ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will show that it is possible to trace the beginning of Russian imperial history not only from the mid-sixteenth century, with the conquest of the Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ khanates, let alone from 1721, the date of the formal acceptance of the title of Emperor by Peter I. In 1445 the Kasimov khanate was founded as a result of the catastrophic defeat of the Muscovite Grand Prince Vasilii II by the sons of the exiled khan of the Golden Horde, Ulugh Muhammad. A new sort of arrangement took form between Vasilii II and Ulugh Muhammad, whereby Juchid 1 kinsmen of the latter resettled in Muscovy for protracted sojourns. This arrangement between Vasilii II and Ulugh Muhammad marks a milestone in Muscovite relations with the steppe. With the foundation of the Kasimov khanate 2 within the territory of future Muscovy, Muscovy was ‘prepared’, both politically and mentally, for the incorporation of foreign, ethnically and religiously different Muslim lands into the Russian domain. The period of the fifteenth to the first half of the sixteenth centuries paved the ‘way to empire’, which was formed later as an increasingly heterogeneous multinational and multi-confessional state.
