What "Tartary" Actually Was

Before it meant anything on the internet, Tartary (Latin: Tartaria) was a real, working term in European geography, cartography and diplomacy — in continuous use from roughly the 13th century through the late 19th century. It referred, loosely and inconsistently, to the vast stretch of Central Asia and Siberia: from the Caspian Sea and the Volga in the west to the Pacific coast in the east, and from Persia and India in the south up to the Arctic Ocean.

The word derives from "Tartar" (also "Tatar") — the name Europeans applied broadly to Turkic and Mongolic peoples of the steppe, a group that was never ethnically or politically unified. The Library of Congress's own map division states it plainly: the region labelled "Tartary" never seems to be in quite the same place on two different maps.

This is the single most load-bearing fact in the whole discussion: no European source ever depicted "Tartary" as a unified political state with one government. A 1757 map — Magnae Tartariae Tabula, "Map of the Great Tartary" — divides the labelled region into at least seven separately named zones on a single sheet: Independent Tartary, Chinese Tartary, Western Tartary, Eastern Tartary, Muscovite Tartary, Little Tartary (modern Ukraine), plus separately labelled Tartars of Kuban, Dagestan and Tumen in the Caucasus.

Historically, the region encompassed Mongols, various Turkic groups, Manchus, Tibetans and numerous other distinct peoples — a genuinely diverse population Europeans simply hadn't studied closely enough to name individually. It was, in the words of one Library of Congress researcher, never a political designation at all.

European knowledge of the deep Asian interior came almost entirely at second or third hand — Marco Polo's 13th-century travel account, the legends of "Prester John," fragments of classical geography, and whatever traders and missionaries managed to report back. As one antique map specialist notes of Ortelius's founding 1570 map: much of its content north of China is "mythical or loosely derived" from these sources rather than direct observation. Europeans were mapping the edge of what they knew, and filling the rest with the best available guess.

"Tartary" didn't vanish through any single dramatic event. It faded out gradually through the 18th and 19th centuries as Russian, Chinese and European geographic and ethnographic knowledge of the region improved — the vague catch-all label was steadily replaced by more specific and accurate names: Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, Siberia, and the political boundaries of the Russian and Chinese empires. By an 1885 map of Central Asia, the term "Tartary" is simply absent — not erased, just superseded by better information.