Volga Bulgaria

Volga Bulgaria, or Volga-Kama Bulgaria, sometimes called the Volga Bulgar Khanate, was a historical Bulgar state that existed between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries around the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, in what is now European Russia. The Bulgars were an Oghuric people who had settled north of the Black Sea, and the origins of the state are debated; most scholars place their homeland between modern Kazakhstan and the north Caucasian steppe, and see Hunnic pressure and the Pontic-Caspian steppe in their migration. The state was multi-ethnic, with large numbers of Bulgars, Finno-Ugrians, Varangians and East Slavs, and its position on the great river crossroads let it hold a local trade monopoly with Norse, Cumans and Pannonian Avars, whose crafts and furs moved through its markets. Islam took root among its rulers in the tenth century. The conquest of the Mongols, begun in the late 1230s, ended the state in 1240 and wiped its cities off the trade map.