Original subtitles

There is no great controversy in saying that the\h internet is full of strange beliefs and theories.\h\h

With a few clicks of your mouse, you can find\h message boards to share all sorts of nonsense\h\h

with people all over the world, throwing\h ideas back and forth to illuminate\h\h

non-existent problems. One such conspiracy you\h may have seen around online is the “Myth of\h\h

Great Tartaria,” which you can find dropped onto\h posts and videos relating to the Mongol Empire.\h\h

Today we will share with you a short guide to\h this internet myth, and give you some tools you\h\h

can use to debunk it, should you be unfortunate\h enough to see it in the wild, as well as explore\h\h

the historical puzzle of the usage of the\h word Tatar in relation to the Mongol Empire.

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As there are a number of variations to the\h Tartaria myth, we will address the most basic\h\h

version. In short, the myth states that most of\h the Eurasian continent was, until about 200 years\h\h

ago, incorporated into a massive empire called\h Great Tartaria, or Tartary. Depending on the\h\h

chronology the specific poster uses, this either\h followed the Mongol Empire, or the Mongol Empire\h\h

was in fact a part of this. Usually, Great\h Tartaria is presented as a period of peace,\h\h

prosperity and technological advancement, an\h idyllic world where all the cultures of Asia\h\h

lived in harmony. The myth-makers generally do not\h agree on the makeup of the empire’s population,\h\h

with some arguing that they were Mongolian,\h East Asian or the Tatars of modern Russia and\h\h

Eastern Europe, while others argue\h that the rulers of Great Tartaria\h\h

were white people, or sometimes even giants. What specifically brings down Great Tartaria is\h\h

vague. Some of the commenters have Europeans,\h usually the British Empire, jealous or fearful\h\h

of Tartaria’s might, and succeed in not\h just overcoming it, but destroying all\h\h

evidence both literary and archaeological, as\h well as any folk memory of the empire across\h\h

all of Asia, so determined were the Europeans\h to not be challenged in their authority again.\h\h

Other versions have the same process, but\h instead stick the blame onto history’s favourite\h\h

scapegoats, the Jews, who sometimes work in tandem\h with the British Empire, or actually run it,\h\h

while those who like to see Tartaria’s masters\h as white people tend to have the Jews act\h\h

on their own. The end result is the same,\h with the Jews somehow toppling the Empire.\h\h

Still others have Tartaria’s collapse come\h not from any human power, but ecological,\h\h

a great “mudflood” which supposedly blanketed\h human societies. Tartaria was the great victim,\h\h

leaving no trace behind except for\h sunken buildings dotted around the world.\h\h

The understanding for these adherents\h then, is that the rest of history is\h\h

fabrication filling in the gap left by the flood. But if the British, Jews, or mud erased all\h\h

evidence of Great Tartaria, then how do these\h modern super sleuths manage to know its existence?\h\h

Well, for all their cleverness, the unseen enemy\h overlooked one matter; European cartographers\h\h

of the last 400 years. As the Tartarian truthers\h have pointed out, cartographers from across Europe\h\h

marked massive swathes of Asia as Tartary, Grand\h Tartaria and other variations of the term. The\h\h

trend continues to the modern day, where Tartary\h continues to be used for the Strait of Tartary,\h\h

for example, between the Russian\h coast and the Island of Sakhalin.\h\h

Which suddenly begs the question; if the goal\h was to remove Tartary from human memory, why can\h\h

it so easily be found not only in historical\h maps, but even in modern geographic usage?\h

And this is where the Tartarian theory falls apart\h as if struck by a massive mud flood. Tartary,\h\h

or Tartaria, was simply a European name to refer\h to most of Asia, and from the 13th century until\h\h

the 19th, remained perhaps the most common,\h if rather ambiguously defined, a term which\h\h

was almost synonymous in the European mind with\h “the east.” Central Asia and Siberia were most\h\h

regularly referred to as Tartary, often in overlap\h with Turkestan, Moghulistan, and Dzungaria.\h\h

Manchuria, and China itself, particularly under\h the Qing Dynasty, were sometimes included in it\h\h

as well. More ambitious though inaccurate\h maps even included India. However, it is\h\h

never a political term, but a geographic one,\h much like how today we will use Africa or Asia\h\h

to refer to the continents, but understand that\h these do not refer to unified political bodies.\h

It would be useful then to explore the historical\h usage of the term Tatar, and how it ended up on\h\h

these maps. For that, we need to look at what\h Tatar refers to in the historical sources.\h\h

The word Tatar originally refers to peoples in\h Mongolia, first recorded on the early 8th century\h\h

Orkhon inscriptions, and with sparse mentions in\h the works of Central Asian geographers or Chinese\h\h

dynastic sources in the following centuries.\h It reached its widest audience, so to speak\h\h

during the Mongol Empire. Generally speaking,\h sources from outside of the Mongol Empire,\h\h

especially in the first half of the thirteenth\h century, such as Arabic, Persian, Armenian,\h\h

the Rus’ principalities, the Byzantine Empire\h and European travelers like Friar Julian,\h\h

William of Rubruck or John de Plano Carpini\h to letters from Queen Rusudan of Georgia or\h\h

King Louis IX of France, to even Vietnam\h and Java, refer to the Mongols as Tatars.\h

Sources from the Mongol Empire and eastern\h Asia tend to paint more complicated pictures.\h\h

Independent sources like the Jin Dynasty\h official Li Xinchuan or the Song Dynasty\h\h

envoys whose accounts were compiled in the\h Mengda Beilu and Heida Shilue, compiled by\h\h

visitors to the courts of the Mongol viceroy\h Mukhali and the Great Khan Ögedai, use Mongol\h\h

to refer to the state and Tatar as the population.\h An intriguing example comes from Ögedai himself,\h\h

who in a letter demanding the submission of\h Korea refers to himself and his people as Tatars.\h

Historian Stephen Pow has argued\h that Tatar in the late 12th century\h\h

served as a general endonym for at least\h part of the peoples of the Mongolian plateau,\h\h

with Mongol originally just the “dynastic” name of\h the political union established by Chinggis Khan\h\h

in 1206. This is reflected in how sources will\h consistently refer to the people as Tatars, but\h\h

the empire itself is always the Mongol Empire, the\h yeke Mongqol ulus, especially in the few surviving\h\h

Mongolian-language documents of the period, such\h as the letters of submission the Khans sent to\h\h

the Popes. Then, around the 1240s and increasing\h over the 1250s, we begin to see a shift in usage,\h\h

with travellers recording the Mongols reprimanding\h those who called them Tatars. In the 1240s,\h\h

Plano Carpini and Simon of St. Quentin record that\h while others called them Tatars, they preferred to\h\h

be called Mongols; Carpini’s well-publicized\h account of his travels was awkwardly titled\h\h

“the Mongols whom we call Tatars.” The trend reached its apogee in the\h\h

later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Then,\h in government sources associated with the Toluid\h\h

Mongol Dynasties, first with Great Khan Möngke,\h then the Yuan in China and Ilkhanate in Iran,\h\h

Mongol becomes the catch-all term for the\h state and people, with Tatar reduced to single,\h\h

rebellious tribe in Eastern Mongolia. The trend\h kicks off with the Secret History of the Mongols,\h\h

compiled in 1252 on Möngke’s order, and continuing\h with the most heavily utilized imperial sources,\h\h

such as the Compendium of Chronicles of the\h Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din, or the Ming-era\h\h

Yuan-shi, composed from Yuan imperial documents.\h There, the Tatars were exterminated by Chinggis\h\h

Khan at the start of the 13th century. Taken at\h face value that the Tatars were only a single\h\h

specific group in Mongolia, it has been difficult\h to explain how it is that so many peoples across\h\h

the world kept calling the Mongols, especially\h when they had supposedly been exterminated.\h

What precisely kicked off the shift in the usage\h of Mongol and Tatar by the mid-13th century is\h\h

unclear; Stephen Pow suggests it may be associated\h with the fall of the Jin Dynasty in 1234,\h\h

the great enemy of Chinggis Khan. Then, with a new\h sense of legitimacy and with a whole generation\h\h

having grown up since the establishment of the\h Empire, Mongol started to become not just the\h\h

political term, but what we might term the ethnic\h one as well. The trend, though, seems to be more\h\h

closely tied to the Toluid lineage, which under\h Möngke seized the imperial throne in the 1250s\h\h

and likely actively encouraged the usage\h not just in the new imperial historiography,\h\h

but among the people at large. Non-Toluid\h dynasties, such as the Jochid Golden Horde,\h\h

never picked up the distinction, with\h the exception of Batu’s son Sartaq.\h\h

Sartaq spent time in the imperial capital of\h Karakorum and among the Toluids, and seems to have\h\h

identified himself as a Mongol; hence when William\h of Rubruck visited Sartaq’s encampment in 1253,\h\h

Sartaq’s officials insisted that Rubruck\h not call Sartaq a Tatar, but a Mongol. Yet,\h\h

due to distance and political falling out, Mongol\h never succeeded in replacing Tatar amongst the\h\h

Golden Horde’s population, made up of “Tatars” who\h moved there during the great invasion under Batu.\h\h

Thus the Golden Horde’s population and descendants\h did not adopt the term Tatar from the Europeans,\h\h

as sometimes suggested, but instead had simply\h never stopped using it. And as Europeans had\h\h

the closest contact with these populations,\h Tatar was understood as the name for all\h\h

nomadic peoples of the steppes. The regular\h association with the Greek Tartarus resulted in\h\h

the regular addition by European authors both\h medieval and modern of an extra ‘r’ in Tatar.\h

Regardless of the specifics of the Chinggisid\h usage of the term, from the 13th century onwards\h\h

Europeans generally understood all the lands\h east of Hungary to be ruled by Tatars, and hence,\h\h

these lands were all Tatary, or Tartaria, much\h like how a Roman writer could refer to all lands\h\h

beyond the Rhein vaguely as Germania. The great\h 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in his\h\h

“Squire’s Tale,” certainly thought this to be the\h case, when he wrote of “Cambuskan,” the Great King\h\h

of “Tartary,” at war with Muscovy. European travel\h along the inner Asian trade routes, and across the\h\h

Mongol Khanates, continued into the mid-fourteenth\h century, by which point plague, wars between the\h\h

khanates, and collapse of most of them left\h the route too dangerous for further journeys.\h\h

Without new information on the\h changing political makeup of Asia,\h\h

in the following centuries, it was usually\h assumed that the Tatars simply continued to rule.\h\h

When Christopher Columbus set out\h at the end of the fifteenth century,\h\h

he expected to reach China, and anticipated to\h still find descendants of Khubilai Khaan ruling\h\h

there, not knowing that the Yuan Dynasty had\h been pushed from China well over a century prior.\h

Even as European contact and knowledge of\h Asia increased over the early modern period,\h\h

the understanding of the region, particularly the\h steppes, as the “lands of the Tatars,” remained\h\h

difficult to drop, particularly when many of\h these states were still ruled by people who\h\h

considered themselves descendants of Chinggis\h Khan, Tamerlane, or both. In the case of India,\h\h

ruled by the Mughal Dynasty was enough\h for some to lump it into Tataria as well.\h\h

Europeans were not above considering anyone they\h saw as remotely similar to the Mongols as Tatars.\h\h

The Manchu, rulers of the Qing Dynasty, were often\h referred to as Tartars even after the Qing Dynasty\h\h

fell in 1912. You can still find modern authors\h who will still mistakenly call the Manchu Tartars.\h\h

Today though, the only people regularly referred\h to as Tatars remain the largely Muslim, Turkic\h\h

people across Eastern Europe and the Russian\h Federation, a multitude of peoples from Poland,\h\h

to Crimea, to Siberia who are descendants of the\h Golden Horde. Siberia itself makes an interesting\h\h

comparison; the name comes from a later Tatar\h Khanate, the Khanate of Sibir, which itself\h\h

was named for one of its major sites, the Sibir\h fortress, noted in 14th century Rus’ chronicles.\h\h

With the Russian conquest of the Khanate in the\h 16th century, the former Khanate and neighbouring\h\h

territory were known as Siberia. Gradually this\h has grown in scale. As an administrative term,\h\h

the Russian government uses it strictly\h for the Siberian Federal District\h\h

while popular usage has it for essentially\h everything east of the Urals to the Arctic Ocean;\h\h

territory which, only two or three hundred\h years prior, would have been dubbed Tartary.\h

It should be emphasized that Central and\h East Asian history is not a gap that needs\h\h

to be filled by a Tartarian Empire. From Asian\h sources in hundreds of languages and forms,\h\h

we have plenty of information on the political\h makeup of the region following the Mongol Empire.\h\h

Turkic, Persian, Chinese, and Russian sources,\h to name but a few, attest to the later histories\h\h

of the various Mongol Khanates and their own\h successors, from the Timurids to the Uzbeks\h\h

and Kazakhs in Central Asia, the Safavids\h in Iran, to the Oirats, or western Mongols,\h\h

from whom came the Kalmyks and the Dzungar\h Empire, the latter giving its name to Dzungaria\h

The belief in a vast, erased history of an empire\h known as Tartary comes from a misunderstanding of\h\h

European mapmaking from the 16-19th centuries,\h which would often lazily refer to vast tracts of\h\h

Asia as Tartaria. Any supporter of the Tartarian\h myth must ask the question: Which is more likely,\h\h

that some faceless organization completely\h erased the history of a vast Tartarian empire\h\h

archaeologically and in sources across the breadth\h of Asia, in hundreds of languages and replaced its\h\h

existence with made up dynasties, polities, and\h empires, but was unable to erase its presence\h\h

from maps which can be found in books purchased\h easily from your local book ship? Or that European\h\h

mapmakers simply stuck with convention and\h referred to much of Asia as 'Tartaria,' because\h\h

of its association with Tatars and Mongols. No\h shortage of peoples from around the world can\h\h

attest to Europeans’ tendencies to care little for\h the accuracy of colonial-era naming conventions.\h\h

Just ask the Indians who live in North America\h how well colonists like to be accurate with names.\h

Further, it can hardly be said European mapmakers\h had any need to necessarily reflect the truth of\h\h

the situation on the ground. European empires\h liked to portray themselves controlling vast\h\h

stretches of the American or African continents,\h even when in reality they had no troops physically\h\h

present or any control over matters on the ground.\h Just because a Spanish cartographer could show\h\h

the Spanish Empire controlling the entire western\h coastline from South America to British Columbia,\h\h

does not mean that Spain actually exerted\h control over such a region. Such facts, however,\h\h

never got in the way of good imperial map making. Belief in the state of Great Tartary rests\h\h

entirely on taking European mapmaking as the\h single highest, most reliable form of evidence\h\h

of the last few centuries, and reducing all\h other sources to forgeries, barring those few\h\h

excerpts which can be removed from their contexts.\h Utilizing sources from any period always requires\h\h

understanding their contexts, and reasons they\h were made, a level of nuance that the internet,\h\h

unfortunately, is not always capable of reaching. We are planning more videos on the history of the\h\h

Mongols, so make sure you are subscribed and have\h pressed the bell button. Please consider liking,\h\h

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and much more. This is the Kings and Generals\h channel and we will catch you on the next one.