Erzyan Mastor

Erzyan Mastor (Purgaz Rus, Purgaz's volost), literally meaning "Land of the Erzya," was a medieval state formation on the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, preceding the Nizhny Novgorod Principality. It was the most significant tribal confederation of the Mordva peoples.

Erzyan Mastor controlled a substantial portion of the trade routes running from the south, east, and northeast along the rivers Rav (Volga), Oka, Tsna, and Sura, which flowed through its territory. The Don River connected the Land of the Erzya with the southwest.

It possessed rich forests, rivers, and fertile lands.

What lies behind the name

Erzyan Mastor — "the land of the Erzya," the Erzya name for the territories that the Erzya occupied before Russian colonization: the interfluve of the Oka, the Volga, and the Sura with their tributaries — the Tyosha, the Pyana, and the Alatyr. In Russian chronicles these lands are called the Mordovian Land, and the associated "Purgaz's volost" and "Purgaz's Rus" have been a subject of dispute among historians for the past century and a half.^[1]^[2]

Ivan Smirnov, in an 1895 essay, described the ancestral lands of the Mordva as the territories watered by the Tyosha, the Pyana, the Moksha, and the Sura. The place names and hydronyms of the Volga's right bank are predominantly of Mordovian origin: Arzamas, the Kudma River, Chuvarlei, Kuzhutki.^[3]

The Erzya name is also borne by a newspaper published in Saransk since September 1994 — more on that below.

Chronicle sources

"Purgaz's Rus" is mentioned in the Laurentian Chronicle only once, under the year 1229: "Purgaz was defeated by Puresh's son together with the Polovtsy, and all the Mordva and Purgaz's Rus were slain." The same text is repeated in the Moscow Chronicle Compilation of the late fifteenth century, the Voskresenskaya and Nikonovskaya chronicles; the term does not appear in other sources or in Vasily Tatishchev. Purgaz himself is mentioned twice under the year 1228, and in April 1229 the Mordva, together with Purgaz, marched on Nizhny Novgorod.^[1]^[2]

"Purgaz's volost" is not the same as "Purgaz's Rus," and this distinction is significant. Historian Andrey Kuznetsov notes that reasoning based on archaeological and anthropological material "may be valid for localizing Purgaz's volost, which may not coincide territorially or politically with Purgaz's Rus"; Aleksandr Tsirkin, by contrast, treats these two concepts as identical.^[1]

Foreign testimony concerning these same lands begins earlier. Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, in his treatise De Administrando Imperio (948–952), measures the distance "to Mordia"; the Dominican friar Julian writes in 1235 that he "traveled by river for fifteen days through the kingdom of the Mordvins," naming two rulers within it — Purgaz and Puresh.^[4]

The name "Mordva" itself appears in the Primary Chronicle; the first recorded military clash is dated to 1103. The names of the individual branches entered the written record much later: "Moksha" appears in cadastral records of 1624–1626, and "Erzya" only in eighteenth-century scholarly works.^[2]

To the east and south of the Moksha River stretch vast forests inhabited by the Mordva people, who have their own language and are subject to the Muscovite sovereign… The Mordva people live along the Volga, below Nizhny Novgorod, on the southern bank^[4]
— Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes on Muscovy, 1549

Where scholars have sought Purgaz's volost

There is no agreed localization of Purgaz's volost: at least nine proposed locations have accumulated over the years — ranging from the lower reaches of the Oka to the middle Posurye. The wide variation is explained by the fact that the chronicle offers only a single mention with no geographical references, and the archaeological material is open to different interpretations.^[1]

Proposed localizations of Purgaz's volost in historiography
Scholar	Proposed location
N. F. Kapterev	along the Tyosha, Pyana, and Serzha rivers
V. V. Golmsten, E. I. Goryunova	lower reaches of the Oka near its confluence with the Volga
A. N. Nasonov	the Mordovian Land near the Murom Principality
P. D. Stepanov	lower reaches of the Moksha, near Stary Kadom
V. N. Gagin	the basins of the Sura, Alatyr, and Pyana, and the middle course of the Moksha
L. R. Prozoriv	the Posurye (Sura River basin)
A. V. Begovatkin	the lower Primokshanye, Kadomskoye and Temgenevskoye hill-forts
V. V. Zeleneyev	the interfluve of the Tyosha and the Moksha
V. V. Sedov	the middle Posurye

Who were "Purgaz's Rus"

Several interpretations of this phrase have accumulated, and none has become universally accepted.^[1]^[5]

The first: Russian colonists who had fled princely oppression to come under the authority of an Erzya ruler. This line was taken by Mikhail Pokrovsky and Kapterev; Melnikov-Pechersky considered them to be Ryazanians, while Smirnov identified them as migrants from the Murom Principality.

The second: a hired retinue. Dmitry Ilovaiskiy called it "a miscellaneous Russian war band," Vladimir Pashuto described it as Ryazanian mercenaries. Kuznetsov summarizes the position as follows: it was a detachment of Slavs subordinate to Purgaz.

The third: a distinct non-Slavic people. Nikolay Kostomarov saw in them "a separate Finnic tribe"; Sergey Solovyov suggested that "Rus is probably an altered form of Erza"; Nikolay Zavaryukhin wrote directly that "Rus is the Erzya." Ilovaiskiy sharply contested this line, pointing out that in the same chronicle Purgaz's volost is described as Mordovian, not Russian.

The fourth: a relic of different origin — a remnant of the Varangian Rus of the Baltic–Volga route (Vyacheslav Fomin), the Rus-Alans of the Rus Khaganate (Elena Galkina, Apollon Kuzmin), or descendants of the Posura Imenkovo culture people (Sedov). This version is criticized for artificially binding Sura River anthropological material to the hypothesis.^[1]

One further hypothesis rests not on chronicles but on physical anthropology. Viktor Abramov, having applied cluster analysis to Mordovian, Russian, and Turkic groups of the Volga Region, found that the Tyeryukhane were closest to the Erzya group and, after them, to the Upper Volga Russian population; he concluded that the Tyeryukhane had formed from a mixture of local Mordva and incoming Upper Volga Russians. From this he drew the question placed in the title of his study: might the Tyeryukhane themselves be that very "Purgaz's Rus"?^[5]

"Purgaz's Rus" of the Laurentian Chronicle remains a mystery for the resolution of which there is insufficient data… It remains a mystery by virtue of the single mention it receives^[1]
— A. A. Kuznetsov, as quoted in an article by V. A. Yurchenkov, 2013

On old maps

These lands were not labeled by their own name on European maps: an ethnonym was used instead. The inscriptions Mordwa populi, Mordua populi, Mordva Peuples, Mordua, Mordwa appear on maps by Augustin Hirschvogel (1546), Sigismund von Herberstein (1549, 1556, 1557), Giacomo Gastaldi (1550), Anthony Jenkinson (1562), Caspar Vopel (1566), Gerard Mercator (1594), Giovanni Magini (1596), Matthias Quad (1600), Hessel Gerritsz (1613), Isaac Massa (early seventeenth century), Guillaume Sanson (1674), and Guillaume Delisle (1706).^[4]

Medieval Western forms of the ethnonym include Merdas, Merdinis, Merdium, Mordani, Mordua, and Morduinos.^[4]

The newspaper Erzyan Mastor

The same name is borne by an independent socio-political newspaper published in Saransk since 20 September 1994, in both the Erzya and Russian languages. Its founder is the Fund for the Salvation of the Erzya Language, registered on 8 February 1993 by the writer Evgeniy Chetvergow, known by his Erzya pen name Nuyan Vidyaz, and named after the linguist Anatoly Ryabov (1894–1938).^[6]

The editors-in-chief have been Nuyan Vidyaz (1994–2016), Olga Kuzovatkina (2016–2019), and Tatyana Larina (from 2019); the founding contributors included Aleksandr Sharonov and Mariz Kemal. A free digital archive covers the years 2003–2012 — 235 issues and 1,652 articles. The same fund established Erzya Language Day, observed on 16 April, and the Ryabov Prize.^[6]

A page from this newspaper can be seen in the article Erzya", and its readers from Nizhny Novgorod can be found in Pikshen, where an issue of Erzyan Mastor is on display in the museum of Erzya everyday life.^[6]

The Nature of the Phenomenon

Erzyan Mastor is usually referred to "allegorically" as "Purgaz's Volost" or "Purgaz's Rus," after the last Inyazar of the Erzya people — the great ruler of Erzyan Mastor, Purgaz, who heroically gave his life in the struggle for the independence of his country and people.

A Mark on History

Saransk scholar N. F. Mokshin writes: "Purgaz's Rus ('Purgaz's Volost') — a territory (?) in the late 12th and early 13th centuries with a population subject to the Mordovian (Erzya) prince Purgaz.

The center of Purgaz's Rus has not been established.

It has been suggested that it may have been Purgasovo Gorodishche."

Colonization

Erzya patriots hold that cultural colonization began at the moment of the military conquest of Erzyan Mastor.

The traditional Erzya faith in the Creator Ineshkipaz was replaced by faith in Jesus Christ. Praying to Ineshkipaz was forbidden. The Erzya's places of worship (keremets, maars, kalmazyrs) were destroyed, and burial according to Erzya customs was prohibited.

The Erzya rite of lemdyamo (name-giving) was replaced by Orthodox baptism; the rite of chiyamo (wedding ceremony) was replaced by Orthodox matrimony; the rite of layshema (lamentation) was replaced by the funeral service. Erzya festivals — Rasken Ozks, Velen Ozks, Inechi, Kizen veshnema, Tuvonsyay, and others — were banned and replaced by Easter, Epiphany, Trinity Sunday, the Ascension, and so on. Erzya Ozatis and Ozavys were replaced by Orthodox priests.

On Erzya graves, a cross came to be erected in place of the traditional house-shaped markers bearing ancestral buycheshks (clan signs). The arrangement of bodies within graves also changed.

The Roots of the Confrontation Between Slavs and Erzya

The nature of the confrontation lies in differing types of land use. The economy of the Erzya tribes did not disturb the natural landscape of the country — the broad-leaved forests within the quadrangle of Ryazan – Zhiguli – Kazan – Dyatlov Hills. The Slavic tribes, already under pressure from the steppe peoples in the pre-Christian period, began pushing the Finno-Ugric peoples aside, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. The lands cleared of forest (and incidentally of the local population) and fertilized by ash yielded enormous harvests for the first few years, leading to rapid population growth; once yields declined, the population would move on, sending the "firebird" ahead of them. The river Oka became a natural barrier to this colonization. The Erzya patriotic tradition traces the beginning of the conflict to the burning of the city of Ryazan (Erzyan, later known as "Old Ryazan"), and links the subsequent resistance to the movement of the Erzya proto-state northeastward along the right bank of the Oka and the founding of a new capital — Arzamas (Erzya Mas).

Was There a Purgasova Rus?

The "Laurentian Chronicle" reports that the Murom prince Yuri Davydovich entered the Mordvian land, burned the grain of Purgaz's volost, destroyed it, and slaughtered the livestock, sending the captives back. The Mordvians fled into their forests and strongholds, and those who did not flee were cut down by Gyurgi's young warriors… and in the same source: …The Mordvians came with Purgaz to Novgorod and were repelled by the Novgorodians; they set fire to the monastery of the Holy Mother of God and the church that stood outside the city; that same day they departed, carrying away many of their dead. That same year, Puresh's son, together with the Polovtsians, defeated Purgaz, and slew all the Mordvians and Purgaz's Rus, while Purgaz barely escaped with a small detachment.

Erzya patriots eager to prove that the Erzya people had reached a state stage of development — rather than remaining at a primitive one — by the time colonization began frequently base their argument on this passage, treating the term "Rus" as directly meaning "state." But is that actually so?

The arguments of those who wish to read "state" into the term "Rus" trace back directly to the quasi-historical writings of Lomonosov, who was determined to prove that the state arose spontaneously in Kievan Rus — without any Varangian involvement. For him, therefore, "Rus" derived from the Ros River south of Kyiv. From this, Lomonosov reasoned, it was an autochthonous state, since its name was of local origin.

The opposing view is held by supporters of the Norman theory of the origin of the Novgorod and subsequently Kievan state. In Finnish, "ruotsi" originally denoted the crew of a Viking warship, and later came to mean "Sweden." In East Slavic, "ruotsi" became "rus'" in the same way that "suomi" became "sum'." This makes it clear what "princely rus'" meant — and in particular what "Purgaz's rus'" was, the force entirely destroyed by the Mokshans (led by Puresh's son) together with the Polovtsians. It was a princely retinue, mercenaries. That is, the passage "slew all the Mordvians and Purgaz's rus'" refers not to the annihilation of the Erzya people and their state, but to the severe military defeat of the local militiamen and mercenaries of the inyazor (ruler) Purgaz.

At the same time, it must be noted that the fact that the term "rus'" does not mean "state" does not automatically imply that an Erzya state as such did not exist. The contrary is suggested by the term "Purgaz's volost" — clearly an administrative-territorial formation. The chroniclers use the word "volost" to diminish their subject, placing the ruler Purgaz on a level with the boyars. In the text of the tale of the battle on the Pyana, Mordvian leaders of clearly lower rank than Purgaz are called "vile Mordvian princes." There the Rurikids, having suffered defeat at the hands of a Siberian-Mordvian army, conversely inflate the status of their opponents in order to justify their own defeat by pointing to the enemy's might. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between: Purgaz was certainly no tsar with princes beneath him, but neither was he a mere boyar. Most likely, Erzyan Mastor at the time of the events described was on a par with a grand principality or a large and influential one.

Interesting Facts

On domestic maps, not a single Erzya city or settlement is marked within the territory of Erzyan Mastor, as though it had been a desert or an empty forest. As a rule, the borders of Russian principalities and Volga Bulgaria are shown, while between them, across the vast supposedly empty territory, the word Mordva is written. Russian historiography effectively suppresses the war against Erzyan Mastor.

A representative of the Erzya people (archive) Nikon was made Patriarch of All Rus.

Links

ErzyanMastor.RF — a blog about Erzya traditions
source lost
The page no longer opens, and no copy exists in any web archive — neither we nor its author managed to save it in time. We are preserving the address at which it was hosted, as the information in this article is based on it.
http://эрзяньмастор.рф
site erzyanmastor.rf · accessed 14 September 2026 · copy exists — please bring it

Sources

niign.ru — Tsentr i periferiya — V. A. Yurchyonkov. Purgasova Rus: From a Historiographical Puzzle to Historical Reality. 2013, No. 4, p. 4 (archive)
cyberleninka.ru — Sotsialno-politicheskiye nauki — Ye. N. Mokshina. The Mordva People in Russian Chronicles and Other Written Sources of the Middle Ages, 2013 (archive)
niign.ru — Research Institute of the Humanities under the Government of the Republic of Mordovia — I. N. Smirnov. Mordva: A Historical and Ethnographic Study. Kazan, 1895 (reprint Saransk, 2002) (archive)
zubova-poliana.narod.ru — Historical and Ethnographic Site of the Zubovo-Polyansky District — The Mordva Through Foreign Eyes in the 6th–18th Centuries (archive)
cyberleninka.ru — Vestnik Mordovskogo universiteta — V. K. Abramov. The Teryukhane — Purgasova Rus? 2014, No. 3
mastor.erzja.info — About the publication: the newspaper Erzyan Mastor and the Erzya Language Rescue Foundation