The capital of the khanate, Bakhchisaray, was by comparison a sad little affair. The entrance to the palace of the khans carried the Genghizid dynastic symbol, the tamgha trident, but the khanate could not live up to the dynasty’s legacy. The only port the khanate was allowed to keep was the smallish Goezleve (Yevpatoria) on the underdeveloped western coast, its sole adornment the graceful Juma Jami Mosque, designed by the Ottoman architect of genius Mimar Sinan at the peak of the khanate’s might. A miniature variation on the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and modest compared with Sinan’s great works, the Juma Jami still supplied the city with a distinguished silhouette, its dome identifiable fifteen miles off.[16]
In the twentieth century, when Crimean Tatar intellectuals were reinventing their nation, the khanate’s statehood became a principal issue. Having a fully independent state in one’s past was viewed as indispensable to a national creation myth. This resulted in a lively revisionist discourse that gave rise to widely divergent descriptions of the relationship between Bakhchisaray and Istanbul. According to most historians, the Giray dynasty that ruled the Crimean Khanate “recognized Ottoman suzerainty” and served as Istanbul’s “vassals”; but in the nationalists’ view, the “two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance,” the Giray khans “more allies than subjects,” and the khanate had “partial independence” while enjoying the “protection of the Ottoman sultans, who regarded it as a valuable bulwark against the Russians.”[17]
In the language of modern political science, the khanate most closely fits the definition of a “client state.” On one hand, Bakhchisaray minted its own coins and maintained diplomatic relations with Russia and Poland. On the other, each Genghizid claiming succession rights traveled to Istanbul to be approved and anointed by the Ottoman sultan, the Sunni Caliph. When required by Istanbul, Crimean cavalry fought for the sultan throughout the region, making a critical contribution in many battles, including the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The Ottoman coastal fortresses, originally meant to keep an eye on the Tatars, also guarded Crimea from the occasional Russo-Ukrainian amphibious raids.[18]
The Tatar core of the khanate consisted of three groups: Nogai (Kipchak) nomads, Tat mountaineers, and Yaliboyu coastal dwellers. An eighteenth-century British visitor, Maria Guthrie, described three different “races of men” on the peninsula. The Nogai were “distinguished by high cheek bones” and looked exactly like the “Huns of ancient authors, who committed such horrible ravages in Europe in old times.” The Tat had “round, and rather ruddy faces, and stout well-made bodies,” while the Yaliboyu were “distinguished by a dark complexion and a rather longish face, with features much more resembling the European” than the “frightful” Huns.[19]
In Turkic languages, “Tat” refers to conquered people, and in the hierarchy of the khanate Tats sat the lowest, with a special cabinet minister of the khan, “Lord of the Tats,” regulating their affairs.[20] The Yaliboyu on the littoral were understandably the closest to the Ottomans, and their upper classes had absorbed the culture of Turkish Anatolia. The most numerous group, the nomadic Nogai in the north, made up the bulk of the khanate’s army, and the incessant raids plaguing Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were more Nogai than “Tatar.”[21]
The economy of the khanate was based on pillaging and the slave trade. As the raids pursued material benefit more than anything else, they were executed not only by the khan’s army but also by troops loyal to individual aristocrats (beys). In addition to sustaining the state bursary and the aristocracy, they also served to weaken and destroy Slavic settlements on the steppes. One of the most famous campaigns was Khan Devlet Giray’s attack on Moscow in May 1571, when his troops burned down everything in the Russian capital except for the Kremlin walls, which were made of brick. The Russian tsar at the time was none other than Ivan the Terrible. Remembered as a successful empire builder, he was powerless against the khanate’s cavalry.[22]
Kaffa became the largest center of slave trading in Eastern Europe. A Polish historian estimates that Poland lost a million people to Tatar raiders between 1550 and 1694. A Soviet historian argued that eastern Ukraine lost a hundred thousand a year.[23]
The peninsula’s agriculture was supported in the mountain valleys by Tats. Finance, trade, and crafts were in the hands of Greeks, Armenians, and Karaites living mostly on the Ottoman littoral.[24]
The war between Russia and Crimea, which went on for four centuries, had nothing to do with grand strategy. The Ottoman Empire was already overstretched and could not possibly have been interested in subjugating Russia or wresting Ukraine away from Poland. The goal of the Ottomans and their Crimean client state was to maintain Russia and Ukraine as a permanent source of slaves.
At first, Russia’s military goal was just basic security in the south. Until the 1600s, the Crimean Khanate remained the stronger power, but even after the two had reached military equilibrium, the annual devastation of its southern provinces depleted Russia’s labor pool and kept the local economy at a subsistence level. As the Russian state strengthened, it found another goal in the war against the Crimean Khanate: to annex the fertile black earth belt, the Wild Fields, where Nogai Tatars lived. Later, still another motivation emerged: Russia’s perceived place in the clash of civilizations.
The Third Rome
In an essay written in 1985 called “Flight from Byzantium,” a meditative Istanbul travelogue, Joseph Brodsky talks about observing “the aircraft carriers of the Third Rome sailing slowly through the gates of the Second on their way to the First.”[25] The trope is more meaningful than elegant.
The “Third Rome” concept is a noxious perennial of Russian history. Formulated around 1511 by an ecclesiastic named Philotheus from the Pskov Eleazer Monastery, it announced that after the fall of Rome and then of the Second Rome (Constantinople) because of their transgressions against true Christianity, the center of the world had moved to Moscow. “Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be.” Within a few decades, this grand concept grew into Russian state doctrine. Not only did the princes of Moscow reinvent themselves as “tsars,” a corruption of “Caesar.” As James H. Billington puts it in his seminal interpretation of Russian history The Icon and the Axe, “All of Muscovy came to be viewed as a kind of vast monastery under the discipline of a Tsar-Archimandrite.”[26]
An upstart community stuck on the periphery of Christianity and Islam, destitute even by the forgiving standards of sixteenth-century Europe, suddenly imagined itself the leader of humankind. Here is what made this happen.
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia became the only Orthodox country still standing. Its place in world affairs remained utterly humble—precisely the reason it had been allowed to survive, as no foreign conqueror was interested in the cold and wet patch of landlocked woods that was Russia at the time. It is not even mentioned in The Alexiad, a war and diplomacy treatise by the twelfth-century Byzantine princess Anna Komnene.[27] To reformulate their country, Russians needed an intellectual push from the outside; it appears to have come from an exceptional European woman, Princess Sophia Palaeolog. Born Zoe, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and raised as a ward of Pope Paul II, she was married off to the grand prince of Moscow, Ivan III, in 1472. One example of her strong influence on her husband and his court is the Kremlin: the architects invited to build it came from Italy, and its walls and towers bear a striking resemblance to the Milan castle of the Sforzas, from the color of the bricks to the swallowtail merlons.
16
Henry A. S. Dearborn,
17
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg,
22
Isabel de Madariaga,
24
Descriptions of the Crimean Khanate can be found in a number of travelogues: Evliyá Efendí; Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, eds.,
25
Joseph Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium,” in Joseph Brodsky,
26
James H. Billington,