Over the Urals into Sibir

Yermak Timofeyevich · 1582 CE – 1585 CE · Earth

Carry the war beyond the Urals against Khan Kuchum and open the fur country of the Irtysh.

Historical context

The Stroganovs held a charter to colonise the Kama and the right to raise troops against raids from the Khanate of Sibir, a Turkic Muslim state that taxed the fur-hunting peoples of the Irtysh and the Ob. Hiring a band of outlawed Volga Cossacks was cheaper than an army, and Yermak turned a defensive contract into an invasion. Gunpowder against cavalry, and rivers used as roads, gave Russia in three years the first foothold of an expansion that would reach the Pacific within sixty.

The voyage, step by step

1. The salt towns on the Kama

   1582 CE

   A merchant house hires a band of outlawed Cossacks to guard its frontier, and arms them for war.

2. Up the Chusovaya

   1582 CE

   Eight hundred men pole flat-bottomed boats east against the current, into the mountains.

3. The portage

   1582 CE

   Where the Serebryanka runs out they haul the boats over the watershed to the Barancha.

4. Chimgi-Tura

   1582 CE

   The first Tatar town on the Tura falls to arquebus fire from the water.

5. Down the Tobol

   1582 CE

   Kuchum gathers his horsemen and his Ostyak levies where the Tobol meets the Irtysh.

6. Chuvash Cape, 26 October

   26 October 1582

   Behind a felled-timber rampart the khan’s army breaks under massed arquebus fire.

7. Three winters in Qashliq

   1584 CE

   The band holds the empty capital while hunger, ambush and reinforcements all arrive.

8. The night at the Vagai

   August 1585

   Kuchum surprises the camp in the rain and Yermak drowns reaching for his boats.

Outcome

Took Qashliq in October 1582 and held it for three winters; Yermak drowned at the Vagai in 1585, but Russian forts followed within a year.

Yermak Timofeyevich

Volga Cossack ataman who took a flotilla of river boats over the Urals in 1582, broke the Khanate of Sibir and opened Siberia to Russian conquest.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Yermak Timofeyevich — Wikipedia
• Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier to 1750George V. Lantzeff and Richard A. Pierce · McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal · 1973

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