Khanate of Sibir

At a glance

Where was the Khanate of Sibir?

The khanate lay in the south of the West Siberian plain, where the forest gives way to steppe. The Great Russian Encyclopedia, in an entry by Vadim Trepavlov, places its borders approximately between the Urals, the Baraba steppe and the lands on the middle course of the Irtysh and the Tobol. Its rulers subdued Ugric tribes on the Irtysh and the Konda and Turkic nomads in the Baraba steppe.

The core was much smaller. The historian Sergei Bakhrushin, commenting in 1937 on Gerhard Friedrich Müller's History of Siberia, described a heartland of small fortified towns guarding the capital along the Irtysh, among them a fort on Chuvash Cape and Kysym-tura at the mouth of the Vagai. To the south, in his words, the borders "were lost in the steppes of Baraba".

Müller, who travelled through Siberia in the 1730s, was sceptical of larger claims. In his judgement the Tatars of the Irtysh and lower Tobol "undisputedly" recognised Kuchum, the Baraba Tatars probably did, and those of the upper Tobol, the Tura and the Iset were doubtful. The Khanty (Ostyaks) living on the Irtysh paid tribute; the rest of the Khanty, and the Mansi (Voguls) of Verkhoturye, Pelym and Berezov, were "probably not subdued at all". Tatar raids on the Khanty were frequent, he wrote, but raids do not mean conquest.

No source consulted for this entry gives a figure for the khanate's area. The large peak area derived from the border data, about 3.9 million km², includes forest peoples who were at most occasional tributaries and is best read as a dataset estimate of the widest sphere, not as territory that was ruled.

How did the Khanate of Sibir begin?

As a corner of the Golden Horde. The Great Russian Encyclopedia describes the Siberian Khanate as a state formed on the basis of one of the Golden Horde's uluses, governed by the Shibanids, descendants of Chinggis Khan's grandson Shiban. Its centre was Chimgi-Tura on the Tura, the Tyumen of the Russian chronicles, which the historian Aleksei Parunin calls the "only large town of late-medieval Western Siberia". It enters the written record in 1406, when the fugitive former khan of the Horde, Tokhtamysh, was killed "in the Siberian land near Tyumen".

In the early 1420s, as part of the Golden Horde's break-up, the area belonged to the Shibanid khan Hajji Muhammad. In the wars of 1428–1429 he was killed by the Mangyt leader Gazi, and it was at Chimgi-Tura that the Shibanid Abu'l-Khayr chose to take the throne. The town became the first capital of his Uzbek khanate.

The date 1468 that appears on this site is the year of Abu'l-Khayr's death, not a recorded founding. According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, when his khanate broke apart, the bek Mar, a member of the Taibugid family, established himself in Chimgi-Tura. Mar was soon killed by the Shibanid Ibrahim, better known as Ibak, and under Ibak, from the mid-1470s to about 1495, the Tyumen Khanate took shape, with pastures on the lower Irtysh, Ishim, Tobol and Tura. The border data behind the map begin even earlier, in 1429, with Abu'l-Khayr's accession at Chimgi-Tura.

Who were the Taibugids?

A local ruling family of beks who were not descended from Chinggis Khan and therefore, in the steppe political order, could not take the title of khan. The Siberian chronicles open with their legend. In Savva Esipov's chronicle of 1636, a Muslim king named On ruled on the Ishim until a commoner called Chingis killed him "like a robber". On's son Taibuga was saved, served Chingis, conquered peoples along the Irtysh and the Ob, and built a town on the Tura named Chingiden.

Historians treat this as legend. Müller already doubted it, and Parunin calls it the "Taibugid legend", a story that justified the family's claim to rule. The chronicles then trace the line down to Mar, who married the sister of the "Kazan tsar Upak", to Mar's sons Ader and Yabalak, and to Ader's son Mamet. Bakhrushin's reconstruction continues through Kasim to the brothers Ediger and Bekbulat and Bekbulat's son Seydyak.

Who was Ibak, the khan who killed Khan Akhmat?

Ibak, or Ibrahim, was the Shibanid khan of Tyumen in the last decades of the fifteenth century. According to Parunin, citing Trepavlov and Denis Maslyuzhenko, the Nogai Horde was formally dependent on Tyumen from around 1473, and in 1480 the Nogai beks Musa and Yamgurchei recognised Ibak's authority.

His fame rests on one raid. In 1480 Khan Akhmat of the Great Horde had faced the army of Ivan III of Moscow across the river Ugra and withdrawn. That winter Ibak and his Nogai allies fell on Akhmat's camp. The so-called Arkhangelogorodsky chronicler gives the date as 6 January and says that Ibak came in the morning while "Tsar Akhmat was still asleep, and killed him with his own hands".

Other chronicles tell it differently. The Nikon Chronicle, in Serge Zenkovsky's English translation, says that Akhmat "was attacked by Khan Ivak of Nogai, who conquered the Horde", but that Akhmat himself "was killed by the latter's brother-in-law", the Nogai murza Yamgurchei.

That same year Ibak sent his envoy, Prince Chyumgur, to Ivan III, "with joy that I have killed your enemy, Tsar Akhmat", in the words the chronicles put in his mouth. Parunin calls it the first official embassy from the Tyumen Khanate to Moscow. The Habsburg diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein, writing about Muscovy in 1549, still knew of the "kingdom of Tumen", whose prince "is called in their native language the Tumenski czar" and "has not very long ago done great injury to the Prince of Moscovy".

Ibak's younger brother Mamuk carried Shibanid ambitions further west. In the mid-1490s, the Nikon Chronicle records, "Mamuk, Khan of Shiban'" marched against Kazan with great forces; Zenkovsky's note places him in "the Central Urals and Western Siberia".

When was the town of Sibir founded?

By tradition about 1495, after the killing of Ibak. The Rumyantsev chronicler says that "Ader's son Moamet killed the Kazan tsar Upak", by which the Siberian chronicles mean Ibak, "destroyed the town of Chingiden, and set himself up a town on the river Irtysh, and named it Sibir". Historians differ on the year: Veliaminov-Zernov, Maslyuzhenko, Trepavlov and others give 1495, while Damir Iskhakov and A. Frank lean towards 1493.

The archaeologist A. P. Zykov, in the Great Russian Encyclopedia, writes that according to the Pogodin chronicle Sibir was founded about 1495 by Muhammad-bek (Mamet) as his residence and as the capital of the state he headed. Müller explained the move as a matter of safety: Chimgi-Tura stood in open country, so Mamet chose high ground on the eastern bank of the Irtysh and fortified it. "Its remains," Müller wrote, "can still be seen 16 versts above Tobolsk."

The site is the hillfort now called Isker, on a promontory where the small river Sibirka enters the Irtysh, 16 km south-east of Tobolsk. Zykov dates it as the capital of the Taibugid bekdom from the end of the fifteenth century to 1563 and again in 1585–1587/88, and of the Siberian Khanate from 1563 to 1582.

Was Sibir a khanate or a principality before Kuchum?

In Russian documents the Taibugids appear as princes (knyaz), and the Great Russian Encyclopedia calls them beks, not khans. The Great Russian Encyclopedia states that their status implied the suzerainty, in this case formal, of some neighbouring khan. After Ibak's death, it says, his relatives took refuge in the Khanate of Bukhara and real power returned to the Taibugids.

Damir Iskhakov questioned this picture in 2010, in an article pointedly titled "Khanate or principality?". He noted that Kuchum's father Murtaza may already have been khan of the Siberian Yurt, and quoted Trepavlov's remark that Kuchum, or a close relative, may for a while have sat "quietly in Tura, content with the status of a nominal khan under the beks who really ruled". On this reading, Sibir before 1563 was a khanate with a Shibanid figurehead and Taibugid strongmen. The scanty sources cannot settle the question; this entry uses the name Khanate of Sibir for the whole period.

Why did Ediger pay tribute to Ivan the Terrible?

Because he needed a protector against the Shibanids. In the mid-sixteenth century, according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the Shibanids renewed their struggle for Sibir with the backing of the Nogais and of Abdullah Khan II of Bukhara. Ivan IV had just conquered the Khanate of Kazan and Astrakhan. The Siberian beks Ediger and Bekbulat, brothers ruling jointly, turned to Moscow.

The submission came in stages, which popular accounts often merge.

January 1555: the request. Envoys "from the Siberian prince Ediger and from all the Siberian land" asked Ivan to take them under his protection and impose tribute, "from every black man a sable", that is from every taxpaying commoner, plus a squirrel for the tsar's tribute collector, the daruga. The number of "black men" given was 30,700. Ivan sent Dmitry Kurov as daruga to take the oath and count the people. According to Maslyuzhenko and Elena Ryabinina, "Siberian" had appeared in the Russian ruler's official title a year earlier, in 1554.

November 1556: the shortfall. Kurov returned with Ediger's envoy Boyanda and only 700 sables. Ediger wrote that the "Shiban tsarevich", a Shibanid prince, had made war on them and carried off many people. Kurov told the tsar that "they could have sent the full tribute, but did not want to". Boyanda's goods were confiscated and he was put under guard.

1557/58: the full tribute and the oath. In the following chronicle year, 7066, the Tatar servitors Devlet Kozya and Sabanya Ryazanov returned from Siberia with Ediger's envoy Istemir and "the tribute of the Siberian land in full": 1,000 sables, 100 sables road duty and 69 sables in place of squirrels. They also brought a sworn charter with the prince's seal, in which Ediger acknowledged himself the tsar's kholop, his bondsman, and promised tribute every year.

Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina think Ediger inflated the number of his subjects: in the early seventeenth century all the taxpaying Mansi and Khanty on both sides of the Urals numbered no more than 2,700, according to Bakhrushin. More tribute came in 1559 and a last embassy in 1563, but Moscow, absorbed by the Livonian War, never sent the help it had promised.

Who was Kuchum Khan?

Kuchum was a Shibanid prince, the son of Murtaza, and the khan whom later Siberian Tatars and Russians alike remembered as the ruler of the Siberian kingdom. His grandfather was Ibak of Tyumen, as a charter of Tsar Fyodor to Kuchum, dated 1597, reminded him, speaking of the time "when your grandfather Ibak was still tsar of the Siberian state". He seized Sibir in 1563 and ruled it until Yermak's Cossacks drove him out in 1582; for sixteen more years he fought the Russians from the steppe.

The Siberian chronicles describe his arrival as a conquest: "Tsar Kuchum, son of Murtaza, came across the steppe from the Kazakh Horde with many warriors, and the town of Sibir was taken, and the princes killed." Ediger and Bekbulat died. Bekbulat's son Seydyak escaped and, in Müller's account, was sent to Bukhara for safety.

1555 or 1563? Müller, following the Khivan historian Abu'l-Ghazi, who gave Kuchum a reign of forty years ending in the Islamic year 1003 (1594/95), dated his arrival to 1555. Modern historians date the seizure of Sibir to 1563. Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina point out that in the earlier Russian documents Kuchum's father Murtaza and elder brother Ahmad-Girey are the active Shibanid leaders, and they place the restoration in late summer or early autumn 1563, since the Nogai leader Ismail, who died at the end of that September, still wrote to Moscow about it.

Conquest or invitation? The Russian Patriarchal Chronicle puts it differently from the Siberian chronicles: "the Siberian people stopped paying tribute to the sovereign's collectors and took a tsarevich to Sibir." Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina read this as an invitation, linked to the wish to stop paying Moscow. Tobolsk Tatars told Müller a similar story: the Tatar nobles, unable to agree on a ruler, asked Murtaza of Bukhara to send them one of his sons, and he sent his middle son Kuchum, who was recognised as khan by all. The chronicle phrase "from the Kazakh Horde" does not make Kuchum a Kazakh. Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina link it to the Nogai group known as the Altyuly, who had nomadised with the Kazakhs of Haqq-Nazar.

How did relations with Moscow break down?

Gradually, between 1569 and 1582. In 1569 Moscow reminded Kuchum that Ediger had paid tribute every year. Kuchum replied that he was at war with the Kazakh khan, and that if the Kazakh khan defeated him and sat in Sibir, no tribute would be paid at all. In 1570 Kuchum wrote again, proposing friendship but adding: "If you want peace, we will make peace; if you want war, we will make war." Tribute was then set at 1,000 sables, and in 1571 Tretyak Chebukov went to Siberia to take Kuchum's oath. The first tribute arrived, and Kuchum confirmed his oath.

The peace did not last. In July 1573 Kuchum's nephew Mametkul crossed into the Chusovaya valley and captured Chebukov, whom Ivan IV had sent to the Kazakhs at the request of the Stroganov family. The Stroganovs were merchants with vast estates on the Kama and the Chusovaya. On 30 May 1574 Ivan granted Yakov and Grigory Stroganov a new charter, for lands beyond the Urals on the Tobol and its tributaries, with the right to build forts "on the Irtysh and on the Ob and on other rivers" and keep guards with firearms there. The charter complains that Mametkul had collected tribute from Khanty and Mansi who used to pay it to Moscow.

How did Islam come to Sibir?

Muslim preachers had come before him, and some, Müller was told, died as martyrs, but Kuchum made the spread of Islam a state project. Müller recorded that the Tobolsk Tatars and Bukharans credited Kuchum with introducing "the Mohammedan faith" in Siberia for the first time. An old sheikh from Bukhara showed the graves of seven martyr-saints, whose memory the Tatars still honoured. When his subjects proved slow to give up their old beliefs, Kuchum asked his father Murtaza for help, and Murtaza sent Ahmad-Girey with troops, an akhun and several mullahs and *abyz*es.

Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina, drawing on a Tatar source published by Nikolai Katanov in 1897, describe two Muslim missions to Isker, in 1572 and 1574, the second escorted from Bukhara by Ahmad-Girey. In this tradition Kuchum then ceded the throne to his elder brother until the latter's death in 1578. Conversion was slow: Müller wrote that even in his day "many were pagans".

The ethnographer Igor Belich studied the mausolea of Muslim saints, called astana, around Isker. Earlier scholars linked them to Central Asian missionaries of the Naqshbandi Sufi order who died in clashes with non-Muslim Tatars, and Belich's own research suggested that the cult of saints was established officially under Kuchum and served as an important instrument of state religious policy. Some of these shrines are still visited; Belich mentions the restored tomb of Hakim-sheikh at Baish in the Vagai district.

How was the khanate governed?

Loosely. Maslyuzhenko and Ryabinina, following Bakhrushin, describe a state in which the lords of individual uluses remained largely independent in their internal affairs. Their ties to the khan's court at Isker consisted of paying yasak, a tribute in kind whose size is unknown, and sending troops. More distant princes could be regarded not as subjects but as allies bound by an oath, the shert'. Only Kuchum's own followers, many of them Bukharans and Nogais, depended on him directly.

According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, an influential and fairly numerous group of the khanate's inhabitants came from the Uzbek lands of Central Asia. Its chief wealth was fur, paid as tribute to Moscow and sought by Bukharan merchants, whom Ryabinina and Maslyuzhenko describe as "interested in furs". In 1564 Abdullah Khan of Bukhara asked Moscow for free passage across Russian territory for his merchants, and Yermak's last journey in 1585 was made to meet Bukharan merchants whom, according to the Stroganov Chronicle, Kuchum's son Ali would not let through.

How did Yermak conquer Sibir?

With a few hundred Cossacks, firearms and the river system. According to the Stroganov Chronicle, Volga Cossacks under the atamans Yermak Timofeyevich and his comrades came to the Stroganov towns on the Chusovaya on 28 June 1579, invited by the Stroganovs, who had heard of their daring on the Volga. On 1 September 1581, the chronicle continues, the Stroganovs sent them "to Siberia against the Siberian sultan", together with 300 of their own men, "Lithuanians and Germans and Tatars and Russians", 840 men in all. According to the Kungur Chronicle they went up the Chusovaya towards the Tagil portage and the Serebryanka, hauled their boats across to the rivers flowing east, and sailed down to the Tobol and the Irtysh.

Moscow learned of it with alarm. On 16 November 1582 Ivan IV sent the Stroganovs a furious letter, rebuking them for having taken in robbers and sent them against the Votyaks, the Mansi, the people of Pelym and the Siberians without the tsar's knowledge. The letter states that the Cossacks had left Perm on 1 September, which some historians read as 1 September 1582.

The decisive fight came on Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh, near Kuchum's capital. According to the 1636 chronicle of Esipov, the battle near the khan's residence took place on 23 October, and three days later the Cossacks went into the town, which the defenders had abandoned. In the Remezov Chronicle Kuchum's Khanty and Mansi auxiliaries desert him and he flees in the night of 25 to 26 October. The chronicles agree that Yermak entered Sibir on 26 October, the feast of St Demetrius of Thessalonica.

Within days the local peoples came to terms. Müller recorded that on the fourth day after Yermak entered the town, a Khanty prince named Boyar came from the river Demyanka with many people, bringing furs and food, especially fish.

Was Isker taken in 1580, 1581 or 1582?

The day, 26 October, is not in doubt; the year has been debated for three centuries. Esipov dated the capture to the year 7089 of the Byzantine era, which by the September-year reckoning used in Russia corresponds to autumn 1580. The Stroganov Chronicle has the expedition leave on 1 September 1581, which would put the capture in October 1582, more than a year later, after a winter on the way.

Bakhrushin preferred this reading in 1937. About 1980 the historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, followed by A. T. Shashkov, argued for a start on 1 September 1582 on the strength of Ivan IV's letter of 16 November 1582, with the capital falling less than two months after departure. Yakov Solodkin added a 1606 charter that speaks of "the Siberian taking of 7091", that is 1582/83. The year of the capture, 1582, is now generally accepted; the length of the campaign before it is not.

How did Yermak die?

In an ambush at night. In August 1585, according to the Stroganov Chronicle, messengers came to Yermak saying that many Bukharan merchants were coming to them with their goods, but that Kuchum's son Ali would not let them pass. Yermak set out with his men to meet them. They found no merchants, camped near the mouth of the Vagai and fell asleep in their tents, and Kuchum's men fell on them in the night. Yermak tried to reach his boats and drowned in the Irtysh.

The details are later embroidery. Most chronicles put his death on 5 August, the eve of the Transfiguration, and some on 6 August. Müller combined the two as the night of 5 to 6 August, in the year 1584. Bakhrushin, rebuilding the chronology from documents, dated it to August 1585, and Solodkin notes that the survivors, fewer than a hundred men under the officer Ivan Glukhov, reached Moscow in autumn 1585. The famous detail of Yermak being dragged down by his armour, two coats of mail in some versions, Solodkin regards as legendary; the redaction of the Stroganov Chronicle that Elena Romodanovskaya considered the original does not mention armour at all.

Reinforcements had been slow: Prince Semyon Bolkhovsky, sent from Moscow with 500 men in May 1583, reached Sibir only in November 1584, according to Bakhrushin. Kuchum's nephew Mametkul had been captured and sent to Moscow, but Kuchum himself remained at large.

Who held Sibir after Yermak?

For a few years, Siberian Tatar rulers again. When the Russian survivors abandoned the town, it was occupied by Ali, Kuchum's eldest son and heir. Then Seydyak, Bekbulat's son, who had grown up in Bukhara, "came to the town of Sibir, and took the town, and drove out tsarevich Aley", in the words of Esipov's chronicle, receiving "the patrimony of his father Bekbulat".

Elena Ryabinina and Denis Maslyuzhenko, writing in 2023, argue that the usual picture of Seydyak as Kuchum's mortal enemy may be too simple. Seydyak, raised at the court of a Bukharan sayyid, cannot have appeared in Siberia before mid-1585, and they doubt that the Bukharan sayyids, who had invested so much in the khanate's Islamisation, would have sent an opponent of the legitimate khan. Seydyak was joined by a Kazakh prince, Uraz-Muhammad, and by Kuchum's former chief adviser, the karacha.

When was Tobolsk founded?

In the summer of 1587, as the base for a permanent Russian presence. In early 1586 the voevodas Vasily Sukin and Ivan Myasnoy and the officer Danila Chulkov left Moscow with about 300 men, and on 29 June 1586 Sukin began to build Tyumen on the site of old Chimgi-Tura.

In the summer of 1587, Müller wrote, 500 more servicemen reached Tyumen with orders for Chulkov to go to the Irtysh and found "near the Tatar town of Sibir" another town, from which it would be easier to act against the Tatars. So began Tobolsk, at first a small wooden fort, soon the seat of the chief governors of all Siberia. In 1588 Seydyak, Uraz-Muhammad and the karacha were seized by the Russians in Tobolsk, and Isker ceased to be a capital.

How did the Khanate of Sibir end?

On the Ob, on 20 August 1598. Kuchum spent the following years nomadising in the Ishim steppe and raiding the Russians and their Tatar tributaries, while the Russians founded Tara on the Irtysh in 1594. In 1598, Müller wrote, the voevodas Efim Buturlin of Tobolsk and Prince Ivan Mosalsky of Tara were ordered to attack the khan wherever he was found, and on 9 May they marched out of Tara with 700 Russians and 300 Tatars.

According to the Russian reports that Bakhrushin cited, the battle took place on 20 August on the Ob, two days' journey from Lake Ik, and lasted from sunrise to noon. Kuchum lost six princes, ten murzas and 150 servitors; a hundred men drowned and fifty captives were hanged. Five of his sons, the youngest aged five, were captured, with eight of his wives and eight daughters. Prisoners disagreed about the khan himself: some said he had drowned in the Ob, others that he had escaped across the river in a boat. Müller does not name the field commander; the Soviet historian V. S. Sinyaev, in his 1951 study of the battle, names him as Voeikov.

He had escaped. Müller tells that Kuchum fled with a few servants to the upper Irtysh, where the Kalmyks were already nomadising, and stayed near Lake Zaysan, but provoked the Kalmyks by having horses driven off; they caught up with him by Lake Kargalchin and killed his remaining men. What happened next is uncertain. Esipov wrote that he fled to the Nogais and was killed by them. Abu'l-Ghazi placed his death among the "Mangkats". Bakhrushin thought the most credible account was attributed to Kuchum's son Kanai, that the Bukharans "lured their father Kuchum into the Kalmyk lands and killed him by deceit". No source consulted for this entry gives the year of his death.

Was Kuchum the last khan of Sibir?

Not in the eyes of his descendants. His son Ali was proclaimed khan, and in 1603 a messenger from Tobolsk visited "the Siberian khan Ali" in his camp at Emesbulak. Trepavlov, in a 2011 study, describes the life of the Kuchumovichi, Kuchum's sons and grandsons, as one of wandering: they nomadised mainly on the upper Ishim and Tobol, and their own letters show them hunting and fishing as much as fighting.

The Kuchumovichi allied with any power that might restore them. Oirat (Kalmyk) groups attacked Tara, Tomsk, Tobolsk and Tyumen in 1616, according to a 2021 study by A. S. Salmanov, who traces how the Kuchumovichi, the Kalmyks and later the Dzungars took up the idea of restoring the Siberian Khanate. Kuchuk, son of Ablai, who led Kuchum's clan in the 1660s, became the figurehead of the Bashkir rising of 1662–1664, whose rebels cried, "Our tsar has risen against Rus'!"

What is left of the Khanate of Sibir?

The name, first of all. "Tsar of Siberia" entered the official title of the Russian rulers, and the town's name spread to the whole of northern Asia.

The site of Isker survives as an archaeological monument on its promontory above the Irtysh. It was described by Nikolai Spafary in the 1670s and measured by Müller in 1739. After amateur digs in 1880–81 and 1915, scientific excavations followed in 1968, 1988 and 1993, published by Zykov, P. A. Kosintsev and Trepavlov in their monograph Gorod Sibir – gorodishche Isker. Reviewing it in 2018, Maslyuzhenko and Sergei Tataurov noted, citing the authors, that five Russian villages had once stood on the site and had moved away because the Irtysh was eroding the bank.

The khanate's Turkic population became the Siberian Tatars, who still venerate the saints' tombs near Isker, where a stele now marks the site as the capital of the Siberian Khanate.

Rulers of the Khanate of Sibir

The order of the Taibugids follows Bakhrushin's reconstruction from the chronicles and a royal charter; their dates before 1555 are unknown.

Common myths about the Khanate of Sibir

Timeline of the Khanate of Sibir

What the map shows next

The border data draw the Siberian realm from 1429 to 1587; at 1508 on the map it lies east of the Urals on the Tobol and Irtysh. Its parent state appears at Golden Horde, and its western neighbour, conquered by Moscow in 1552, at Khanate of Kazan. The Nogai Horde, Ibak's ally against Akhmat, is drawn at Nogai Horde. After the conquest the region belongs to the Tsardom of Russia.