‘Tatar’
In 1292 a Mongol army invaded Java. This event is recorded in Chinese histories and in a number of historical texts in Old Javanese, including the kakawin Deśawarṇana, written in 1365 and preserved in a number of mostly nineteenth-century manuscripts, and the Pararaton, a vernacular history of East Java in late Old Javanese (so-called ‘Middle Javanese’) probably composed in the sixteenth century and likewise preserved in later manuscripts (1).
One of the interesting features of these texts is that they both use the word Tatar to refer to the Mongols. The Mongol Khan — who at the time of the invasion was Qubilai Qan, aka ‘Kublai Khan’ — is mentioned in the Pararaton as ratu Tatar or ratu riṅ Tatar ‘king of the Tatars’. The soldiers, who in both versions side with Raden Wijaya against the usurper Jayakatwaṅ, are called woṅ Tatar (or, in the Deśawarṇana [44.4], wwaṅ Tatar), meaning ‘Tatar people’. This is something the Javanese texts have in common with many other medieval Afro-Eurasian sources on the Mongols and their conquests.
Tatar is one of the great Wanderwörter of the Middle Ages. It is the name by which the Mongols were almost invariably known across Afro-Eurasia, although in fact ‘Tatar’ was originally the ethnonym of one of the Mongols’ earliest enemies — adversaries on the steppe before the enormous expansion of the Mongol ulus under Chinggis Khan. The name is an old one and is found in a number of eighth-century CE Old Turkic inscriptions, the oldest of which is the Kul Tigin inscription.
Precisely why the Mongols came to be referred to as Tatars is not known; the Mongol sources most often use ‘Mongol’ (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ), even from the earliest times. In Khubilai’s letter to the ‘King of Japan’ in 1266, for instance, shortly before the establishment of the Yuan dynasty, we find the term 大蒙古國 ‘Great Mongol State’ (presumably equivalent to Mongol Yeke (Ikh) Monggol Ulus) (Figure 1). 蒙古 (pinyin: ménggǔ; ’Phags-pa pronunciation: munggu) is just a Chinese transliteration of Monggol, perhaps by way of Jurchen (2). The Chinggis Khan stone inscription of 1224–25 (St Petersburg, Hermitage, inv. no. BM-728) also uses the word Mongol in the standard Classical Mongolian spelling (3). So we can be fairly sure that ‘Tatar’ wasn’t the Mongol self-designation, at least among the elite (4).
In any case, an entry for the year 1224 CE (6732 in the Byzantine calendar followed in Rus’) in the Old East Slavic Novgorodian Chronicle is the oldest Russian text to mention the name ‘Tatar’ and perhaps the oldest such reference in western Afro-Eurasia. In Serge Zenkovsky’s translation (1974:39):
‘6732 (1224) In the same year, for our sins, there came unknown tribes. No one knew who they were or what was their origin, faith, or tongue, and some people called them Tatars, while others called them Taurmens, and still others called them Pechenegs.’
Zenkovsky suggested that the Mongols were known to the Russians (and others) as ‘Tatars’ because ‘[t]he Tatars were […] a Mongolian tribe from which were taken the shock troops for the advancing Mongolian army’. This seems to be a common explanation, but I wonder how applicable it is given the Javanese evidence. Is it plausible that the same kind of ‘shock troops’ were used in Sübedei’s army campaigning in Central Asia in the 1220s and on the Yuan overseas expeditions in the 1290s?
Then again, it is entirely possible the Javanese name came from a western Afro-Eurasian source, perhaps Persian or Arabic, rather than from direct experience. ‘Tatar’ is found in both languages, apparently spelled <تتار> — as, for example, in the Egyptian scholar al-Nuwayri’s early-fourteenth-century encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (§5.2), wherein Chinggis Khan is described as ‘the king of the Tatars’ (in Elias Muhanna’s 2016 translation).
In Latin Christian Europe an additional <r> was added into the name — not Tatar but Tartar (whence steak tartare). This is said to be have been due to the influence of the Classical Greek Τάρταρος (Tartaros), the hellish prison of the Titans, the implication being that the Tatars/Mongols came from Hell. This form is found in the Latin verse account of the Mongol invasion of Hungary, Planctus destructionis regni Hungariae per Tartaros (1242), and by the later Middle Ages it had become the standard name not only for the Mongols but, as Tartaria or Tartary (see Figure 2), for a huge swathe of land in Inner Asia. It is notable that in Greek this form was not adopted, though: In the description of Timur’s invasion of Anatolia in Michael Panaretos’ On the Emperors of Trebizond (late fourteenth century), for example, we find Τάταρ (in §105 following Scott Kennedy’s 2019 edition and English translation of the text).
In calling the Mongols wwaṅ Tatar, the Javanese composers of the kakawin Deśawarṇana and the Pararaton were thus following a trend found across the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere — further evidence, if any were needed, that Java was an integral part of the medieval world.
NOTES
(1) Here I am relying on Theodore Pigeaud’s 1960 edition of the Deśawarṇana in volume I of his Java in the 14th Century, the Old Javanese text of which is apparently trustworthy. The translation famously is not, however, and for the interpretation of the text I am using Stuart Robson’s much better 1995 English translation for the KITLV. The Pararaton has yet to be published in an up-to-date edition but a first effort transcription and English translation by I. Gusti Putu Phalgunadi came out in 1996 (The Pararaton: A Study of the Southeast Asian Chronicle, New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan), and that’s the text I’m using here.
(2) This is still the name for Mongolia and the Mongols in Chinese. If I remember correctly, it’s a rather old name and may date from before the conquests, but I’m not willing to continue this deep dive so I’ll leave it there.
(3) I took a picture of this stone in the Hermitage earlier this year but the room it’s in is frankly quite dark and the text isn’t clear unless you know exactly what you’re looking at. You can find images and a transcription online if you have a good look (and pictures of the replica in Ulaanbaatar as well).
(4) But see this interesting video on the Tatar/Mongol issue, which references the recent work of Stephen Pow on the interaction between the two names. Pow argues that ‘Tatar’ was the older name and ‘Mongol’ a new designation created by the Mongol elite (Chinggis himself, possibly) that gradually overtook ‘Tatar’ over the course of the thirteenth century.
Extra note: Medium formatting does not allow vertical Classical Mongolian text. That’s a shame — but actually Classical Mongolian/Uyghur script written horizontally is known from some Timurid-era manuscripts, so I suppose I can live with it.
REFERENCES
al-Nuwayri, Shihab al-Din. 2016 (1314–1333). The ultimate ambition in the arts of erudition. Muhanna, Elias (trans). New York: Penguin Books.
Kennedy, Scott. 2019. Two works on Trebizond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pigeaud, Th. G. Th. 1960. Java in the 14th century. Vol I. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Robson, Stuart. 1995. Desawarnana. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Zenkovsky, Serge A. (ed). 1974. Medieval Russia’s epics, chronicles, and tales. New York: Meridian.
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