Becoming a Slave: From Village to Kaffa and then Istanbul...

This painful process made an indelible impression on the remaining settlers (see Figure 6). As we saw above, a considerable body of folklore grew up, especially a vast body of Ukrainian historical songs and laments.

Ukraine lamented that there was nowhere to survive.

The Horde trampled the children and left none alive.

They trampled the little ones; the big ones they took,

They tied them in fetters... to the khan for a look.³¹

Other verses describe other stages on the long road to Turkish slavery.

Once the Tatar raiders had returned to the khanate, they divided the loot - including the captives - among themselves. Firstly, those Tatars who had incurred losses during the expedition were recompensed. For exam­ple, if a Tatar had lost a horse or some armour, he was compensated the equivalent in booty: valuable objects, livestock, or yasir. A detailed register of all booty and captives was prepared, and the khan or other leader of the expedition received a portion. Occasionally the leader would resign some of his portion to his warriors.³² The French engineer Beauplan, who seems to have interviewed more than one eyewitness, paints a sorrowful picture of this division of the spoils:

That day [and same] night they bring together all their booty, which consists in slaves and cattle, and divide it among themselves. It is a sight [that] would grieve the most stony heart to see a husband parted from his wife, and the mother from her daughter, without hopes of ever seeing one another, being fallen into miserable slavery, under Mahometan infidels, who use them inhumanely. Their brutish na­ture causing them to commit a thousand enormities, as ravishing of maids, forcing of women in the sight of their parents and husbands, and circumcising their children in their presence to devote them to Mahomet.

The ethnographic evidence supports Beauplans testimony, for folksongs on this very theme have been preserved and analysed. Here are a few typical lines:

Oh you Turkish land, Busurman faith,

You, the Christian bane!

You have separated father from mother,

Sister from brother,

And husband from wife again!³⁴

Contemporaneous Muslim sources such as the Turkish traveller Evliya Chelebi, who was very sympathetic to the Ukrainian captives, confirms this picture. At one point he even quoted an ostensible Muslim proverb: “Whosoever sells a man, cuts down a tree, or breaks a dam, is cursed by God in this world and in the next.”³⁵

After this division of the spoils, the captives were driven on to the great Crimean port at Kaffa (Kefe in Turkish) or to one of the other Turkish Black Sea ports: Bilhorod (Bialogrod in Polish, Akkerman in Turkish), Ochakiv (Ozu in Turkish), or Kilia. Russians captured on the borders of Muscovy were taken to Azov (Azak in Turkish) and from there by sea to Kaffa. On at least one occasion, and probably many more, captives from Ochakiv were also taken by sea to Kaffa,³⁶ which remained the greatest slave emporium on the Black Sea throughout the period.

It was usually at this point that negotiations for ransoming of the nobler or wealthier captives were begun. Armenians and Karaite Jews, communities of whom lived both in Poland-Lithuania and in the Crimea, generally served as intermediaries.³⁷ Prisoners from the gentry (szlachta)

were, of course, highly prized for their redemptive value, and, because they were so valuable alive, were much better treated than the common folk.

Indeed, sometimes common Cossacks were redeemed by their families. In one widely quoted historical song, a young Cossack captive tells the grey pigeon to take greetings to his Christian homeland:

Remind them of my Cossack fate

Let my father and mother know my troubles

Let them sacrifice their wealth

To free my Cossack head from wretched slavery!⁴⁰

The great majority of prisoners, however, were not redeemed, but were sold into Turkish slavery.

Today Kaffa (Teodosiia) is a small city on the south-east coast of the Crimea. Its main architectural monuments are the remaining city walls and turrets of the Genoese fortress, a thirteenth-century church, and a seventeenth-century mosque. But in its heyday under the Ottomans it was a major Black Sea port. Sultan Selim the Grim spent part of his mi­nority there, as did his son, later Suleiman the Magnificent (Suleiman the Lawgiver, in Turkish tradition). At that time, Suleiman probably first be­came acquainted with a Slavonic language, most likely Ukrainian itself. Considering the number of slaves that passed through it, Kaffa must have possessed a very large slave market with many traders. Turks and Tatars certainly engaged in the trade, but whether the non-Muslim minorities also participated is more uncertain.⁴¹

In Kaffa, the slaves were sorted according to sex, age, and skills, and sold individually to local buyers, or again in large numbers for further shipment to Istanbul or even Persia.

It is necessary to say what they do with such people. Namely, when the time for trading comes, they lead these unfortunates in groups into the square of the marketplace, which has many people in it. They are bound around their necks in groups of ten like cranes flying in single file, and they sell them by tens at auction with the auctioneer loudly shouting to raise the price that these are new slaves, simple, not cunning, only just arrived from the king's people and not from the Muscovites. This is because the Muscovite people are cunning and deceitful and are very lowly valued on the slave market. And so this type of merchandise is evaluated with great care in Tavria [Crimea] and is bought by foreign merchants for a high price in order to sell it even more highly to distant and wild peoples such as the Saracens, the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs, the Syrians, and the Assyrians.

Michael remarks that Kaffa's was the most notable slave market on the pen­insula because of its convenient location and insatiability - “not a city but a great vampire which drinks our blood.”⁴²

Some of the captives sold in Kaffa were bought by locals and remained in the Crimea. Most, however, went on to Istanbul. The voyage from Kaffa to Istanbul took ten days by sea, with sometimes a stopover at Sinop on the north shore of Asia Minor. Once in Istanbul, the slaves were examined by the sultan's officials, and the best and brightest men and the most beautiful women were selected for his household and his harem. The remainder were sold on the open market by one of the many slave dealers in the city, who were organized into a special guild. The Turkish traveller Evliya Chelebi says that in his day they numbered about two thousand; but other sourc­es reveal that of these only thirty-nine had a government licence, the rest being watchmen, guards, and helpers of various sorts. Still, the trade was brisk; the salary of one major market official, the Esirhane emini, required the sale of some two thousand slaves annually.⁴³