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Updated: June 20, 2025
The envoys of Iermak, John Koltzo and his companions, also appeared before the Prince to offer him the realm of Siberia, as well as the precious furs of sables, black foxes, and castors. These were, since a long time, the first transports of joy in gloomy Moscow. The Czar and the nation seemed to wake up.
They made them presents of sables and treated them with all the luxury which their position permitted, preparing together for new enterprises. However, this happiness of Iermak and his companions was not of long duration; we touch upon the beginning of their reverses.
In a bloody engagement Iermak put them to flight on the shores of a lake; and the annalist reports that at his time many human bones were still to be seen there. But the timid inhabitants of the cantons of Koschutz and of Tabarin paid the tribute demanded by the Cossack leader without a murmur. These peaceful savages lived in an absolute independence, having neither princes nor chiefs.
When they had sufficiently tested the courage and fidelity of these warriors, and had learned the talent and boldness of Iermak Timofeif, their principal leader of obscure origin, the annals say, but illustrious by his greatness of soul they formed a troop especially composed of Tartars subject to Russia, of Lithuanians and of Germans, ransomed from captivity among the Nogais, for the latter brought, as a matter of custom in their encampments, the prisoners whom they made in war, as mercenaries of the Czar.
Iermak treated them with so much kindness that their fathers and husbands did not delay in coming to find him with a tribute. After reducing the cantons of Tarkhan to submission, the Cossacks entered the country of the most considerable of the Ostiak princes, named Samar.
Then Iermak made Prince Mahmetkul start for Moscow, announcing to the Czar that, while all was going on well in Siberia, yet he asked immediately for more considerable aids than the first, in order to preserve his conquests and to be able to make new ones. Mahmetkul, faithful observer of the law of Mahomet, served afterward in the Russian armies.
If his bullet only killed one of them, the frightful detonation of his gun put to flight twenty or thirty. In the first combat, held on the bank of the Tobol, at a place called Babassan, Iermak, under shelter of intrenchments, checked by some discharges of musketry the impetuosity of ten thousand men of Mahmetkul's cavalry, who rushed forward to crush him.
In the country of Sargaty there lived an illustrious old man, a former Tartar chief, a hereditary judge of all the tribes since the first khan of Siberia. He made the act of submission as well as Prince Etichai, who governed the city of Tehend. The latter, bearing tribute to Iermak, presented his young daughter, betrothed to the son of Kutchum.
The news was of the nature to cause a lively satisfaction to the leader of the Cossacks, whose new enterprises were to be favored by the weakness of the principal enemy of Russia, as well as by the approach of spring. Iermak, leaving a part of his troop at Isker, embarked with the other part on the Irtysh, which he descended, navigating toward the north.
This enterprise, suited to irritate the Prince of Pelim and the sultan Kutchum, is a treason worthy of the last punishment! I command you to cause Iermak and his companions to start without delay for Perm and Ussolie on the Kama, where they may be able to efface their faults by forcing the Ostiaks and the Vogulitches to submission.
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