New in Research of Arzamas Initial History

The article discusses major achievements in historical, archaeological and source studies of the initial history of Arzamas, made over the past five years and which made it possible to solve many problems that existed quite recently. The results of these achievements provide grounds for recreating in general terms the early history of Arzamas. From the middle of the 1st millennium AD there existed a Mordovian village on the territory of the city. At the beginning of the 13th century it was located on the periphery of the proto-state formation of the Mordovians (Purgasova volost) and in the middle of the century was destroyed either by Russian squads or Mongol-Tatars. At the end of the 15th century local Tatar princely dynasties fell into vassal dependence on Moscow, and from the beginning of the 16th century in the future Arzamas region a group of Russian palace villages was formed. However, the Arzamas fortress was founded only in 1572 in the conditions of the second Cheremis war on a certain Arzemas settlement.
The founder of Arzamas was the governor Nikita Ivanovich Eropkin. The Arzamas district was assembled from the lands that were previously subordinated partly to the Murom and partly to
the Nizhny Novgorod administration. The city was the center of the military service corporation of the county; its economic importance was initially small due to its remoteness from the ancient caravan road. At the time of the founding of the fortress, next to it there was the Mordovian village, which was then moved about 30 km to the north. The main remaining problem in this picture of the early history of Arzamas is the existence of settlements here between the mid-13th and mid 16th centuries. The discovery of their traces would make it possible to understand what
the Arzemas settlement was like, and who Arzemas, whose name it bore, was.