Meshchera people

This is in stark contrast to the related tribes Merya and Muroma, which appear to have been assimilated by the East Slavs by the 10th and the 11th centuries.

Ivan II, prince of Moscow, wrote in his will, 1358, about the village Meshcherka, which he had bought from the native Meshcherian chieftain Alexander Ukovich.

In the 16th century, the St Nicholas monastery was founded in Radovitsky in order to convert the remaining Meshchera pagans.

The graves of women have yielded objects typical of the Volga Finns, of the 4th-7th centuries, consisting of rings, jingling pendants, buckles and torcs.

Some of the graves contained well-preserved copper oxides of the decorations with long black hair locked into small bells into which were woven pendants.

In the 16th century, the St Nicholas monastery was founded in Radovitsky in order to convert the remaining Meshchera pagans.

The princely family Meschersky in Russia derives its nobility from having originally been native rulers of some of these Finnic tribes.

[1] Some linguists think that Meschera might have been a dialect of Mordvinic,[7] while Pauli Rahkonen has suggested on the basis of toponymic evidence that it was a Permic or closely related language.

[8] Some toponyms which Rahkonen suggested as Permic are the hydronymic stems: Un-, Ič-, Ul and Vil-, which can be compared to Udmurt uno 'big', iči 'little', vi̮l 'upper' and ulo 'lower'.