About the Tatars

[Oleg Smirnov]

There is some ambiguity for the terms 'Tatars', 'Turks' and 'Mongols'.

* * *

History of (proto)Turks and (proto)Mongols is tricky due to the mobile
pastoralist specificity. At the low level, the nomads formed clans based
on consanguinity. At a higher level, the clans formed larger alliances,
which were unstable. Mobile lifestyle was enabling them to rather easily
left an alliance and join another alliance or form new alliances.
Against sedentary peoples, there was much more such dynamics. The nomads
also might pretty fastly migrate in long distances within the steppe.

The modern Turkic people(s) are diverse genetically. There may be a
significant genetic distance between some Turkic ethnicities, and there
may be a genetic diversity even within a not so numerous ethnic group
united by perception of common identity. The map <http://bit.ly/3iLIBK2>
leaves no doubt that propagation of the Turkicness was linked with the
steppe, and the complicated genetic picture reflects specificities of
the steppe lifestyle.

At some point, Turkicness as such had shifted to be more about language,
less about customs and even less about common ancestry (e.g. formations
like Volga Bulgaria, Turkey and Azerbaijan formed when nomadic Turkic
speakers intruded into the sedentary areas and linguistically turkicized
the locals, while the intruders, in turn, abandoned their nomadism).

In eastern part of the Eurasian steppe, nomadism was mainly represented
by the Mongolic people. The Mongolic region <https://bit.ly/3zvVy1i> is
geographically more indiscrete against the scattered Turkic area, and in
the Mongilic case there are genetic markers more unambiguously linked
with language and customs. Besides, there're also peoples in the region
who speak Turkic and are genetically related to the typal Mongols (like
the Tuvans and Sakha, for example).

* * *

I had scanned the Wikipedia articles about the Tatars in most of major
languages to learn what they tell about the way the name was transformed
from the eastern Mongolic-Chinese use to the western Russian-European
use, and it looks like all of them either avoid clarifying it or provide
a confusing (or even incorrect) explanation.

By the 13th century, Tatar was a name of one of the major nomadic groups
in the eastern steppe <https://bit.ly/3hZGuTC> <https://bit.ly/3iFBZwI>.
Genghis Khan defeated (and killed most of) them at the initial stage of
his far-reaching imperial developments. There is some controversy about
whether those primary Tatars were linguistically Mongolic or Turkic, but
it even does not really matter for formation of the meaning of the term
'Tatars' in the later western use.

What seems to matter is that, by the 12th century, the Chinese and the
sinicized Liao's Khitans used the 'Tatar' word also more generically, to
designate any 'barbarians' north of the China's Great Wall in a
generalized sense and with a pejorative flavor. Then this term must have
also been known in Western Liao (Qara Kithai). So it's likely that the
Cumans piked up this 'Tatars' word from the escapees who were fleeing to
the Cuman lands from Qara Kithai because of the Mongol onslaught.

To the Russians, 'Tatars' weren't known before the 1220s. The very first
emergence of the term in an early Russian chronicle occurred to describe
some remarkable events that took place in 1223. There's little doubt the
Russians had adopted the term from the Cumans, so the knowledge of then
situation would allow to understand what did it really mean.

The relationship between the Russians and the west-Cumans throughout the
11 - 12th centuries is itself a specific topic. In brief, the Cumans
were interested in raiding / looting outskirts of the Russian sedentary
lands while the Russian princes were interested in use of the Cumans for
their feuds against each other <https://bit.ly/3jLbcAZ>. By the 13th
century, the both had managed to know and culturally impacted each other
well (the Cumans borrowed many Slavic words in their language while the
Russians learned Turkic words, and in the early 13th century some Cuman
khans even started to give Russian names to their sons).

Sometimes, Russian and Cuman troops might fight together against someone
else. There were cases when the Cumans participated in the Russia's wars
against Hungary, and there were cases when the joint Russian and Cuman
troops attacked Volga Bulgaria (and the fact that the Bulgarians and the
Cumans were both Turkic-speaking, did not prevent this). About the same
time, medieval Georgia employed the [pagan] Cumans to fight against the
Seljuk Turks and other regional Muslims <https://bit.ly/3eR8EhG>.

By the 1220s, the Genghis Khan's troops had finished Western Liao and
started to intrude to the eastern Cuman lands. The Cumans in the western
steppes detected the Sinister Wave ingoing from the east, saw it as an
existential treat, and sent an unprecedented mission to Russia - several
leaders of their hordes brought rich gifts and asked the Russian princes
for joint resistance against 'the Tatars'. The unprecedentedness was
also manifested by the fact that some of those Cuman khans decided to
adopt the Christianity in order to better incline the Russians to enter
into an alliance with them - something that never happened before.

The Cumans' call to joint resistance gives the context for understanding
of how the Russians initially learned the term 'Tatars'. And the Cumans
might similarly pass on it to other sedentary peoples with whom they had
contacts, and thus it went further including central and western Europe.
At then moment and situation, 'the Tatars' simply meant *some* ominous
and threatening force which was approaching. Hardly anyone in Russia or
in Europe knew anything specific about those primary Tatars in the east
(all of whose men taller than a lynchpin had been massacred 20 years ago).
In then western meaning it pointed to "the coming barbaric invaders"
without much specifics, and some chroniclers in Caucasus and Middle East
at the time also mentioned the Tatars in this non-specific meaning.

In the 1222, a Mongol-led army moved through Khwarazmian lands, bypassed
the Caspian Sea from the south, invaded Caucasus and the western steppes.
In the 1223, the Russian princes (not all of them) responded positively
to the Cumans' proposal, arranged joint troops, and, together with the
Cuman hordes, had come to battle the Tatars. It's known as Battle of the
Kalka River (the Donbas area, presently), - the Russian-Cuman troops had
been completely defeated, - mainly due to the lack of central command
and clamsy miscoordination between units. The Tatars then turned towards
Volga Bulgaria, and the Bulgarians managed to defeat and drive them away.
However, 13 years later, a better prepared Tatar army had come again and
fully destroyed Volga Bulgaria and Russia and more.

* * *

After the post-invasion situation stabilized, the result was represented
in the fact of establishment of the Golden Horde state. In Russian use,
'Tatars' shifted from their initial role-functional meaning - "barbaric
invaders" - to designation of the kind of people that constituted the
most representative part of the Horde's population. In qualitative terms
one might point to attributes like Turkic-speaking, nomadic (semi-
nomadic, post-nomadic) and Islamic. Islam was introduced as the Horder's
state religion since the 1320s. With regard to regional differences and
peculiarities, especially after the Golden Horde began to disintegrate
into regional factions, the Russians specified kinds of the Tatars (e.g.
Nogai Tatars or Crimean Tatars or Volga Tatars etc).

More non-typal groups living within the Horde - like the Volga Finnic
peoples or the Turkic-speaking Chuvashs who rejected Islamization even
since the Volga Bulgaria period - weren't called Tatars by the Russians.
Still, one can not find an easy strict rule here, because, for example,
the term 'Tatars' was applied also to some non-Islamic groups, like the
Khakas and Atlai people. The Russians didn't call the [Ottoman] Turks
'Tatars' because Turkey was out of context of the Horde. The term wasn't
commonly applied to the Turkic-nomadic-Islamic peoples in the Central
Asia, because closer contacts with them began in later times, when
perception of the Mongol invasion already became muffled. The way the
world knows the several ethnic groups of the Tatars today was developed
within the Russian history since the 13th century. Those eastern Tatars
who once existed in the Mongolic area have essentially nothing to do
with the variety of the post-Genghis-Khan Tatar groups except their name
had been carried over to other peoples.

In Europe the meaning of Tatars remained more generic for a longer time.
After the Mongol invasion, the Catholics spoke <https://bit.ly/36ZBlEI>
about "the wicked race of the Tartars". The Euros developed a geographic
concept of Tartaria, which was supposed to be tartarous and infernal
(since Tartar was the idea of underworld in the Greco-Roman mythology)
and residing somewhere to the east of Russia and to the north of China-
India. Poor knowledge about the Tartars and the first association with
the Mongols led the Euro-thinkers to inadequate ideas, so that as late
as in the 18 century, the enlightened German racist theorists classified
generalized Tartars as Mongolian Race <https://bit.ly/3zzXMfZ> (while
seeing the [Ottoman] Turks as Caucasian Race).

Modern genetics shows that the Mongolic, and, more generally, east-Asian
genetic contribution to the population of the 'western' groups of Tatars
is pretty small, which suggests that the Mongol invasion in the 13th
century can not be imagined too literally in the form of numerous hordes
of the Mongolic people who then settled on the conquered lands.

While the Mongol armies were led by the Chingizids and there's no doubt
that their high command were Mongolic, it's reasonable to think that a
large part of their regular fightermen were taken from nomadic Turkic
peoples the Mongols managed to subdue and incorporate into their troops
before they reached the western end of the Eurasian steppe. For example,
the Russian chronicler who first mentioned the Tatars (generic invaders)
due to the 1223 events, also mentioned specific 'Turkmen' in somewhat
addition to the Tatars. It corresponds to the fact that shortly before
invading of the west-Cuman area, the Mongol-led troops took the route
<https://bit.ly/3x7k0Eh> on which they might replenish their selves with
the local Turkmen in the south-Caspian areas.

Local nomadic clans might simply join the invaders voluntarily by seeing
their power, and, besides, 'the Tatars' widely used social engineering
techniques allowing to make use of captives, taken from local combatants
and non-combatants, not only as laborers for the invaders but also as a
human shield and / or as an expendable auxiliary militia. In the eastern
steppe region, the Khitans and Jurchens evolved such techniques long
before Genghis Khan. Those of the captives who survived after such a use
might then join the invaders as loyal participants through the Stockholm
Syndrome mechanics.

In turn, when the Mongols started to conquere sedentary areas - starting
from Volga Bulgaria, then Russia, and then further west - there were
fewer men there fitting to their nomadic-based military organization,
but instead the sedentarites had many buildings, which was a fun to burn
and many non-martial peasants and townsfolks which was a fun to kill.

In the 1220-30s, some part of the Cumans (primarily their chieftains who
had something to lose) fled to Hungary and elsewhere, while most of the
low rank Cuman clans simply switched under 'the Tatar' power during the
invasion, and similar situation likely took place for other western and
central steppe nomads.

* * *

In the Golden Horde's major 'Tatar' population, which from the beginning
was predominantly Turkic, the Mongolic people were more represented
among upper strata. Islamization of the Horde, which happened since the
1320s as a top-down policy pursued by then khan Uzbek, met quite a great
resistance from the adherents of the traditional cults and related mores
and customs. And those who had more superior lineage - which primarily
meant the Chingizids and other men of Mongolia descent - also had more
reasons to reject Islam, because veneration of ancestors was in the core
part of the traditional steppe cults and it was involved to maintain the
nomadic clannish organization and hierarchy. Islam threatened to
diminish the importance of the ancestry-based statuses. Also many found
it shameful and inacceptable to abandon Law and Statute established by
Genghis Khan Himself in exchange for "faith of the Arabs", because the
Mongols saw the Arabs inferior. One Persian chronicler wrote at the time
that khan Uzbek executed more than hundred of the high rank Chingizids
who conspired against him <https://bit.ly/3zE7gXu>. Thus, the situation
should be seen not only as the Islamization but also as a 'de-
Mongolization' of the state, which increased its Turkic characteristics.
It also had laid a rift in the Horde's relationship with the Yuan state.
One more effect was that the adoption of Islam had raised status of (the
area of the former) Volga Bulgaria within the Horde.

Volga Bulgaria adopted Islam already since the early 10th century (they
did it primarily as a mean to be in alliance with the Caliphate against
Khazaria at the time). The 10th century was also such a time when the
Bulgars and other nomads, which previously fled from the Khazar power to
the mid-Volga region, were completing their transofmation to cedentary
lifestyle. The Bulgarians still maintained connections with the nomadic
Cuman-Kipchak infidels in the south-Volga area, and their ties were even
more close than the Russian-Cuman relationship. It was so because the
both had a common and stable business interest with regard to the Volga
Trade Route and the both were Turkic-speaking, besides, the post-nomadic
Bulgarians still partly kept the nomadic characteristics and customs.

In the 1230s, Volga Bulgaria had been devastated by the Mongols to about
the same extent as Russia, or even harder. The result of the destruction
was so that the survived part of them migrated north further from the
steppes, while the post-Bulgarian (semi)steppe area began to attract the
southern Cumans - submitted to the Mongol power - and other nomads who
had been brought with the Mongol-led troops from more remote areas. It's
what contributed to the post-Mongol ethnogenesis of the Volga Tatars.
The Uzbek's Islamization in the 14th century boosted status and prestige
of the Bulgarians over the neo-Islamized nomads, which made the Golden
Horde more comfortable to the post-Bulgarians, and in combination with
the old Volga Bulgaria's cultural reserve it had eventually made the
Volga Tatars the major / most notable Tatar group among all kinds of the
post-Horde Tatars.

* * *

Read also <https://bit.ly/2RDkSC4> and <https://tinyurl.com/yhcm5a9n>

[Byker]

"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:sdpv5q$1c2$1...@os.motzarella.org...

>
> There is some ambiguity for the terms 'Tatars', 'Turks' and 'Mongols'.

Is there any ambiguity regarding "Cossacks"?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxaefqC-k90&t=510s