Ancestral Icons

The Yusupovs are an ancient Moslem dynasty with roots going as far back as the Baghdad Caliphate in the 10th century AD. Family legends and ancient chronicles at the Russian National Archive of Ancient Deeds in Moscow bear ample evidence to the Yusupovs' family history. For a long time, historians had named the legendary Abu Baqar (572-634), a friend and father-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, as the Yusupov paterfamilias.

But in his two-volume historical treatise, On the Provenance of the Princes Yusupov, written in the 1860s, Prince N.B. Yusupov contested that theory. "[My most ancient ancestor] was not Abu Baqar, the father-in-law of Mohammed, but his namesake three centuries later, Abu Baqar bin Raioq, a high-placed official and second-in-command under Caliph Radi-Billag, who vested bin Raioq with the entirety of clerical and secular power," wrote N.B. Yusupov. Twelve generations of his descendants lived in the Middle East, holding various high posts such as sultans and emirs in Damascus, Egypt, Constantinople, and Mecca.

In the 12th century for reasons unknown, Termes the third son of Sultan Babatuqles of Mecca, led his subordinate Moslem tribes to the shores of the Azov and Caspian Seas, where they settled down across a vast area between the Danube and the Volga, and then between the Volga and the Urals.

Two hundred years later, one of his descendants, Yedygei (1340s-1419), a brave field commander under Timur, founded the Nogai Horde, which reached its heyday during the reign of his great-great-grandson, Khan Yusuf (1480s-1555). For 20 years Yusuf remained a close ally of  John IV (Ivan the Terrible), who in return recognized the Nogai Horde as a sovereign state. But the Russian and Nogai strongmen eventually went to loggerheads over the Kazan Khanate, where Yusuf's daughter Sumbeca (1520-1557) was the Khan's wife and queen.

The troops of Ivan the Terrible besieged and captured Kazan in 1552, taking Sumbeca and her young son prisoner. In Moscow, the regal prisoners were treated with appropriate honors and respect, and resided at the Kremlin. Yusuf, however, demanded an unconditional release of his daughter and grandson and, when the Russian Tsar refused, decided to sever his alliance with Russia. Yusuf would have done so without hesitation if it hadn't been for his brother, Ismail Murza, who killed Yusuf and usurped power in the Nogai Horde.