Volga Sentence Examples

For the first time the Volga became a Russian river.

Corn from middle Russia for Astrakhan is transferred from the railway to boats at Tsaritsyn; timber and wooden wares from the upper Volga are unloaded here and sent by rail to Kalach; and fish, salt and fruits sent from Astrakhan by boat up the Volga are here unloaded and despatched by rail to the interior of Russia.

A fort was erected here in the 16th century to prevent the incursions of the free Cossacks and runaway serfs who gathered on the lower Volga, as also the raids of the Kalmucks and Circassians.

He reached Asiatic the headquarters of Batu, on the Volga, in February journeys.

The double river-systems of the Volga and Kama, the Ob and Irtysh, the Angara and Yenisei, the Lena and Vitim on the Arctic slope, and the Amur and Sungari on the Pacific slope, are instances.

There the Volga, the Ural, the Syr-darya and the Amu-darya discharge their waters without reaching the ocean, but they bring life to the rapidly desiccating Transcaspian steppes, and link together the most remote parts of Russia.

The limits of the Russian Jurassic system may be represented by a line drawn from the double valley of the Sukhona and Vytchegda to that of the upper Volga, and thence to Kieff, with a wide gulf penetrating towards the N.W.

By their means the plains of the central plateau - the very heart of Russia, whose natural outlet was the Caspian - were brought into water-communication with the Baltic, and the Volga basin was connected with the Gulf of Finland.

The White Sea has also been brought into connexion with the central Volga basin while the sister-river of the Volga - the Kama - became the main artery of communication with Siberia.

They freeze in winter and dry up in summer, and most of them are navigable only during the spring floods; even the Volga becomes so shallow during the hot season that none but boats of light draught can pass over its shoals.

The Volkhov, discharging into Lake Ladoga, and forming part of the Vyshniy-Volochok system of canals, is an important channel for navigation; it flows from Lake Ilmen, which receives the Msta, connected with the Volga, and the Lovat.

Its navigation is of great importance, especially for goods brought from the Volga, and its fisheries are extensive.

Russia was 'the seat of the empire' of the Khazars, who drove the Bulgarians, descendants of the Huns, from the Don, one Section of them migia.tiug up thu Volga to found there the Bulgarian empire, and the remainder travelling towards the Danube.

Bogdanov, Birds and Mammals of the Black-Earth Region of the Volga Basin (in Russian, Kazan, 1871); Karelin for the southern Urals; Kessler for fishes; Strauch, Die Schlangen des Russ.

One section of them crossed the Urals and occupied the steppes between the Urals and the Volga; the remainder belong to Turkestan and Siberia.

The Mongol race is represented in Russia by the Kalmucks, who inhabit the steppes of Astrakhan between the Volga, the Don and the Kuma.

They are Lamaists by religion and immigrated to the mouth of the Volga from Dzungaria, in the 17th century, driving out the Tatars and Nogais, and after many wars with the Don Cossacks, one part of them was taken in by the Don Cossacks, so that even now there are among these Cossacks several Kalmuck sotnias or squadrons.

Chelyabinsk was linked by a transverse line with the middle Urals railway, which connects Perm, the head of navigation in the Volga basin, with Tyumen, the head of navigation on the Ob and Irtysh, passing through Ekaterinburg and other mining centres of the middle Urals.

In the Volga section of the Caspian Sea fish are caught to the value of about £I,000,000 annually; in the Ural section over 40,000 tons of fish and nearly 1500 tons of caviare are obtained.

Thereupon Russian colonization and political influence retreated northwards, and from that time the continuous stream of Russian history is to be sought in the land where the Vikings first settled and in the adjoining basin of the upper Volga.

This time the invaders came to stay, and they built for themselves a capital, called Sarai, on the lower Volga.

The khanate closely connected with the history of Russia was that of Kipchak or the Golden Horde, the khans of which settled, as we have seen, on the lower Volga and built for themselves a capital called Sarai.

In order to reply to accusations brought against them, or in order to be confirmed in their functions, they had to travel to the Golden Horde on the Volga or even to the camp of the grand khan in some distant part of Siberia, and the journey was considered so perilous that many of them, before setting out, made their last will and testament and wrote a parental admonition for the guidance of their children.

Those of the Volga and the Don professed allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy, whilst those of the Dnieper recognized at first as their suzerain the king of Poland.

Many believed, or affected to believe, in the pretender, and in a short time he gathered around him a large force of Cossacks, peasants, Tatars and Tchuvash, swept over the basin of the lower Volga, executed mercilessly the landed proprietors, seized and pillaged the town of Kazan, and kept the whole country in a state of alarm for more than a year.

In Finland the population is composed of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking Protestants; the Baltic provinces are inhabited by German-speaking, Lettspeaking and Esth-speaking Lutherans; the inhabitants of the south-western provinces are chiefly Polish-speaking Roman Catholics and Yiddish-speaking Jews; in the Crimea and on the Middle Volga there are a considerable number of Tatarspeaking Mahommedans; and in the Caucasus there is a conglomeration of races and languages such as is to be found on no other portion of the earth's surface.

He then became lieutenant of engineers, and took part in the Russian campaign, during which he was taken prisoner and was confined at Saratov on the Volga.

It appears that at the end of his life Dominic had the idea of going himself to preach to the heathen Kuman Tatars on the Dnieper and the Volga.

The Kalmucks are a Buddhist and Mongolian people who originated in a confederacy of tribes dwelling in Dzungaria, migrated to Siberia, and settled on the Lower Volga.

In addition large quantities are shipped at Baku direct for the Volga and the Transcaspian port of Krasnovodsk.

In the 10th century bands of Varangians or Russified Scandinavians sailed out of the Volga and coasted along the Caspian until they had doubled the Apsheron peninsula, when they landed and captured Barda, the chief town of Caucasian Albania.

Russian aggression began somewhat early in the r8th century, when Peter the Great, establishing his base at Astrakhan on the Volga, and using the Caspian for bringing up supplies and munitions of war, captured Derbent from the Persians in 1722, and Baku in the following year.

The primitive methods originally in use in the Russian oil-fields have already been described; but these were long ago superseded by pipe-lines, while a great deal of oil is carried by tank steamers on the Caspian to the mouth of the Volga where it is transferred to barges and thence at Tzaritzin to railway tank-cars.

With his name, too, is associated the building of the first Russian merchant-vessels on the Dvina and Volga.

The Bulgars of the Volga were of Turkish origin, but may have assimilated Finnish and, later, Slavonian elements.

A disastrous attack on Astrakhan, with the object of carrying out Sokolli's plan for uniting the' Don and the Volga, first brought the Turks into collision with the Russians.

Several flour-mills and other factories have recently sprung up. Much grain is exported; timber is brought from the upper Volga, and manufactured wares from Nizhniy Novgorod.

On the lower Don and Volga we have the Sauromatae, and on the middle course of the Volga the Budini with the great wooden town of Gelonus and its semi-Greek inhabitants.

According to it the Scyths dwell in Asia, and were forced by the Massagetae over the Araxes (Volga ?) into the land of the Cimmerians.

About 512 B.C. Darius, having conquered Thrace, made an invasion bf Scythia, which, according to the account of Herodotus, he crossed as far as the Oarus, a river identified with the Volga, burned the town of Gelonus and returned in sixty days.

They were the Venetians of the Caspian and the Euxine, the organizers of the transit between the two basins, the universal carriers between East and West; and Itil was the meeting-place of the commerce of Persia, Byzantium, Armenia, Russia and the Bulgarians of the middle Volga.

The tide of their dominion ebbed and flowed repeatedly, but the normal Khazari may be taken as the territory between the Caucasus, the Volga and the Don, with the outlying province of the Crimea, or Little Khazaria.

Amongst the nomadic Ugrians and agricultural Slays of the north their frontier fluctuated widely, and in its zenith Khazaria extended from the Dnieper to Bolgari upon the middle Volga, and along the eastern shore of the Caspian to Astarabad.

They have been identified with the AKarcpoc (perhaps AkKhazari, or White Khazars) who appear upon the lower Volga in the Byzantine annals, and thence they have been deduced, though with less convincing proof, either from the AyetOvpvoc (Agathyrsi) or the Kariapoc of Herodotus, iv.

Throughout the 6th century Khazaria was the mere highway for the wild hordes to whom the Huns had opened the passage into Europe, and the Khazars took refuge (like the Venetians from Attila) amongst the seventy mouths of the Volga.

The agricultural Sla y s of the Dnieper and the Oka were reduced to tribute, and before the end of the 7th century the Khazars had annexed the Crimea, had won complete command of the Sea of Azov, and, seizing upon the narrow neck which separates the Volga from the Don, had organized the portage which has continued since an important link in the traffic between Asia and Europe.

The merchants of Byzantium, Armenia and Bagdad met in the markets of Itil (whither since the raids of the Mahommedans the capital had been transferred from Semender), and traded for the wax, furs, leather and honey that came down the Volga.

Before the onset of those fierce invaders the precarious suzerainty of the khakan broke up. By calling in the Uzes, the Khazars did indeed dislodge the Petchenegs from the position they had seized in the heart of the kingdom between the Volga and the Don, but only to drive them inwards to the Dnieper.

The kingdom dwindled rapidly to its ancient limits between the Caucasus, the Volga and the Don, whilst the Russian traders of Novgorod and Kiev supplanted the Khazars as the carriers between Constantinople and the North.

So costly was this victory, however, that Bata, finding he could not reduce Neustadt, retraced his steps and established himself in his magnificent tent (whence the name "golden") on the Volga.

Large deposits of phosphate occur in Russia, and those in the neighbourhood of Kertch have attracted some attention; it is said that the Cretaceous rocks between the rivers Dniester and Volga contain very large supplies of phosphate, though probably of low grade.

With all the means at her disposal cheerfully placed in the hands of such valiant and capable ministers, it would have been no difficult task for the Republic to have wrested the best part of the Baltic littoral from the Scandinavian powers, and driven the distracted Muscovites beyond the Volga.

After that all trace of him is lost for six years, when he reappears as the leader of a robber community established at Panshinskoe, among the marshes between the rivers Tishina and Ilovlya, from whence he levied blackmail on all vessels passing up and down the Volga.

He then sailed down the Volga with a fleet of thirty-five galleys, capturing the more important forts on his way and devastating the country.

After a three weeks' carnival of blood and debauchery Razin quitted Astrakhan with two hundred barges full of troops to establish the Cossack republic along the whole length of the Volga, as a preliminary step towards advancing against Moscow.

Saratov and Samara were captured, but Simbirsk defied all efforts, and after two bloody encounters close at hand on the banks of the Sviyaga (October 1st and 4th), Razin was ultimately routed and fled down the Volga, leaving the bulk of his followers to be extirpated by the victors.

His conquests to the west and north-west led him among the Mongols of the Caspian and to the banks of the Ural and the Volga; 1 The pastorals in this aspect are closer to Clemens Romanus than to Ignatius.

Timur had carried his victorious arms on one side from the Irtish and the Volga to the Persian Gulf and on the other from the Hellespont to the Ganges.

They formerly occupied the basin of the Oka (where the town Meshchersk, now Meshchovsk, has maintained their name) and of the Sura, extending north-east to the Volga.

The western shore, from the delta of the Volga to the mouth of the Kuma, a distance of 170 m., is gashed by thousands of narrow channels or lagoons, termed limans, from 12 to 30 m.

These channels are filled, sometimes with sea-water, sometimes with overflow water from the Volga and the Kuma.

From the former it is entered by the Volga, which is estimated to drain an area of 560,000 sq.

And it is indeed the fact that large portions of the vast region comprised between the lower Volga, the AralIrtysh water-divide, the Dzungarian Ala-tau, and the outliers of the Tian-shan and Hindu-kush systems are actually covered with Aralo-Caspian deposits, nearly always a yellowish-grey clay, though occasionally they assume the character of a more or less compact sandstone of the same colour.

No other inland sea is so richly stocked with fish as the Caspian, especially off the mouths of the large rivers, the Volga, Ural, Terek and Kura.

Some 50,000 persons are engaged in this industry off the mouth of the Volga alone.

In the northern section, which receives the copious volumes brought down by the Volga, Ural and Terek, the salinity is so slight (only 0.0075% in the surface layers) that the water is quite drinkable, its specific gravity being not higher than 1.0016.

The former section, which is too shallow to store up any large amount of heat during the summer, freezes for three or four months along the shores, effectually stopping navigation on the lower Volga, but out in the middle ice appears only when driven there by northerly winds.

Other ports in addition to those just mentioned are Astrakhan, on the Volga; Petrovsk, Derbent and Lenkoran, on the west shore; Enzeli or Resht, and Astarabad, on the Persian coast; and Mikhailovsk, on the east coast.

At various times and by various persons, but more particularly by Peter the Great, the project has been mooted of cutting a canal between the Volga and the Don, and so establishing unrestricted water communication between the Caspian and the Black Sea; but so far none of these schemes has taken practical shape.

A plan had been elaborated at Constantinople for uniting the Volga and Don by a canal, and in the summer of 1569 a large force of Janissaries and cavalry were sent to lay siege to Astrakhan and begin the canal works, while an Ottoman fleet besieged Azov.

Although in 1519 he was obliged to buy off the khan of the Crimea, Mahommed Girai, under the very walls of Moscow, towards the end of his reign he established the Russian influence on the Volga, and in 1530 placed the pretender Elanyei on the throne of Kazan.

After crushing, or compelling the alliance of, various nations unknown to fame (Alpilzuri, Alcidzuri, Himari, Tuncarsi, Boisci), they at length reached the Alani, a powerful nation which had its seat between the Volga and the Don; these also, after a struggle, they defeated and finally enlisted in their service.

An outbreak of plague on European soil in1878-1879on the banks of the Volga caused a panic throughout Europe.'

The only other appearance of plague in Europe in 1899 was on the Volga.

Returning to the court of Uzbeg, at Sarai on the Volga, he crossed the steppes to Khwarizm and Bokhara; thence through Khorasan and Kabul, and over the Hindu Kush (to which he gives that name, its first occurrence).

Its importance was still further increased during the latter part of the 19th century in consequence of the growth of manufacturing industry in the Oka basin, the rapid development of steamboat traffic on the Volga and its tributaries, the extension of the Russian railway system and the opening of Central Asia for trade.

The Kremlin, or old fort, occupies one of these hills facing the Volga.

The view from the Kremlin of the broad Volga, with its lowlying and far-spreading left bank, is very striking.

The fair is held on the flat sandy tongue of land between the Oka and the Volga, connected with the town by only a bridge of boats, 1500 yds.

An island in the Volga is the place where various kinds of rough wares are landed.

Nizhniy is the chief station of the Volga steamboat traffic. The first steamer made its appearance on the Volga in 1821, but it was not till 1845 that steam navigation began to assume large proportions.

From remote antiquity Russian merchants were wont to meet in summer with those from the East at different places on the Volga, between the mouths of the Oka and the Kama - the fair changing its site with the increasing or decreasing power of the nationalities which struggled for the possession of the middle Volga.

The confluence of the Oka and the Volga, inhabited in the 10th century by Mordvinian tribes, began to be coveted by the Russians as soon as they had occupied the upper Volga, and as early as the Iith century they established a fort, Gorodets, 20 m.

With the fall of Kazan, and the opening of free navigation on the Volga, it became the starting-place for the "caravan" of boats yearly sent to the lower Volga under the protection of a military force, whilst the thick forests of the neighbourhood favoured the development of shipbuilding.

The surface is a low-lying plain, except that in the west the Ergeni Hills (500-575 ft.) form the water-parting between the Volga basin and that of the Don.

Fishing off the mouth of the Volga gives occupation to 50,000 persons; the fish, chiefly herrings and sturgeon, together with the caviare prepared from the latter, are sold for the most part at Nizhniy-Novgorod.

The term Finn has a wider application than Finland, being, with its adjective Finnic or Finno-Ugric (q.v.) or Ugro-Finnic, the collective name of the westernmost branch of the Ural-Altaic family, dispersed throughout Finland, Lapland, the Baltic provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, Curland), parts of Russia proper (south of Lake Onega), both banks of middle Volga, Perm, Vologda, West Siberia (between the Ural Mountains and the Yenissei) and Hungary.

It derives its importance from its situation on the Volga, opposite the mouth of the Sheksna, which connects the Volga with the regions around Lake Ladoga.

The "basin" of the Volga is not limited to its actual catchment area.

By a system of canals which connect the upper Volga with the Neva, the commercial mouth of the Volga has been transferred, so to speak, from the Caspian to the Baltic, thus making St Petersburg, the capital and chief seaport of Russia, the chief port of the Volga basin as well.

The stream first traverses several small lakes, all having the same level, and, after its confluence with the Runa, enters Lake Volga.

From its confluence with the Sheksna the Volga flows with a very gentle descent towards the south-east, past Yaroslavl and Kostroma, along a broad valley hollowed to a depth of 150-200 ft.

At its confluence with the Oka the Volga enters the broad lacustrine depression which must have communicated with the Caspian during the post-Pliocene period by means of at least a broad strait.

On the right the Volga is joined by the Sura, which drains a large area and brings a volume of 2700 to 22,000 cub.

The Kama,' which brings to the Volga a contribution ranging from 52,500 to 144,400 cub.

It rises in Vyatka, takes a wide sweep towards the north and east, and then flows south and south-west to join the Volga after a course of no less than 1150 m.

Along the whole of the Samara bend the Volga is accompanied on its right bank by high cliffs, which it is constantly undermining, while broad lowland areas stretch along the left or eastern bank, and are intersected by several old beds of the Volga.

The isthmus is too high to be crossed by means of a canal, but a railway to Kalach brings the Volga into some sort of connexion with the Don and the Sea of Azov.

Here the Volga receives no tributaries; its right bank is skirted by low hills, but on the left it anastomoses freely with the Akhtuba when its waters are high, and floods the country for 15 to 35 m.

All along its course the Volga is eroding and destroying its banks with great rapidity; towns and loading ports have constantly to be shifted farther back.

The question of the gradual desiccation of the Volga, and its causes, has often been discussed, and in 1838 a committee which included Karl Baer among its members was appointed by the Russian academy of sciences to investigate the subject.

No positive result was, however, arrived at, principally on account of the want of regular measurements of the volume of the Volga and its tributaries - measurements which began to be made on scientific principles only in 1880.

Still, if we go back two or three centuries, it is indisputable that rivers of the Volga basin which were easily navigable then are now hardly accessible to the smallest craft.

The network of shallow and still limans or "cut-offs" in the delta of the Volga and the shallow waters of the northern Caspian, freshened as these are by the water of the Volga, the Ural, the Kura and the Terek, is exceedingly favourable to the breeding of fish, and as a whole constitutes one of the most productive fishing grounds in the world.

It is estimated that 180,000 tons of fish of all kinds, of the value of considerably over £1,500,000, are taken annually in the four fishing districts of the Volga, Ural, Terek and Kura.

Seal-hunting is carried on off the Volga mouth, and every year about 40,000 of Phoca vitulina are killed to the north of the Manghishlak peninsula on the east side of the Caspian.

The greater part of the traffic is up river, the amount of merchandise which reaches Astrakhan being nearly fifteen times less than that reaching St Petersburg by the Volga canals.

The Volga was not improbably known to the early Greeks, though it is not mentioned by any writer previous to Ptolemy.

According to him, the Rha is a tributary of an interior sea, formed from the confluence of two great rivers, the sources of which are separated by twenty degrees of longitude, but it is scarcely possible to judge from his statements how far the Sla y s had by that time succeeded in penetrating into the basin of the Volga.

The Arab geographers throw little light on the condition of the Volga during the great migrations of the 3rd century, or subsequently under the invasion of the Huns, the growth of the Khazar empire in the southern steppes and of that of'Bulgaria on the middle Volga.

But we know that in the 9th century the Volga basin was occupied by Finnish tribes in the north and by Khazars and various Turkish races in the south.

The Sla y s, driven perhaps to the west, had only the Volkhov and the Dnieper, while the (Mahommedan) Bulgarian empire, at the confluence of the Volga with the Kama, was so powerful that for some time it was an open question whether Islam or Christianity would gain the upper hand among the Slav idolaters.

The great lacustrine depression of the middle Volga was thus reached; and when the Mongol invasion of 1239-42 came, it encountered in the Oka basin a dense agricultural population with many fortified and wealthy towns - a population which the Mongols found they could conquer, indeed, but were unable to drive before them as they had done so many of the Turkish tribes.

This invasion checked but did not stop the advance of the Russians down the Volga.

But in the meantime a flow of Novgorodian colonization had moved eastward, along the upper portions of the left-bank tributaries of the Volga, and had reached the Urals.

With the capture of Kazan (1552) the Russians found the lower Volga open to their boats, and eight years afterwards they were masters of the mouth of the river at Astrakhan.

Two centuries more elapsed before the Russians secured a free passage to the Black Sea and became masters of the Sea of Azov and the Crimea; the Volga, however, was their route.

P. P. Semenov's Geographical and Statistical Dictionary (5 vols., St Petersburg, 1863-85) contains a full bibliography of the Volga and tributaries.

Bogusla y skiy, The Volga as a Means of Communication (Russian, 1887), with detailed profile and maps; Peretyatkovich, Volga Region in the 15th and 16th Centuries (1877); and Lender, Die Wolga (1889).

In May 1722 a flotilla descended the Volga commanded by Tsar Peter and on the 19th of July the Russian flag first waved over the Caspian.

Owing to its situation on the navigable river Don and at the junction of three railways, radiating to north-western Russia, Caucasia and the Volga respectively, Rostov has become the chief seaport of south-eastern Russia, being second in importance on the Black Sea to Odessa only.

From their land four rivers flowed into the Maeotis, but as one of them, the Oarus, is almost certainly the Volga, there must be some mistake about this.

Owing to the great railway which crosses the country from Riga to Smolensk, afterwards dividing into two branches, to Orenburg and Tsaritsyn on the lower Volga respectively, Riga is the storehouse and place of export for hemp coming by rail from west central Russia, and for corn, Riga merchants sending their buyers as far east as Tambov.

On the Volga they mingled with remnants of the old Bulgarian empire, and elsewhere with Finnish stems, as well as with remnants of the ancient Italian and Greek colonies in Crimea and Caucasians in Caucasus.

The Bashkirs who live between the Kama, Ural and Volga are possibly of Finnish origin, but now speak a Tatar language and have become Mahommedans.

Eight miles above Astrakhan, on the right bank of the Volga, are the ruins of two ancient cities superimposed one upon the other.

Among European freshwater fishing-grounds, the Danube is only surpassed by the Volga; the most valuable fish being sturgeon and sterlet, mostly netted in the St George mouth; carp, often weighing 50 lb; pike, perch, tench and eels.

In the middle division, or from the mouth of the Voronezh to the point where it makes its nearest approach to the Volga, the stream cuts its way for the most part through Cretaceous rocks, which in many places rise on either side in steep and elevated banks, and at intervals encroach on the river-bed.

Shallow reaches are not uncommon, and there are at least seven considerable shoals in the south-western part of the course; partly owing to this cause, and partly to the scarcity of ship-timber in the Voronezh government, the Don, although navigable as far up as Voronezh, does not attain any great importance as a means of communication till it reaches Kachalinskaya in the vicinity of the Volga.

From that point, or rather from Kalach, where the railway (built in 1862) from the Volga has its western terminus, the traffic is very extensive.

They contain shells of molluscs now inhabiting the Sea of Aral, and in their petrographical features are exactly like those of the lower Volga.

The Ust-Urt plateau and the Mugojar Mountains prevented it from spreading north-westward, and a narrow channel connected it along the Uzboi with the Caspian, which sent a broad gulf to the east, spread up to the Volga, and was connected by the Manych with the Black Sea basin.

They are supposed to be recent immigrants to Syr-darya, having come from the former Bulgarian Empire on the middle Volga.

Tradition relates that he preached in Asia Minor and in Scythia, along the Black Sea as far as the Volga.

Novorossiysk is connected by a branch railway to Tikhoryetskaya (169 m.) with the main Caucasian line, which crosses the Volga near Tsaritsyn, and has become an important centre for the export of corn, and since the petroleum wells of Groznyi in northern Caucasia were tapped it has become an entrepot for the export of petroleum.

It has railwaycarriage works, cotton mills, steam flour mills, tallow works and quarries of limestone, and carries on an active trade in the export of wooden wares and in the import of grain, salt and fish, brought from the Volga governments.

Wild hemp still grows on the banks of the lower Ural, and the Volga, near the Caspian Sea.

Thus the Volga, the Dnieper and the Don attain respectively lengths of 2325, 1410 and 1325 m., and their basins run to 563,300, 202,140 and 166,000 sq.

The Volga, the chief river of Russia, has a length of 2325 m., and its basin, about 563,300 sq.

It is connected with the Baltic by three systems of canals (see Volga).

Their home was in the spurs of the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian - called by medieval Moslem geographers Bahr-al-Khazar ("sea of the Khazars"); their cities, all populous and civilized commercial centres, were Itil, the capital, upon the delta of the Volga, the "river of the Khazars," Semender (Tarkhu), the older capital, Khamlidje or Khalendsch, Belendscher, the outpost towards Armenia, and Sarkel on the Don.

European and Chinese merchants resided at Ardebil in the middle ages, and for a long time the city was a great emporium for central Asian and Indian merchandise, which was forwarded to Europe via Tabriz, Trebizond and the Black Sea, and also by way of the Caucasus and the Volga.