Astrakhani

The Astrakhani are the Tatar Muslims of the lower Volga, of the Volga delta on the Caspian Sea. Their country was the Golden Horde's heartland, whose capital Sarai stood nearby, and after the Horde's collapse they became the population of its rump state, the Khanate of Astrakhan, founded in the 1460s by Mahmud bin Küchük, a descendant of Jochi, Genghis Khan's grandson.

Ruled from Xacitarxan, it lived on transit trade between Muscovy, Kazan, Crimea and Central Asia and on the Volga's busiest slave market. Crimea briefly occupied Astrakhan in 1523 and again in 1549.

After the fall of Kazan, Russian armies descended the Volga: Khan Yamghurchi fled in 1554, and in 1556 tsarist troops occupied Astrakhan and destroyed its slave market. The town was rebuilt twelve kilometres downstream in 1558; an Ottoman attempt to retake it failed in 1569. From the seventeenth century the Astrakhani mingled with Volga Tatars and neighbouring Nogai herders.