A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Russia, the Golden Horde, and the Chaghatayids 163
for a brief period, under Sokollu Mehmet Pasha – grand vizier from
1565 to 1579 – its target was also Russia.This far-sighted Ottoman
statesman was rightly concerned: Ivan IV had in two vigorous campaigns
destroyed the khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556)
and annexed their territories, an unprecedented reverse at a time when
no obstacles to constant expansion of the Dar al-Islam led by the mighty
Ottoman empire appeared possible; worse still, the conquests created
almost overnight a new and powerful neighbor for the Ottoman and
Central Asian Turks.Sokollu conceived the bold plan of digging a navigable
canal from the Don to the Volga rivers and thus making it possible
for Ottoman ships to reach the Caspian Sea.The project was
attempted in 1569 in cooperation with the Crimean Tatars, but lack of
enthusiasm both at the empire’s center and at the khan’s court stymied
the work until it was abandoned with the approach of winter.Had it succeeded,
the Turks might have been able to liberate Astrakhan; and had
they subsequently adopted an expansive policy in competition with
Muscovy for the still Turkic and sparsely populated Kipchak steppe
instead of engaging in interminable and ruinous wars against the
Habsburgs in the Balkans or Venice in the Mediterranean, their empire
might have ultimately fared better.If Sokollu Mehmet feared Russia,
however, few of his co-religionists shared his apprehension, and for some
time to come her behavior seemed to prove them right.The Russians
appeared contented with having reached the Volga estuary and the
shores of the Caspian, but otherwise did not press their advantage
farther south toward Ottoman or Shaybanid possessions; instead, their
expansion took an eastward tack, beyond the Ural mountains into the
vast expanse of Siberia.The only serious resistance, that of the Khanate
of Sibir, which the Russians attacked for the first time in 1582, collapsed
by 1600 with the death of its khan Küchüm.By 1649, the Russians
reached the Pacific and anchored their presence there by constructing
the fortification of Okhotsk; and a mere three years later they staked out
their ownership of Siberia against possible Mongol or Chinese claims by
erecting, in the continent’s geographical center, the fortress of Irkutsk.It
was the most grandiose growth of a continental empire ever – with the
notable exception of Genghis Khan’s; but fundamental structural
differences separated the two, for the Mongol empire was little more
than a frail artificial edifice, whereas the Russian empire was to become
solid as a rock.
Closer to home, Russia waited for another age before annexing the
Crimea in 1783 and conquering Central Asia between 1865 and 1884;