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Lame, Tamerlane, the greatest conqueror since GenghisKhan, shattered the power of the Golden Horde (1395).Unlike the Ottomans, temporarily stricken by Timur(1402), the Tatars of the Golden Horde never fullyrecovered.By about 1450, when the Ottomans were capturingConstantinople, the Horde had split up into the threerival khanates of Astrakhan, Kazan, and the Crimea, anda little later the Nogai horde, paramount in the opensteppes east of the Volga, and the khanate of the SiberianTatars to the east of the Urals. The accompanyingdissensions enabled Ivan the Great to rid himself oftribute and any formality of dependency (1480). Thestage was being set for the great Muscovite advance fromthe forest against the steppe, but the breakdown of theGolden Horde marked no diminution, on the contraryan increase, in the frequency of Tatar raids, especiallyfrom the side of Kazan.The advance began down the Volga, not the Don,against the Kazan Tatars, who were relatively near andat the time a greater danger than the Crimean Tatars, faraway to the south and difficult to strike at. Kazan itselfwas not finally captured until 1552 by Ivan the Terrible,when the khanate was annexed, after nearly a century ofMuscovite efforts to reduce it, in part by war, in part byestablishing Tatar adherents as khans. The same intermixtureof Russian and Tatar is exemplified in the policybegun in the mid-fifteenth century of granting lands torenegade Tatar princes and taking them into frontierservice, a policy of assimilation which continued to be amain feature of Russian relations with Tatars and otherEastern peoples.The conquest of Kazan had been a long and costlyundertaking, but it was followed by a rapid sweep rightdown the Volga to its mouth and the easy seizure ofAstrakhan (1556). Henceforward the rich ribbon of theVolga trade-route was in Muscovite hands, a windingwaterway through the steppes, but not in itself themaster-key of the steppes. A challenge from theOttoman empire, with its vassals the Crimean Tatars,for a moment (1569) endangered the new-won conquest39