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population were relatively free peasants, earning a veryvaried livelihood, with distinctive communal institutionsthat preserved a certain measure of local autonomy.Later they became organized in the class of state peasantsunder conditions considerably easier than those imposedupon the serfs of the landowners. The North contributedmuch to the re-establishment of Muscovy in thefinal crisis (1611-12) of the Time of Troubles, and from theNorth came the conquest and early settling of Siberia.When the Western nations were thrusting afield in theAmericas and the Indies, the Russians spanned the continentof Asia with a rapidity—some fifty years—to rivaleven the Spaniards a century earlier; ever pressing on," to the east of the sun, to the passage of the great TsarAlexander, to the most high mountain Karkaraur, wheredwell the one-footed, one-armed folk." The conquestof Siberia was the continuation of the Russian penetrationof the unending northern forests east of the Urals,which are no dividing barrier; and until the eighteenthcentury the Russians remained almost confined to theforest and tundra zones, except in the extreme west ofSiberia where the black-earth wooded steppe thrusts upits most northerly wedge (see map 2).Here lay the main centre of the loose khanate of theSiberian Tatars, which for a century before 1581 hadalternately challenged the steady expansion of Muscovyfrom the Kama and paid irregular tribute to her. Thelast khan, Kuchum, a son of the emir of Bokhara andan active proselytizer of Islam, passed to the offensiveagainst the Stroganov family, who had been confirmedby Ivan the Terrible as merchant-marcher lords on theUrals frontier. As a counter-measure they took intotheir service a Cossack soldier of fortune, Yermak—famous hero of Russian folk-poetry—and in 1581equipped him with an expedition to forage eastwards forbooty and tribute, "with fighting and without fighting."Such was the origin of Yermak's ' conquest of Siberia.'He was a born leader of men and immediately wonresounding successes; but he was besieged and drownedin 1585, and it soon proved to be beyond the Stroganovs'resources to consolidate his initial gains. The Muscovite29