The Island Town of Sviyazhsk

When Ivan the Terrible, the Grand Prince of Moscow and the first Tsar of Russia, ascended the throne in the middle of the 16th century, he decided to put an end to the Khanate of Kazan, a medieval Bulgarian-Tatar Turkic state occupying the territory of former Volga Bulgaria, and ruled by the descendants of Genghis Khan. The Khanates and the Muscovites had been at conflict for the last hundred years. The bone of contention between the two was Kazan’s strategic location on the Volga River near its confluence with the Kama, the major river in the western Ural Mountains. As long as Kazan existed as a threat, Russian movement into and beyond the Urals, as well as south toward the Caspian Sea, was blocked. Photo credit: vershinatur.com Between 1545 and 1550, Ivan led several campaigns against Kazan, the capital of the Khanate, but failed to seize the city. While returning from one such unsuccessful seize of Kazan, in 1550, the Tsar’s troops camped on the banks of the Volga near the confluence with the Sviyaga River, about 30km away from Kazan. This was when Ivan noticed a small wooded promontory, rising above the waters on the banks of the Volga. Ivan realized that in order to conduct a successful seize of Kazan he needed a base closer to the city from which he could launch his attacks. The promontory provided Ivan the perfect place for his base. It was both accessible and defensible, and its location in the Volga allowed him to keep under control the waterways and roads leading to Kazan, and eventually Kazan itself. Ivan ordered the construction of a massive fortress, but not at the chosen site. Building a fortress on the promontory under the nose of the enemy would have been foolhardy. Instead, construction took place at Uglich, about 700 km upstream, where Ivan’s engineers could carefully design, build and test without the lingering threat of enemy attack.