The Khan Who Ruled Russia for Eleven Months

Here is a fact that sounds like a mistake. In the autumn of fifteen seventy-five, the tsar of Russia gave up his throne. He handed it to a Tatar khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. And he called himself that khan's servant.

It happened. And the khan came from a small town on the river Oka, called Kasimov.

Kasimov is quiet now. Wooden merchant houses, a few church domes. And in the middle of it, a stone minaret. White, squat, with a narrow spiral stair inside. A mosque tower in the heart of Orthodox Russia. It is not imported and it is not a copy. It stayed because, for more than two centuries, this town was a Muslim khanate.

You might guess the Tatars conquered it and held on. It was the opposite. Moscow gave it to them.

In fourteen fifty-two, the Moscow prince Vasily, called the Blind, gave the town of Meshchera, on the Oka, to a Tatar prince named Qasim. Qasim had helped Vasily during a civil war. He was the son of a khan of Kazan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. So the heir of the steppe conquerors received land from a Russian prince, as a reward for loyal service.

The town was soon renamed Kasimov, after him. And a very strange arrangement began. The khan minted his own coins. He had his own nobles, his own muezzins, and mosques went up. His army marched off to war against Kazan, the Tatar city his own family came from.

That was exactly the point. Moscow now held a living Tatar prince in reserve. If Kazan rebelled, Moscow could send them a khan of its own choosing. If a khan grew too independent, he went back to Kasimov.

The best-known of these khans was Shah-Ali. Heavy, plain-looking, and despised by the nobles of Kazan. Yet they put him on their throne three times. In fifteen fifty-two, his regiments led Ivan the Terrible to the walls of Kazan. A few years later, the captured queen of Kazan, Syuyumbike, was married to him against her will. Tradition says she is buried in Kasimov, in a white stone tomb that Shah-Ali built for himself while he was still alive.

But the strangest chapter comes back to fifteen seventy-five.

Ivan the Terrible announces that he is stepping down. He seats the khan of Kasimov on the throne of Moscow. Simeon Bekbulatovich had been baptized, but he was still a descendant of Genghis Khan. He was also the great-grandson of Khan Akhmat, the one who once faced Ivan's grandfather across the river Ugra.

Simeon is crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin. He is called grand prince of all Russia. And Ivan writes to him the way a servant writes to a master. Petitions that begin: "Your slave Ivanets Vasilyev strikes his forehead before you."

For eleven months, a Tatar prince formally rules Russia. Then Ivan quietly takes the throne back.

Why did he do it? Nobody knows for sure. A cover for new executions, maybe. A test of the nobles. Or a way to dodge an astrologer's prophecy that the tsar would die. Historians still argue.

Simeon's fate was sad. Years later, Boris Godunov feared a rival with royal blood, sent him off to a distant estate, and then had him blinded. The former sovereign of all Russia died a plain monk in a Moscow monastery. He outlived Ivan, he outlived Godunov, and he outlived the Time of Troubles, the years of chaos that followed.

Kasimov went on. Khans came and went, and more and more of them were exiles from Central Asia, men who had no throne left at home. One of them, Afghan-Muhammad Sultan, from Khiva, lies in a graceful brick mausoleum built in sixteen fifty-eight. It still stands in the middle of town, and people will happily show it to you.

The last ruler was a woman, Fatima-Sultan. When she died in sixteen eighty-one, nobody named a successor. The khanate simply stopped being renewed. No decree, no war.

The great stone mosque was later ordered pulled down by Peter the Great. But the minaret survived. They say the Kasimov Tatars begged the tsar, and he waved a hand and let it be.

So for more than two hundred years, descendants of Genghis Khan ruled a small Tatar country, by leave of Moscow. They left no fortress and no chronicle. They left a minaret in the Russian countryside, and it is still there.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.