Khanate of Sibir

The town that named a continent

Drafted 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 II (1880)formation

There was a small wooden town on a bluff above the Irtysh, about twenty versts upstream of where Tobolsk now stands. Its own people called it Kashlik or Isker. The Permians and Zyrians west of the Urals called it Sibir, and from them the Russians took the name — first for the khanate, then for the country beyond the mountains, then for a third of Asia.

Before the khanate

The dynasty that ruled the Tobol and the Tura before it was not Chinggisid and was not Muslim. The Siberian annals trace it to a prince called Taybuga, and give him a genealogy — a khan called On, murdered by a common Tatar called Chingis — that is a folk memory of the Kerait chief Ong Khan and of Chinggis himself, attached to the name of a town. What can be said is that the Taybugids held Chimgi-Tura on the river Tura, that their subjects were Tatars and Ugrians, and that they were still pagan.

That made them a target from two directions at once.

The Shibanids

East of the Volga the descendants of Shiban, the fifth son of Jochi, had a claim to the whole eastern half of the Jochid inheritance and no fixed country to exercise it in. One of them, Ibak, made himself a power around Tyumen in the 1480s: he was one of the two men who rode into the camp of the Great Horde in 1481 and killed its khan, and in 1489 he was corresponding with Moscow about a Kazan prisoner.

Ibak married the sister of Mar, the Taybugid ruler, and then killed him and took his kingdom. Mar's grandson Mamuq gathered what people he could, killed Ibak in his turn, and recovered what he called the patrimony of his ancestors.

Howorth will not date this. Ibak is not heard of after 1493, he says, and the killing was probably soon after that year. By May 1496 Mamuq was strong enough to be attacking Kazan, where the Russian chronicles call him the tsar of Shiban.

The move

Mamuq did not go back to Chimgi-Tura. He built himself a new capital downstream on the Irtysh, at Kashlik, and that is the moment the khanate of Sibir begins: a Muslim Turkic state on the Siberian rivers with a walled seat of its own.

Müller, who saw the site in the eighteenth century, found no trace of any building — they had been wood. It had barely room inside its bounds for the khan's house and his dependents', with the Irtysh on one side, the Sibirka brook on another, and a rampart round the rest.

That was the capital. The country it governed reached from the Urals towards the Ob, and its wealth was in animals nobody in it had to farm for.

A tribute of sables

Drafted 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 II (1880)expansion

The khanate's whole economy can be given in a sentence out of the Russian archives. In 1555 the khan Yadigar sent Moscow seven hundred sable skins, was told it was not enough, and the next year sent a thousand sables, a hundred more for tolls, and sixty-nine in place of squirrel.

Yasak

The tax was called yasak and it was paid in fur. The khan's Tatars lived on the open river valleys of the Tobol, the Tura and the Irtysh; the people who trapped the animals were Ostyaks and Voguls — Khanty and Mansi — in the forest and the bogs north and west of them, under their own princes, who obeyed the khan and paid him.

It was a system of tributary chieftainships rather than an administration, and it had two properties that decided the khanate's history. It produced, from almost no population, a commodity of enormous value in Europe and Central Asia. And it could be taken over intact by anyone who beat the khan, because the forest princes paid whoever was collecting.

The reach

Howorth reckons the Siberian khan was obeyed by the Voguls, the Ostyaks and the other Ugrian peoples of the Urals, and the evidence for it is that when Moscow sent an army against them in 1499 their overlord resented it: Abalak, Mamuq's brother, marched on Kazan in reply.

That is the pattern of the khanate's outward action for a century. It was entangled in Kazan, where its princes campaigned repeatedly; it intermarried with the Nogai murzas across the steppe to the south; and it faced west across the Urals, where its tributaries touched the Russian fur frontier coming the other way.

The roads

There were several. From the Vychegda a route ran by the Vishera to the Kama, then by the Lozva, the Tavda and the Tobol. From the Vym another went by the Izhma to the Pechora, and from the Pechora three separate ways over to the Ob — by the Shchugor and the Sygva, by the Ilych and the Sosva, or by the Usa and the Sob. The Sygva and Sosva roads were the oldest and most used.

Merchants had been going over them for a long time before any army did. The khanate sat at the far end of them, which is why it was rich, and why it was found.

Kuchum

Drafted 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 II (1880)peak

In 1563 an envoy of the khan Yadigar was still at Moscow with the year's tribute when the news arrived that his master was dead. A prince from the south had come into the country with an army, killed Yadigar and his brother Bekbulat, and taken the khanate.

Who he was

Kuchum was a Shibanid — a descendant of Jochi's fifth son, from the Uzbek world south of the steppe, son of the khan Murtaza. A Siberian legend says the Tatars sent for him because they would not be ruled by Yadigar's children; Howorth dismisses it, on the grounds that the story exists to explain the name of Yadigar's son Seydyak, and that everything else in the record says Kuchum came as a conqueror and took the country by force.

Bekbulat's son Seydyak escaped to Bukhara, which is the fact that matters twenty-five years later.

What he changed

Two things, and the second outlasted the khanate.

He stopped the tribute. The Taybugids had paid Moscow in sable and apologised when they were short; Kuchum did not, and by the 1570s his people were raiding the Russian settlements on the Kama and killing the tsar's men.

And he brought Islam. The Siberian dynasty he displaced had been pagan — Howorth makes the point that Taybuga's line were still heathens when Kuchum conquered them — and Kuchum imported mullahs and imams from Bukhara and Urgench and set them to converting his subjects. The Muslim Tatars of western Siberia date from his reign and are still there.

The height

At his strongest he was the only serious power between the Urals and the Ob. The Nogai over the steppe sought him as an ally, and he married his son Ali to the daughter of Din Ahmad, the Nogai chief; his name appears in Russian reports as a prime mover behind Tatar raids on the Kama as late as 1583, when he had already lost his capital. He had two iron cannon, each two ells long and firing a forty-pound shot, got from Bukhara or from Kazan.

He was also, by the time the Cossacks reached him, blind.

Eight hundred and forty men

Drafted 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 II (1880)contraction

The force that destroyed the khanate was a band of river pirates hired by a merchant family, and nobody agrees how many of them there were. Müller's authorities say about five thousand at the outset; the Siberian sagas say eight hundred and forty.

The expedition

Yermak set out on 5 July 1579 with Zyrian guides, wintered on the Serebryanka, lost so many men to disease that a muster the following spring counted 1,636, and crossed the low spurs of the Urals into the Tobol watershed on 12 May 1580. Everything about the campaign was improvised: boats built on the Tagil when the old ones would not serve, winter quarters wherever they stood in November, food taken from the people whose land they were in — including Voguls who had received them hospitably, and who thereafter raised the country behind them.

By the time they reached the khanate proper the force was down to a little over a thousand.

The defence

Kuchum did what a Tatar ruler could do. He sent his nephew Mahmetkul with an army to meet them; Karamzin puts it at ten thousand horse, and it fought for five days at Babasan and lost. He had an iron chain stretched across a narrow reach of the Tobol with men waiting to shoot into the boats as they fouled it; Yermak dressed bundles of birch poles in Cossack coats to hold the watchers' attention, landed the rest of his men and took the ambush from behind. He dug a new ditch round Kashlik, ordered his subject princes to fortify their towns, and threw up an entrenchment on the Irtysh below the hill called Chuvash.

It was there, on 26 October 1581, that the thing was decided. His people came out through three gaps in the rampart at the Cossack ranks; Mahmetkul was wounded and carried across the river; the Ostyak chiefs ran and the Tatars followed. The Russians lost a hundred and seven men, whose names were read in the cathedral of Tobolsk for generations afterwards. Kuchum threw his two cannon into the Irtysh and fled towards the Ishim.

On 7 November Yermak walked into the capital. There was a great booty of furs in it and, Karamzin says, no food at all.

Why it went that way

Howorth's explanation is the one the campaign itself keeps demonstrating: bows and arrows were no match for firearms, and the Siberian annals fill the gap between the two with omens — a white wolf and a black hound fighting at the mouth of the Tobol, a Christian town with bell towers appearing in the air over the future site of Tobolsk, a crowned king on a throne driving the Tatars before him while their bowstrings snapped.

They are stories told afterwards by the losing side, and the historian who quotes them says so. What they record accurately is the experience of being on the wrong end of a technology, which is the same thing they recorded in Peru.

The last feast

Drafted 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 II (1880)end

Taking the capital did not end the khanate. It took another seventeen years, and the decisive act was not a battle.

The interval

Yermak drowned in 1584 and his survivors walked out of the country; Kuchum sent his son Ali to reoccupy Sibir and Seydyak — Bekbulat's son, back from Bukhara — drove him out and reigned there himself. For three years the khanate had a khan in its own capital again, while its founder's displacer wandered the Baraba steppe with a following.

What was different was on the other side of the Urals. Yermak's men had shown that the crossing was easy, and the state took over from the adventurers. Three hundred streltsy and Cossacks under Sukin and Myasnoy left Moscow in 1587; they built a town at the old Tatar fortress of Chimgi on the Tura and called it Tyumen, the first permanent Russian settlement east of the Urals. The next year Danilo Chulkov came down to the Irtysh and laid the foundations of Tobolsk on the eastern bank, opposite the mouth of the Tobol — a wooden fort and a church, within sight of Seydyak's capital.

The invitation

In the summer of 1588 Seydyak was out hawking on the Irtysh with the Kazakh prince Uraz Muhammad and the murza Karacha and five hundred men. They came near the new town, and the governor invited the three of them to a feast at which a treaty might be arranged.

They accepted. The three chiefs and a hundred followers were let inside; the rest stayed out. When the brandy had done its work the three were seized and the hundred were killed.

The men camped outside fled when they heard. So did the inhabitants of Sibir. The capital of the khanate was abandoned, and Howorth records the result in six words: thenceforward Sibir remained uninhabited. The captives went to Moscow in September.

The old man on the Ob

Kuchum refused every offer. Moscow held his eldest son Abulkhair and made him write to his father praising the tsar's generosity; two more of his sons went over; his nephew Mahmetkul's mother went over. He answered the Russian terms with a sentence worth the whole correspondence: I did not cede Siberia to Yermak, although he conquered it; but, wishing peace, I demand as a frontier the banks of the Irtysh.

Tara was built in 1594 to contain him, garrisoned by a force whose composition is its own commentary — streltsy from Moscow, Tatars from Kazan, Bashkirs, Poles, Lithuanians, Circassians, Cossack exiles and three hundred tributary Siberian Tatars sent against their own khan.

On 2 September 1598 Voyeikov found his camp on the Ob among cornfields in the marshes and attacked before sunrise. The fight lasted all day. His brother and one son were killed with six princes, ten murzas and a hundred and fifty of his best men; more than a hundred drowned; eight of his wives and five of his children were taken. Voyeikov burned what he could not carry and wrote to Boris Godunov that the Russians were now undisputed masters of Siberia.

Kuchum was not among the dead. A Muslim priest sent to find him came on him in a wood on the bank of the Ob, sitting under a tree among Tatar corpses with three sons and thirty men, and offered him the tsar's clemency.

I did not go to him in happier days, when I was rich and strong; shall I go now to find a disgraceful death? I am blind and deaf, poor, and alone.

He said he did not mourn his riches but his captured son Asmanak, that he would send his family to Bukhara and go to the Nogai, and he asked the Chat people, who had been his subjects and were now the tsar's, for a horse and warm clothes as alms. Then he spent two days burying the dead in the priest's presence, mounted, and rode off.

He reached the Nogai. They had been ill-used by his father Murtaza, and they killed him.

The tax that outlived the khanate

Drafted 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 II (1880)afterlife

Kuchum's family entered Moscow in a triumphal procession in January 1599. Boris Godunov, who badly needed a victory, made a feast of it and rewarded the Cossacks who brought them in.

What happened to the dynasty

It was absorbed rather than destroyed.

The captives came into Moscow in sledges — the women in pelisses of velvet, satin and cloth of gold with gold and silver embroidery, the princes in long red robes trimmed with rare furs, escorted by soldiery dressed in sable, through streets full of people. They were lodged with nobles and great merchants and given moderate pensions, and the khan's wives and daughters were allowed to go and live at Kasimov and Bezhetsk.

Mahmetkul, who had commanded the khanate's armies against Yermak, entered the Russian army; he fought the Swedes in 1590, and in 1598 he rode out with Tsar Boris to Serpukhov to face the Crimean Tatars. Abulkhair, Kuchum's eldest son, was baptised in 1591 and renamed Andrew. Uraz Muhammad, the Kazakh prince taken at the feast in 1588, was made khan of Kasimov — a Tatar appanage inside Russia, which is what the Chinggisid dignity had become.

Not all of them submitted. Kuchum's son Ali gathered his brothers and what Siberian Tatars still regarded them as their lawful rulers, lived in the steppe without a fixed home and raided the Ishim, the Irtysh and the Tobol as far as the Yaik and the neighbourhood of Ufa. He opened negotiations in 1600 and would not come in person; the Russian messengers rode to the Abuga and could not find him.

What happened to the system

Nothing. The Russians took the yasak.

The forest peoples who had paid the khan a tribute of sable went on paying the same tribute under the same name to a Russian voivode, and it financed the crossing of the rest of the continent. Tyumen in 1586 and Tobolsk in 1587 were followed by Tara in 1594, and then by a chain of stockaded towns that reached the Yenisei within thirty years, the Lena within fifty and the Pacific within sixty. Each was built where a river route made it possible to collect furs and defend the collection, which is precisely the logic the khanate had run on.

The difference was scale. Kuchum had taxed the Ugrians of one river system. The state that replaced him applied the same instrument from the Urals to the sea of Okhotsk.

The name

The khanate's capital was a wooden enclosure with room for one household and its dependents, and it was abandoned in 1588 and never rebuilt. Its name had already escaped. The Permians called the place Sibir, the Russians took the word from them, and it spread outward from a vanished village on the Irtysh to cover five million square miles and, in most languages on earth, to mean distance and exile.