Lesser Nogai Horde

The Lesser Nogai Horde, also called the Kazyev Horde, was the western branch of the Nogai confederation, a nomadic polity that broke away from the Nogai Horde in the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1557 the Nogai bey accepted the suzerainty of Ivan the Terrible, and Kazy mirza led the clans that refused Moscow's overlordship westward to the steppe between the lower Volga, the Don and the Sea of Azov. The breakaway uluses grazed the right bank of the Volga and the Azov grasslands, and from the 1560s groups moved toward the Budjak, where they became known as the Budjak Tatars. The Lesser Nogais were nominally subject to the Crimean Khanate, though their mirzas ran their own herds, caravan tolls and raids, and their warriors joined Ottoman campaigns against Astrakhan and Moscow. Kalmyk pressure in the 1620s and 1630s pushed the horde off the Volga-Don interfluve across the western Manych; from the 1640s its camps lay on the Kuban, the Manych and the Kum, in the foreland of the north Caucasus. Some uluses, including the Yedisan, Jamboyluk and Yedickul, were moved by the Ottomans to the Black Sea steppe in 1728. In 1770 these hordes accepted a Russian protectorate, and in 1783 their political autonomy ended. Their descendants are counted among the steppe Crimean Tatars and the Nogais of the north Caucasus.