Astrakhan Khanate

The Astrakhan Khanate was a Tatar state on the lower Volga, one of several successors that split away from the Golden Horde in the fifteenth century. Its khans, who traced their descent to Genghis Khan through his grandson Toqa Temür, ruled from the trading town of Hajji Tarkhan near the Volga delta from around the 1460s until the Russian conquest of 1556. Small and poorly documented, it mattered chiefly because it sat where the Volga trade route met the Caspian Sea.

The lower Volga had long been a meeting point of trade, where the river route south towards Persia crossed the caravan roads running north of the Caspian. Turkic-speaking peoples had dominated the region for centuries, and it had been the heartland of the Khazar state before the Mongols made it part of the Golden Horde. Hajji Tarkhan, the town that Russians called Astrakhan, was described by travellers from the early thirteenth century, and Timur burned it in 1395 during his war against the Horde.

As the Golden Horde fragmented, separate khanates emerged at Kazan and in Crimea in the late 1430s and early 1440s. After the death of Khan Küchük Muhammad in 1459, power was divided between his sons, Ahmad and Mahmud, and Mahmud based himself around Astrakhan. The khanate is traditionally dated to 1466, founded either by Mahmud or by his son Qasim, although it remained tied to the remnant of the Horde until that state was destroyed in 1502. The Venetian traveller Ambrogio Contarini passed through in 1476.

The khanate covered the lower Volga valley and its delta, roughly today's Astrakhan region of Russia, together with the steppe to the west of the river. The Caspian lay to the south and the Nogai Horde to the east. Most inhabitants were Astrakhan Tatars and Nogais, and the town lived from transit trade linking Muscovy and Kazan with Crimea, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Society was ranked beneath the khan into sultans, begs and lesser nobles, with ordinary people known as the qara xalıq. Sunni Islam was the state religion.

Little is known of the khanate's internal history beyond an uncertain list of khans. It was caught between larger neighbours: the Crimean Khanate occupied Astrakhan briefly in 1523 and again in 1549, and the khans dealt constantly with the Nogais and sometimes the Circassians. Diplomatic contact with Moscow had begun by 1532. Once the Tsardom of Russia conquered the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, the whole Volga lay open to Russian power.

Khan Yamghurchi made a nominal submission to Moscow in 1551 but then turned to Crimea and the Nogais. In 1554 a Russian river army took the town without a fight and installed a client khan, Dervish Ali. When Dervish Ali in turn sought Crimean help and broke with Moscow, Ivan IV sent a smaller force in 1556 that took the town again, and the khanate was abolished. Russian tsars added "Tsar of Astrakhan" to their titles from 1557.

In 1558 the Russians rebuilt Astrakhan about 12 kilometres downstream as a fortress, the site of the modern city. An Ottoman attempt to take it in 1569 failed. The town became Russia's gateway to the Caspian, and over the following century merchants from Persia, Armenia, India and Central Asia settled there.

Our 1530 map shows the Astrakhan Khanate on the lower Volga, beside the Nogai Horde, the Crimean Khanate and the Khanate of Kazan.