2 Introduction
France for influence over Christian populations in the disintegrating and
increasingly weak Ottoman Empire.
But the tsar’s Orthodox imperial rhetoric concealed an important truth:
nineteenth-century Russia was not uniformly Orthodox, but a multiethnic and
multireligious empire. This was the result of centuries of aggressive Russian
imperial expansion that began in the fifteenth century, much of it into former
Mongol lands, and at Ottoman and Persian expense. The greatest land empire
in world history, the Russian Empire circa 1900 held within its borders large
and internally diverse Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish communities, and espe-
cially large Muslim populations. Much has been written about imperial Russia’s
five-million-strong Jewish population (a result of the strong émigré presence in
the field), but far less attention has been paid to its more numerous Muslims.
An 1897 census revealed that Muslims were the empire’s second largest confes-
sional group overall, after Orthodox Christians. No monolithic community,
imperial Russia’s Muslims were internally divided by religious beliefs and cul-
ture, language and geography. They included Sunnis and Shiʿis, sedentary and
nomadic peoples, and dozens of ethnicities that spoke various Indo-European,
Semitic, and Turkic languages. They lived in eighty-nine provinces and territo-
ries of the empire (in addition to the semi-autonomous protectorates of Bukhara
and Khiva), above all in the Volga-Ural region and Siberia, Crimea and the
Caucasus, the Kazakh steppe and Central Asia. By the turn of the twentieth
century, at its greatest territorial extent as an empire, “Orthodox” Russia ruled
far more Muslims than the neighboring “Muslim” Ottoman Empire—twenty
million, compared to fourteen million.^2
Through its dramatic conquests of Muslim lands and peoples, Russia became
integrated into global hajj networks. By the nineteenth century, long stretches
of ancient Eurasian caravan routes that had been forged in earlier centuries
under Muslim rulers, and had long served as hajj routes to Mecca, now lay
within the Russian Empire’s borders. This made the hajj a diplomatic issue in
Russia’s dealings with its Muslim neighbors to the south. In the early nine-
teenth century, Persian and Bukharan rulers routinely petitioned Russia’s tsars,
as a matter of their own legitimacy and authority, to allow their subjects access
to these routes in making the Meccan pilgrimage. Russia’s tsars, for their part,
often honored these requests, and assumed ad hoc a role historically performed
by Muslim rulers—that of patron and “protector” of the hajj—securing routes
for hajj pilgrims through their realm, and subsidizing their travel to Mecca.
Tsars did this with an eye toward developing economic and diplomatic ties
with their Muslim neighbors. It is impossible to know how many Muslims