Mordvinic

Mordvinic is a small subgroup of the Uralic family consisting of two languages, Erzya and Moksha, both spoken in the middle Volga region around Mordovia; they are not mutually intelligible, and the medieval Meshcherian language may have belonged to the same group. The name Erzya first appears in a letter of the Khazar khagan Joseph in 968.

The Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century placed the Mordvins inside the Golden Horde. In the late fourteenth century Moscow seized the western Mordvin lands while the east passed to the Kazan Khanate, and after Kazan fell in 1552 all Mordvins became Russian subjects.

Russian rule brought forced conversion to Christianity, an influx of Russian settlers and serfdom; a joint rebellion of Mordvins, Chuvash and Mari in the seventeenth century was suppressed, after which many Mordvins fled east beyond the Volga.