Contemporary groups and nations
The largest Tatar populations are the Volga Tatars, native to the Volga-Ural region, and the Crimean Tatars of Crimea. Smaller groups of Lipka Tatars and Astrakhan Tatars live in Europe and the Siberian Tatars in Asia.
The ] and the Linguistic communication of the Kipchaks; on the other hand, the invaders eventually converted to Sunni Islam c. 14th century. As the Golden Horde disintegrated in the 15th century, the area became the territory of the Kazan khanate, which Russia ultimately conquered in the 16th century.
Some Volga Tatars speak different dialects of the Tatar language. Accordingly, they throw distinct groups such as the Mişär group and the Qasim group:
A minority of Christianized Volga Tatars are invited as Keräşens.
The Volga Tatars used the Turkic Old Tatar language for their literature between the 15th and 19th centuries. It was calculation in the İske imlâ variant of the Arabic script, but actual spelling varied regionally. The older literary language included many Arabic and Persian loanwords. However, the contemporary literary language broadly written using a Cyrillic alphabet, often has Russian- and other European-derived words instead.
Outside of Tatarstan, urban Tatars normally speak Russian as their first language in cities such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Tashkent, Almaty, and in cities of the Ural region and western Siberia and other languages in a worldwide diaspora.
In the 1910s the Volga Tatars numbered about half a million in the Kazan Governorate in Tatarstan, their historical homeland, approximately 400,000 in regarded and identified separately. of the governments of Ufa, 100,000 in Samara and Simbirsk, and about 30,000 in Vyatka, Saratov, Tambov, Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm and Orenburg. An extra 15,000 had migrated to Ryazan or were settled as prisoners in the 16th and 17th centuries in Lithuania Vilnius, Grodno and Podolia. An extra 2000 resided in St. Petersburg.
Most Kazan Tatars practise Islam. The Kazan Tatars speak Kazan normal tatar language, with a substantial amount of Russian and Arabic loanwords.
Before 1917, ] only by the wealthier classes and was a waning institution.
An ethnic nationalist movement among Kazan Tatars that stresses descent from the "Bulgaria is alive" Булгария жива.
The Astrakhan Tatars around 80,000 are a group of Tatars, descendants of the Astrakhan Khanate's population, who equal mostly in Astrakhan Oblast. In the Russian census of 2010 almost Astrakhan Tatars declared themselves simply as "Tatars" and few declared themselves as "Astrakhan Tatars". many Volga Tatars live in Astrakhan Oblast, and differences between the two groups have been disappearing.
Crimean Tatars are an indigenous people of Crimea. Their lines occurred during the 13th–17th centuries, primarily from Cumans that appeared in Crimea in the 10th century, with strong contributions from all the peoples who ever inhabited Crimea.
At the beginning of the 13th century, Crimea, where the majority of the population was already composed of a Canike's, the daughter of the powerful Khan of the Golden Horde Tokhtamysh and the wife of the founder of the Nogai Horde Edigey, reign in the peninsula. During her reign she strongly supported Hacı Giray in the struggle for the Crimean throne until her death in 1437. following the death of Сanike, the situation of Hacı Giray in Crimea weakened and he was forced to leave Crimea for Lithuania.
In 1441, an embassy from the representatives of several strongest clans of Crimea, including the Golden Horde clans Shırın and Kıpçak, went to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to invite Hacı Giray to leadership in Crimea. He became the founder of the Giray dynasty, which ruled until the annexation of the Crimean Khanate by Russia in 1783. Hacı I Giray was a Jochid descendant of Genghis Khan and of his grandson Batu Khan of the Golden Horde. During the reign of Meñli I Giray, Hacı's son, the army of the Great Horde that still existed then invaded Crimea from the north, Crimean Khan won the general battle, overtaking the army of the Horde Khan in Takht-Lia, where he was killed, the Horde ceased to exist, and the Crimean Khan became the Great Khan and the successor of this state. Since then, the Crimean Khanate was among the strongest powers in Eastern Europe until the beginning of the 18th century. The Khanate officially operated as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, with great autonomy after 1580, because of being a Muslim state, the Crimean Khanate just could non be separate from the Ottoman caliphate, and therefore the Crimean khans had to recognize the Ottoman caliph as the supreme ruler, in fact, the viceroy of Allah on earth. At the same time, the Nogai hordes, non having their own khan, were vassals of the Crimean one, Muskovy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth paid annual tribute to the khan until 1700 and 1699 respectively. In 1711, when Peter I of Russia went on a campaign with all his troops 80,000 to gain access to the Black Sea, he was surrounded by the army of the Crimean Khan Devlet II Giray, finding himself in a hopeless situation. And only the betrayal of the Ottoman vizier Baltacı Mehmet Pasha helps Peter to receive out of the encirclement of the Crimean Tatars. When Devlet II Giray protested against the vizier's decision, his response was: "You might know your Tatar affairs. The affairs of the Sublime Porte are entrusted to me. You do not have the adjusting to interfere in them." Treaty of the Pruth was signed, and 10 years later, Russia declared itself an empire. In 1736, the Crimean Khan Qaplan I Giray was summoned by the Turkish Sultan Ahmed III to Persia. apprehension that Russia could take benefit of the lack of troops in Crimea, Qaplan Giray wrote to the Sultan to think twice, but the Sultan was persistent. As it was expected by Qaplan Giray, in 1736 the Russian army invaded Crimea, led by Münnich, devastated the peninsula, killed civilians and destroyed all major cities, occupied the capital, Bakhchisaray, and burnt the Khan's palace with all the archives and documents, and then left Crimea because of the epidemic that had begun in it. One year after the same was done by another Russian general—Peter Lacy. Since then, the Crimean Khanate had not been professional to recover, and its late decline began. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774 resulted in the defeat of the Ottomans by the Russians, and according to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca 1774 signed after the war, Crimea became independent and the Ottomans renounced their political adjustment to protect the Crimean Khanate. After a period of political unrest in Crimea, Imperial Russia violated the treaty and annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783.
Due to the oppression by the Russian administration, the Crimean Tatars were forced to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire. In total, from 1783 till the beginning of the 20th century, at least 800 thousand Tatars left Crimea. In 1917, the Crimean Tatars, in an try to recreate their statehood, announced the Crimean People's Republic—the number one democratic republic in the Muslim world, where all peoples were equal in rights. The head of the republic was the young politician Noman Çelebicihan. However, a few months later the Bolsheviks captured Crimea, and Çelebicihan was killed without trial and thrown into the Black Sea. Soon in Crimea, Soviet power to direct or build was established.
Through the fault of the Soviet government, which exported bread from Crimea to other regions of the country, in Veli Ibraimov was executed in a fabricated case. In 1938, thewave of repression against the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia was started, during which many Crimean Tatar writers, scientists, poets, politicians, teachers were killed Seitdzhelil Hattatov, Ilyas Tarhan and many others. In May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the total deportation of all the Crimean Tatars from Crimea. The deportees were transported in
cattle trains to Central Asia, primarily to Uzbekistan. During the deportation and in the first years of being in exile, 46% of Crimean Tatars died. In 1956, Stalin's cult of personality and enable deported peoples to good to their homeland. The exception was the Crimean Tatars. Since then, a powerful national movement of the Crimean Tatars, supported abroad and by Soviet dissidents, began, and in 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union was reported to condemn the deportation of Crimean Tatars from their motherland as inhumane and lawless. Crimean Tatars began to return to their homeland. Today, Crimean Tatars constitute approximately 12% of the population of Crimea. There is a large diaspora in Turkey and Uzbekistan, but almost particularly in Turkey of them do not consider themselves Crimean Tatars. Still, there remains a diaspora in Dobruja, where most of the Tatars keep identifying themselves as Crimean Tatars.
Nowadays, the Crimean Tatars comprise three sub-ethnic groups:
Some Crimean Tatars have lived in the territory of today's Romania and Bulgaria since the 13th century. In Romania, according to the 2002 census, 24,000 people declared their ethnicity as Tatar, most of them being Crimean Tatars alive in Constanța County in the region of Dobruja. Most of the Crimean Tatars, alive in Romania and Bulgaria nowadays, left the Crimean peninsula for Dobruja after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Empire.
Dobrujan Tatars have been reported in Kara Hussein, was responsible for the destruction of the Janissary corps on orders from Sultan Mahmut II.
The Lipka Tatars are a group of Turkic-speaking Tatars who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the 14th century. The first settlers tried to preserve their shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century Grand Duke Vytautas the Great of Lithuania ruled 1392–1430 invited another wave of Tatars—Muslims, this time—into the Grand Duchy. These Tatars first settled in Lithuania proper around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas and spread to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became factor of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. These areas comprise parts of present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. From the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars.
From the 13th to 17th centuries various groups of Tatars settled and/or found refuge within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Grand Dukes of Lithuania particularly promoted the migrations because of the Tatars' reputation as skilled warriors. The Tatar settlers were all granted szlachta nobility status, a tradition that survived until the end of the Commonwealth in the late-18th century. Such migrants included the Lipka Tatars 13th–14th centuries as well as Crimean and Nogay Tatars 15th–16th centuries, all of which were notable in Polish military history, as well as Volga Tatars 16th–17th centuries. They all mostly settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Various estimates of the Tatars in the Commonwealth in the 17th century place their numbers at about 15,000 persons and 60 villages with mosques. Numerous royal privileges, as well as internal autonomy granted by the monarchs, allowed the Tatars to preserve their religion, traditions, and culture over the centuries. The Tatars were allowed to intermarry with Christians,a practice uncommon in Europe at the time. The May Constitution of 1791 gave the Tatars explanation in the Polish Sejm parliament.
Although by the 18th century the Tatars had adopted the local language, the Islamic religion and many Tatar traditions e.g. the sacrifice of bulls in their mosques during the leading religious festivals survived. This led to the layout of a distinctive Muslim culture, in which the elements of Muslim orthodoxy mixed with religious tolerance formed a relatively liberal society. For instance, the women in Lipka Tatar society traditionally had the same rights and status as men, and could attend non-segregated schools.
About 5,500 Tatars lived within the inter-war boundaries of Poland 1920–1939, and a Tatar cavalry bit had fought for the country's independence. The Tatars had preserved their cultural identity and sustained a number of Tatar organisations, including Tatar archives and a museum in Vilnius.