Khanate of Sibir

The Khanate of Sibir was a Tatar state in western Siberia, along the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, from the late fifteenth century to 1598. It was one of the successor states of the Golden Horde, and its conquest by Russian Cossacks opened the way for Russia's expansion across Siberia, which takes its name from it.

After the Mongol conquest, western Siberia was part of the lands of Shiban, a grandson of Genghis Khan, and then of the White Horde. The region was home to Siberian Tatars, Turkic-speaking people who farmed, fished and herded, and to Ugric peoples, the Khanty and Mansi, and Samoyedic peoples, who hunted and fished in the forests and paid tribute in furs. The Tyumen Khanate, ruled by Shaybanid khans, existed in the fifteenth century. Around 1490, Mamuk, of the local Taibugid family, took the town of Qashliq, also called Isker or Sibir, on the Irtysh near today's Tobolsk, which became the capital of the khanate.

Two families competed for power: the Taibugids, descended from a local ruler, and the Shaybanids, descendants of Genghis Khan through Jochi's son Shiban. In the 1550s, the Taibugid khan Yadegar, facing Shaybanid rivals, offered to pay tribute in sable furs to Ivan IV of Moscow, who had just conquered Kazan. In 1563 the Shaybanid Kuchum, with help from Bukhara, killed Yadegar and took power.

Kuchum promoted Islam, inviting missionaries from Bukhara, and stopped paying tribute to Moscow. He attacked the lands of the Stroganovs, a wealthy merchant family who had received huge estates on the Kama river, west of the Ural mountains, from Ivan IV, with the right to build forts and hire soldiers.

The Stroganovs hired a band of Cossacks led by Yermak Timofeyevich, a former Volga river pirate. In 1581 or 1582, Yermak, with about 540 or more men armed with firearms, crossed the Ural mountains by river. In October 1582, at the Battle of Chuvash Cape near Qashliq, the Cossacks defeated Kuchum's army, led by his nephew Mametkul, and took the capital. Ivan IV, initially angry at the unauthorised expedition, pardoned Yermak and sent reinforcements. In August 1585, Yermak was killed in a night attack by Kuchum's forces on the Irtysh; according to legend, he drowned, weighed down by a coat of armour given by the tsar.

Russian troops returned and founded Tyumen in 1586 and Tobolsk in 1587, which became the capital of Russian Siberia. Kuchum fought on from the steppe. In 1598 Russian forces defeated him on the Ob river and captured his family. He fled south and was killed by Nogais around 1601. His descendants served the tsars as nobles.

The conquest of Sibir began Russia's expansion across Siberia, which reached the Pacific by 1639, driven by the fur trade. Yermak became a hero of Russian folk songs and paintings, such as Vasily Surikov's Conquest of Siberia by Yermak, painted in 1895. The Siberian Tatars live today mainly in the Tyumen, Tobolsk and Omsk regions.

Our maps show the Khanate of Sibir on the 1492, 1500 and 1530 maps. Its largest outline, about 680,000 square kilometres on the 1530 map, lies almost entirely in today's Russia. Before it, the region belongs to the White Horde; on the 1600 map, to the Tsardom of Russia.