Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich established the Tambov fortress on April 17, 1636 on a hill at the confluence of the rivers Tsna and Studenets to protect the southern border of Muscovy from nomads. The city has served this purpose well. No enemy has captured the city since its founding.
In 1779, Catherine II established the Tambov governorship and appointed Count Roman Vorontsov the governor-general. In 1781, the city received its coat of arms, depicting a beehive and three bees against an azure background. In 1796, the Tambov governorship became a province. At the time, it was twice the size of today's Tambov Region.
From 1786 to 1789 the province was led by Russian poet and public figure Gavriil Derzhavin, who is responsible for Tambov's geometric and convenient layout. Derzhavin was also the founder of the city theatre, the publishing house, Russia's first provincial newspaper, the Tambov News, and a public school.
Since the mid-18th century, Tambov has developed as a commercial and economic centre, famous throughout Russia for its meat, bacon, honey, and thoroughbred horses.
In the first half of the 19th century, the city saw the opening of an elementary school, a seminary, a secondary school, a public library, a boarding school for daughters of the aristocracy, a teachers' college, and a museum of history and ethnography.
By the end of the 19th century, Tambov had metalworking factories and agricultural processing plants. In the post-war years, the city became a major centre for chemical engineering and factories specialising in military production.
Today, Tambov is also a university town with two prominent universities, one technical and one classical.
The city has four theatres: the Regional Drama Theatre, the Puppet Theatre, the Derzhavin Tambov State University's Student Theatre, and the recently opened Youth Theatre. There is a concert hall, four museums, an art gallery, 19 municipal libraries, several cinemas and culture houses.
The city has over three dozen cultural, historical and architectural monuments. The most prominent ones are the Church of the Intercession, the Voznesensky Women's Monastery, the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, the house of manufacturer Mikhail Aseyev (currently home to a cardiological sanatorium), a former orphanage for blind children (currently the College of Arts), a house with a mezzanine in the Russian Empire style on the grounds of the former estate of the Lukyanenko noble family (currently the Museum of Medicine), the former Noble Assembly (currently the Drama and Puppet Theatres), etc.
There are monuments to Gavriil Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Sergei Sergeyev-Tsensky, and Sergei Rachmaninov, as well as a monument to a peasant of Tambov. In May 2010, the city unveiled a monument to war veterans to mark the 65th anniversary of the victory in World War II.
The population of Tambov is approximately 280,000, a quarter of the total population in the Tambov Region.