Astrakhan

Astrakhan lies in the Volga delta, where the river breaks into countless channels on its way to the Caspian. In 1337 the town was still Hajji Tarkhan, a Golden Horde market on the river's western bank, some way upstream of the city later built on the present site. Caravans from Sarai passed through it on the way to the Caucasus passes and to Azak, where Venetian and Genoese merchants waited for Eastern silk and spices. When Ibn Battuta came in 1333 in the train of Khan Özbeg, he found a town of fine bazaars where the khan wintered, and saw straw spread over the frozen Volga so that carts and caravans could cross.

Timur burned Hajji Tarkhan in 1395, yet the khanate founded here in 1459 made it a capital again, and the Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin stopped here around 1469 on his journey to India. In 1554 a Russian river fleet took the city for Ivan IV, and in 1556 the khanate was abolished. A new kremlin rose in 1558 on a hill downstream. The new city beat off an Ottoman and Tatar army in 1569, fell to Stenka Razin's Cossacks in 1670, and in 1717 became the seat of a governorate under Peter I.