The Cossacks have been prominent in the history of Eastern Europe since the mid-16th century. Cossack communities and settlements, not to mention wandering bands of rogue Cossacks, existed before among both Turks and Slavs . But as an active, active and organized force, they begin to be recorded from the end of the 1540s in the correspondence of the Russian diplomatic department-the Embassy Order with the Nogai Horde. This nomadic power, having emerged on the "ruins" of the Golden Horde, finally took shape at the end of the XV century on the territory of modern Western Kazakhstan. Its center was the steppes along the banks of the Yaik River (Ural), where the only Nogai city that survived from the Golden Horde times was located, Saraychuk ( Saraychik)-the residence of the Nogai biy rulers. The earliest mention of the Cossacks on the Don is apparently contained in the Continuation of the Chronograph of 1512 to 1548, when the Putivl and Sevryuk people under the leadership of Mikhail Cherkashenin and Istoma Izvolsky founded a fortification - "prison" on Perevolok 2 and defeated a detachment of Azov Tatars there .3 The next time the local Cossacks appear, apparently, in the memory (instructions) of I. B. Fedtsov, the Moscow ambassador to Biy Sheikh-Mamai in February 1549. After holding all protocol events, negotiations and distribution of "wake" (offerings) he was to ask Biya for a secret audience and inform him, among other things, that Tsar Ivan IV, out of allied duty ("for your friendship"), "ordered the Crimean ulus to fight with his Cossacks of Putiml and Don" 4 . This measure was planned by the tsar as a sign of solidarity with the Nogai Horde after the terrible defeat of its cavalry by the Crimean Khan in the winter of 1548-1549. The Cossack question turned out to be very relevant for the Nogai elite. Fedtsov did not find Sheikh Mamai alive, and a new biy Yusuf entered into correspondence with Moscow about this. During 1549-1551, he repeatedly complained about the ... Читать далее