It Took Russia 300 Years To Destroy the Final Pieces of Genghis Khan’s Empire

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Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan’s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of 1552, the 22-year-old Ivan stood outside the walls of a city that had raided, humiliated, and enslaved Russians for over a century. The Kazan Khanate, successor state to the Golden Horde and one of the wealthiest trading cities on the Volga, had already repulsed two of Ivan's previous campaigns — both times thanks as much to the Russian weather as to Tatar arms. But this time was different. Ivan had spent two years building a prefabricated fortress hundreds of miles upstream and floating it downriver, creating…