The raid of the Yaik Cossacks on the Khiva Khanate in 1603 in the description of military and civilian pre-revolutionary authors

Abstract

At the beginning of the 17th century, a detachment of Yaik Cossacks, led by ataman Nechai, raided the Khiva Khanate, plundering and ruining its capital – the city of Urgench. However, the raid ended tragically for the Cossacks – they were all killed by the troops of the Khan Arab-Mohammed, whose son, a few decades later, described this event in his book on the history of the Khanate. The disappearance of this ancient book with its preserved translations into various European languages, although they do not allow us to restore the contents of the protograph with absolute accuracy, but they show that the legends of the Ural Cossacks about the campaign of their ancestors led by Nechai to the Khiva Khanate reflect real events, that these are not myths and legends created by the imagination of the Cossacks. The works of all the authors mentioned in the article, despite the differences present in them, contain relatively small amounts of information about those events, since they, as a rule, cover a wide chronological framework, within which the raid of the Yaik Cossacks on the Khiva Khanate in 1603 is only a small episode. The article also analyzes the reasons for the differences in the coverage of this event by different authors.

For citation: Dubovikov A.M. The raid of the Yaik Cossacks on the Khiva Khanate in 1603 in the description of military and civilian pre-revolutionary authors. From History and Culture of Peoples of the Middle Volga Region. 2023, vol.13, no.3, pp.10–30. https://doi.org/10.22378/2410-0765.2023-13-3.10-30 (In Russian)