Geography and History
Tartary was often divided into sections with prefixes denoting the name of the ruling power or the geographical location. Thus, western Siberia was Muscovite or Russian Tartary, Xinjiang and Mongolia were Chinese or Cathay Tartary, western Turkestan (later Russian Turkestan) was known as Independent Tartary, and Manchuria was East Tartary.
As the Russian Empire expanded eastward and more of Tartary became known to Europeans, the term fell into disuse. Tartary never existed as a formal political state, but was ancient part of a Mongol state created by Chingiz Khan. European areas north of the Black Sea inhabited by Turkic peoples were known as Little Tartary.
The "Komul Desert of the Tartary" was mentioned by Immanuel Kant in his "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime", as a "great far-reaching solitude".
Read more about this topic: Tartary
Famous quotes related to geography and history:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)