There’s a story circulating on the internet regarding a country lost in the chronicles of history. A country that once seemed to be world known is now forgotten, buried in the sands of time. Tartaria, Tartary, or Grand Tartaria has been troubling online researchers as they dig in old maps dating back as far as to the 15th century. What intrigued the internet was a declassified document by the CIA, which mentions the deletion of this country’s history which seems to have been located in the land of modern Russia/Siberia & Asia.
According to the old world maps, at times it reached the borders of China and Mongolia. Little is known about the people inhabiting the land at that time and due to the lack of information people are still speculating if it was an area or an actual country. Europeans during the 19th century and earlier seem to have called Asian areas Tartary before they explored them and recorded them in greater detail.
This is an excerpt of the declassified CIA document created in 1957.
According to Wikipedia:
“Tartary (Latin: Tartaria) or Great Tartary (Latin: Tartaria Magna) was a historical region in Asia located between the Caspian Sea-Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Tartary was a blanket term used by Europeans for the areas of Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia unknown to European geography. It encompassed the vast region of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the Volga-Urals, the Caucasus, Siberia, Inner Asia, Mongolia and Manchuria.
Knowledge of Manchuria, Siberia and Central Asia in Europe prior to the 18th century was limited. The entire area was known simply as “Tartary” and its inhabitants “Tartars”. In the Early modern period, as understanding of the geography increased, Europeans began to subdivide Tartary into sections with prefixes denoting the name of the ruling power or the geographical location. Thus, Siberia was Great Tartary or Russian Tartary, the Crimean Khanate was Little Tartary, Manchuria was Chinese Tartary, and western Central Asia (prior to becoming Russian Central Asia) was known as Independent Tartary.”
Wikipedia claims that Tartaria was a blanket term and that not much knowledge was available to Europeans but in this book below written by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine in 1252 we can find an extensive research made about the Tartars and their empire.
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(I recommend finishing this article before watching the videos. Write does a good job of covering what is fact whereas many theories thrown about in the below videos)
