Tartary was a broad geographical label that European mapmakers used for centuries to describe the vast interior of Asia, stretching from the Caucasus Mountains and the Russian steppe all the way to the Pacific coast. It was never a single country or empire with unified borders. Instead, it was a catch-all term Europeans applied to lands they knew little about, lumping together dozens of distinct peoples and cultures under one name.
Where the Name Came From
The English word “Tartary” comes from the Latin “Tartaria,” built the same way as “Germania” or “Britannia,” meaning simply “the land of the Tartars.” The word “Tatar” (usually spelled with one “r”) referred to a group of primarily Turkic peoples living across Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. When Mongol armies swept through Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia in the 13th century, Europeans began applying the label broadly to the invaders and the lands they came from.
The extra “r” in “Tartar” likely crept in through association with Tartarus, the underworld of Greek mythology. To terrified medieval Europeans watching Mongol cavalry burn their way across the continent, the connection to hell seemed fitting. The spelling stuck on maps and in travel accounts for hundreds of years, even though the people it described never used the term themselves.
What Tartary Looked Like on Maps
One of the earliest and most influential maps was created by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius in the late 1500s. Its full Latin title translates to “Tartaria, or the Kingdom of the Great Khan,” and the region it depicted was essentially meant to represent the Mongol Empire. It covered an enormous portion of Asia, from the edges of Eastern Europe across Siberia and down into parts of what is now China.
As European knowledge of Asia grew, mapmakers began splitting this massive region into subdivisions. The most common breakdown included “Russian Tartary” (Siberia and lands under Russian control), “Chinese Tartary” (Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet under the Qing dynasty), and “Independent Tartary” (the Central Asian khanates of places like Bukhara and Khiva, which were not directly ruled by either Russia or China). These labels appeared on maps well into the 18th and early 19th centuries.
By the mid-1800s, the term had largely disappeared from serious cartography. As the Russian Empire expanded eastward and the Qing dynasty consolidated control over its western frontiers, mapmakers replaced the vague label with more specific names: Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Turkestan, Central Asia. The region Europeans had once seen as a single mysterious expanse was now better understood as a patchwork of distinct territories, each with its own political reality.
The People Who Actually Lived There
The biggest problem with “Tartary” as a concept was how much it oversimplified. This single label covered areas inhabited by Turkic peoples, Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and many other ethnic groups, most of whom had no shared identity or political allegiance. In the Caucasus alone, European maps marked “Tartars of Kuban” and “Tartars of Dagestan” as though they were branches of the same civilization, when in reality these were distinct communities with their own languages, customs, and histories.
Marco Polo, who traveled through these lands in the late 1200s, described the Tartars as nomadic peoples dwelling in northern regions without fixed towns or fortified places, living on extensive plains with good pasture and large rivers. He documented how the Mongol khan conquered roughly nine provinces not through some unified Tartar identity, but because each town and district was governed independently and could not resist a centralized military force. The lands Europeans later called “Tartary” were, in Polo’s own account, a fragmented collection of peoples who happened to fall under Mongol rule.
Tartary in Modern Discussions
If you encountered the word “Tartary” online rather than in a history book, you may have run into the “Great Tartaria” theory. This is a fringe alternative-history claim that a vast, technologically advanced civilization once spanned Asia (and sometimes other continents) before being deliberately erased from the historical record. Proponents point to old maps labeled “Tartaria” as evidence of this lost empire.
The historical reality is more straightforward. “Tartary” was a European geographical convenience, not evidence of a hidden superpower. The label reflected European ignorance about the interior of Asia, not the existence of a unified state. As the Library of Congress notes, the region shown on these maps “covers areas inhabited by numerous Turkic peoples, who may or may not have called themselves Tatars,” along with many other unrelated groups. The maps are real, but what they depict is a vague European impression of distant lands, not the borders of a single nation.
Tartary as a Botanical Term
You might also encounter “Tartary” in a completely different context: Tartary buckwheat. This is a grain-like crop (technically a pseudocereal, since it’s not a grass) that originated in the mountain regions of western China. It gets its name from the same geographical label, since European botanists associated its growing range with the lands they called Tartary.
Tartary buckwheat is cultivated today in China, Bhutan, northern India, Nepal, and parts of central Europe, particularly Luxembourg and adjacent areas of Belgium and Germany. It also has a long tradition in Slovenia, Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The plant is notable for its high content of flavonoids, which are natural compounds that interact with starch molecules to produce foods with a lower glycemic index. Regular consumption has been linked to protective effects against obesity, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and gallstone formation, largely due to its resistant starch, protein quality, and concentration of plant-based protective compounds. It is also rich in mineral elements compared to more common grains.
Of the 21 known species in its plant family, only two are widely eaten: common buckwheat and Tartary buckwheat. A third wild species has traditional use in Chinese medicine. Tartary buckwheat tends to have a more bitter flavor than the common variety, which is why it historically remained a regional specialty rather than a global staple, though interest in its nutritional profile has grown in recent years.