Burtas Erotic

The Burtas were a people of the middle Volga who appear in the written record for roughly four centuries, from the ninth to the thirteenth, and then stop appearing. They lived in the forest steppe between the Khazars downriver and the Volga Bulgars upriver, in country that is now the Penza, Ulyanovsk and Saratov regions of Russia. Nobody knows what language they spoke. The candidates are Finno-Ugric, most often the ancestor of Moksha Mordvin, or a Turkic tongue, or an Iranian one carried north by Alan settlers, and the argument has never settled. What survives of them is a name, a fur, a scatter of graves, and the notes of Muslim geographers who never quite agreed on where they lived.

Those geographers, Ibn Rusta and al-Istakhri among them, describe a people with no king. Authority sat with the elders of each settlement, who heard disputes and were obeyed because there was nobody else to obey. The Burtas lived in wooden houses strung out along the river rather than in walled towns, kept cattle and bees, farmed, and rode. They owed the Khazar khagan cavalry, said to number ten thousand horsemen, and they used those horsemen on their own account against the Bulgars and the Pechenegs, with whom they were more or less permanently at odds. Two burial rites ran side by side: some Burtas burned their dead, others buried them, which suggests either two populations under one name or a people in the middle of changing its mind about the afterlife.

Their real fame was commercial. Burtasi fox pelts, the black ones especially, were a luxury good in Baghdad and beyond, priced high enough that the name of the people became the name of the fur. That trade tied them into the Volga route carrying northern goods south and Islamic silver north, and it is probably why anyone in the Caliphate bothered to write about them at all.

The Mongol conquest of the 1230s folded the Burtas into the Golden Horde, where the name still attaches to a town in fourteenth century sources before going quiet for good. The people were absorbed rather than erased. Their descendants are likely distributed among the Moksha Mordvins, the Mishar Tatars and the Chuvash, none of whom carry the old name forward. It survives on maps, in a few Russian place names, and in the fur.