XIII.] RUSSIAN CONQUEST OF SIBERIA. 519 



Anika, ancestor of the Stroganov family, entered into with 

 the wild races settled in Western Siberia, whom he even partially 

 induced to pay a yearly tribute to the Czar of Moscow. In con- 

 nection with this he and his sons, in the middle of the sixteenth 

 century, obtained large grants of land on the rivers Kama and 

 Chusovaja and their tributaries, with the right to tuild towns 

 and forts there, whereby their riches, previously very considerable, 

 ■were much increased. The family's extensive possessions, how- 

 ever, were threatened in 1577 by a great danger, when a host of 

 Cossack freebooters, six to seven thousand strong, under the 

 leadership of Yermak Timofejev, took flight to the country 

 round Chusovaja in order to avoid the troops which the Czar 

 sent to subdue them and punish them for all the depredations 

 they had committed on the Don, the Casjjian Sea and the Volga. 

 In order to get rid of the freebooters, Maxim Stroganov, 

 Anika's grandson, not only provided Yermak and his men with 

 the necessary sustenance, but supported in every way the bold 

 adventurer's plan of entering on a campaign for the conquest of 

 Siberia. This was begun in 1579. In 1580 Yermak passed the 

 Ural, and after several engagements marched in particular 

 against the Tartars living in Western Siberia, along the rivers 

 Tagil and Tura to Tjumen, and thence in 1581 farther along 

 the Tobol and Irtisch to Kutschum Khan's residence Sibir, 

 situated in the neighbourhood of the present Tobolsk. It was 

 this fortress, long since destroyed, which gave its name to the 

 whole north part of Asia. 



From this point the Russians, mainly following the great 

 rivers, and passing from one river territory to another at the 

 places where the tributaries almost met, spread out rapidly m 

 all directions. Yermak himself indeed was drowned on the ^^th 

 August, 1584, in the river Irtisch, but the adventurers who 

 accomi^anied him overran in a few decades the whole of the 

 enormous territory lying north of the deserts of Central Asia 

 from Ural to the Pacific, everywhere strengthening their 

 dominion by building Ostrogs, or small fortresses, at suitable 

 places. It was the noble fur-yielding animals of the extensive 

 forests of Siberia which played the same part with the Russian 

 promyschleni, as gold with the Spanish adventurers in South 

 America. 



At the close of the sixteenth century the Cossacks had 

 already possessed themselves of the greater part of the river 

 territory of the Irtisch-Ob, and sable-hunters had already gone 



Geographica Detection'is Freti (Photo-lithographic reproduction, by Fre- 

 derick MuUer, Amsterdam, 1878). The same work, or more correctly, 

 collection of small geographical pamphlets, contains also Isak Massa's 

 map of the coast of the Polar Sea between the Kola peninsula and the 

 Pjaisna, which I have reproduced. 



