Bashkir

The Bashkirs are a Kipchak Turkic people of the southern Urals, pasturing cattle in a land their traditions call Badzhgard. Their ancestors migrated from the Aral and Syr Darya steppes to the Urals between the ninth and tenth centuries, and in 922 Ibn Fadlan described them as a warlike people who worshipped sky and nature spirits.

Islam reached them in the tenth century and took root in the 1320s and 1330s under the Golden Horde. When the Horde broke up, they were divided among the Nogai Horde and the khanates of Kazan and Sibir, until from the mid-sixteenth century they passed under the Russian tsars.

The building of Orenburg from 1735 provoked six years of revolt, and in 1774 Salavat Yulayev led them into Pugachev's rebellion. The crown formed an irregular Bashkir army in 1798, whose regiments rode as far as Paris in 1814.