The manuscript copy book of Tarsky uyezd: an underestimated data source for the history of Siberia and Siberian Tatars of late XVI - first quarter of XVII centuries

Documents on the history of Western Siberia of the end of XVI century - the first quarter of the XVII century can rarely be found in the archives. But the Russian state archive of ancient acts in the fund of Siberian decree stores some copy books of Siberian cities of that time. One of them and the greatest in terms of volume (more than 500 pages) is Tara copy book, containing materials on the history of the district and Siberia from 1594 to 1625. This source has attracted researchers’ attention on several occasions in the last 100 years. Each of the researchers used the book to solve certain tasks. At the same time, its complex investigation or at least its detailed description has not been done. And we have to state that with such a source the history of Tara city and Tara district has not been studied. In the book there are given commendations to Tara voivodes, there are orders sent from Moscow, and also letter writing with the Tobolsk voivode. Moreover, documents in the book allow reconstructing archives of the number of other cities of Siberia to a great extent and seriously add to documentary records, collected by G.F. Miller. Among other matters, here lists from the patrol book of Yasak municipalities of Tara district of 1623/23 are preserved. Also, the part of this document is a copy book of Tomsk government office, where there are materials from 1604 to 1625. Its contents are identical to Tara book, but shows a worse preservation of the documents of the archive of Tomsk government office. The documents of the book allow precising long-held beliefs of how they fought with Kuchum from 1595 to 1598, and seeing the problem of Siberian BokharanNogai relations of the end of the XVI century in a new light, the roles of Nogai and Bokharan in Kuchum’s rebellion against Russian voivodes, reconstructing the list of names of male population of the city and the district, including Yasak and Yurta tartars, and also state peasants, stating the income from Yasak tax and expenses on material maintenance of army class people, discovering separate moments of routine city life; learning the geography of origin of the first Siberian resettlement. In some cases the documents of the book go beyond the history of Siberia. So this source has records of the destiny of peasants of Tver Grand dukeSimeon Bekbulatovich. Tara copy book gives an opportunity to draw firm conclusions that in the decades after the conquest, Siberia was if not subsidized but at least the region that didn’t make any profit to the Crown. Besides, the book studied in the article lets us observe how they carried out paperwork in separate cities of Siberia. These documents give the right to produce some generalizations of similatities of the position of Yasak population of Siberia and Mordva, as well as Siberian Yurta tartars with Mechsherskayaarmy class tartars and Mordva. In many aspects the information included into this source is unique and needs publishing in its full volume, but not in pieces as it has been done before.

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