Mordvinic

The Mordvinic group gathers the Erzya and Moksha, and the Meschera, a Finno-Ugric tribe between the Oka and Klyazma rivers. Around the 700s the ancestors of the Mordvins met the Bulgars and paid tribute to Volga Bulgaria.

The Mongols took the region in the 1200s and made it part of the Golden Horde. In the late 1300s Moscow took the western Mordvin lands, and the east passed to the Kazan Khanate; when Kazan fell in 1552, all Mordvins became Russian subjects. After a rising with the Chuvash and Mari in the 1600s was crushed, many Mordvins fled east across the Volga.