Kazan

Kazan stands above the Volga near the mouth of the Kazanka, on ground where a Bulgar fortress guarded the middle Volga. It grew as a trading town of the Golden Horde, and an older Kazan up the Kazanka is first mentioned in 1391, when Novgorodian river raiders came down the Volga. In 1438 the deposed Horde khan Ulugh Muhammad seized the town and made it the capital of the Kazan Khanate; a wooden kremlin was built around the Bulgar fort. Wars with Moscow forced the Grand Prince first to pay tribute, but by the end of the fifteenth century Kazan was a Muscovite protectorate. In the 1520s the Giray dynasty of Crimea took power there.

Ivan IV's army stormed Kazan on 2 October 1552, and much of the city was destroyed. Tatars were forbidden to settle within thirty versts, and some seven thousand Russians were brought in to resettle it. In 1556 two hundred Pskov masons under Postnik Yakovlev began the white-stone kremlin, which by 1568 had thirteen towers. The icon of Our Lady of Kazan was found after the fire of 1579. Kazan became a governorate seat in 1708, and in 1758 opened Russia's first provincial gymnasium. Pugachev's rebels burned much of the city in 1774. The Marjani Mosque rose in the 1760s, a university opened in 1804, and by the end of the century about one in ten residents was Tatar.