The Fall of Kazan

Kazan, on the middle course of the Volga in the cold land of forest and steppe far to the north-east of the older centres of Islam, was the capital of the Khanate of Kazan, a Muslim Tatar state that had emerged in the fifteenth century from the breakup of the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate whose ruling house and people had turned to Islam in the time of Ozbeg Khan two centuries before. Its people were Muslims, its town held mosques, minarets and madrasas, and it was one of several Tatar successor-khanates, with Crimea, Astrakhan and Sibir, that carried the Islam of the Horde into the early modern age. In the summer and autumn of 1552 the rising Christian state of Muscovy, under Tsar Ivan IV, later called the Terrible, brought a great army and a powerful siege-train against Kazan: the Muscovites threw earthworks and batteries of cannon around the walls, dug mining galleries beneath them, and after a siege of several weeks sprang the mines, breached the ramparts and stormed the city on the second of October 1552, when it fell with great slaughter and the survivors were taken captive. The fighting men were largely killed and many of the women and children carried off, and in the years that followed came the destruction of mosques, pressure to be baptised, and the displacement of the Tatars from their own city. The conquest ended Muslim rule on the middle Volga and was the first great Muslim land to be absorbed into the expanding Russian state; Astrakhan fell in 1556, and there began the long advance of Christian Muscovy and then of Russia over the Muslim peoples of the Volga, the steppe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, together with the long endurance of the Volga Tatars as a Muslim people under that rule. The loss was known and mourned in the wider Muslim world: the Ottoman historian Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli, rahimahu Allah, records the fall of Kazan among the misfortunes of the Muslims of the north, and the Crimean khans and the Ottomans long counted the Volga khanates as kin in faith. Muslim and Tatar accounts of the event are scarce, and the detail of the siege survives mainly in the Russian chronicles of the conquest, which must be read against the Muslim experience of the loss. This scene depicts the storming at its height: the embattled fortress with defenders still on its smoking walls and a siege tower run up against them, the surviving domed mosque and slender minaret of the Muslim town beyond the wall, a gun-crew firing a wheeled cannon from behind wicker gabions in the churned autumn mud, and the ranks of the besieging army with its banners and guns pressing in. In keeping with a sober treatment no killing is shown; the assault on the walls carries the event, while the captivity and slaughter that followed are told only in the summary.