Allegiance in the Eye of the Beholder: The Khivan Submission of 1700

Abstract In 1700, a petition submitted in Moscow by the envoy Dostak Bahādur on behalf of Shāh Niyāz Khān of Khiva was interpreted by Russian officials as a request to enter the subjecthood of Peter I. Historians have generally explained this episode either as a formal but politically insignificant act of submission or as the product of mistranslation. Yet, neither previous dynamics of Muscovite-Khivan relations nor the contents of the embassy’s original objectives points to any intention on the part of the Khivan ruler to become the tsar’s subject.This essay re-examines the Khivan embassy of 1700 and the circumstances in which the petition was produced. It moves beyond explanations that attribute the episode to bureaucratic manipulation or a fundamental incommensurability of political vocabularies, and instead situates it within the political dynamic of Peter I’s court. In particular, it pays attention to the individuals such as Boris Golitsyn and the intermediaries, most notably Mikhail Zamanov, whose linguistic and social connections linked the Khivan envoy to Golitsyn’s circle. The essay argues that the idea of Khivan submission was not part of the embassy’s original agenda, but seems to have emerged in the course of negotiations in Moscow. The language of “submission” remained deliberately ambiguous, allowing different actors to attach different meanings to the same document.