Khanate of Astrakhan

A khanate of one city

formationDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)

Of the states that came out of the Golden Horde, Astrakhan was the one with the least of everything — the smallest army, the shortest reach, the poorest hinterland — and the best address on the continent.

What broke, and what was left

The Horde did not fall in a battle. Through the fifteenth century it came apart along the lines of its own princely families: Kazan on the middle Volga in the 1430s, the Crimea in the 1440s, the Uzbek and Nogai groupings east of the river, and in the middle of them a rump still calling itself the horde of the Jochids — what the Russians called the Great Horde — riding the grass between the Don and the lower Volga.

Astrakhan separated from that rump. Mahmud, son of Kuchuk Muhammad, lost the contest for the Great Horde to his brother Ahmad and withdrew downriver in the 1460s to the old trading town of Hajji Tarkhan, near the head of the delta. What he founded was a khanate in the full sense — a Chinggisid of the senior line, minting, receiving embassies, treated as a sovereign by his neighbours — with a territory that amounted to one town and the fisheries around it.

Why the address mattered

Everything that moved between the Caspian and the north moved past that town.

Silk and spices coming up from Shirvan and Gilan, Persian and Armenian merchants, the caravan road east to Khwarazm and Bukhara, the salt of the lakes, the sturgeon of the delta, and above all the Volga itself, which runs from the Caspian into the whole forest zone of Russia and does not stop until it is a few days' portage from the Baltic and the Arctic drainage. Astrakhan sat on the Caspian end of that system.

A state on such a spot does not need to be strong to be rich, and does not get to choose whether it is important. Every power on the steppe wanted the delta: the Crimea, the Nogai mirzas across the river, the Ottomans behind the Crimea, and — increasingly and then decisively — Moscow.

The permanent condition

The khanate had no answer to any of them and never pretended to have one. Its rulers were made and unmade by outsiders from the first generation; its safety lay entirely in the fact that no one of its neighbours would let another have it.

That is not a weakness peculiar to Astrakhan. It is what happens to a small state sitting on something several large ones need, and it worked, in its fashion, for ninety years.

The great emporium

expansionDrafted from Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851)

Sigismund von Herberstein went to Moscow twice as an imperial ambassador, in 1517 and 1526, and wrote up everything he had been able to establish about the country and the lands beyond it. He never saw the lower Volga. What he recorded is what Moscow knew about it in the 1520s, which is itself the point: the delta was close enough to matter and far enough to be uncertain.

What he was told

Astrachan is a wealthy city, and the great emporium of the Tartars, which gives its name to all the surrounding country.

He places it on the near bank of the Volga, near the mouth, ten days' journey below Kazan, and admits the disagreement among his informants about whether it stood on the mouths or some days above them. His own judgement is that the city must lie at the point where the Volga breaks into its branches — seventy of them, he had heard — and makes its islands and falls into the Caspian by as many mouths, with so much water that from a distance it looks like a sea.

Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851) · NASA · Public domain

That is an accurate description of the delta arrived at by reasoning from merchants' reports, and it is the kind of knowledge a trade route produces: precise about the goods and vague about the ground.

The goods

Herberstein's Russians knew the emporium by what came out of it. Silks and the finer wares of Persia reached Moscow through Astrakhan; Shemakha in Shirvan, six days from the city, supplied the silk dresses its weavers were famous for. The caravan trade to Bukhara went out across the Ust-Urt. Azov on the Don, seven days away, connected the same commerce to the Black Sea and Constantinople.

Between Kazan and Astrakhan, he writes, along the Volga and west as far as the Dnieper, lie desert plains inhabited by Tatars with no fixed abodes. The khanate was a point of settlement in an enormous emptiness, and the emptiness was the reason it was worth holding and the reason it was impossible to defend.

What the khanate took

Tolls on what passed, and a share of what the delta produced — salt from the lakes, and fish on a scale that later visitors found hard to credit.

No land tax worth the name is recorded, because there was almost no land: the islands would not bear corn, and the pasture that the khanate's own Tatars used was shared with the Nogai, who were far more numerous. Astrakhan lived on transit and on water, which made it prosperous in peace and worthless in a siege.

The conqueror at dinner

peakDrafted from Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851)

In the winter of 1523 the strongest ruler on the western steppe marched down and took Astrakhan, and within weeks he was dead and the city had its own khan back. The episode is the clearest single demonstration of what the khanate was for.

The march

Mehmed Giray of the Crimea had spent years playing Moscow and Poland against each other, and Herberstein — who was in Moscow trying to negotiate a peace between them — watched him do it. Each court bribed him to attack the other; he took the presents from both and deluded both with vain hopes.

Strengthened by that trade, and allied with Mamai, one of the princes of the Nogai, he brought an army out of the Crimea in January and fell on Astrakhan. The khan abandoned the city and fled. Mehmed Giray besieged it, took it, and then did the thing that killed him: he quartered his army inside the walls and stayed there as conqueror.

The advice

Agish, Mamai's brother, was appalled. He rebuked Mamai for having lent his forces to so powerful a neighbour, and warned him that a man of Mehmed Giray's temper might well turn on them both next — expel them, kill them, or make slaves of them.

Mamai took the point and sent word for Agish to come with every man he could raise. Then he sent a message to the khan in Astrakhan, full of concern for his army: he should not corrupt his soldiers and ruin their discipline by keeping them housed, but leave the city and live in the open field, according to the custom of the Tartars.

Mehmed Giray agreed. He brought his troops out and encamped in the open country. Agish arrived and joined his brother. A short time later the two of them fell on the camp while the khan was at dinner with the son of Sultan Batir, entirely unsuspecting, and killed him. Most of his army was destroyed and the rest scattered. The Nogai pursued the wreck beyond the Don and into the Crimea itself, and got as far as laying siege to Perekop before giving it up and going home.

What it did

Herberstein's summary is exact: the king of Astrakhan, by the agency of these princes, regained his kingdom — and the Crimea never recovered the position it had held under Mehmed Giray.

Astrakhan had been conquered and restored inside a single campaigning season, and had done nothing whatever to bring either about. It survived because the Nogai would not tolerate a Crimean delta, and the Crimea would not tolerate a Nogai one, and each was strong enough to stop the other. That balance was the khanate's entire defence, and it held for another thirty years, until a fourth party arrived with boats.

A throne with no fixed tenant

peakDrafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division I (1880)

Astrakhan's own named peak-era khan held the throne through two separate reigns, driven off it once and restored once, in a decade when the city changed ruler almost as often as it changed allies.

A khan abducted, a khan deposed

Kasim, who had made peace overtures to Moscow in 1532, lost his throne and very nearly his life within the same year: Circassian raiders fell on Astrakhan, carried him off, killed a number of the city's princes and people, and plundered their corpses before installing Ak Kubek in his place. Kasim seems to have died in the raiders' hands soon after. Ak Kubek, his cousin, lasted only a few months before the Nogai - the power that had made and unmade Astrakhan's khans since the horde first killed Ahmed Khan on the same steppe - deposed him in turn.

Abd al-Rahman

Abd al-Rahman, probably a nephew of the deposed Ahmed line rather than one of its direct descendants, was already on the throne by 1533 and opened his reign the way every Astrakhan khan had to: with a friendly letter to Grand Prince Vasili. It bought him four years. By 1537 the regency council ruling Moscow during the young Ivan IV's minority was writing to warn him that both the Crimean Tatars and the Nogai had turned against him, and within the year the Nogai drove him out and put Dervish Ali, a descendant of the old Ahmed line, on the throne instead.

Dervish did not hold it long. By September 1539 Abd al-Rahman was back, exchanging friendly embassies with Moscow again - a Russian envoy sent to inquire after his health, his own envoy Kudaliar returning the courtesy the following year, and in July 1541 an Astrakhan mission that also arranged for a stray Chinggisid prince, Yadigar, to enter Russian service at Kasimov rather than stay and complicate the succession further. Abd al-Rahman's own second reign ends where the sources simply stop naming him: the next time Astrakhan is mentioned, the throne belongs to a new khan, Yamgurchi, with no account of how the change was made.

What the throne actually was

Four khans in roughly a decade, two of them the same man twice over, none of them installed or removed by a battle anyone thought worth describing in detail - that is the whole political shape of Astrakhan's so-called peak. The city sat on the richest single crossing of the lower Volga, and every neighbour with cavalry wanted a khan there who owed them something. What none of them wanted, evidently, was to hold the throne itself; a kingdom worth fighting over four times in ten years was still, to Crimea and the Nogai alike, not worth the trouble of actually keeping.

The river opens

contractionDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)

Kazan fell in October 1552. From that month the whole Volga from the forest to the delta was open to one power, and the balance that had kept Astrakhan alive was over.

What the fall of Kazan changed

It was not that Moscow had become suddenly stronger. It was that the river had become continuous.

A Russian army could now be assembled on the upper Volga, put into boats, and delivered fifteen hundred kilometres downstream with its guns and provisions intact, to a place where no fortified point remained in the way. Nothing on the lower river could stop a fleet coming down it, and nothing on the steppe could feed an army marching the same distance overland — which was why the delta had been safe from the north for three centuries.

Ivan IV understood what he now held. He took the title tsar of Astrakhan in official documents from 1552, four years before he had the place.

The client

Yamgurchi, khan at the time of Kazan's fall, made his submission to Moscow and then broke it, turning back to the Crimea and the Ottomans, who had every reason to want the delta out of Russian hands.

In 1554 a Russian expedition came down the river, drove him out, and installed Dervish Ali — a Chinggisid who had spent years in Russian service — as khan on terms: tribute, a Russian voice in his affairs, and free passage for Russian merchants and fishermen.

It was the oldest arrangement in the khanate's history, with a new patron. Every khan of Astrakhan had held his throne on somebody's sufferance, and the throne had survived each time because the patron changed. The men who accepted Dervish Ali in 1554 had no particular reason to think this patron would be different.

Why it was different

Because Moscow did not want a khan. It wanted the river mouth, and it had just demonstrated at Kazan what it did with a city it wanted: took the walls, removed the dynasty, garrisoned the place and taxed it directly.

Dervish Ali seems to have understood this within a year. He opened negotiations with the Crimea and the Ottomans, which was the only move available to him and the one that ended the khanate.

1556

endDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)

The second Russian expedition came down the Volga in the summer of 1556 and found the city empty.

No siege

There was no defence to make. Dervish Ali had taken what force he had and gone, and the townspeople had scattered into the delta; the Russians occupied Hajji Tarkhan without a fight and this time installed nobody. The khanate was annexed, the Chinggisid line in the delta ended, and a garrison of musketeers was set to building an earth-and-timber fort on an island in the river a short way below the old town.

(eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009) · Alexxx1979 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dervish Ali made for the Crimea and disappears from the record. The Nogai mirza Ismail, who had murdered his own brother Yusuf and written to the tsar that his enemy was dead and the people had elected him by acclamation, had supported the Russians throughout and was rewarded with the friendship of a monarch who nonetheless declined to let a Tatar prince address him as brother.

What had actually been conquered

Not much of a state. Astrakhan had never controlled more than its town, its islands and the fishing and salt grounds around them; its army had never been able to face any neighbour; its dynasty had been installed and removed by outsiders for ninety years.

What Moscow had conquered was the Caspian end of the Volga, and with it the entire river — the first time since the Khazars that the whole of it had belonged to one power, and the moment at which a forest principality became an empire with a frontier on Asia. The Persian trade, the Bukharan caravan road and the fisheries came with it. So did an open steppe frontier and a hundred and fifty years of war on it.

The title

Ivan IV's style thereafter ran tsar of all the Russias, of Kazan and of Astrakhan, and the two khanates stayed in the Russian imperial title until 1917. Conquering a Chinggisid throne and then wearing it was not incidental. It was the argument: the successor of the khans, by right of having beaten them, in a realm where that had been the basis of legitimacy for three hundred years.

Fish hung in the streets

afterlifeDrafted from others, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia (1886)

Two years after the annexation an English merchant reached the delta on his way to Bukhara and wrote down what the place was like under its new owners. It is the first eyewitness account of Astrakhan in English and it is not a happy one.

The town

Anthony Jenkinson came downriver in July 1558, passed the ruins of the old town on his right hand and arrived at the new one — a settlement on an island, on a hillside, with a castle inside it walled about with earth and timber, neither fayre nor strong, and the town likewise walled with earth. Except for the captain's lodging and a few gentlemen's houses, the buildings were most base and simple.

The island was destitute and barren of wood and pasture, and the ground would bear no corn. The people lived on fish, and chiefly on sturgeon, having great scarcity of flesh and bread. They hung their fish up in the streets and houses to dry, which bred such an abundance of flies as he had never seen in any land, to their great plague.

Of trade he found a certaine trade of merchandize there vsed, but as yet so small and beggerly, that it is not woorth the making mention — though merchants did come, from Shemakha and elsewhere, and when he offered them English kerseys they told him they could buy as cheap at home.

Herberstein's great emporium of the Tatars, thirty years on and under new management.

The famine

What Jenkinson mostly saw was the destruction of the Nogai.

Civil war among the mirzas, followed by famine and pestilence, had consumed above a hundred thousand of them in that year by his reckoning — the like plague was neuer seéne in those parts — leaving a country of great pasture unpeopled, to the great contentation of the Russians, who had fought them a long time.

The survivors came in to Astrakhan in great numbers to surrender to their enemies and seek relief, and were ill entertained. They died of hunger all through the island, lying in heaps, unburied and like beasts, very pittifull to beholde. Many were sold by the Russians; the rest were driven off the island. Jenkinson, who was travelling on the tsar's safe-conduct and was in no position to object, recorded that he could have bought as many Tatar children as he wanted from their own fathers and mothers — a boy or a girl for a loaf of bread worth sixpence in England — but that his party had more need of victuals than of such merchandise.

What replaced it

Astrakhan, he notes, was the furthest hold the tsar had taken from the Tatars towards the Caspian, and was kept very strong, with men, victuals and timber for the castle sent down every year.

That is the shape of the aftermath: a fortified terminus, supplied from the north, with a broken steppe around it. Going back up the river in June 1559 he took six weeks to reach Kazan, because in all that way there was no habitation. The khanate's world had not been conquered so much as emptied, and the emptiness took two centuries to fill.

The ambassador and the last khan

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851)

Almost everything Europe knew about the lower Volga before the Russians took it came from one book, and the book is wrong about how the story ends.

How Herberstein knew what he knew

Sigismund von Herberstein was an imperial envoy, not a traveller. His Notes upon Russia were compiled from what he could get out of Muscovite officials, out of Russian chronicles read to him in translation, and out of merchants who had been where he had not. He was careful, he names his disagreements, and he says when he is guessing — which is why the book survived as the standard account of Muscovy and its neighbours for the better part of two centuries.

He also had one piece of evidence nobody else had: he had met the last khan of the Great Horde.

Sheikh Ahmed, driven out of the steppe by the Crimeans, had fled to Lithuania and been detained there. Herberstein describes his reception, the Polish council that agreed on a war to restore him, the unreasonable time the Poles took over mustering, the khan's attempt to slip away, and his recapture — and then, flatly, that he was taken back to the castle of Trakai four miles from Vilnius, where I saw him and dined with him.

The senior Jochid line, holder in name of the throne of Batu, eating in a Baltic fortress with an Austrian diplomat.

The error

From that dinner Herberstein drew a conclusion:

This was the termination of the reign of the kings of Savolha, and together with them ended the race of the kings of Astrachan, who derived their origin from the same royal line.

The first half is right. The second is not. The khans of Astrakhan did descend from the same line — Mahmud, who founded the khanate, was the brother of the Ahmad who lost the Great Horde — but they were still reigning in the delta when Herberstein wrote, and would go on reigning for another thirty years. He knew the city well enough to describe its trade and argue about its position, and he believed its dynasty extinct.

Why it is worth noticing

Because it is exactly the mistake the sources make about small states at the far end of a trade route. A visible dynasty collapses; the invisible branch of it that continues five hundred miles downriver is assumed to have gone with it.

Astrakhan spent ninety years being assumed to have been settled by whoever had last marched through — the Crimeans in 1523, the Nogai after them, Moscow in 1554 — and each time it was still there. What finally ended it was not another conqueror riding away but a garrison that stayed.