Tatars

Tatars, collective name applied to the peoples of Turkic origin whose ancestors invaded parts of Asia and Europe under Mongol leadership in the 13th century. Also known as Tartars, the original Tatars probably came from east-central Asia or central Siberia, and, unlike the Mongols, spoke a language belonging to the Turkic branch of the Altaic languages family.

Following the conquests of the Mongol leader Genghis Khan early in the 13th century, the Mongol and Turkic elements of the invaders gradually merged and became known to Europeans collectively as Tatars. Together with local tribes they comprised the Kipchak Empire, or empire of the Golden Horde, founded in the 13th century by Genghis Khan's grandson, Batu Khan. The empire ruled most of Russia until it broke up in the 15th century, emerging as the independent khanates of Kazan’, Astrakhan’, Sibir (Siberia), and Crimea. In the 16th century the three former khanates were conquered by the Russian tsar Ivan IV, and in 1783 the last Tatar state, Crimea, was annexed to Russia.

The Tatars are Muslims. The majority live in the region of Tatarstan and the northwestern part of the region of Bashkortostan, in eastern European Russia. The rest are distributed in the Ural Mountains, Crimean Peninsula, western Siberia, and Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics. A popular referendum in the Tatar region in March 1992 endorsed the establishment of Tatarstan as a sovereign state.