Medieval people imagined that somewhere far, far away, mystical monsters really exist.
For example, geographers and cartographers of Western Europe believed that in the east there is a huge territory called Great Tartary. Allegedly, this is where the river of the dead begins, and the inhabitants of this country will one day announce to the whole world about the coming of the end of the world. Where was this mystical land located?
What kind of country?
Great Tartary is a geographical term used mainly by Western European scientists. From the XII to the XIX century, they placed this state in various parts of Asia: from the Urals and Siberia to Mongolia and China.
Some cartographers believed that this was the name for all lands not explored by representatives of the Catholic world. And then the borders of Tartary expanded from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Other scholars, on the contrary, associated this mysterious country with Turkestan or Mongolia.
For the first time, this toponym is found in the writings of the Navarran rabbi Benjamin of Tudel, about 1173 this traveler wrote about Tartaria, calling it a Tibetan province. According to the Jewish religious leader, this country is located to the north of Moghulistan in the direction of Tangut and Turkestan.
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Pagans from hell
Scientists associate the origin of the toponym "Tartaria" with the contamination of two terms at once: the ancient Greek Tartar and the name of the people "Tatars". It is believed that these words were united in the minds of the inhabitants of Western Europe due to the similarity in sound.
The fact is that from the caravans who transported goods from China along the Great Silk Road, the Europeans had heard about the mysterious Tatars inhabiting the eastern lands.
Since the Chinese called practically all the peoples living north of the Celestial Empire, including the Mongols and Yakuts, Tatars, the idea was formed in the west that Tartaria is a huge power that occupies almost all of Asia.
In the 13th century, after the raids of the troops of the Mongol Khan Batu in a number of European countries, the attitude towards the Tatars became negative. They began to be perceived as terrifying warriors from the east, whose hordes would one day end the existence of Christian civilization. In religious texts it was said that the Tatars are savages, fierce like demons sent by Satan himself.
In addition, according to ancient Greek mythology, Tartarus is an abyss under the kingdom of Hades (the world of the dead). Due to the similarity of the ethnonym "Tatars" with the name of the pagan hell in Western Europe, it was believed that Great Tartary is a land where various monsters and monsters live, including the legendary Gog and Magog, and people there worship the Antichrist.
It was believed that the source of the river flowing through this territory is in the otherworldly reality.
From the Urals to the Pacific Ocean
Many scientists from Western Europe considered the Great Tartary to be a huge empire stretching from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. For example, the Italian diplomat and Jesuit Giovanni Botero, in his work Relationi universali, dated 1595, wrote that this country was formerly called Scythia. And it occupies half of Asia, in the west it borders on the Volga region, and in the south - with China and India. At the same time, the lands of the huge empire are washed by the waters of the Caspian on one side, and the Bering Sea on the other.
Another representative of the Jesuit order - French orientalist Jean-Baptiste Duald - in 1735 published a scientific work "Geographical, historical, chronological, political and physical description of the Chinese Empire and Chinese Tartary." In his opinion, in the west this huge country borders on Muscovy, in the south - on Mongolia and China, from the north this state is washed by the Arctic Sea, and the East Sea separates Tartary from Japan.
And in 1659 in London, an appendix to the work of the Cardinal of France Dionysius Petavius "The Science of Time" (Opus de doctrina temporum), devoted to geography, was published. It said that the Tartarus River irrigates most of the vast empire. According to the cardinal, Great Tartary is bounded in the west by the Urals, and in the south by the Ganges River. The coast of the Frozen Ocean is located in the north of the country, and the waters of the Qing Sea wash this territory from the east.
central Asia
However, not all scientists were inclined to give such vast spaces to Great Tartary. Some geographers located this country in Central Asia. So, the encyclopedia "Britannica" (volume 3, 1773) indicates that the state of Tartarus is located south of Siberia, north of India and Persia and west of China.
This point of view was also shared by the Swedish researcher Philip Johann von Stralenberg. In 1730 he published "A New Geographical Description of Great Tartary", placing this state between Mongolia, Siberia and the Caspian Sea.
Mongolia
A number of scientists directly associated Tartaria with the homeland of Genghis Khan. Italian diplomat and Franciscan Giovanni Plano Carpini, who visited Mongolia in 1246, left a bizarre description of the country. In his work "The History of the Mongals, We Call Tartars", he combined his travel impressions with medieval mystical legends. For example, the author mentioned fire-spewing stuffed animals, people with dog heads and cow hooves, as well as creatures whose legs do not have joints.
Probably, Plano Carpini pursued two goals: to impress readers and not contradict the idea of Tartary that was well-established among Catholics.
Many Western European cartographers were guided in their work by the works of the Italian Franciscan diplomat for several more centuries.
Siberia
Some scholars considered the mysterious expanses of Siberia to be the Great Tartary. So the Fleming Abraham Ortelius in 1570 published the atlas of the world "The Spectacle of the Earth's Circle" In this edition, Tartary was located between Muscovy and the Far East.
Some researchers in their writings mentioned that it is so cold in a huge empire that ice is already shallow underground. It was here, as the French traveler of Hungarian origin Franz Tott believed, that the cradle of humanity was located. In his "Memoirs of the Turks and Tartars" (1784), he wrote that the very first people migrated from Tartaria to the south and west, settling in China, Tibet, India, and later Europe.
Muscovy
Many Catholic scholars considered the border between Europe and Asia a mystical border between Good and Evil. And although Muscovy was geographically located west of the Ural Mountains, in the minds of the British, Italians, French and Germans, it coincided with the image of an alien, distant, wild and dangerous land. Therefore, geographers often put an equal sign between Russia and Great Tartary.
For example, the English researcher John Speed in 1626 presented to the scientific community the "New Map of Tartary" he compiled. The publication contained an image of a typical inhabitant of this country, he was in the clothes worn by the guardsmen under Ivan IV the Terrible. And the cartographer painted the Russian Tsar sitting in a yurt.
In addition, some historians and geographers from Western Europe considered the North Caucasus to be the westernmost part of Great Tartary.
As for domestic scientists, they avoided this toponym for two reasons:
knew that there was no people called "tartars";
Tartary was associated with the world of the dead or a country ruled by evil forces.
Although on the very first Russian maps you can find this state, which is explained by the influence of the Western European tradition. So, Tartary got on the "Drawing of all Siberia, taken in Tobolsk by decree of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich", which was drawn up in 1667 under the leadership of boyar Peter Godunov.