way east to Sibir; Vytautas survived the battle, although some twenty princes, including two of his cousins fell in the fight. The defeat was disastrous, ending Vytautas' ambitious policy in the Pontic steppes. Death Reduced to the position of an adventurer, Tokhtamysh made his way across the territory of the Golden Horde to its peripheral Siberian possessions. Here he succeeded in bringing parts of the area under his control in 1400, and by 1405 was attempting to ingratiate himself with his protector-turned-enemy, Timur, who had just quarreled with Edigu. Timur's death in February 1405 made any rapprochement moot. Throughout this period, Tokhtamysh naturally attracted the hostility of Edigu and his new puppet khan, Shādī Beg. Edigu is said to have fought Tokhtamysh on sixteen separate occasions between 1400 and 1406; in the final instance, after a reverse at the hands of Tokhtamysh, Edigu spread a rumor about his own death to draw Tokhtamysh out into the open and have him killed in a hail of darts and spears, late in 1406 (or early in 1407), near Tyumen. Khan Shādī Beg apparently claimed or was given credit for the death of Tokhtamysh, while others credited Edigu or Edigu's son Nūr ad-Dīn. Legacy When he reunified the Golden Horde in 1380–1381, Tokhtamysh promised to revitalize and stabilize it after two decades of chronic civil war. He was the last khan of the Golden Horde who minted coins with Mongolian script. His sack of Moscow in 1382 undid the setback suffered by the Golden Horde in its domination over the Russian principalities at the Battle of Kulikovo two years later. Finally, the invasion of Azerbaijan followed in the path of the aspirations of earlier khans for the exploitation or conquest of that region. In 1385, Tokhtamysh was at the height of his power and his future, and that of the Golden Horde, looked bright. However, in entering into and exacerbating the conflict with his former protector Timur, Tokhtamysh set a course for the undoing of all his achievements and for his own destruction. Seeking allies, after he had weakened Moscow, he strengthened it with the concession of making the Grand Principality of Vladimir a hereditary possession of the Prince of Moscow in 1389, and by allowing it to take over Nižnij Novgorod in 1393. Similarly, he helped Lithuania establish a precedent for involving itself in the government and politics of the Golden Horde,