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Tatars: Volga Tatars
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The language of Tatars-Mishars living in Mordovia is called Mishar dialect of Volga-Tatar language. People in the most of the Tatar villages of Mordovia speak "choking" variant of Mishar dialect. There are ... four villages in the West of Mordovia where "tsoking" Mishars live.
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In the earliest Chinese references to the Tatars, in records dating to the eighth century, they are called "Dadan." They were part of the Turk Khanate until it fell apart in approximately 744. Following this, the Tatar grew in strength until they were defeated by the Mongols. The Tatar mixed with Boyar, Kipchak, and Mongols, and this new group became the modern Tatar. They fled their homeland in the region of the Volga and Kama rivers when the Russians moved into Central Asia in the nineteenth century, some ending up in Xinjiang. Most Tatar became urban traders of livestock, cloth, furs, silver, tea, and other goods as a result of the trading opportunities created by the Sino-Russian treaties of 1851 and 1881. A small minority of Tatar herded and farmed.
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The origins of the Lithuanian Tatars are particularly interesting. According to their legends they are the descendants of the wanderers far from the Baltic coast - Nogays and Crimean Tatars- who were brought to Lithuania as prisoners of war. Indeed, in 1397 several thousand prisoners of war were taken and they settled in the Wilno(Vilnius) area and on the territory of the present-day Minsk and Grodno Regions. Tokhtamysh, the famous Golden Horde khan and thousands of his warriors, defeated by Tamerlane (Timur), fled to Lithuania a year later. He became the ruler of the present-day Belorussian town, Lida. In 1430 Prince Shvitrigalis of Lithuania summoned the Kypchaks and Nogays from beyond the Volga to his military service and 3,000 remained in his army.
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In the history of Russia, Tatars played an important role in the national awakening of the Islamic peoples before and after the revolution of 1917. Tatar intellectuals were the first Muslims of the Russian Empire to demand cultural and (ultimately) national autonomy for themselves. Before the revolution, the political and cultural issues of the Muslim world were debated in Tatar and on the pages of Tatar newspapers, whose numbers surpassed that of periodicals in other Turkic languages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Tatar merchants often served as Kulturträger, spreading literacy and Islamic culture to other peoples, such as the Kazakhs of Central Asia, the Bashkirs of the Urals, and the Chuvash of the middle Volga. Tatars ... introduced educational innovations, such as modern sciences in the primary Islamic school, and reconsidered the status of women in Islam.
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Linguistically, Tatars are closely related to the Bashkirs and other Turkic peoples. Tatars are the direct descendants of the Volga Bulgars. Volga Bulgars were a mixed people, whose ancestors may have included speakers of Scythian, Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages. (In Turkic bolğar means mixed). After coming to the Middle Volga, Bulgars mixed with Finno-Ugric speaking tribes.
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A lasting sign of this victory emerged in Ginghis Khan's 1206 order that all conquered peoples be called Tatars, where Tatar is synonymous with conquered. Gradually... the Mongol conquerors were assimilated by the peoples they had conquered, and in 1246, Piano Carpini, an Italian traveler, noted that "even the Mongols themselves, especially since they have been cut off from their homeland, have come to be called 'Tatars.' Thus, the name Tatar has become synonymous with Mongol." [9] It seems that most of the peoples of the Golden Horde accepted their new ethnonym without significant resistance, yet the ancestors of the Volga Tatars were still reluctant to embrace the name in the sixteenth century. [10]
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Volga Tatars