Khanate of Kazan

For roughly a century, from the 1430s or 1440s until 1552, a Muslim khanate ruled from the city of Kazan controlled the forested lands of the middle Volga, in the old heartland of Volga Bulgaria. One of several states carved out of the crumbling Golden Horde, it spent most of its life caught between Moscow and Crimea, and its conquest by Ivan IV opened the Volga to Russian expansion.

When the khanate began is disputed. One tradition credits Ulugh Muhammad, a deposed khan of the Golden Horde, with seizing Kazan in 1437 or 1438 with help from local nobles. Other historians, including the Great Russian Encyclopedia, prefer autumn 1445, when his son Maxmud began to reign there, and note that Ulugh Muhammad's own presence in Kazan is unconfirmed. In 1445 Maxmud and his brother Yakub defeated the army of Vasily II of Moscow near Suzdal and took the grand prince prisoner, releasing him only for a heavy ransom and a yearly tribute.

The state took in what are now Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Mari El and Mordovia, with parts of Udmurtia and Bashkortostan. The Volga, Kama and Vyatka rivers served as its highways. Alongside the Muslim Tatars lived Chuvash, Mari, Mordvins, Udmurts and Bashkirs; one Chuvash reference work counts the Chuvash, at about 200,000, as the largest single group. Volga Turki, or Old Tatar, was the language of government. Townspeople worked as potters, smiths, weavers and jewellers, and exported furs, honey, leather and grain. The khanate struck no coins of its own and relied mainly on Russian money. Slave raiding was also part of the economy, and a Chuvash encyclopedia estimates that 100,000 Russian captives were held there between the 1520s and the 1540s.

Formally the khan ruled alone, but decisions lay largely with the diwan, a council of leading nobles and clerics, while assemblies of the nobility made and unmade khans and decided on war. The khanate's official religion was Hanafi Sunni Islam, and a madrasa and library stood beside the main mosque in Kazan. Village schools spread literacy, and the ruined city of Bolghar became a place of pilgrimage. Poets such as Möxämmädyar and the cleric Qolşärif wrote in Old Tatar.

The throne changed hands constantly; one historian counted 15 khans in 118 years, some reigning more than once. In July 1487 the Muscovite grand prince Ivan III occupied Kazan and installed Möxämmädämin, and until 1521 the khanate was effectively a Muscovite protectorate. That year the Crimean prince Sahib Giray took power and led a raid on Moscow alongside his brother, the khan of the Crimean Khanate. For three decades pro-Moscow and pro-Crimean factions fought for control, drawing in the nomads of the Nogai Horde as well.

In 1551 the regent Söyembikä was captured and sent to Moscow, and the pro-Russian Şahğäli returned for a third reign. He left the city in March 1552, and an uprising installed Yadegar Mokhammad of Astrakhan. Later that year the army of Ivan the Terrible, based at the new fortress of Sviyazhsk, besieged Kazan for more than 40 days, breached the walls with mines and stormed the city on 2 October 1552 (Old Style). Many defenders and townspeople were killed. Mari and other rebels resisted until May 1557. Afterwards a Moscow office governed the region, Russian settlers received land, and many Tatars were moved away from rivers and the city and pressed to convert.

Shown on our maps as the Kazan Khanate, it appears in 1492, 1500 and 1530, east of the Grand Principality of Moscow and north of the Nogai lands. By the next map year the region has passed to the Tsardom of Russia.