Were the Mongols originally called Tatars by the world?

Nature · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: History often confuses who we are with who we fought. For centuries, the term 'Tatar' was a floating label, sometimes describing a specific confederation, sometimes a linguistic outsider, and occasionally even the very Mongols who eventually erased them from the map. The truth is a complex web of migration and identity.

The Tatar confederation was a major tribal entity in the 12th-century Mongolian Plateau. Its origins are deeply contested by historians. Some link them to the Rourans, who were potentially of Proto-Mongolic origin, while others argue they contained significant Turkic-speaking elements from the Xiongnu. This ambiguity persists because Chinese historians historically ascribed Xiongnu ancestry to many different nomadic groups, regardless of their actual linguistic roots.

The ethnonym 'Tatar' appears in various forms across different cultures. In Turkic inscriptions from 732 and 735 CE, it referred to the 'Thirty Tatar clan' and 'Nine Tatar.' While some scholars argue these were Mongolic speakers, others point to 10th-century geographical treatises identifying Tatars as part of Turkic-speaking groups. By the 11th century, the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari included Tatars among Turkic peoples, even noting they were bilingual, speaking both Turkic and their own distinct languages.

The relationship between Tatars and Mongols is particularly nuanced. Some theories suggest that Europeans first learned of the Mongols through the Tatars, who served as vanguards in battle. During the initial 30 to 40 years of the Mongol Empire's growth, some scholars observe that the term 'Tatar' served as an endonym for ethnic Mongols prior to their shift towards 'Mongol' as a dynastic-state designation. This shift may have been driven by insecurity or a need to distinguish 'in' groups from 'out' groups. Ultimately, after Genghis Khan conquered the Tatar confederation in 1202, the survivors were absorbed, and the name 'Tatar' eventually became a derogatory term for rebellious tribes or a label for unrelated Turkic-speaking groups like the Volga Tatars.

Today, the legacy of the name survives in two distinct directions: as a cultural identity for the Volga Tatars, who adopted the name of their conquerors as a sign of political allegiance, and as a historical ghost of a confederation that was once a primary rival to the rise of the Mongol Empire.

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