Tartary

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This article deals with the historical region of Tartary. For the Russian federal subject formerly known as Tataria, see Tatarstan. For the village of Tǎrtǎria in Romania which gained fame after discovery of Tărtăria tablets, see Săliştea, Alba.

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.

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[edit] Geography and history

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".

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[edit] Tartary in fiction

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 William Shakespeare, the witches include Tartars' lips in their potion.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein pursuits the monster "amidst the wilds of Tartary and Russia, although he still evaded me, I have ever followed in his track."

In Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, Herbert Pocket describes Estella Havisham as a Tartar because she was "hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex."[1]

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[edit] References and further reading

[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations, Chapter 22. 

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