Understanding Tartarian Religious History
The question of whether Tartarians were Muslim doesn't have a single answer. The term "Tartar" or "Tartarian" was used loosely by European writers from the medieval period through the 1800s to describe a wide range of Turkic and Mongolic peoples across the Eurasian steppe. That means you're actually looking at dozens of distinct groups with different religious histories, and they changed over centuries. The short version is that many of the groups Europeans called Tartars did become Muslim, but it happened at different times and in different ways. The most significant conversion came through the Golden Horde, the western portion of the Mongol Empire that controlled much of what is now Russia and Ukraine. Uzbek Khan made Islam the state religion of the Golden Horde around 1313, and from that point on, the ruling elite and increasingly the general population in those territories were Muslim. The Crimean Khanate, which emerged from the Golden Horde's fragments, remained a Muslim state until Russia annexed it in 1783. The Kazan Khanate fell to Ivan the Terrible in 1552, but its Tatar population stayed predominantly Muslim. But here's where it gets complicated. The original Mongol conquests under Genghis Khan in the 1200s were not Islamic. The Mongol ruling class practiced a mix of Tengrism and shamanism, and they were notably religiously tolerant. They kept Buddhist advisors, employed Christian Nestorian administrators, and allowed Muslim merchants to operate freely across their empire. The shift toward Islam was gradual and mostly happened among the Turkic-speaking populations that the Mongols ruled over, not among the Mongols themselves in any immediate way. By the time European mapmakers were drawing "Tartary" on their charts in the 1600s and 1700s, the distinction between Mongol and Turkic had mostly blurred in popular usage, but the religious picture was already layered.
I spent too many hours early on trying to map every group labeled "Tartar" onto a single religious category. It doesn't work. You'll find Siberian Tatar groups like the Siberian Tatars proper who were Muslim but also had significant shamanic practices mixed in. Some groups in the Altai region practiced Buddhism well into the modern era. The Kalmyks, who migrated from Central Asia to the lower Volga region in the 1600s, are ethnically Oirat Mongols and remain predominantly Buddhist to this day. They were called Tartars by Russian sources but were never Muslim. Then there are groups like the Volga Tatars, who are firmly Muslim but whose religious practice has absorbed considerable pre-Islamic tradition, especially in rural areas. The deeper issue people run into is that "Tartar" was an exonym, not an endonym. These peoples mostly called themselves by their specific tribal or regional names. Modern scholarship avoids the term Tartary almost entirely because it bundles together groups that have very little in common beyond being on the steppe and being described by outsiders. If you're researching a specific population, you need to know which one before you can say anything meaningful about their religion. Assuming all Tartarians were Muslim is like assuming all people from "the Orient" shared the same beliefs. It's a category error that shows up constantly in older literature and still pops up in amateur histories. One thing that trips people up is the timeline. The Islamic expansion into these regions wasn't a single event. It stretched from the 8th century onward with the initial Arab contacts, picked up momentum with the Karakhanid conversion around 960, accelerated through the Golden Horde in the 1300s, and continued through the khanate periods into the 1500s and beyond. At the same time, Russian imperial expansion from the 1500s onward pushed Orthodox Christianity into Tatar lands, and Soviet anti-religion campaigns from the 1920s through the 1980s suppressed Islamic practice across all former Tatar territories. Any snapshot you take of "Tartarian religion" depends entirely on which century you're looking at and which geography you're focusing on.
If you want to go further, the primary sources in Arabic and Persian from the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde periods are useful but require Arabic script reading ability. For most people, secondary scholarship in English is the practical route. The works of Denis Sinor on Inner Asian history, Christopher Atwood's encyclopedia of Mongol worlds, and Roman Khakimov's research on Volga Tatar history cover the religious transitions in decent detail. Russian-language scholarship on the subject is extensive but often inaccessible without the language. What you won't find in any of it is a unified Tartarian identity or religion, because neither one existed. The people behind the European label were too diverse, too spread out, and too changeable across time for either to be true.
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