It Took Russia 300 Years To Destroy the Final Pieces of Genghis Khan’s Empire

Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan’s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of 1552, the 22-year-old Ivan stood outside the walls of a city that had raided, humiliated, and enslaved Russians for over a century. The Kazan Khanate, successor state to the Golden Horde and one of the wealthiest trading cities on the Volga, had already repulsed two of Ivan's previous campaigns — both times thanks as much to the Russian weather as to Tatar arms. But this time was different. Ivan had spent two years building a prefabricated fortress hundreds of miles upstream and floating it downriver, creating Russia's first standing professional infantry corps, recruiting an engineer whose identity remains disputed to this day, and stockpiling enough gunpowder to blow the city's gates apart simultaneously at dawn. When 48 barrels detonated on the morning of October 2nd, the walls of Kazan came down — and with them, the last major Tatar khanate on Russia's eastern frontier

Today’s guest is Mark Galeotti, author of Siege of Kazan 1552: Ivan the Terrible Breaks the Kazan Khanate, to walk us through one of the most consequential — and most misunderstood — battles in Russian history. We'll talk about why the siege was as much an intervention in a Tatar civil war as an act of Russian imperialism, how the Muscovite army that showed up in 1552 was fundamentally different from the feudal cavalry force that had failed twice before, and what really happened inside Kazan's walls when the assault nearly collapsed into looting and disaster before Ivan was physically dragged onto his horse and led to the banner. We'll also look at what came after the victory — the four-year guerrilla war Ivan didn't plan for, the rapid conquest of Astrakhan, and how the fall of Kazan set Moscow on a collision course with the Ottoman Empire that would define Eurasian geopolitics for the next two hundred years.

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