As merchants from the Middle East traded with the
Bashkirs and other people living on the western slopes of the Ural as far north as
Great Perm, since the 10th century, medieval
mideastern geographers had been aware of the existence of the mountain range in its entirety, stretching as far as the Arctic Ocean in the north. The first Russian mention of the mountains to the east of the
East European Plain is provided by the
Primary Chronicle, where it describes the
Novgorodian expedition to the upper reaches of the
Pechora in the year 1096. During the next few centuries, the Novgorodians engaged in
fur trading with the local population and collected tribute from
Yugra and
Great Perm, slowly expanding southwards. The city-state of Novgorod established two trade routes to the
Ob River, both starting from the town of
Ustyug. The rivers,
Chusovaya and
Belaya, were first mentioned in the chronicles of 1396 and 1468, respectively. In 1430, the town of
Solikamsk (Kama Salt) was founded on the
Kama at the foothills of the Ural, where salt was
produced in open pans.
Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, captured Perm,
Pechora and
Yugra from the declining Novgorod Republic in 1472. With
the excursions of 1483 and 1499–1500 across the Ural, Moscow managed to subjugate Yugra completely. The Russians received tribute, but contact with the tribes ceased after they left. 's map Nevertheless, around the early 16th century, Polish geographer,
Maciej of Miechów, in his influential
Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis (1517) argued that there were no mountains in Eastern Europe at all, challenging the point of view of some authors of Classical antiquity, which were popular during the
Renaissance. Only after Sigismund von Herberstein in his
Notes on Muscovite Affairs (1549) had reported, following Russian sources, that there are mountains behind the Pechora and identified them with the
Riphean Mountains and
Hyperboreans of ancient authors, did the existence of the Ural, or at least of its northern part, become firmly established in the
Western geography. The Middle and Southern Ural were still largely unavailable and unknown to the Russian or Western European geographers. in 1910 In the 1550s, after the
Tsardom of Russia had defeated the
Khanate of Kazan and proceeded to gradually annex the lands of the Bashkirs, the Russians finally reached the southern part of the mountain chain. In 1574, they founded
Ufa. The upper reaches of the Kama and Chusovaya in the Middle Ural, still unexplored, as well as parts of Transuralia still held by the hostile
Siberian Khanate, were granted to the
Stroganovs by several decrees of the tsar in 1558–1574. The Stroganovs land provided the staging ground for
Yermak's
incursion into Siberia. Yermak crossed the Ural from the Chusovaya to the
Tagil around 1581. In 1597, Babinov's road was built across the Ural from Solikamsk to the valley of the
Tura, where the town of
Verkhoturye (Upper Tura) was founded in 1598. Customs was established in Verkhoturye shortly thereafter and the road was made the only legal connection between European Russia and Siberia for a long time. In 1648, the town of
Kungur was founded at the western foothills of the Middle Ural. During the 17th century, the first deposits of
iron and
copper ores,
mica,
gemstones and other minerals were discovered in the Ural. Iron and copper
smelting works emerged. In particular, the
Gumyoshevsky mine was established in 1702 at an ancient copper deposit known since
Bronze Age — so-called "legendary"
Copper Mountain which also produced
malachite. Mining intensified particularly quickly during the reign of
Peter I of Russia. In 1720–1722, he commissioned
Vasily Tatishchev to oversee and develop the mining and smelting works in the Ural. Tatishchev proposed a new copper smelting factory in
Yegoshikha, which would eventually become the core of the city of
Perm and a new iron smelting factory on the
Iset, which would become the largest in the world at the time of construction and give birth to the city of
Yekaterinburg. Both factories were actually founded by Tatishchev's successor,
Georg Wilhelm de Gennin, in 1723. Tatishchev returned to the Ural on the order of
Empress Anna to succeed de Gennin in 1734–1737. Transportation of the output of the smelting works to the markets of European Russia necessitated the construction of the
Siberian Route from Yekaterinburg across the Ural to Kungur and Yegoshikha (Perm) and further to Moscow, which was completed in 1763 and rendered Babinov's road obsolete. In 1745, gold was discovered in the Ural at
Beryozovskoye and later at other deposits. It has been mined since 1747. The first ample geographic survey of the Ural Mountains was completed in the early 18th century by the Russian historian and geographer Vasily Tatishchev under the orders of Peter I. Earlier, in the 17th century, rich ore deposits were discovered in the mountains and their systematic extraction began in the early 18th century, eventually turning the region into the largest mineral base of Russia. In 1845, Murchison, who had according to
Encyclopædia Britannica "compiled the first geologic map of the Ural in 1841", The first railway across the Urals had been built by 1878 and linked Perm to Yekaterinburg via
Chusovoy,
Kushva and
Nizhny Tagil. In 1890, a railway linked Ufa and
Chelyabinsk via
Zlatoust. In 1896, this section became a part of the
Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1909, yet another railway connecting Perm and Yekaterinburg passed through Kungur by the way of the Siberian Route. It has eventually replaced the Ufa – Chelyabinsk section as the main trunk of the Trans-Siberian railway. The highest peak of the Ural,
Mount Narodnaya, (elevation ) was identified in 1927. During the
Soviet industrialization in the 1930s, the city of
Magnitogorsk was founded in the South-Eastern Ural as a center of iron smelting and
steelmaking. During the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–1942, the mountains
became a key element in Nazi planning for the territories which they expected to conquer in the USSR. Faced with the threat of having a significant part of the Soviet territories occupied by the enemy, the government evacuated many of the industrial enterprises of European Russia and Ukraine to the eastern foothills of the Ural, considered a safe place out of reach of the German bombers and troops. Three giant
tank factories were established at the
Uralmash in Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg used to be known),
Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, and
Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in Chelyabinsk. After the war, in 1947–1948, Chum –
Labytnangi railway, built with the forced labor of
Gulag inmates,
crossed the Polar Ural.
Mayak, southeast of
Yekaterinburg, was a center of the Soviet nuclear industry and site of the
Kyshtym disaster. ==Geography and topography==