Yermak's Conquest of Siberia (1582): The Fall of Qashliq

Yermak’s conquest of Siberia was the campaign in which a band of Cossacks led by the ataman Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Ural Mountains, defeated Kuchum Khan and in October 1582 captured Qashliq, the capital of the Khanate of Sibir. The expedition was financed by the Stroganov merchant family and carried out with only a few hundred men. Although Yermak was killed in 1584 and his men withdrew, the campaign opened the way for Russia’s expansion across northern Asia to the Pacific.

Background

In the 16th century the Grand Duchy of Moscow grew into a powerful state. Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, conquered the Tatar khanates of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, opening the Volga to Russian control. Beyond the Ural Mountains lay the Khanate of Sibir, a successor state of the Golden Horde centred on the Irtysh and Tobol rivers.

From the 1560s Sibir was ruled by Kuchum, a descendant of Genghis Khan who had taken power by force. He worked to spread Islam among his subjects and at first paid tribute to Moscow, but later stopped and allowed raids on Russian settlements in the Urals.

The Stroganovs, a rich family of merchants and salt producers, held vast estates along the Kama and Chusovaya rivers on the European side of the Urals. Ivan IV had granted them land and the right to build forts and hire soldiers. Threatened by raids from Sibir, and eager for the region’s furs, they turned to the Cossacks.

Yermak and the Cossacks

The Cossacks were free communities of frontiersmen on the steppe rivers, many of them runaway peasants, who lived by fishing, raiding and service as soldiers. Yermak was a Volga Cossack leader, apparently with a record of river raiding. His real origins are uncertain; later chronicles give different accounts.

The Stroganovs hired Yermak and his band and supplied them with gunpowder, firearms, light cannon and food. According to the chronicles the force numbered about 540 Cossacks, joined by around 300 men from the Stroganov estates, for a total of roughly 840. Most sources date their departure to September 1581, although some historians argue for 1579 or 1582.

The campaign

The Cossacks travelled by river boat up the Chusovaya, dragged their boats across the watershed of the Urals, and descended by the Tura and Tobol rivers into the territory of Sibir. Along the way they fought several engagements with local forces.

Their decisive advantage was firepower. The Siberian Tatars and their allies fought mainly with bows and lances, while the Cossacks had muskets and small cannon. They also had experience of fighting from boats and fortified positions.

In late October 1582 Yermak’s men faced the main army of Kuchum, commanded by his nephew Mametkul, at Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh, near Qashliq. After a hard fight the Tatar army broke, partly because some of Kuchum’s subject peoples deserted him. Kuchum fled south into the steppe. On 26 October 1582 the Cossacks entered Qashliq, which had been abandoned.

After the victory

Yermak sent his lieutenant Ivan Koltso to Moscow with a large gift of furs and news of the conquest. Ivan IV, who had earlier condemned the Stroganovs for provoking conflict, now pardoned the Cossacks for past crimes and sent reinforcements under the commander Semyon Bolkhovsky.

The reinforcements arrived without enough food, and many, including Bolkhovsky, died during a hard winter in 1583-1584. Mametkul was captured and sent to Moscow, but Kuchum remained at large and continued to attack. Local peoples paid tribute in furs, yet the Cossack force was steadily worn down.

In August 1584 Kuchum’s men surprised Yermak’s camp at night on the Irtysh near the mouth of the Vagay river. Yermak was killed; according to the chronicles he drowned while trying to reach his boats, weighed down by his armour. His surviving men abandoned Qashliq in 1585 and retreated.

Key people

• Yermak Timofeyevich (died 1584): Cossack ataman who led the expedition. Contemporary documents about him are few, and much of his life is known only from later chronicles and songs.
• Kuchum Khan (died c. 1600): ruler of Sibir, a descendant of Genghis Khan through his son Jochi. He resisted the Russians for some 16 years after losing his capital.
• Mametkul: Kuchum’s nephew and leading commander, defeated at Chuvash Cape and later captured; he entered Russian service in Moscow.
• Ivan IV (1530–1584): Tsar of Russia, who first rebuked the Stroganovs and then embraced the conquest once it succeeded.
• The Stroganovs: a merchant family, notably the brothers Yakov and Grigory and their heirs Maksim and Nikita, who organised and supplied the expedition.

Myths and facts

Myth: Yermak conquered Siberia. Yermak broke the power of one Tatar khanate in western Siberia. The conquest of the vast lands further east took the Russian state, its soldiers and many fur traders more than half a century, and his own force was nearly destroyed within three years.

Myth: the tsar ordered the expedition. The initiative came from the Stroganovs and the Cossacks themselves. Surviving letters suggest that Ivan IV at first ordered the Cossacks back to defend the Urals, before the news of victory changed his mind.

Fact: firearms were decisive but not everything. Cossack muskets and cannon gave a crucial advantage in battle, but Yermak also depended on the divisions within Kuchum’s state, where many local princes and peoples had little loyalty to the khan.

Consequences

Yermak’s death did not stop Russian expansion. Government troops returned and founded the forts of Tyumen in 1586 and Tobolsk in 1587, close to the old Tatar capital. In 1598 Kuchum was finally defeated on the Ob river and fled, dying soon afterwards in exile.

Within about 60 years Russian fur traders, Cossacks and soldiers had crossed the whole of Siberia, reaching the Pacific Ocean at the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639. The fur tribute called yasak, collected from Indigenous peoples, became a major source of state income. For the native peoples of Siberia, Russian rule brought heavy taxation, disease and loss of land.

Legend and memory

Yermak became a hero of Russian folk songs and later national history. The main sources for his campaign are Siberian chronicles written decades afterwards, especially the Stroganov Chronicle, the Esipov Chronicle of 1636 and the illustrated Remezov Chronicle of around 1700. They sometimes disagree on dates and numbers, and contain legendary elements. The Orthodox Church at Tobolsk commemorated Yermak’s men, and Vasily Surikov’s large painting Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia (1895) fixed the episode in the Russian imagination.

Timeline

• 1552: Ivan IV conquers the Khanate of Kazan, opening the way east.
• 1558: Ivan IV grants the Stroganovs lands along the Kama river.
• 1581, September: Yermak’s Cossacks set out from the Stroganov lands, by the most common dating.
• 1582, October: Yermak defeats Kuchum’s army under Mametkul at Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh.
• 1582, 26 October: The Cossacks occupy Qashliq, capital of Sibir.
• 1584, August: Yermak is killed in a night attack on the Irtysh.
• 1587: Russia founds Tobolsk near the ruins of Qashliq.
• 1598: Kuchum is finally defeated on the Ob river.

Why it matters

Yermak’s campaign began Russia’s conquest of Siberia, which turned a European state into a power stretching to the Pacific and laid the foundations for later milestones such as the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the Bering expeditions and the Trans-Siberian Railway.