Donkov

Donkov stands on the Don River in the wooded steppe, a frontier fortress of Ryazan and later of Muscovy. The fort was founded by the Princes of Ryazan in the late fourteenth century and took its name from the river. Crimean Tatar raiding parties from the south destroyed the old town more than once; in 1521 the army of Khan Mehmed Giray burned it, and in 1568 the Muscovite government sent Prince Kurlyatev to build a new fortress on the ancient earthwork. Its garrison of musketeers and Cossacks sent out patrols across the steppe as part of the southern defensive line.

In 1613 Donkov held out against the Cossacks of Ivan Zarutsky and against the Crimean Tatars, but in 1618 the Zaporozhian hetman Petro Sahaidachny took and burned it. The fortress was rebuilt in 1619 about thirty kilometres to the south, near the mouth of the Vyazovka, beside the three villages that had survived. For decades it kept watch against the Tatars. In 1708, under Peter the Great, it joined the Azov Governorate, and in 1778 it became a district town of the Ryazan Viceroyalty.