Astrakhan Khanate

At a glance

What was the Astrakhan Khanate?

It was one of the states that formed as the Golden Horde, the western part of the Mongol Empire, broke apart in the fifteenth century. Its neighbours were the Khanate of Kazan up the Volga, the Crimean Khanate to the west and the Nogai Horde, whose nomads grazed the steppes on both sides of the river. Of all of them, Astrakhan was the smallest and weakest.

The Great Russian Encyclopedia describes it as a state of the right-bank lower Volga "and possibly the north-west Caspian coast", with a population that was "not numerous". Its people lived mainly from nomadic herding, combined with fishing, a little farming and salt-working. Its position mattered more than its size. Hajji-Tarkhan lay on the old trade route between the Volga and the lands south of the Caspian, and whoever held it controlled the river's outlet to the sea.

How large it was is not known. The site's map, based on the Cliopatria border data, draws it at about 163,000 km² at its greatest extent. We have found no historian's estimate of its area. Ilya Zaitsev, author of the only book on the khanate, reconstructs its borders only in outline, and on the steppe they will hardly have been fixed lines. The map figure is a modern reconstruction, not a measurement.

Why is so little known about it?

Zaitsev opened his Astrakhan Khanate (2004) by quoting an earlier scholar: the historian of Astrakhan works "in more difficult conditions than historians studying the other Tatar states". He gave the reasons himself. Sources are extremely scarce, and "even the city that gave its name to the state and was its capital has not existed since at least the end of the sixteenth century".

No document of the khans' own chancery is known to survive. The State Archive of Astrakhan Oblast holds nothing from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and Moscow's books of Astrakhan embassies, kept from 1508, are lost. What we know comes from outside: Russian chronicles and diplomatic papers, Crimean and Ottoman letters, coins, a handful of travellers, and archaeology on sites that the Volga has been eroding for centuries.

Where was Hajji-Tarkhan?

Hajji-Tarkhan had been a city of the Golden Horde. Its mint struck coins from 1374, and the conqueror Timur destroyed it in the winter of 1395–1396. The Golden Horde city is traditionally placed at the hillfort of Shareny Bugor, on the right bank of the Volga about 11 km upstream of present-day Astrakhan. An archaeological survey published in 2018 reported that the site is now "almost entirely washed away by the Volga" and built over.

Whether the khanate's capital stood on the same spot is not certain. Excavations at Shareny Bugor in 1966 found no layers from the fifteenth century. A Russian military service register (razriadnaia kniga) describes two Tatar "towns" walled with wattle of reeds filled with earth. Zaitsev concluded that defences of this kind "simply could not have survived to our day". The historian D. V. Vasil'ev suggested in 2017 that by the time of the Russian conquest Hajji-Tarkhan may have been only a seasonal camp, with the khans' main seat elsewhere. That remains a hypothesis.

The Venetian envoy Ambrogio Contarini, who passed through in 1476, was according to the editors of Anthony Jenkinson's travels the first to describe the town. As they summarise it, he found "a small town seventy-five miles from the mouth of the Volga, surrounded by a low wall, with a few houses built of bricks, and a trade in spices".

When was the Astrakhan Khanate founded?

This is the main debate about the khanate. When the Golden Horde khan Küchük Muhammad died in 1459, his sons Ahmed and Mahmud divided power. Mahmud was based at Astrakhan, and many historians date the new khanate to his accession in 1459–60. Others prefer 1465, and the Turkish scholar Reşit Rahmeti Arat, followed by several others, argued for 1466. That date rests on a letter Mahmud wrote to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II on 10 April 1466. Zaitsev points out that the letter names the "Great Horde" and a river that has not been identified, not Astrakhan. Who ruled first is also disputed: Mahmud, or his son Qasim.

Zaitsev argues the case differently. In his reading, Astrakhan in the 1460s and 1470s was one of the centres of the Great Horde, the rump of the Golden Horde, and coins show only that each brother held the town at times. From the 1480s, the Nikon chronicle says, "those Horde khans began to live in Astrakhan". The khanate became a state of its own only when the Crimean khan Mengli Giray destroyed the Great Horde in 1502. His conclusion is blunt: "To speak of the creation of the Astrakhan Khanate in the 1450s–1460s (1459, 1466 and so on) is unjustified." The Muscovite diplomatic papers support a later date: the title "Astrakhan tsar" first appears in them in February 1503.

The Great Russian Encyclopedia simply records the disagreement: "Some historians date the emergence of the independent Astrakhan Khanate to 1459–60 … others to 1502."

Who ruled the Astrakhan Khanate?

The khans were descendants of the Golden Horde khan Timur-Qutlugh. No two modern lists of them agree. The Tatar Encyclopaedia gives the sequence below; Zaitsev begins with Abd al-Karim in 1502, and of one khan he writes, "in reality we do not know when and how Husayn left the throne." Several khans reigned more than once, as rival princes, the Nogais and the Crimeans put their candidates on the throne in turn.

How was the khanate governed?

Its institutions followed the Golden Horde pattern. The khan ruled through a council (divan) of leading begs called karachi. The heir, the qalgha, was the second figure in the state. Below them came the sultans, oglans, begs and mirzas, many of whom held their own lands and collected dues from the "black people" (qara xalıq), the ordinary commoners. The state religion was Islam.

The Great Russian Encyclopedia notes that slaves, usually captives and including Russians, worked in households, but that most were sold on to Crimea and Central Asia. Fish of valuable species and salt were exported to neighbouring states. The khanate could not defend itself alone. The same encyclopedia sums up its position: it "almost always depended on the Crimean Khanate, the Nogai Horde and the princes of the North Caucasus".

Why did Crimea and the Nogais fight over Astrakhan?

Astrakhan was the last foothold of the old Horde dynasty, and the Crimean Girays wanted the Horde's inheritance for themselves. Crimean khans attacked it again and again. Mehmed Giray campaigned against it in 1515. In the spring of 1523 he took the town, and on his way home he was killed by the Nogais. A Crimean prince, Islam Giray, sat on the Astrakhan throne in 1531–1532.

The worst blow came in 1546 or 1547. Sahib Giray of Crimea took Hajji-Tarkhan, sacked it and drove its people off to Crimea. His letter to Ivan IV, received in Moscow in December 1547, explained why he had not kept it: "We took his yurt and wanted to hold it, but abandoned it because the place is bad. And so we did not leave his people and his uluses there, but drove them all to us."

The Nogais were the other power. Their mirzas controlled the steppe around the town and helped to make and unmake khans. In the 1550s the Nogai Horde itself split. Mirza Ismail, who became its ruler, looked to Moscow; his brother Yusuf and his sons looked to Crimea. Astrakhan's fate was decided in that quarrel.

How did Moscow take Astrakhan?

Moscow had sent and received embassies to and from Astrakhan since 1508, and Ivan III's testament of 1504 already counted it among the recipients of the old Horde tribute. After the conquest of Kazan in 1552, the khanate's turn came quickly.

Khan Yamgurchi had at first sworn friendship. Then, the chronicle says, he went back on it and "robbed the envoy of the tsar and grand prince, Sevastian". The Dutch merchant Isaac Massa later wrote that the envoy was treated "worse than the messengers of King David" were by the Ammonites. In 1552 Devlet Giray of Crimea sent Yamgurchi thirteen cannon. In October 1553 envoys of Ismail asked Ivan IV to install a different khan: Dervish-Ali, a prince who had reigned in Astrakhan in the 1530s and was now living in Russia.

In the spring of 1554, as soon as the ice broke, a Russian army under Prince Yuri Ivanovich Pronsky-Shemyakin sailed down the Volga with Dervish-Ali. There was no siege. On 2 July 1554, the Nikon chronicle records, "the town of Astrakhan was taken, on the feast of our most pure Lady the Mother of God, the Deposition of the honourable Robe." The inhabitants had fled. Zaitsev notes that the chronicler may have fitted the date to the church feast, and Massa gives 3 July. On the same day the commanders seated Dervish-Ali on the throne.

The Russians pursued Yamgurchi and captured his wives, who were later brought to Moscow. The khan, the people of Astrakhan said, fled to Azov "with about twenty men". Then came the oath. The chronicle counts 500 princes and mirzas and 7,000 "black people" who swore loyalty for the whole land. The terms were heavy. Astrakhan was to pay "every year forty thousand altyn and three thousand fish". Moscow's fishermen were to fish the Volga from Kazan to the sea free of dues, and if Dervish-Ali died, the tsar would name his successor. The army left on 29 July, leaving a Russian resident, Pyotr Turgenev, with a small force of Cossacks. The news reached Ivan IV at Kolomenskoe on 29 August.

How did the Astrakhan Khanate end?

Dervish-Ali did not stay loyal for long. In May 1555 he beat off an attack by Yamgurchi, but he was soon in contact with Crimea and with the Nogai mirzas who opposed Ismail. In August 1555 the people fled the town again on a rumour that a Russian army was coming to punish them. In March 1556 he broke openly with Moscow and drove out the tsar's envoy, Leonty Mansurov, and his 500 men.

Moscow sent a small force: Ivan Cheremisinov, a head of musketeers (streltsy), and the Cossack ataman Mikhail Kolupaev. Their report in the Nikon chronicle is the khanate's epitaph: "We came to Astrakhan, and the town was empty; the khan and the people had fled." They occupied it without a fight and fortified it. Crimea's help had amounted to 700 Tatars and 300 janissaries with guns. The Nogai mirza Yunus, with his brothers, then drove Dervish-Ali away and sent the cannon that Crimea had given him to the Russians. "And Derbysh fled to Azov, and from there to Mecca." The commoners came back to swear allegiance and asked to live "as before" by the town and pay tribute.

The end is usually dated 1556. The 19th-century Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia dates Dervish-Ali's final defeat to 1557. The dynasty did not die out. According to the Turkish Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Astrakhan khans' family survived in Bukhara, where it later founded a ruling dynasty, the Janids or Ashtarkhanids, in the Khanate of Bukhara.

What did Jenkinson see in Astrakhan in 1558?

The English merchant Anthony Jenkinson, travelling for the Muscovy Company, sailed down the Volga in the summer of 1558 with the new governor's convoy, which Vasil'ev puts at 500 vessels. On 14 July, "passing by an olde castle, which was Astracan, and leauing it vpon our right hand, we arriued at New Astracan". He found the new town "situated in an Island vpon a hill side, hauing a castle within the same, walled about with earth and timber, neither fayre nor strong".

He arrived in a catastrophe. "There was a great famine and plague among the people, and specially among the Tartarres called Nagayans." He believed that over 100,000 Nogais had died that year of civil war, famine and pestilence, an estimate, not a count. "I could haue bought many goodly Tartars children, if I would haue had a thousande, of their owne fathers and mothers, to say, a boy or a wench for a loafe of bread worth sixe pence in England." Of trade he wrote that it was "as yet so small and beggerly, that it is not woorth the making mention". Jenkinson dated the conquest to 1552, which was wrong.

When was modern Astrakhan founded?

The Russians did not keep the khans' town. In the spring of 1558 Moscow sent Ivan Vyrodkov, a secretary of the military office, to build a new fortress and take over as governor. He chose a hill on the left bank of the Volga, protected by the river. Vasil'ev, following the historian E. V. Gusarova, dates the founding of this wooden kremlin to 1 August 1558.

The exact day rests on an inference. The German traveller Adam Olearius, who visited Astrakhan in the 1630s, saw the Russians celebrate a great festival there on 1 August with cannon salutes. He was told that it marked the taking of the town "from the Nogai Tatars" in 1554. Zaitsev thought Olearius had confused the capture with a church feast that falls on that day. Other historians read the festival as the founding day of the new fortress. Either way, no document gives the date directly.

Why did the Ottomans march on Astrakhan in 1569?

The loss of Astrakhan worried Istanbul. The Turkish Encyclopaedia of Islam notes that the Russian advance to the Caspian cut the route by which the Muslims of Central Asia reached the Ottoman lands, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca by the northern route "completely impossible". Muslims of the region sent letters and envoys to Istanbul asking for help. Sultan Süleyman and his grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha planned a campaign as early as 1563, but it was put off, partly because Devlet Giray of Crimea argued against it.

Under Selim II the plan was revived. Halil İnalcık, in his classic article of 1948, describes Sokollu as determined to carry it out "despite all opposition". The idea was bold: to dig a canal across the narrow neck of land between the Don and the Volga, the Perevoloka, so that Ottoman ships could pass from the Black Sea to the Caspian.

The force set out from Kefe in Crimea on 31 May 1569 under Kasım, the governor of Kefe, joined by Devlet Giray and his Tatars. In August it reached the Perevoloka and the digging began. According to İnalcık's reading of the Ottoman chroniclers, about a third of the canal was dug. It soon proved hopeless. Ships could not be hauled overland, part of the fleet went back, and the army marched on to Astrakhan along the river.

On 16 September it reached the site of the old town. The Ottomans began to build a fortress there, but the new Russian fortress on its island was surrounded by water and they had too few guns. With winter coming and supplies short, the army turned back on 26 September and suffered heavily on the march through the steppe to Azov. Devlet Giray had secretly worked against the campaign, because he feared that success would turn Crimea into an Ottoman province.

The numbers are uncertain. One modern study says Selim sent 17,000 men. Russian diplomats reported 80,000, and the Russian envoy Ivan Novosiltsev, who left for Istanbul on 24 January 1570, wrote that only a quarter came home. İnalcık warned that round figures such as 50,000 and 100,000 should "never be taken as they are". In his letter to the sultan, Ivan IV presented the whole affair as a misunderstanding between monarchs.

Historians still disagree about its aim. Was it the canal, Astrakhan itself, or a route to attack Safavid Iran from the north? Ottoman chroniclers and the French and English ambassadors of the time saw Iran as the target. The standard monograph on the campaign remains Akdes Nimet Kurat's Türkiye ve İdil Boyu (1966).

What happened to Astrakhan after the conquest?

Astrakhan became Russia's base on the Caspian. Fishing and salt remained its wealth, as they had been under the khans. A Dutch traveller, Jan Struys, illustrated the sturgeon fishery of the Volga delta in his travel book of 1681.

The Crimean khans did not give up their claim. In 1571 Devlet Giray burned Moscow and, in the negotiations that followed, demanded Kazan and Astrakhan, as the Orthodox Encyclopaedia records. The deposed khan Yamgurchi was living in exile on Rhodes in 1569.

Many of the khanate's Tatars stayed. As the Astrakhan Yurt Tatars, they served the Russian state as soldiers and lived beside the town. Their history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century has recently been studied by Ilya Toropitsyn.

How is the conquest remembered today?

The memory of the conquest is contested. In August 2019 the businessman Konstantin Malofeev proposed a monument to Ivan IV in the city. Tatar, Nogai and Kazakh users protested online, an assistant imam of Astrakhan's White Mosque accused Ivan of destroying "all the mosques", and in December 2019 the World Forum of Tatar Youth wrote to the regional governor against the plan.

The historian A. V. Syzranov, who studied the dispute in 2020, found that one charge at least had no basis in the sources: "It is completely unclear what the accusations against Ivan the Terrible of destroying mosques are based on. We know nothing from the sources about whether the mosques of old Hajji-Tarkhan were destroyed after its capture. That town was simply abandoned by the Russian commanders and, for reasons of military security, moved."

Common myths about the Astrakhan Khanate

Timeline of the Astrakhan Khanate

What the map shows next

At 1470 the khanate appears beside the Golden Horde, with Kazan up the Volga and Crimea to the west. At 1502 the Great Horde has been destroyed and Astrakhan stands on its own. The last year in which the khanate is drawn in its own right is 1555. At 1556 the lower Volga belongs to the Tsardom of Russia, whose ruler is described in our article on Ivan the Terrible.