A vast region of eastern Europe and northern Asia controlled by the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries. It extended as far east as the Pacific Ocean under the rule of Genghis Khan.
|
Results for Tartary
|
On this page:
|
A vast region of eastern Europe and northern Asia controlled by the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries. It extended as far east as the Pacific Ocean under the rule of Genghis Khan.
Tartary or Great Tartary (Latin: Tataria or Tataria Magna) was a name used by Europeans from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century to designate a great tract of northern and central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean inhabited by Turkic and Mongol peoples of the Mongol Empire who were generically referred to as "Tartars", i.e. Tatars. It incorporated the current areas of Siberia, Turkestan (including East Turkestan), Greater Mongolia, Manchuria, and sometimes Tibet.
Tartary was often divided into sections with prefixes denoting the name of the ruling power or the geographical location. Thus, western Siberia was Muscovite or Russian Tartary, eastern Turkestan (later Chinese Xinjiang) and Mongolia were Chinese or Cathay Tartary, western Turkestan (later Russian Turkestan) was known as Independent Tartary, and Manchuria was East Tartary.
As the Russian Empire expanded eastward and more of Tartary became known to Europeans and East Asians, the term fell into disuse.
European areas north of the Black Sea inhabited by Turkic peoples were known as Little Tartary.
The "Komul Desert of the Tartary" was mentioned by Immanuel Kant in his "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime," as a "great far-reaching solitude".
In the novel Ada by Vladimir Nabokov, Tartary is the name of a large country on the fictional planet of Antiterra. Russia is Tartary's approximate geographic counterpart on Terra, Antiterra's twin world apparently identical to "our" Earth, but doubly fictional in the context of the novel.
According to the Metropolitan Opera's summary of Puccini's final opera, Turandot, the son of the vanquished king of Tartary, Prince Cala'f, is smitten with Turandot's beauty and determines to win her love.
In Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels, the European main characters often express fear of tartars, a term apparently referring to many Asian races, as the story takes place far from Mongolia.
In Macbeth, by
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Tartary" at WikiAnswers.
Copyrights:
![]() | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more | |
![]() | Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tartary". Read more |
Mentioned In: