Kazan was a cosmopolitan trading center, with a social and political elite of Turkic-speaking Islamic Tatars and a population of Tatar craftsmen, merchants, Islamic clergy, and scholars. Surrounding the city, most of the khanate's rural population was not Islamic, but animist in belief. South of the Volga (which runs west to east here), in wooded steppe lived Turkic-speaking Chuvash and Finno- Ugric-speaking Mordva farmers, fishers, bee-keepers. North of the Volga lived Finno-Ugric Cheremis (Mari) and Votiaks (Udmurty), who added hunting to traditional forest exploitation.
Once the bloody years of conquest had established control, the Muscovite government settled into what Andreas Kappeler describes as its typical early modern colonial approach, a "flexible and pragmatic" toleration of local autonomies wherever possible. The city was greatly Russianized, but in the surrounding countryside the status quo was affirmed for loyal ethnic groups. Elites kept ownership of land and economic resources (beehives, forest, beaver dams) and kept their traditional administrative and judicial leadership below the criminal law. Islamic courts applied Sharia law to most issues, even as non-Russians had access to, and used, the tsar's criminal courts. Tatar and Chuvash men in the Khanate's cavalry were integrated into the Russian army as Tatar units; they were awarded pomest'e land grants like their Russian counterparts and became the majority of the Kazan gentry. Although they did not have to convert to Orthodoxy to receive lands, own serfs, and serve in a privileged status, some of the highest princes (murzy) did convert and become members of the highest elite in Moscow.
Fiscally, the non-military non-Russian population of the Kazan khanate—Tatar, Cheremis/Mari, Chuvash, Mordva, and Votiak/Udmurt—continued to pay tribute, called iasak, as they had for centuries to Mongol khans and their successors. Conquering lands of Chinggisid heritage, Russian tsars stepped into the role of tribute-taking khan (in the steppe world Moscow's adoption of the title "tsar" in 1547 could be perceived as a claim to Chinggisid legitimacy). In contrast to the tax burdens ofEast Slavic Orthodox peasants, iasak was often not as onerous; when the poll tax and regular military conscription were instituted in the early eighteenth century, they were not imposed on native peoples. Nevertheless, iasak, often demanded in furs, contributed importantly to the tsar's income. As "iasak people," Kazan ethnic groups were considered state peasants, overseen by state bureaucrats; Russian and Tatar landholders were forbidden to enserf or enslave them.
In 1556 Moscow conquered the Caspian trading port of Astrakhan, winning control of the Volga route (but not steppe lands on either side). From this outpost Moscow tried to expand its reach into the northern Caucasus. A group of
Circassians of Kabarda entered into a short-lived alliance with Muscovy (1557-8), symbolized by the marriage of the recently widowed Ivan IV to a Kabardinian princess in 1561 (Mariia Cherkasskaia); her family, the princes Cherkasskie, ranked among the richest and most influential boyars at the tsar's court through the seventeenth century. Moscow maintained a fortress on the Terek River (1567), but under Ottoman pressure failed to consolidate a position in the Caucasus until the eighteenth century. The Ottoman empire tried unsuccessfully to wrest Astrakhan from Russia, but its allies the Crimean Tatars did manage to launch devastating campaigns northward, reaching Moscow in 1571 and 1572.
FOREST AND STEPPE, MIDDLEMEN AND MIDDLE GROUND
Russian history was shaped by an interaction of steppe and forest that pivoted between symbiosis and conflict. The steppe was home to nomadic pastoralists who generally spoke Turkic and Tatar languages in this part of the world (the Black Sea or Pontic and Caspian steppes). The forest was home to groups who lived from forest resources (Finno-Ugric peoples, native Siberians) and to East Slavs who farmed as well as exploited—fishing, hunting, gathering. Trade and alliance forged symbiosis between forest and steppe. Since at least the ninth century goods— amber, furs, slaves—had traversed the forest from the Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas, destined for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern urban centers. Princes of towns in the forest allied with steppe nomads in war and trade. At the same time, nomadic communities relied on a raiding economy to supplement pastoralism; slave raids from the south were a scourge in these centuries. As we have noted, a major turning point in the history of Europe and Eurasia developed when settled agrarian empires—Habsburgs, Poland-Lithuania, and most successfully Russia—were able to conquer the lands of the steppe, block slave raids, monopolize trade, and, most importantly, replace grazing with farming. The process took the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and required long decades of reliance on middlemen.
As we have seen, Russia's expansion westward put it in conflict with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the kingdoms of Poland and Sweden, and the city republic of Novgorod—all settled states with which Russia engaged through war and diplomacy. When Russia looked south and east towards the steppe and the Siberian taiga, however, it faced a different political world. This was the Mongol sphere, where Chinggisid lineage guaranteed legitimacy and Mongol practices of diplomacy, negotiation, alliance, and war governed. The dissolution of the Mongol empire's unity from the Qipchaq khanate to China from the late fourteenth century on yielded splinter khanates claiming Chinggisid legitimacy—the strongest in vibrant trade hubs (Crimea, Kazan) and weaker ones in steppe and forest (the Nogai Horde on the lower Volga steppes, the Siberian khanate at Kuchum). In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the Eurasian steppe was a volatile place, with new groups arriving, pushing previous inhabitants to new pastures. In the lower
Volga the Nogais forced the Great Horde out in the sixteenth century, and were in turn expelled in the early seventeenth century by the Kalmyks. In the early eighteenth century the Dzhungars pushed the Kazakhs from Central Asia to the steppes south of western Siberia and the Urals, encroaching on the Bashkirs. All this volatility exacerbated the raiding economy and complicated Russia's push into the steppe.
Well into the eighteenth century, as Russia advanced into the steppe, it moved into what scholars call a "middle ground," a concept made famous by Richard White in his study of encounters between Europeans and natives in North America and applied by scholars of Russian empire including Thomas Barrett, Yuriy Malikov, Willard Sunderland, and Michael Khodarkovsky. A "middle ground" is a contact zone not governed by strong states but created by the interactions of people of different cultures brought together by trade. As beaver pelts changed hands between Frenchmen and Iroquois and sables between East Slavs and native Siberians, a zone of interchange evolved. Each side accommodated to the other; to one degree or another language, diet, dress, weaponry, even religious beliefs crossed cultures. Typically a "middle ground" zone is impermanent—eventually a strong polity consolidates control and imposes its dominant culture. In the process, however, it often leans on intermediaries for alliances, border defense, and cultural access. Mindful of White's definition—"the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of the villages"—some, such as Michael Khodarkovsky, argue that Russia developed a hybrid "middle ground," since the state, rather than private trade, was a driving factor in pushing into the borderlands. But the characteristic interchanges described by White occurred nonetheless; dozens of versions of a "middle ground" formed as Russians encroached upon its borderlands. Central to this encounter were Cossacks, the quintessential "in between" group in the Eurasian steppe.