Thread by @kamilkazani

What you should know about Tatarstan?

Tatarstan is a large and wealthy ethnic republic located, in the very middle of Russia. While being culturally and institutionally distinctive, it is not really peripheral. It sits in a few kilometres from the population centre of Russia🧵

While Tatarstan does not sit in the centre of Russia geography-wise, it does so demography-wise. The Russian centre of population (red star), located somewhere in southwest Udmurtia, is literally in a walking distance from the Tatarstani border.

It is the very middle of Russia.

If you look at the Russian administrative map, you will see that most ethnic republics (colored) occupy a peripheral position. The main exception are republics of the Volga-Ural region (green), located in the middle of Russia & surrounded by the Slavic sea.

How did that happen?

Short answer:

Since 1500, the Duchy of Muscovy (purple) has been expanding eastward. While its expansion swept away pretty much all societies between the purple area and the Pacific, the Middle Volga area was not swept away to the same degree.

Long answer will take more time.

In the first millennium CE, the Middle Volga was populated by many different tribes. Finnic, Ugric, Turkic. Westward migrations of Asian tribes added even more diversity to the region. Fore example, those Magyars who not make it to Pannonia settled in what is now Bashkortostan.

In the 8th c. new migrants came. The Bulgars. These were the Turkic nomads leaving north of the Black Sea. Once the Old Great Bulgaria of Khan Kubrat was destroyed by the Khazars, some Bulgars fled to th Danube, others to Volga; creating two Bulgarias, far away from each other.

Those Bulgars who fled northeast soon created the dominant polity in the region, that we now retrospectively know as Volga Bulgaria. We should not imagine it as a nation state. Rather as a loose, heterogenous confederation of tribes, Bulgars being the dominant tribe of all.

In 922, the Bulgar king converted to Islam. An Abbasid envoy Ibn Fadlan who travelled all the way from Baghdad for the formal ceremony left an informative memoirs covering his journey & an account of the local ways and customs.

And so, the Islamic civilisation on Volga began.

To understand the history of Bulgaria, you need to keep in mind two facts. First, Volga where Bulgaria was located, is an endorheic river. Which means, it is not connected to the World Ocean. It flows into the Caspian Sea, which is effectively a very large lake

Grey = endorheic

Second, Volga is an *amazing* river navigation-wise. It is:

1. Long
2. Slow (-> you can travel in both directions)
3. Has no rapids

A perfect river for travel and for commerce. Again, with a major caveat, that it is not connected to the ocean.

So, what you have as a result is a potamic economy with a great natural connection to Iran and Central Asia. You can ship stuff from the Sub-Arctic to the Middle East at almost no cost. Ocean access, however, is hard & costly

Hopping from Volga to Don was harder than it sounds

The great majority of medieval treasures dug out in what is now European Russia, have Arabic-inscribed coins. Archaeological evidence suggests that most of currency circulating in this region, must have been coming from the Middle East via the Volga river.

Ship -> Sell

According to the chronicle (= legend), when the Kyivan prince Vladimir raided Bulgaria and took the first captives, his uncle advised him to turn back.

"They wear leather boots. The leather-booted will not be paying us tribute. Let's go look for the bast-shoed people, who will"

In the 13th c., Bulgaria was swept by the Mongol Storm. As the Mongol Empire was divided into personal fiefs, northwestern lands fall into the Ulus Juchi, also known as the "Golden Horde". While we now tend to see the Horde as a purely nomadic society, it is not quite true.

Its demographic, economic and political core were several large and rich cities located in the Lower Volga and serving the northern Silk Road. As long as the rulers could guarantee security, the Volga-Don-Mediterranean route was viable and profitable.

As the Mongol elites assimilated, the Cuman (= Kipchak) language of Turkic steppe nomads became the lingua franca of the Golden Horde. The core of the Horde in the Lower Volga, and its largest cities, all spoke Cuman.

Bulgaria, located further north, was a relative periphery.

What you must know about the Golden Horde:

Lower Volga & Mediterranean = Cuman-speaking core. Demographic, political and economic centre, sitting straight on the Silk Road. Huge connections with Italy.

Middle Volga = Bulgar-speaking region. Semi-periphery. A bit of backwater.

In this world, there is nothing positively good or positively bad, as anything can be good or bad depending on circumstances. Consider the river-side location. As long, as the Golden Horde guaranteed security, it was a positive good.

Great cities mushroomed along the waterways.

But now the Horde was increasingly failing to guarantee security. Around 1400, Tamerlane systematically destroyed the core cities of the Horde around the Lower Volga & Don. It is quite possible that he was consciously eliminating the northern Silk Road.

Some cities were rebuilt again, though not in former splendour. Only to be razed again. As the Horde was weakening, what once used to be a net positive (river-side location) was increasingly turning into the liability.

Easy access to the water -> Bad guys come by the water

Between 1400 and 1500 what once used to be the Horde's demographic core on Lower Volga, was razed, by the river pirates. Not one time but many. This entire society & economy was possible only with a very strong power securing the trade

The power gone, the trade gone, all gone

By 1500 what once constituted the core of the Golden Horde constituted a sparsely populated steppe of the Lower Volga. Cities were gone. Culture was gone. Population was gone, one way or another.

Some of the population perished. The rest fled, in all directions.

One direction was the remote northern periphery. The colder, forested, less fertile area that constituted the deep backwater both of the Bulgaria and of Golden Horde.

The area of modern Kazan.

Historically, Kazan had been isolated from Volga. There were 7 kilometers of hard-to-pass marshes between the city and the river. The only real connection was shallow & narrow Kazan river, you could easily get stranded on.

In times of danger, it all became a huge net positive.

As the old riverside cities of Lower & Middle Volga exposed to commerce (and to pirates) were burnt to ashes, survivors fled to the more isolated, more foresty, and swampy periphery of what is now Kazan region.

As a result, there emerged a new polity that we now call a Kazan Khanate. In the contemporary sources, however, it could be called different ways: the Kazan land/region, the Bulgar land/region. The latter framing stressed the Islamic continuity: we are the ancient land of Islam.

Now the thing to understand about the Kazan polity is that it was not a nation state either. The Muslim Turkic population, of Cuman, Bulgar or whatever origins almost certainly constituted a small minority. The great majority of population was almost certainly "pagan"

Obviously, the term "pagan" is highly inaccurate.

First, it fuses together a great diversity of belief systems, very different from each other and often very complex. There is no one single "pagan" religion, there are many and many.

Second, it is not quite true.

The term "pagan" suggests a strict dichotomy between the pagan and monotheistic beliefs. No such dichotomy existed in reality. Supposedly pagan population seems to have been affected by Muslim practices and ideas to an unknown and varying degree.

In any case, the Kazan Khanate had a high population density compared with the virtual desert down south (= depopulated after the fall of the Golden Horde), or with even colder and even more forested lands to the east.

Lots of people got concentrated in this refugium, comparatively speaking.

It is evening, and there is a great dinner waiting for me. I need to go.

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Tomorrow, I will be writing on the Three Body Problem.

The text above, I will finish later

Will take few days to write and to edit