influence in Kazan, Moscow mounted a military campaign in 1551–2. The
conquest was brutal: using tactics of mass expulsion that had been employed on
the western borderland since the defeat of Novgorod (1478), most of the Tatar
population was moved out of Kazan city. Leaders and elites were executed or
deported; Russian gentry were moved onto their lands and Russian merchants
into the city. Mosques were destroyed and an Orthodox bishopric and monasteries
were founded on confiscated lands. Resistance was persistent—Tatars and Cheremis
(Mari) revolted in 1570–2 and 1581– 4 —and brutally put down.
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 auton-
omies 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’eland 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 trib-
ute, callediasak, 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 of East Slavic Orthodox peasants,iasakwas 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“iasakpeople,”
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
56 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801