A NEW THEORY OF MEDIEVAL RUS’ TERMINOLOGY FOR MUSLIM TATARS: BATUNSKII’S RUSSIA AND ISLAM

: Research Objectives : To examine Mark Batunskii’s theory, articulated in Volume 1 of his history of Russia and Islam , that by calling the Tatars “Pechenegs” and “Polovtsy” the Rus’/Russian sources “Islamized” both the Tatars and their Kyivan prede-cessors. Research Materials : This article is based upon narrative sources, including chronicles, tales, epics, and saints’ lives, which refer to the Tatars from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Novelty of the Research : No specialists have engaged Batunskii’s theory by analyzing the terminology applied to the Tatars, either Muslim or not, in the medieval sources. Nor has anyone compared the Rus’ application of other terms also applied to Muslims such as “pagan,” “Ishmaelite,” “Hagarene” and “Saracen” to their appearance in Western European sources. Results : Extensive examination of the sources reveals that Rus’/Russian sources care-fully identified who was a Muslim ( besermen ) and who was not. The Pechenegs, Polovtsy and Tatars who invaded Rus’ in the thirteenth century were not. Only sources from the late fourteenth century and later associated Tatars, now Muslims, with Pechenegs and Polovtsy not as adherents of Islam but as nomads who were not Orthodox Christians. This historicist identification had the effect of minimizing Tatar adherence to Islam. Fifteenth and six-teenth-century sources do put more emphasis on the Islamic identity of the Tatars, probably because of the increasing weight placed upon Russian Orthodox Christianity as the hallmark of Muscovy.


Introduction
Mark Batunskii's posthumous three-volume Rossiia i Islam has not received the attention it deserves.Rarely has any scholar attempted such an ambitious project, to conceptualize the Rus'/Russian image of Islam from the Kyivan period through the nineteenth century 1 .This article will examine Batunskii's analysis of the Rus'/Russian terminology applied to Muslims in Kyivan Rus' through the sixteenth century in Volume 1. Rus'/Russian sources employed a panoply of terms to Inner Asian non-Orthodox peoples, including pagan, godless, Ishmaelite, Hagarene (Hagarite), Saracen and Muslim.All these terms save the last arose long before the rise of Islam, let alone the first encounter of Kyivan Rus' and the Tatars.Tolan refers to the "complex (and not always distinguished) mix of ethnic, linguistic, and religious definitions" applied to Muslims in medieval Europe [49, pp. xi-xii].The alternative and disputed etymologies of these words matter less than how the terms were used.I will address whether the terms used by Rus'/Russian writers was similar to or differed from their utilization in medieval Europe.
Batunskii claimed that the Rus' "Muslimized" the Pechenegs and Polovtsy by equating them with the Tatars.However, a more extensive examination of the sources reveals that Rus'/Russian sources carefully identified who was a Muslim (besermen) and who was not.The Pechenegs, Polovtsy and Mongols Tatars who invaded Rus' in the thirteenth century who conquered Rus' were not.Only sources from the late fourteenth century and later associated Tatars, by then Muslims, with Pechenegs and Polovtsy, who were never Muslims.This historicist association rested not upon what their religious identity was, but rather what it was not, they were not Orthodox Christians.If anything this approach had the effect of minimizing the significance of the Tatar adherence to Islam.Fifteenth -and sixteenthcentury sources do put more emphasis on the Islamic identity of the Tatars, probably because of the increasing weight placed upon Russian Orthodox Christianity as the hallmark of Muscovite identity.Domestic Muscovite developments, not upon anything that happened to the Tatars, drove this evolution of Muscovite perceptions of the Tatars.
We will begin by presenting Batunskii's exposition at length.I will then examine the comparative evidence of how the terms that Batunskii adduced evolved in Western European sources, followed by a detailed chronological survey of the evolution of these terms in the Rus'/Russian sources, including the distinctions between Muslims and Tatars, and depictions of Tatars who did not adhere to Islam and of Tatars who did.Rus'/Russian bookmen both demonstrated their familiarity with Islam and distorted their own expertise in their propaganda.From deemphasizing the Islamic faith of the Tatars the Rus'/Russian sources turned to exaggerating the role of Islam in Tatar behavior.

A bibliographic note
Before proceeding it is helpful to clarify the provenance of Batunskii's publications.During his lifetime Batunskii published four articles in English on Rus'/Russia and Islam from the Kyivan period through the sixteenth century.Three of the four chapters of Volume 1, chapters 1, 2 and 4, are based upon three of these four articles.Chapter 3 utilizes some of the material in the fourth article.I will correlate these articles with the relevant chapters of Volume 1 and call attention to observations in them which were not repeated in the Russian-language book.

Batunskii's theory
In Chapter 1 of Volume 1 Batunskii emphasized that Kyivan Rus' inherited Byzantium's negative image of Islam and the pejorative terminology applied toward Muslims.Rus'/Russia never overcame that prejudice. 2"Infidels" (iazychniki) included sedentarists as well as nomads."Non-Christians" were called "pagans" (poganye) [2, p. 43].In a footnote Batunskii pointed out that the Narration of the Battle with Mamai (Skazanie o Mamevom poboishche) about the battle of Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi's defeat of the Tatars at Kulikovo Field in 1380 called all of Muscovy's eastern enemies "pagans," not just the Tatars, but also Pechenegs and Polovtsy (Kipchaks, Cumans), Turkic tribal neighbors of Kyivan Rus', who had long-since disappeared [2, p. 46 n. 73; 3, p. 6 n. 25].The Kyivan Tale of Bygone Years (Povest' vremennykh let) identified the oriental enemies of Rus' as Ishmaelites (izmailiane), Hagarenes (agariane) and Saracens (saratsyny), to which the compiler added local groups, Turkmen, Pechenegs, Torks and Polovtsy.The epic Beyond the Don (Zadonshchina), also about the battle of Kulikovo, added "pagan" Tatars and "Muslims" (besermeny). 3In this way the Rus' bookmen "Muslimized" all nomads [2, pp.52, 54].Batunskii's earlier article referred to the "artificial Islamization" of all nomads, which misapplied the concept of Islam [3, pp. 9-10] Chapter 2 turned to the (early) Muscovite image of Muslims. 4 Batunskii began by discussing the Tale of the Destruction of Riazan' by Batu (Povest' o razorenii Riazani Batyem), in which the Tatars are not called Muslims but like the Polovtsy "godless Hagarenes."This phraseology, Batunskii inferred, associated Polovtsy, Tatars and Muslims as Hagarenes and Ishmaelites. 5However, the concepts of Hagarenes, Ishmaelites and even Muslims lacked all Islamic content, because in fact the Polovtsy and at this time the Tatars were not Muslims.Until the middle of the fourteenth century when Islam spread in the Golden Horde, 6 Rus'/Russian sources barely called adherents of Islam Muslims.Rather, all non-Christians enemies of Rus'/Russia were denominated by the names of more familiar pagan nomads from the Kyivan period.All Muslims were called pagans [2, pp. 83, 86].In an article Batunskii amplified the association of the term "Muslims" with non-Muslims, writ-ing that besermeny was "used in common parlance in the course of nearly all Russian pre-revolutionary history to denote any foreigner and not just a Muslim [5, p. 64 n. 1].Therefore at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century Russian sources called Muslim Tatars by several names, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, although the Ishmaelites and Hagarenes were not Muslims; Russian authors could afford to do so because Tatar Islam was no threat to Russian Orthodoxy [2, p. 94; 5, 70].Such propaganda fed the social mobilization required to defeat the Tatars in 1380 [2, p. 95].To retain greater flexibility in propaganda Russian official ideology never defined "Islam" [2, p. 96 n. 87; 5, p. 70], thus eliminating any obstacles to inventing Mamai's invocation in the Narration of the Battle with Mamai to Perun and other "pagan" gods as well as to Muhammad.In this text all of Muscovy's enemies were pagans, meaning infidels, not just Muslims but Armenians, Friazi (Italians) [my translation], Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans, as well as Pechenegs such as Telibei who engaged in personal combat with the Rus' monk-warrior Peresvet.The author referred to Pechenegs because Rus'/Russians still hated the Pechenegs, although they had long since passed from the scene.In addition, the text associated Mamai with the Hellenic religion, i.e. classical Greek polytheism [2, pp.97-98, including 97 n. 86, n. 87, 100; 5, pp.including 73 n. 43, 75].In his earlier article Batunskii acknowledged that the besermeny (here translated as "infidels") in this text have been interpreted by Soviet scholars to refer to Kama Bolgars or Azerbaidjanis.In addition, other urban populations such as the people of Astrakhan' were assigned to that denomination . 7 Returning to early Muscovy, Batunskii mobilized evidence of Muscovite knowledge of Balkan and Middle Eastern Muslims.He notes Rus' familiarity with the Christian ruler of Cyprus who in 1365-1366 attacked Alexandria, killing Saracens (Arabs?) [his question mark], Muslims and Turks, just as a 1346 epidemic there killed Muslims and Tatars [2, pp. 117, 120 n. 256].By the late fourteenth century the phrase "Tatar" has become thoroughly deformed and references' to Islam were for propagandistic purposes only [2, p. 120].
Chapter 3 proceeded to the image of Islam in the "Russian" (rossiisskoe) state [2, pp. 124-60].Tikhomirov (one of the Soviet historians to whom Batunskii had previously referred) thought the term besermen' mostly applied to Volga Bolgars until the late fourteenth century, after which Muslim Turks were meant.A fourteenth-century liturgical book and the fifteenth-century travel account to India by the Tverian merchant Afanasii Nikitin referred to "Islam" (besermenstvo), 8 and historical dictionaries alluded to "Muslim tsars" in 1554 and to the "Muslim Yoke" (igo) in 1556 à propos of a Crimean Tatar raid into Lithuania [2, pp. 129, 131].In Beyond the Don the Tatars are predominantly called "pagans"; the terms "Hagarene" and "Ishmaelite" did not appear and "Muslim" was rare [2,  "MUSLIM" TERMINOLOGY IN WESTERN EUROPE Batunskii rightly called attention to the ubiquity of the application of the word "pagans" to the Tatars and all other Rus' enemies, "eastern" and "western."According to Batunskii, to the Rus' Muslims were pagans both before and after they converted to Islam.This valid assertion raised the issue of whether Rus'/Russian designation of the Tatars as "pagans," as well as Hagarenes, Ishmaelites, and Saracens, differed from West European.The answer is negative.
Of course in its modern definition Islam is hardly a "pagan" religion.In the ancient, medieval and early modern world "pagan" did not necessarily mean polytheist or idolater as we now define those terms.Daniel conceded that some medieval authors "thoughtlessly" used "pagan" to mean someone who was "neither a Christian nor a Jew." Concerning Muslims as pagan idolaters, Daniel opined: "Finally, we must remember that 'idolatry' may always be used (in strict theology correctly) to describe any mistaken idea of God that men may worship, but that does not then mean in particular the worship of physical idols."Elsewhere he observed that in some cases "Saracen" meant all non-Christians and that in the popular chansons de geste "we can see more and more clearly that 'pagan' meant no more than and no less than 'non-Christian'." 9Cruz wrote: "The adjective 'pagan' does not necessarily describe an idolater in medieval sources, however.For many writers it appears to be no more than a synonym for non-Christian," echoing the view of Comfort that in the medieval context "Saracen" meant any people whose religion was other than Christianity.Thus Saxons, Irish, Danes, and Vandals, before their conversion to Christianity, might be confused with Saracens." 10Allaire concurred that to the medieval reader "Saracen" could mean any non-Christian or unbeliever [1, p. 246].Hoyland wrote that "pagans" "in a general way" could mean all non-Christians, even if it were mostly applied to Muslims [26, p. 194].Therefore because they were not Christians all Muslims were pagans, but all pagans were not Muslims. 11Rus' authors carried this line of reasoning even further.All non-Orthodox Christians, specifically Catholics, were also called pagans.Because there was no significant difference in their minds between Islam and "paganism" Rus' authors could portray Tatars they knew to be Muslim as engaging in what a modern historian of religion might call "pagan" rites.Chekin found the same case in Kyivan Rus' where "pagan" became the "standard epithet" for non-Christians [9, p. 10].The term "pagan," to borrow Batunskii's formulation, lacked any Islamic content.In this case, as Batunskii did not make clear, "western" and Rus'/Russian use of the term "pagan" applied to Muslims coincided.Although it did encompass Muslims, "pagan," from its usage, did not "mean" all and only adherents of Islam.
A different complication pertains to the Old Testament term "Hagarenes," traditionally seen as a reference to the descendants of Hagar, Egyptian slave of Abraham.According to Crone and Cook the early Muslims called themselves Hagarenes (the Greek Hagarenoi derived from Arabic Muhjirun).It was not until the eighth century that Muslims called themselves "Muslims" [11].Hoyland concluded that sources in several languages called the early Arab conquerors Hagarenes but later labeled them "Muslims," a synonym of "Saracens" [26].However, he also adduced a seventh-century Greek text that refers to a "Christian Saracen." 12 Donner argued that the early Muslims called themselves "believers."Some of these "believers" retained their Christian and Jewish affiliations.Once Islam evolved into a self-conscious religious confession, however, that became impossible [15].Donner did not mention Ishmaelites or Hagarenes, but his analysis confirms the absence of "Muslims" as an early self-definition of Muslims.
The best-known etymology of "Ishmaelites" is that it references the descendants of Ishmael, son of Hagar.The term appeared in biblical sources long before the appearance of Islam.In the eighth to fourth centuries BCE, according to Eph'al, a federation of Semitic-speaking tribes in the Northern Sinai desert, Northern Arabia and the Syrian-Arabian desert were called Ishmaelites, although they called themselves Arabs. 13Other specific groups were called Hagarenes.Neither term was a generic cognomen.Each, in the minds of outsiders, denoted a specific "tribal" unit.Indeed, in different centuries different groups in different Middle East locations were designated Ishmaelites [17].
Before the rise of Islam, according to Timani, Europeans used the term "Saracen" to apply to Arabs.Some medieval authorities traced the name to Sarah, wife of Abraham, who drove out Hagar and Ishmael."Saracens" became widely used in the Medieval Europe, where "Islam" and "Muslim" appeared only rarely [48].According to Donner, "Saracen" in seventh-century Greek referred to Arab nomads, not Muslims [15, pp. 107, 134].
These studies considerably muddy the waters of any attempt to discern an "essentialist" meaning of Hagarene, Ishmaelite or Saracen.These terms arose before the seventh century and therefore could not possibly have described Muslims then.They had different geographic and chronological parameters, although all primarily designated nomads.Yet long before Kyivan Rus' entered the East European scene, all had become all-purpose generic terms applied universally to Muslims in the Middle East.
While such usage seems to match that of Kyivan Rus', in one sense it does not, precisely because the West Europeans were describing the Middle East, where not only all nomads (Arabs, Bedouins) had become Muslim by the early medieval period, but almost everyone, including Persians and Turks, had adopted that faith, except for the vastly outnumbered Eastern Christians.Kyivan Rus' sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries used all three terms (Hagarenes, Ishmaelites, and Saracens) to describe non-Muslim nomads.Therefore, when the Tatars arrived on the Pontic and Caspian steppe to Kyivan Rus' they became just another group of pagans, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, who, unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, were not Muslims. 14Indeed Batunskii noted that thirteenth-century Tatars were not called "Muslims."By the second half of the fourteenth century in Russia Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens had become generic identifiers of Muslims, because by then all the Turkic nomads of the steppe had become Muslim, like all the Arabs/Bedouins in the Middle East.Until that time these terms, as Batunskii averred, had no Islamic content.Let me suggest a distinction between terms like pagans, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, which were eventually used to describe Muslims although they had previously been applied to non-Muslims as extrinsic referents to Muslims, and terms like besermen' and basurman, which were applied to Muslims but never to non-Muslims as intrinsic referents to Muslims.Extrinsic referents to Muslims were inclusive, but intrinsic referents to Muslims were exclusive. 15The only sometime exception may have been the original Muslim use of "Hagarene," but in this meaning it was surpassed by "Muslim" and fell into desuetude.All Muslims were pagans, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, but not all pagans, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, in Rus'/Russia, were Muslims.At no time were the Rus'/Russians "ignorant" of who was a Muslim.Russian sources in the late fourteenth century did not describe the Permians (Zyrians) as Muslims, in the late fifteenth century and beyond did not describe the Lapps in the Arctic North, as Muslims, in the middle of the sixteenth cen-tury did not describe the non-Muslim middle Volga Finnic nationalities like Cheremis' as Muslims, and in the late seventeenth century, beyond the scope of this article, hardly described the Buddhist Kalmyks as Muslims.
TERMINOLOGY IN CHRONOLOGICAL SEQUENCE Batunskii's interpretation of the Rus'/Russian terminology for the Muslim Tatars did not pay sufficient attention to the dating and provenance of sources.The chapters in Volume 1 of Rossiia i Islam lack chronological or thematic uniformity.Batunskii referred to early Muscovy in the chapter on Kyivan Rus', treated a Riazan' source in a chapter on early Muscovy, and began a chapter on the Rossiisskoe state with fourteenth-century events when the term should begin to apply in the late fifteenth century.This pattern impairs the cogency of Batunskii's argument.Because these anomalies also occurred in the articles in English published during his lifetime, such chronological inconsistency cannot be attributed to the unfinished state of the volume at the time of Batunskii's death.These chronological and geographical anomalies may have hidden some patterns in the Rus'/Russian terminology of the Tatars from Batunskii's view.Moreover, his analysis relied upon "typical" examples to prove his points, not an extensive analysis of the source base.To be sure, a truly comprehensive analysis of all references to Muslims in the medieval Rus//Russian sources would require another book.To be sure Batunskii's argument that the Rus' hostile image of Islam demonstrated considerable continuity from Kyivan times through the end of the sixteenth century (and beyond, as shown by the subsequent volumes of Rossiia i Islam) was completely convincing.Batunskii was also quite correct that the Kyivan Rus' image of Islam derived from Byzantium.However, recent research has proposed that the Byzantine attitude toward Islam was more ambivalent than Batunskii allowed [6; 16; 24].
When the Rus' first encountered the Tatars in 1223, like the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, they were not Muslims.The conversion of the Juchid ulus to Islam was a gradual process but the major turning point was the reign of Khan Uzbek.Even early Tatar rule, however, introduced Muslims into the Rus' forest zone.Batunskii's observation that Rus'/Russia lacked a theoretical or conceptual model of Islam with Islamic content16 resonates with Bushkovitch's analysis that Rus' had no interest in Muslim theology because, as Batunskii stated repeatedly, Islam was not a threat to the existence of Russian Orthodox Christianity. 17However, Batunskii was quite mistaken in concluding that the Tatars were "immediately equated with Islam."As we shall see, examination of Rus'/Russian use of the adjective "Muslim" or allusions to Muhammed in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century were far from promiscuous in identifying individual or groups of Tatars or non-Tatars as Muslim.The Rus' sources carefully and knowledgeably identified individuals who were Muslims as Muslims, although they might treat Tatar Muslims as non-Muslims for polemical purpose.From the mid fifteenth century on, and increasingly through the middle of the sixteenth century, Rus'/Russian sources berated Tatar plans to coerce all Russians to convert to Islam or, at the individual level bemoaned the apostasy to Islam of Orthodox Christians or lauded the martyrdom of Orthodox Christians who refused to apostasize.The generic terms for non-Orthodox Christians, pagan, Ishmaelites, Hagarenes and Saracens, continued to be used, although there are ambiguous passages where for example "Saracen" seemed to acquire a confessional coloration.Nevertheless I have not found a single passage in which Rus'/Russian authors described as a Muslim someone we know not to have been Muslim."Muslim" remained a necessary and sufficient indicator of adherence to Islam.It never lost its non-intellectualized Islamic content.

NON-TATAR MUSLIMS AND TATAR MUSLIMS
Rus'/Russian sources maintained the distinction between "Muslims" and Tatars before and after a majority of Tatars accepted Islam.Batunskii mentioned the Muslim artilleryman in 1184, obviously not a Tatar and probably not a Polovtsian, who joined a Polovtsy raid and could shoot fire.Given the technology involved, we may infer that this Muslim probably came from an urban locale, perhaps Central Asia.
Batunskii, to repeat, insisted that the equation of Tatars with Pechenegs and Polovtsy in Tale of the Destruction of Riazan' by Batu epitomized all of them as Muslims because they are all Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, although the concept of "Muslim" had become empty of Islamic content.This last observation may derive from Batunskii's realization that neither the (long-gone) Pechenegs nor the Polovtsy nor the Tatars in the thirteenth century were Muslim when Batu destroyed Riazan'.Of course the Rus' could hardly confuse the Tatars with Polovtsy in 1223 because the Tatars had just defeated the Polovtsy and would then destroy the joint Rus'-Polovtsy army at the battle of the Kalka River.Nevertheless the image of the Polovtsy devolved onto the Tatars [9, pp. 22, 24].Even in the fourteenth century when the Tale of the Destruction of Riazan' by Batu was written it is not certain that Islam had definitively achieved dominant status among the Tatars at the time of its composition.The text might have been composed early enough in the fourteenth century to predate the full extent of conversion to Islam in the Juchid ulus.In any event Batunskii misinterpreted the connection.The Tatars were like the unnamed Pechenegs and Polovtsy because they were non-Orthodox Christians, godless Ishmaelites, enemies of Orthodox Christianity, and incidentally Inner Asian pastoral nomads, not because of they shared the same religion.
The Juchid ulus included several Islamic cities, Grand Bolgar on the Volga River and Khwarezm in Central Asia.The world Mongol empire utilized Central Asian Muslims as tax-collectors.But the nomadic core of the Juchid ulus did not become predominantly Islamic until the reign of Khan Uzbek in the first half of the fourteenth century.In 1262 several northeastern Rus' cities revolted against Muslim tax-farmers, probably Central Asians. 18In the same year the Orthodox Christian priest Izosima, a drunkard and blasphemer, became an apostate by adopting the faith of the prophet Muhammad (prorok Makhmet), for which he was executed [35, p. 476].
In 1262 the evil and accursed Muslim Kutlubii invaded northeastern From his Turkic, rather than Arabic, name, Kutlubii could have been a Tatar, so this chronicle entry might be the earliest reference to a Tatar Muslim [35, p. 476].In 1266 the chronicler noted that Batu's death his successor as khan was his brother Berke, 18 [35, p. 476].A short narrative in the Ustiug and Vologda Chronicles (Utiuzhskie i vologodskie letopisi), written in the late fifteenth century about the conversion of a rapist Tatar official to Christianity to save his life, mentioned Alexander Nevskii's order to stage an anti-Tatar uprising and kill Muslims (basurmane).This is obviously a derivative account of the 1262 events.These Muslims also appear not to be Tatars [42, p.70].
a Muslim; under Berke Rus' suffered less from "Muslim oppression."Batu was not a Muslim, Berke was, so the "Muslims" who were oppressing Rus' most probably were the non-Tatar Central Asian Muslim tax collectors from the central World Mongol Empire.Berke's immediate successors were, again, not Muslims [39, p. 72].In the 1280s an official (basqaq) named Akhmat, described as a Muslim, oppressed several small areas of southwest Rus'.In retaliation a local prince attacked two Muslims and thirty Rus' traveling from one settlement established by Akhmat to another.Another Rus' prince sought justice before the Muslims by visiting the nomadic camp of the powerful Tatar lord Nogai before whom the khan's fishermen testified on their Muslim faith (besermenskaia pravda).Akhmat himself is not categorized as a Tatar, and it is possible that he and his minions were Central Asian Muslims [39, pp.79-51].Only when the boy Temujin, the future Chinggis Khan, his widowed mother and brothers were reduced to penury did they avert starvation by fishing [46, pp. 19-20], so it is possible that the Muslim fishermen were not Tatars.
Either knowledge of Berke's chosen religion did not spread widely or all authors did not consider the fact of his adherence to Islam was significant.The Life of the Venerable Petr, Tsarevich of the Horde (Povest' o blazhennom Petre, tsareviche ordynskom) failed to mention Berke's religion, although his nephew, the future saint Petr, had to wait for his uncle's death in 1267 to convert to Christianity because of Berke' opposition to his choice of faiths.By definition, therefore, Berke was not an Orthodox Christian, but that did not make him a Muslim.Petr began to question the Mongol belief in "the sun, the moon, the stars and fire," not Islamic beliefs, in 1262, when Berke was already khan, and the land consecration ritual attributed to Petr was not Muslim [20; 19, p. 648].The Life of the Venerable Petr was written in the fourteenth century, and distorted Berke's religious practices, in effect depicting him as a pagan.Although the Rus' knew which Tatars were Muslim, motivated mostly by bias they had no qualms about attributing very non-Muslim rites and beliefs to those Muslims.I would argue that sensationalist religious hostility, not ignorance, was the driving motivation.No medieval Rus' author would have balked at such literary legerdemain.As Batunskii noted, the Narration of the Battle with Mamai turns Mamai into a devotee of Slavic pagan gods and adept of the "Hellenic" religion.
When Khan Uzbek ascended the throne of khan of the Juchid ulus in 1313 he was already a Muslim, but not all Russian chroniclers considered his faith important enough to mention. 19The Simeonov Chronicle (Semenovskaia letopis') did so [39, p. 88], but not the Moscow Chronicle Compilation of the End of the Fifteenth Century (Moskovskii letopisnyi svod konta XV veka).Its compiler did excoriate Uzbek's "God-defiling" (bogomerzskaia) Saracen faith, mentioned in connection with the 1315 execution of Saint Grand Prince Mikhail of Tver', which might have meant he was a Muslim, even if the chronicler did not refer to the "Muslim" faith [41, p. 161].In 1327 the residents of Tver' revolted against the oppression of the city by the Tatar Chol Khan, probably collecting taxes and recruits.The early chronicle accounts of this incident written in Tver' mentioned only exactions and abuse but did not make religion an issue.The Novgorod Fourth Chronicle (Novgorodskaia chetvertaia letopis') fictitiously accused him of wanting to convert the people of Tver' to the "Tatars' faith" (khristiane khotiashe privesti v Tatarskuiu veru), not the Muslim faith [37, pp.50-51].That "Tatar" faith meant Islam, as "Saracen" did sub anno 1315 above, might similarly be inferred in a 1371 entry in the Tipograph Chronicle (Tipografskaia letopis'), usually dated to the 1520s, that German, Metropolitan of Jerusalem, came to Rus' for alms because of "oppression from the pagan Saracens" (nasilie ot poganskikh sratsyn) [40, p. 127].I have not seen any references to the "Hagarite faith" or the "Ishmaelite faith" in the Rus' sources.In other words, even after Uzbek's conversion Russian sources did not immediately or consistently label all Juchid ulus Tatars "Muslims," and they continued to distinguish "Tatars" from "Muslims." The chronicler's reference to "Tatar and Muslim" plague victims in 1346 suggests that the two groups were not entirely identical, that is, Islam had not yet spread to all Tatars in the Juchid ulus."Muslim" here probably refers to non-Tatar Muslims, probably Central Asian.Sub anno 1371 according to the Tipograph Chronicle (Tipografskaia letopis'), usually dated to the 1520s, German, Metropolitan of Jerusalem, came to Rus' for alms because of "oppression from the pagan Saracens" (nasilie ot poganskikh sratsyn), which testifies to both Rus' knowledge of Islamic rule in Palestine and the application of the terms "pagan" and "Saracen" to Muslims [40, p. 127].
It is only in works about Kulikov that Polovtsy and Pechenegs "become" Tatars.Monuments of the Kulikovo cycle named Pechenegs and Polovtsy as constituting parts of Mamai's army.By this time there was a religious disconnect between Mamai and the nomads of the Kyivan period, because Mamai was a Muslim, but their connection was hostility toward Orthodox Christianity [21].Russian authors had no need to project Mamai's Muslim faith onto the Pechenegs or Polovtsy.The historicist elements of these texts should not be projected onto thirteenthcentury Rus' conceptions of the relationship of the Tatars to their predecessors in the Pontic and Caspian steppes.
The Expanded Redaction of the Chronicle Tale of the battle of Kulikovo, despite not depicting the Tatars as Muslims, contradictorily accused Mamai's ally Grand Prince Oleg of Riazan' of being a "Muslim accomplice" (pobornik besermen'skii), which implied that the Tatars were Muslims [43, p. 30].The Expanded Redaction (Rasprostranennaia redaktsiia) of the Chronicle Tale (letopisnaia povest') of the battle of Kulikovo, as Batunskii noted, recorded that Mamai hired Muslims (Besermeny), Italians (Friazi), and Armenians to fight Dmitrii Donskoi.The text implicitly distinguished these mercenaries from Tatars, so I suspect they came from Khwarezm and were actually Muslims [43, p. 30].In fact Mamai's Tatars would all have been Muslims but the text vilifies them not as Mulsims but as pagans, Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, like the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, and pehaps because the text highlights the historical continuity of the Rus'/Russian battle against steppe nomads.The full redaction of the Oration on the Life and Death of Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich, Rus' tsar' (Slovo o zhitii i o prestavlenii velikogo kniaz'ia Dmitriia Ivanovicha, tsaria russkogo), found in the Novgorod Fourth Chronicle under the year of his death, 1389, accused Mamai of wanting to convert the Russians to the faith of Muhammad (veliu klaniatisia svoemu Bakhmetiiu), which can only mean Islam, and would be nonsense if he were not a Muslim [37, pp. 350-51].A short narrative in the Moscow Chronicle Compilation of the End of the Fifteenth Century about the "Stand on the Ugra River" in 1480 labelled Ivan III's "evil advisors" who urged him not to stand firm against the Tatars' "Muslim accomplices" (norovniki besermenskie), akin to Oleg of Riazan' in 1380, which entailed that these Tatars were Muslims [41,p. 328].
Russian sources dealing with the Khanate of Kazan', a successor state of the Juchid ulus, especially by the sixteenth century foreground the role of Islam in motivating Kazan' Tatar animosity toward Orthodox Christians.The Tale of Timofei of Vladimir (Povest' o Timofee Vladimirskom) narrates how a Russian Orthodox presbyter raped a virgin during confession during Lent and then fled to Kazan' where he converted to Islam [33, pp, 58-67].Although these events purportedly took place in the second half of the fifteenth century, the literary style of the tale matches the dating of its manuscripts, in the seventeenth century.To be sure, the definitely Muslim Kazan' Khanate existed in the second half of the fifteenth century.References to Islam and the "evil Muslim Saracen faith" abound in the text.Similarly hostile to Kazan' Tatar Islam is About a holy martyr Ivan, who was tortured for Christ in the city of Kazan' (O sviatom muchenike, izhe za Khrstia muchen vo grade Kazani), also known as the Life of Ivan of Kazan (Zhitie Ioanna Kazanskogo) or An Account of the great and glorious wonders that happened in the town of Kazan (Skazanie velikago i slavnago chiudesi, ezhe byst' vo grade Kazani), sometimes attributed to Nifont Kormilitsyn or another Volokolamsk monk.In its short paragraph narrative, before dying under torture for refusing to convert, Ivan curses Muhammad, which unambiguously identified the religion of the Kazan' Tatars as Islam [34, p. 278 ' [38, pp. 217, 228].All Muslims who survived the storming of the city were subject to God's judgment and executed. 20uscovite chroniclers from Ivan IV's reign possessed considerable expertise about the Islamic clerical establishment in Kazan'.Passages in the Book of Degrees (Stepennaia kniga) and the Chronicle of the Beginning of the Tsarstvo (Letopisets nachala tsarstva)) mention molni = mulla, mullas = religious authorities; kadi, qadi, Islamic religious judges; seiti = seyits, sayyids = descendants of the Prophet Mohammed; and imamy, imams, prayer leaders [22].These authors were hardly likely to be confused as to who was a Muslim and who was not.
The same is true of two texts whose dating to the sixteenth century has been contested.The Kazan' History (Kazanskaia istoriia), a history of Kazan' from its foundation in the fifteenth century through its conquest by Ivan IV in 1552, has a more problematic dating [29].Its author claimed to have accessed Kazan' chronicles during the twenty years he spent as a captive in Kazan' but he got so many things about Kazan' wrong that most specialists reject his self-proclaimed biography as a literary conceit.If there were a sixteenth-century redaction of the work it cannot be retrieved because all extant manuscripts, which date to the seventeenth century, derive from a later redaction.On the other hand the author was familiar with Islam, so the text deserves mention here.The author inter alia portrayed the Kazanis as pious Muslims who prayed in mosques [29, pp. 57, 148-49, 157].The Kazanis refused to abandon their Muslim faith [29, p. 146].Ivan, contradictorily, promised to respect Islam if the Kazanis surrendered but when they do not he insisted that he was not a "cannibal" (syroiadets) like the "pagan Muslims" [29, pp. 128-29].He scornfully informed them that their "false prophet Bakhmet" could not save them from Muscovite arms [29, p. 145].Ivan ordered the execution of all Muslim clergy (ereev bokhmichikh) [29, p. 158].The text referred to seyyids, mullahs, hafiz (men who knew the Qur'an by heart), and dervishes.Despite his invective, the author evinced sympathy toward Kazanis as Muslims, lamenting that the Islamic faith (bokhmichiu veru) perished with the city [29, p. 163].Contradictorily he noted the death of a seyyid of the false faith of Muhammad (lozhnago zakona Bakhmeteva) [29, p. 96].The author of the text, whoever he was and whenever he wrote, was more than knowledgeable enough about the Islamic clerical establishment not to have mistaken non-Muslims for Muslims.Prince Andrei Kurbskii, in his History of the Grand Prince of Moscow (Istoriia o velikom kniaze moskovskim), assuming that it is authentic, 21 called the Kazan' Tatars "Muslims" (Fennell translates as "Mussulmans"), referred to Kazan' as a Muslim city, and criticized Ivan IV for departing Kazan' prematurely instead of pursing the annihilation of all the Muslim soldiers of Kazan' [45, pp.28-29, 36-37, 44-45, 48-49, 50-51, 54-55, 56-57, 60-61, 68-69, 70-71, 72-73].
By the middle of the sixteenth century Muscovite texts do not compare any group of Tatars, including Kazan', Crimean, and Nogai, to the Pechenegs or Polovtsy.Rather, their antecedent point of reference stands at Batu, whom Mamai in 1380 and Khan Akhmat of the Great Horde in 1480 sought to emulate by defeating Rus' Orthodox Christianity.By this time the entire Tatar steppe was Muslim.Of course, as Muslims all Tatars could still be castigated as pagan, Hagarene, Ishmaelite and Saracen.

Conclusion
In the Middle East extrinsic terms for Muslims, pagan, Ishmaelite, Hagarene and Saracen originally referred to non-Muslims, then became ubiquitous for non-Christians, and finally designated almost entirely Muslims, because there was pretty much no one else.Because the Rus' applied them to the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, Batunskii inferred that the Rus' had "Islamicized" these nomads, although the Rus' knew that the Pechenegs and Polovtsy were not Muslim.When the pagan Tatars arrived, Rus' projected this same terminology onto them, which Batunskii argued constituted affiliating them with Muslims.Although this is a sophisticated and subtle theory, it does not fit the evidence.Kyivan Rus' knew who was a Muslim and, as in the "testing of the faiths" of St. Vladimir's conversion, referred to them by terms that meant adherence to Islam.In the Kulikovo era Russian authors did project their image of the Polovtsy onto the Tatars, because both were non-Orthodox Christian nomadic enemies; Islam had no relevance here.Batunskii's claim that "Muslim" lost all substantive meaning in the process did not take into account the meticulous use of "Muslim" by Rus'/Russian authors from the middle of the thirteenth century on.They knew who was a Muslim and who was not; they used extrinsic terms for both non-Muslims and Muslims, but never intrinsic terms or references to Mohammed for non-Muslims.Batunskii employed in his research too narrow a source base and payed insufficient attention to chronology.The equation of the Tatars and the Pechenegs/Polovtsy in texts about the battle of Kulikovo did not derive from religious but historical continuity, the battle of Orthodox Rus' against non-Orthodox nomads.In the fifteenth and especially sixteenth centuries the increasing prominence of Islam in Russian depictions of the Tatars, accusations that the Tatars wanted to convert all Russians to Islam and incidents of martyrdom to avoid forced conversion reflected changes in Muscovite society, not the eruption of a more militant form of Islam among the Tatars.Rus'/Russian authors' manipulation of the extrinsic vocabulary from the Kyivan period to denote Muslims and non-Muslim non-Orthodox Christians remained serviceable throughout the entire period of Eastern Slavic history covered by Volume 1 of Batunskii's "Russia and Islam."We have, in conclusion, Batunskii's ambitious and erudite magnum opus to thank for the opportunity to explore that terminology as a window onto Rus'/Russian perceptions of Islam.