Enigmatic Tatars

[cegorach]

Hello guys !

Recently in a Osprey book about Turkish armies I have read about a weird Tatar unit - khan's mounted infantry recruited from his personal domain and armed with firearms.

I have read several sources about Tatar armies, but nowhere else these guys are mentioned.

So my questions is how were they called ? Or overall anything more about these guys, please.


regards Cegorach

[Watchman]

What time period ? Those sound a bit like the Central Asian mounted arquebusiers (armed with matchlock muskets) mentioned in the book about late Imperial Chinese armies. One gets the impression that by that point of time (1700s onwards) the millitary power of the steppe peoples was distinctly waning - not only did China and Russia walk all over them whenever they felt like it, the Manchu horse-archers beat them in their own traditional field...

Odds are there's no single word or term for those troops, as one might well imagine if they appeared in regions as far removed as Turkey and far western China; nevermind now that the multitudious steppe peoples each had their own (although often closely related) languages and would thus tend to call same things by different names... At least the peoples of deep Central Asia seem to have been stuck with outdated matchlock arquebuses (heck, second-rate Chinese regular units were still using those in 1907 and thereabouts...), hardly a quality weapon by the standards of the time (all modern armies already had metal-cased repeater rifles) and not exactly an optimum weapon for use on horseback either, as horses obviously aren't going to like a lenght of burning cord waving around their ears.

But thyen again, even the badly run-down Chinese military was able to kick the nomads around almost at will by that point, and the Turks were only holding together through sheer structural inertia and the oddities of European grand geopolitics, so it's probably safe to say these mounted musketeers weren't overly effective against anything but equally decaying steppe khanates...

[Meneldil]

Well we're at it, could anyone explain me if Tatars were Mongols, or if they were two different people. I've read many sources mentioning "tatars & mongols", and apparently, tatars are nowaday an ethnical group on their own.

Furthermore, I read in a lot of book that Kara Khitai (for exemple), were tatars, just as the tribe that attacked Genghis' tribe when he was young, and were different from real mongols.

OTOH, Marco Polo calls all Mongols 'tatars', and I've seen some people claiming that both are in fact the same people.

Sorry for bothering you with this not really related topic, but I thought it wasn't worth creating another thread about the Tatars.

[Watchman]

AFAIK the Tatars proper were yet another Turkic steppe people grazing the grasslands of Southern Russia or thereabouts, and one of the major subject tribes the Golden Horde conquered along the way, and hence ended up donating their name to the motley collection of nomad tribes which made up the Horde by the point it started attracting serious attention from Europeans.

Another source would be Medieval references to the Horde as demons from Tartarus, one of the supposed layers of Hell, the possibly inspired by the very similar-sounding tribal name or the other way around - these things tend to get a little confused, all the more so as the nomads themselves aren't exactly the most diligent record-keepers around.

Whatever its origins, by the end of the Middle Ages "Tatar" seems to have stuck as the common name for at least the Turkic parts of the nomads left roaming around the Southern Russian plains, and in the case it wasn't their original name was probably adopted by the nomads themselves much the same way the Helvetians came to call themselves "Swiss".

Curious detail: following the Russian conquest of Finland from Sweden in 1809 a small group of Tatars moved and settled into the new Grand Duchy as merchants and craftsmen. They're still around although few Finns even realize their capital has actually had a small but prosperous Muslim minority with their own mosque and all for almost two hundred years... As a side effect many Turks, who have a habit of looking after their Turkic cousin peoples, are surprisingly well-informed of Finnish affairs... Go figure.

By what I know "Tatar" normally refers specifically to Turkic peoples; the Mongolic ones are a different bunch both ethnically and linguistically. AFAIK the Mongolic peoples tend to have an unmistakably Asian cast to their features whereas the Turkic ones tend to, well, not; the Arabs considered them to be "white", and the Cumans were certainly known to be light-skinned and often blonde or red-headed, for example. Naturally enough the two groups have gotten rather mixed up in some places, both with each other and other ethnic groups nevermind now probably not quite fitting to such neat categorizations to begin with and in any case being sub-divided to myriad little groupings whom outsiders more likely than not could only tell apart by dress, but them's the general guidelines.

[cegorach]

[QUOTE=Watchman]What time period ?


My mistake

They were Crimean Tatrs of course and it was somewhere between 1500 and 1700.

Name in Tatar language would be preferred, of course, but hard to find, I believe.

Regards Cegorach

[Rodion Romanovich]

Well we're at it, could anyone explain me if Tatars were Mongols, or if they were two different people. I've read many sources mentioning "tatars & mongols", and apparently, tatars are nowaday an ethnical group on their own.

Furthermore, I read in a lot of book that Kara Khitai (for exemple), were tatars, just as the tribe that attacked Genghis' tribe when he was young, and were different from real mongols.

OTOH, Marco Polo calls all Mongols 'tatars', and I've seen some people claiming that both are in fact the same people.

Sorry for bothering you with this not really related topic, but I thought it wasn't worth creating another thread about the Tatars.

I don't know who the tatars really were, but I know it wasn't uncommon a while ago to confuse tatars and mongols. Even as late as in the 19th century, for instance Edward Gibbon called the mongols Tatars. There's also some quote in M:TW "the hordes of the tatars are numberless" etc. (a very cool quote btw), that calls mongols tatars. And Marco Polo also did it.

[Watchman]

The Crimean Tatars were a rather long-term presence in their namesake peninsula and its surrounding are for quite a while aften the Golden Horde fragmented, I know that much. They tended to be allied with the Ottomans too, and I understand the eventual Russian conquest of the region displaced them to move into Ottoman territory. Which had its share of issues; I understand both the Bulgarian and Armenian genocides originally stemmed from trouble started by another displaced nomad people, the Cilician Turks.

Alas, to my knowledge the Crimean guys weren't the only folks bearing the name of Tatars on this side of the Urals. They just were the ones whose khanate stood the longest, the other ones getting conquered by Imperial Russia earlier on.

[Orda Khan]

Tatars were a people of Eastern Mongolia who were subdued by Chingis Khan. Things get very complicated from that point since the name was used by the Mongols themselves to describe other conquered tribes. There is also the Tartarus reference to further complicate things. With the end of the Western campaign, the majority of subjects/armies of the Khanate of Qipchaq ( Golden Horde ) under the rule of Batu were 'Tatars', Mongols were very much in the minority. Tatars became the common Western description of the people of this area and the Mongols as well, presumably because they ruled this area. Therefore the term Tatar remained. The Tatars of Crimea were finally purged from their 'homelands' by Stalin, though they still make up a small percentage of the population. Mengli Girai of the Khanate of Crimea became subordinate to the Ottoman Turks around 1475 and my guess is that the unit described is a Tatar unit serving in the later Ottoman ranks.

Side Note:
The people of Qara Khitai were the descendants of the Khitan who were overthrown by the Chin and left to found a new homeland

.....Orda

[Steppe Merc]

AFAIK the Tatars proper were yet another Turkic steppe people grazing the grasslands of Southern Russia or thereabouts, and one of the major subject tribes the Golden Horde conquered along the way, and hence ended up donating their name to the motley collection of nomad tribes which made up the Horde by the point it started attracting serious attention from Europeans.

I always thought the main Golden Horde Turks were Qipchaqs...

But I think some of the whole Tatar could come from the absorbed tribe that Chingis defeated. It is unlikely, judging by all other nomads and Chingis' later attitudes that they were totally destroyed as is recorded, so possibley some mixed in with the Mongols.

[Watchman]

To my knowledge all the nomad empires ever operated on a kind of "snowballing" dynamic - conquer a tribe, subjugate it, add it to your forces, conquer, subjugate and recruit the next one etc. etc. Usually they ran out of momentum sooner or later, but the Mongols managed to keep going more or less until they ran out of new nomads to forcibly recruit...

Naturally whatever khanate/empire/whatever said tribes used to have were rendered defunct in the process, which is probably what the sources usually mean by "destruction".

[nokhor]

it was my understanding that genghis did the old 'exterminate the adult males and absorb the women and children' conquest style when he defeated the tatars. if that was indeed a case of cultural obliteration of the tatars, i've always been confused as to how they managed to perpetuate their name, as the next generation would be brought up by and probably view themselves as mongols. unless their new masters specifically brought up their new subject/slaves as tatars and gave them the national identity that genghis had destroyed. which would be wierd because as far as i know, none of the other tribes that genghis destroyed in what became known as mongolia, managed to retain their tribal identity or name.

[Meneldil]

Actually, the people called Tatars don't live in Mongolia, but mainly in Russia, Khazakstan, Georgia, Ukrainia, Belarus and Poland.

And actually, there are quite a lot of different tribes in modern days mongolia : the Mongols are the most important ethnical groupe (around 85% of the population) but there are also Khazaks, Tungus, Kirghiz and many different turkish people.
These obviously did not lost their name or identity, and have their own countries (Khazakstan, Khirgizistan).


Genghis Khan would have had a hard time conquering Asia if he just destroyed every single tribe he met on the Steppe (btw, Mongols' lands were far more important than modern day Mongolia - I think Genghis was born in modern days Russia-, and the population of this country is not really representative of the ethnical setup of the steppes.)

[Watchman]

Uh, Men ? Modern-day Russia covers some 70 to 80% of the Great Eurasian Steppe Belt, where all those mounted nomads sort of by definition dwelled...