Astrakhan Khanate

Overview

The Khanate of Astrakhan was a Tatar khanate — a rump successor state of the Golden Horde — that existed from 1466 to 1556 in the Lower Volga valley and Volga Delta, around the modern city of Astrakhan. Its territory, roughly 160,000 square kilometres, covered most of today's Astrakhan Oblast and the steppe on the right bank of the Volga in present-day Kalmykia; it was bordered by the Caspian Sea to the south, the Nogai Horde to the east, and Nogai groups nominally subject to Crimea to the west. Its capital was Xacitarxan (Astrakhan in Russian chronicles), located about 12 km north of the modern city.

Its khans claimed patrilineal descent from Toqa Temür, the thirteenth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan. The khanate emerged when the Golden Horde ruler Küchük Muhammad died in 1459 and power split between his sons Ahmed Khan — the ruler who lost Russia at the Ugra standoff in 1480 — and Mahmud bin Küchük, based at Astrakhan. The khanate is said to have been founded in 1466 (a date possibly deriving from a letter Mahmud sent to the Ottoman sultan claiming the area as his patrimony), by Mahmud himself or his son Qasim I, but it did not become fully separate until the Golden Horde's final collapse in 1502. It was visited by the Venetian traveler Ambrogio Contarini in 1476.

The population consisted mostly of Astrakhan Tatars and Nogais. Society was organized in feudal ranks — khan, sultans, begs, and morzalar (mirzas) — above the qara xalıq ("black people"), the standard Turkic designation for commoners. Sunni Islam was the state religion. The city's position at the intersection of the north–south Volga route to Persia and the east–west route north of the Caspian made transit trade between Muscovy, Kazan, Crimea, Central Asia, and the Caucasus its economic foundation; it also hosted the largest slave market on the Volga.

The khanate is poorly documented — as historian Allen Frank notes, "the dates and activities of these rulers are faintly represented in the sources," and knowledge rests on an imperfect khan list, a few military and diplomatic events, and travelers' reports. It was twice briefly occupied by Crimea (Mehmed I Giray in 1523, Sahib I Giray in 1549) and maintained traditional military and diplomatic ties with Crimea, the Nogais, and sometimes the Circassians. Diplomatic contact with Moscow began by 1532 as Russia expanded down the Volga after conquering Kazan (1552). In 1551 Khan Yamghurchi made a nominal submission to Moscow, then allied with Crimea and the Nogais; Russia sent 30,000 troops, he fled in 1554, and Moscow installed the client khan Dervish Ali. When Dervish Ali began intriguing with Crimea, Russian troops occupied Astrakhan in 1556, destroyed the slave market, and in 1558 moved the city to its present site. An Ottoman-Crimean attempt to retake Astrakhan failed in 1569. The conquest secured Russia's hold on the entire Volga waterway to the Caspian, completing the strategic sequence begun at Kazan and paving the way for Russian expansion toward the Caucasus and Siberia; the Astrakhan Tatar community and a Sunni Muslim minority persist in the region today.