Tartary

Tartary (Latin: Tartaria; French: Tartarie; German: Tartarei; Russian: Тартария, romanized: Tartariya) or Tatary (Russian: Татария, romanized: Tatariya) was a blanket term used in Western European literature and cartography for a vast part of Asia bounded by the Caspian Sea, the Ural Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, and the northern borders of China, India and Persia, at a time when this region was largely unknown to European geographers.

[3] In the early modern period, as understanding of the geography increased, Europeans began to subdivide Tartary into sections with prefixes denoting the name of the ruling power or the geographical location.

[3][4][5] By the seventeenth century, however, largely under the influence of Catholic missionary writings, the word "Tartar" came to refer to the Manchus and the lands they ruled as "Tartary".

Mead, the polymath and "seer" Emanuel Swedenborg is quoted as having advised, "Seek for the Lost Word among the hierophants of Tartary, China, and Tibet.

[5] Ethnographical data collected by Jesuit missionaries in China contributed to the replacement of "Chinese Tartary" with Manchuria in European geography by the early 18th century.