Introduction

Muslim Tatars, as well as their co-ethnic co-religionists, Bashkirs, who historically dominated in the Volga-Urals, occupy a central place in the Eurasian Islamic discourse due to a millennium-long Tatar-Russian ethnocultural and political entanglement. Long before ancestors of modern Tatars, Bashkirs and Russians converted, respectively, to Islam and Orthodox Christianity, they had interacted economically, politically and militarily because of their common Eurasian habitat lacking major water and mountain barriers. Their cultural inter-influence had also been facilitated through their participation in the north–south and east–west trans-Eurasian trade, alongside Finno-Ugric (Mari and Udmurts) and some other inhabitants of present-day western and central Russia and the Kazakh Steppe (Desht-i-Qipchaq). It is symptomatic that in medieval and the early modern European sources all were commonly referred to as Tartars. Originally, proto-Russians who belonged to various sedentary eastern Slavic tribes dwelt along the banks of the Dniepr, Pripyat’, Bug and Volkhov rivers in present-day north-western Russia and Ukraine. From the eighth century they began to settle along the Volga (Idil’), thus coming into even more close contact with proto-Tatars. Among their other neighbours were other Turkic peoples – Cumans (Polovets and Pechenegs) and Khazars.

Between the seventh and tenth centuries CE the Khazars presided over a large multiethnic empire, the Khazar Khaganate (650–969), or Khazaria, which was centred on the present-day northern Caucasus. In the early seventh century CE Khazaria served as Byzantium's proxy in its confrontation with Sasanian Iran. Following the fall of the Sasanian Empire as a result of the Arab victory over it in 637, Khazaria assumed the position of a buffer state between Byzantium, the Arab Caliphate, ancient Rus and the Eurasian nomadic confederations. Khazars played an important role in the political consolidation and religious preferences of both proto-Tatars and proto-Russians. In the middle of the eighth century, the Khazar elite, who resisted the caliphal advance in the Caucasus, adopted Judaism. By the early ninth century Khazars subjugated Turkic Biars, who at that time were politically dominant in the Volga region, and in the middle of the ninth century imposed their control on Kiev, the centre of the proto-Russian principality under the Rurik dynasty.