The ethnonym “Tatar” As the largest and most influential ethnic group in the Middle Volga, it may come as a surprise that the Tatars only began to call themselves “Tatars” in the late 19th century. While much is unclear about the origins of the ethnonym “Tatar”, it is believed to have originated in Mongolia. The present territory of Mongolia was inhabited by both Mongolic speaking and Turkic speaking nomadic tribes. At the time of Genghis Khan’s birth, the Turkic Tatar tribe seems to have been the most powerful tribe in Mongolia. As Ghenghis Khan was consolidating his power, he attempted to annihilate the Tatars. However, alliances with various Turkic tribes soon became an essential component of Genghis Khan’s military machine. Because of the former influence of the Tatar tribe, the Chinese saw all the peoples of Mongolia as “Tatars” and the term was later adopted by Europeans. (Europeans in the Middle Ages later deliberately misspelled the word “Tatar” as “Tartar” since this evoked the word for the Greek underworld “Tartarus”, implying that they were a people from hell). Although all Russian principalities (with the exceptions of Pskov and Novgorod) were conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century, Russia was not occupied by the Mongols. Instead, the Russian principalities were only obliged to pay tribute. This period would later come to represent a time of national humiliation, popularly known as the Tatar Yoke. Thus, when Ivan the Terrible decided to conquer the Kazan Khanate, he called the population “Tatars” as a rhetorical strategy to direct the hatred of the Russian people against them. He did so despite the fact that they did not call themselves Tatars. According to the Austrian diplomat Sigismund Herberstein, who visited the Kazan Khanate in 1520, “If they (the people of Kazan) are called Turks or Tatars they feel most unhappy and take it as abuse. The term “Muslims”, on the contrary, pleases them”. The term “Tatar” generally had the same connotation as the word “barbarian”. The word “Tatar” wasn’t always used precisely and in the time surrounding the conquest of Kazan in 1552, oftentimes all former subjects of the Kazan Khanate were collectively called “Tatars”, which would have also included the local Finno-Ugric peoples. Following the conquest, Russians continued to call the Muslim Turks of the region “Tatars”, even though they despised the name and called themselves “Muslims” or “Bolgars”. This situation only began to change in late 19th century. In an age of emerging nationalism, simply being “Muslims” was not enough. The famous jadidist, Marjani challenged his countrymen to accept the name Tatar: “some have regarded being a Tatar a shortcoming, hated it, and insisted ‘we are not Tatars, we are Muslims’ . . . If you are not a Tatar, an Arab, Tajik, Nogay, Chinese, Russian, French . . . then who are you?”. Since everyone else already called them Tatars, they might as well embrace it as their own. Accepting the name Tatar served a secondary purpose. The name recalled the feared Tatar warriors of the steppe, and with the rise of pan-Turkism, this served to give the appearance of Turkic unity in their resistance to Moscow. Still, the name was not universally accepted. As late as 1923, Soviet census-takers received the complaint, “We are Bolgars – we are the people of Kazan or at least, call us just Muslims, but not ‘Tatars’ – they are evil, they destroyed our forefathers and their city of Great Bolgar”.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 06:55:30 +0000
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