In the summer of 1662, on the eastern edge of the Russian world, the Bashkir clans of the southern Urals rose against the tsar. For a century they had held their pastures, forests and wild-hive trees under charters granted by Ivan the Terrible, paying tribute in furs and honey in exchange for protection and the recognition of their ancestral lands. Now monasteries and peasant settlers were ploughing their meadows, corrupt governors were inflating their tribute, and Moscow had handed their pastures to the Kalmyks while forbidding them to fight back.

When their petitions failed, the Bashkirs rode to war. Across four great roads stretching from the Volga to Siberia, they burned the frontier settlements, besieged fortified monasteries, reduced the town of Kungur to ash and closed a ring around Ufa. Their coalition drew in Tatars, Mansi and Mari, Buddhist Kalmyk horsemen, Polish prisoners of war and a fugitive prince of the old Siberian khans.

Drawing on Russian and Bashkir scholarship, Guillermo Mackey tells the gripping story of the Bashkir War of 1662 to 1664, a conflict in which a people without a state lost its battles yet won the peace, and forced one of the great empires of the age to keep its word.