Book of Victory of the Kazan Province (1550)
A Kazan-side account, in Ottoman Turkish, of the Russian siege of Kazan in 1550.
Full title Book of Victory of the Kazan Province (Zafer-name-i vilayet-i Kazan, 1550), Russian translation by F. Khakimzyanov, Ekho vekov 1995 no. 1
Зафер наме-и вилает-и Казан
Sherifi Hajji Tarkhani
Sherifi Hajji Tarkhani wrote this shortly after the 1550 siege of Kazan by Ivan IV, having been in the city, and addressed it to the Ottoman court. The card calls it the only known Kazan-side contemporary account of the Muscovite assault, a native counter-witness to the Kazan Chronicle and the Nikon chronicle. The atlas does not hold the text: the corpus knows it only from a 1995 Russian translation (web text) of a single Istanbul manuscript, and nothing is stored.
- How they knew
- Eyewitness
- Who “Tartar” means here
- The Tatars of the Kazan khanate, seen from inside. The card also lists Crimean Tatars and Nogais, and the Ottomans as the audience.
- Why read it
- The chance to hear the defenders of Kazan, not only the Russian chroniclers who wrote the standard story.
- Watch out
- It survives in one manuscript, and the Russian version was translated from a Turkish edition. The atlas quotes nothing from this work.
What it says
No quotes from this one yet. Its text is out of reach for now, or the scan could not be read.
The fine print
How we know
firsthand The author saw the places or people described.
firsthand: author present in Kazan during the 1550 siege by Ivan IV, writing shortly after for an Ottoman audience
Research notes
- Single Istanbul manuscript; translation from a Turkish edition; authorship of Sherifi accepted by editors.
Why it matters
The only known Kazan-side contemporary account of the Muscovite assault, a native counter-witness to the Kazan Chronicle and Nikon chronicle.
Places named
Kazan; middle Volga
Peoples named
Kazan khanate; Muscovy; Crimean Tatars; Ottoman Empire; Nogai