Meschera

The Meshchera were a Finno-Ugric people of the marshy lowlands between the Oka and Klyazma rivers, east of Moscow. Their language was never written down and its affiliation is debated, though many scholars treat it as close to Mordvinic. Russian chronicles first name them in the thirteenth century.

In 1358 Ivan II of Moscow recorded buying Meshcherka from the baptized chieftain Alexander Ukovich, whose people were Muscovy's Orthodox vassals. Their nobility had been converted and absorbed by the thirteenth century, while hunters, fishermen and beekeepers retained older beliefs longer.

A Meshchera polity centered on Temnikov survived into the sixteenth century, heavily mixed with Mordvins and Tatars and caught up in Ivan the Terrible's wars against Kazan. A monastery at Radovitsy was still converting Meshchera pagans in that century, by whose end they had merged into Russian, Mordvin and Tatar populations.