Khanate of Kazan

A khanate that ploughed

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

The Jochid successor states were mostly hordes: a prince, his clans, and the pasture they moved between. Kazan was not. It was a city on a river with a stone citadel, a fair, a tax register and farmers, and that is the fact from which everything else about it follows — including its destruction.

Where it came from

Ulugh Muhammad had been khan of the Golden Horde and had lost it. Driven west and then east by rivals, he arrived on the middle Volga in 1438 with a following and took Kazan, a town that had grown up near the ruins of the old Volga Bulgar capital.

What he took over was not a blank steppe. The middle Volga had been a settled Muslim country since the tenth century: the Volga Bulgars had a state there when Kiev was pagan, and they had grain, furs, silver and a market that traders came to from Khwarazm and the Baltic. The Mongol conquest had wrecked it and the region had recovered under the Horde as a province.

So the khanate was a Chinggisid dynasty imposed on an old settled polity, in the way the Ilkhans were imposed on Iran — and like the Ilkhans it took the administration it found.

What that meant

It meant revenue that did not have to be raided for. Grain from the black-earth right bank, furs and honey from the forest peoples of the left, and the tolls of a river fair that sat on the junction of the Volga and the Kama, where the routes from the Caspian, from Siberia and from Moscow met.

It also meant subjects who were not Tatars. The Mari, the Chuvash, the Udmurt and the Mordvins were the majority of the population, paid the tribute, and provided most of the army. They were not Muslims, they were not Chinggisids, and their loyalty was to whoever was collecting from them — which turned out to matter enormously in 1551.

And it meant a fixed capital that could be besieged. A horde that is beaten rides away and re-forms. A khanate whose whole revenue is inside one set of walls is finished when the walls go.

The neighbour

Kazan is about seven hundred kilometres from Moscow down a river that runs the right way.

The Volga system connects the two, and the Oka and the Kama connect the parts, which meant that an army with boats could reach Kazan from the Russian centre in a season and that the merchants of both states needed each other continuously. Herberstein, writing in the 1520s, notes both halves: that the rivers flowing from Moscow into the Volga made the subjugation of Kazan easier, and so did the commercial intercourse which they could not dispense with.

A state that is your customer, your supplier, your rival for the fur trade and three weeks away by water is not a state you can ignore. Moscow did not ignore it for a hundred and fourteen years.

More civilized than the rest

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

The best outside description of the khanate of Kazan while it existed was written by a Habsburg ambassador who never went there, from what the Muscovite court and the Tatar princes living in Moscow told him in 1517 and 1526.

Herberstein's paragraph is short, and every clause in it is doing something.

The country

The kingdom of Kazan, with the city and fortress of the same name, is situated on the further bank of the river Volga, nearly seventy miles below Lower Novogorod. The king of this province can raise an army of thirty thousand men, principally foot soldiers, amongst whom the Czeremissi and Czubaschi are the most skilful archers. They say that the Czubaschi excel in the art of navigation.

Thirty thousand, principally foot soldiers — which no steppe khanate fielded. The archers and the boatmen are the forest peoples of the khanate's own hinterland, the Mari and the Chuvash, and Herberstein names them separately from the Tatars because his informants did.

Then the sentence that explains the whole strategic problem:

These Tartars are more civilized than the rest, in as much as they cultivate their lands, live in houses, and carry on various branches of merchandize.

He means it as a compliment and it is a description of a vulnerability. People who cultivate can be starved; people who live in houses can be besieged; people who trade have a relationship that can be cut.

How Moscow managed it

Herberstein then sets out the dynastic mechanics, and his account is the clearest statement anywhere of what a Muscovite protectorate over a Chinggisid throne actually involved.

Alega succeeded his father as eldest son but as he was not entirely obedient to the commands of the Prince of Moscow —

he was on a certain occasion made drunk at a festival by some of the councillors of the Prince of Moscow, whom he had sent thither to watch the disposition of the king, and who in that state placed him in a carriage, as if with the intention of conveying him home; but on that same night he was driven towards Moscow.

He was confined, sent to Vologda and died there. His mother and two half-brothers had already been moved to Beloozero. One brother was released from Beloozero and put on the throne in his place; when he too was removed for a similar reason, the other brother was brought out of confinement and installed.

That is a khanate run as a prison system. Moscow held the eligible candidates, kept them alive, and issued them one at a time.

Nur-Sultan

The figure Herberstein cannot stop returning to is the queen.

Nur-Sultan was married to one khan of Kazan; when he died childless she was taken by the man who thereby gained possession of the kingdom, and bore him two sons. After the fall of her stepson she married Mengli Giray, the khan of the Crimea. Having no children by him, she travelled — in 1504, Herberstein has the date — to Moscow to see one son in confinement and then on to Kazan to see the other on the throne.

One woman, three khans, two khanates and a journey across the whole Jochid world to visit her children, one of whom was a prisoner of the power that had installed the other.

What he could not see

Herberstein wrote all this down as background. Four years after his second embassy Kazan threw the Muscovite party out and took a Crimean Giray instead, and the management system he had described stopped working.

He records that too, at the end of the section, in the present tense: The people of Kazan have now rebelled against the Prince of Moscow; and as this rebellion has given rise to many wars … and as the war remains unterminated up to the present day, I have thought it right to describe its reason below.

The Crimean party

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

In 1521 the begs of Kazan expelled the khan Moscow had given them and sent for a Giray from the Crimea. It was the most consequential decision the khanate ever took, and it converted a managed client into a member of a hostile alliance.

Why it happened

Because the alternative had become intolerable and because an alternative had become available.

Thirty-four years of Muscovite appointment had produced khans who were selected for obedience, and the Kazan aristocracy had watched three of them removed by Moscow when they showed any. The city's merchants had also seen Moscow attempt to divert the Volga fair to Nizhny Novgorod — a direct attack on the khanate's revenue, aimed at the one thing everybody in Kazan agreed about.

At the same time the Crimea under Mehmed Giray had become the strongest of the successor states, had destroyed the rump of the Golden Horde, and was collecting gifts from both Moscow and Poland. A Giray on the throne of Kazan meant Ottoman protection at one remove and a patron whose interests pointed away from the Volga rather than at it.

So they took one: Sahib Giray, brother of the Crimean khan, and after him his nephew Safa Giray.

What it produced

A war that ran, with interruptions, for thirty-one years.

In the same year the Crimean and Kazan armies attacked Muscovy together and reached the outskirts of Moscow; the grand prince left the city; the Crimeans withdrew with an enormous number of captives and a document acknowledging tribute which Moscow subsequently disavowed. That campaign is the high point of the Jochid states in Russia, and Kazan's part in it is the reason the khanate has a peak at all.

It is also the moment Kazan's destruction became a Russian strategic objective rather than a dynastic convenience. A khanate that could be managed was worth managing. A khanate that could open a second front for the Crimea was worth taking.

The two parties

For the next generation the khanate had a Crimean party and a Moscow party and the throne alternated between them, sometimes in the same year.

The pattern is exhausting to follow and the exhaustion is the point: khans installed, expelled, recalled and murdered; Muscovite armies in the field in 1524, 1530, 1545, 1548, 1550; Crimean reinforcements arriving and leaving; the Nogai hordes selling their support to whichever side was paying. Safa Giray was put on the throne three separate times.

What no Russian campaign could do before 1551 was hold anything. The armies arrived in summer, could not be supplied at the walls, and went home.

The subject peoples

The other thing the thirty years did was detach the khanate from its own hinterland.

The Mari, Chuvash, Udmurt and Mordvin peoples paid the khanate's tribute and filled its levies, and had no dynastic loyalty to the Girays whatever. As the wars went on and the Russian frontier came closer, Moscow began taking their oaths directly — offering the same tribute burden under a different collector, with the argument that the collector was winning.

By 1551 most of the right bank had gone over. The khanate that faced the final siege was a city and a Tatar aristocracy, without the forest levies that had supplied two-thirds of its army in Herberstein's description.

A fortress floated downstream

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

The Russians took Kazan in 1552 because of something they did in 1551, and it was not a battle.

The problem

Every earlier campaign had failed the same way. An army could reach Kazan by river in early summer, sit in front of the walls, and then run out of food, because the country between the frontier and the city could not feed it and the supply line up the Volga could be cut. Artillery could be floated down but not kept in the field. Winter sieges were worse: the ice made the approach possible and the cold made staying impossible.

Six campaigns in twenty-seven years had come home for those reasons.

The answer

In the winter of 1550–51 a fortress was cut in the forests of the upper Volga far to the north — walls, towers and gates, framed and fitted and then taken apart — floated down the river in the spring, and reassembled at the mouth of the Sviyaga, about twenty-five kilometres upstream from Kazan on the high right bank.

It was standing in roughly four weeks.

Sviyazhsk gave the Russians what they had never had: a garrisoned, provisioned, artillery-capable base within a day's march of the enemy capital, held through the winter, on ground the khanate could not retake. It also sat on the right bank among the Chuvash and Mari, who came in and swore to Moscow within weeks of its appearing, taking with them the levies that had made up most of the khanate's infantry.

The khanate surrendered a khan, accepted a Muscovite appointee and gave up the right bank in a negotiation conducted under the shadow of the new fort. Then, in 1552, it repudiated the settlement and took a Nogai prince as khan instead.

The siege

The army that came in August 1552 was the largest Moscow had ever put in the field and it came equipped for a siege rather than a campaign: a hundred and fifty heavy guns, a corps of musketeers, engineers, and a Danish or German specialist in mining whom the Russian sources call simply the man who knew about powder.

The method was the mine. The water supply was cut by blowing the underground passage the city drew from. Then galleries were driven under the walls over several weeks and charged, and on 2 October the mines were fired and the assault went in through the breaches.

The fighting in the streets lasted the day. The khan was taken. The Tatar population of the city was killed or driven out, and the city was resettled.

What made the difference

Not numbers, and not courage on either side.

It was that the Russian state had reached the point where it could build a fortress in one place, move it four hundred miles, and stand it up in a month — and could keep an army of that size supplied at the end of a river for a season. That is an administrative capability rather than a military one, and it is the capability the khanate could not answer and did not have.

The same machine went down the Volga to Astrakhan four years later, and then across the Urals a generation after that. Kazan is where it was first assembled.

1552

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

The city fell on 2 October 1552 and the khanate was not restored. That second fact is what makes the date matter, because Kazan had been taken before.

What had happened the other times

Ivan III took it in 1487 and installed a khan. Vasily III's armies took or besieged it repeatedly and the outcome each time was a change of khan. Even in 1551 the settlement was a Muscovite appointee on a Chinggisid throne with the khanate's institutions intact.

That was the normal European and steppe practice and everybody understood it: a defeated state kept its dynasty, its law, its religion and its name, and changed its patron.

In 1552 Ivan IV did not install anybody. The khan was taken to Moscow, baptised, given an estate and a Russian title, and died a Russian nobleman. The territory was annexed, governed by a Muscovite voevoda, and an archbishopric was founded at Kazan in 1555 with instructions to convert. Ivan added Tsar of Kazan to his title, and it stayed in the Russian imperial style until 1917.

Why the difference

Because of what the annexation was for.

Taking Kazan removed a rival for the Volga trade and a Crimean ally on the eastern flank. Keeping Kazan opened the whole river to the Caspian, and Astrakhan followed within four years. The Volga is one system; a Russian Kazan made a Russian Astrakhan nearly inevitable and a Russian Siberia possible, because the Kama leads to the Urals and the Stroganovs were granted their charters on the Kama fifteen years later.

A client khanate could not deliver that. A province could.

The wars that followed

The conquest is conventionally dated to the fall of the city, and the people who lived in the khanate did not experience it that way.

The forest peoples of the left bank — Mari above all — rose against Russian rule within months and were still rising thirty years later. The risings of 1552–57, 1571–74 and 1581–84 are sometimes counted as three Cheremis wars and are better understood as one long refusal, put down by fortress-building, punitive columns and famine. A khanate that had been taken in a single day took a generation to hold.

What was left standing

The Tatar population was expelled from the city and forbidden to live inside it, and settled in a suburb across the lake which became the Tatar quarter and is still there. Mosques in the city were destroyed; the great one, whose imam is remembered as having died in the assault, gave its name to the mosque rebuilt on the Kremlin site in the twenty-first century.

What survived was a language, a literate Muslim tradition and a population that was neither converted nor dispersed. Kazan Tatars are today the second-largest nationality in the Russian Federation, and the republic that carries the name is the direct territorial descendant of the khanate.

The khanate lasted a hundred and fourteen years. The thing it was made out of — a settled Muslim society on the middle Volga — was four hundred years older than the khanate and has outlasted it by five hundred.

Six weeks without habitation

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

Seven years after the fall of Kazan an English merchant came up the Volga from Astrakhan and recorded how long it took and what he saw on the way.

Anthony Jenkinson was the Muscovy Company's agent, returning from Bukhara with a party of Tatar ambassadors and a hundred Russian gunners provided by the tsar for safe conduct. He left Astrakhan on 10 June 1559.

And the eight and twentieth daye of July following, we arriued at the Citie of Cazan, hauing beene vppon the waye from Astracan thither, sixe weekes, and more, without any refreshing of victuals: for in all that waye there is no habitation.

What that sentence contains

Fifteen hundred kilometres of the greatest river in Europe, between two cities Russia had just conquered, with nothing on it.

That is not a description of wilderness. It is a description of a corridor that had been emptied — by the raiding that had gone up and down it for a century and a half, by the wars of the 1540s and 1550s, and by the collapse of the Nogai hordes on the left bank, which Jenkinson had watched at Astrakhan the previous year.

A merchant needs provisions and expects to buy them. What he records is that between the two former khanates there was nobody to buy from, and that he and a hundred gunners and a Tatar embassy went six weeks on what they carried.

The city he arrived at

Jenkinson's own notes on Kazan are brief: a fair town with a strong castle, lately in Tatar hands, now Russian, and being rebuilt. The wooden fortifications put up after the assault were in the course of being replaced in stone.

He does not record any Tatars in it, and he would have been interested: he was a man who counted everything, and at Astrakhan he had counted the dead.

What filled it

The emptiness did not last, and the speed with which it filled is the measure of what had been suppressing it.

The Volga below Kazan was fortified in stages over the following forty years — Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, each a garrison town at a crossing or a portage — and behind the garrisons came peasants, monasteries, salt works and fisheries. The river became the main artery of Russian trade to the Caspian and Persia, which is exactly what the English company had come to find, and the reason Jenkinson was on it in the first place.

He had been sent to look for a route to Asia that did not pass through Ottoman or Portuguese hands. What he found was a river that Russia had spent a century and a half unable to use, opened in his own lifetime, and still so raw that travelling its length meant carrying six weeks of food.