that instead.
Daniel was born in 1201, son of Roman the Great, who had united the principalities of Galicia and Volhynia, and of a daughter of the Byzantine emperor Isaac II. When Roman died in 1205 the Galician nobles drove the four-year-old into exile with his mother, and he grew up at the Hungarian court of his uncle Andrew II. Restored at nine, he was deposed three years later by a rebellious boyar and spent decades winning Galicia back piece by piece.
He fought the Mongols early, surviving wounds at the disastrous Battle of the Kalka River in 1223. When they returned, Kiev, which his commander Dmytro was defending, fell on 6 December 1240, and the invaders swept through Galicia the following spring. Daniel moved his capital to Kholm. Victory at Yaroslav on 17 August 1245 finally reunited his father's lands, but the next year came the forced submission to Batu.
He accepted Mongol overlordship on paper while quietly working against it. He courted Poland and Hungary and asked Pope Innocent IV for a crusade, offering to place his church under Rome, a promise never kept. In 1253 a papal envoy crowned him king at Dorohochyn, but Daniel complained that he had expected an army with the crown. In 1259 a Mongol commander forced him to tear down his own city walls.
At home he invited German, Polish and Rus' traders and craftsmen, welcomed Armenian and Jewish townspeople, and founded Lviv in 1256, naming it after his son Leo. Unlike other Rus' princes, he avoided paying the Mongols tribute or running a census for them. He died in 1266. The royal title passed down to a grandson who died in 1308, and the crown vanished after Poles took Lviv in 1340.
Source: Daniel of Galicia
