Conclusion
The wars between the Ukrainians and the Tatars are well reflected in the Ukrainian folk tradition. Tatar raids are described in detail, as are the trials that the captives endured.
But the folk tradition also depicted Turkish captivity, and in a uniformly negative light. While this tradition seems to have been fairly accurate about the raids, it is clearly less well informed as to the conditions of captivity and sought only a negative picture of the Islamic world. Recent historical studies show that there could be mitigating factors in captivity. The race-based “plantation-style” slavery so common in the Americas was largely absent in Turkey, the Crimea, and the Ottoman Balkans, where most Slavonic captives ended up.Certainly, some aspects of Turkish captivity were very bad indeed. The galley slaves probably had it the worst - the Ukrainian folk tradition got that right. But Muslim slaves rowing Christian galleys probably suffered equally, and one should be careful about making moral generalizations on this basis alone. Moreover, other kinds of Turkish captivity could be much less onerous. Although the raiding process and transportation to market were undoubtedly traumatic, indeed, horrifying, for the poor captives, if they could make it safe and secure to a pious Muslim household, their prospects improved, and manumission, though not return to the Slavonic homeland, became a real possibility. In Ottoman Turkey often enough, household slaves were treated as members of the family and sometimes liberated after only a few years' service. This was also true in the Crimea.
Some women, and the children that they bore to Muslim masters, probably had it best. These women included even wives and mothers of the sultans themselves, like Roxelana. The prevalence of manumission, and Islam's legal colour-blindness, led to quick integration into and absorption by Ottoman and Tatar society and hence contributions to the general Turkish and Tatar gene pool.
The discrimination so colourfully described above by Demetrius Cantemir was evidently completely forgotten after the second generation.Thus most modern Turks and Tatars are unaware of their own or compatriots' possible Ukrainian and Slavonic ancestors, partly because lineage is always traced through the paternal line; but it is remembered in Ukrainian folk legend and in Ukrainian history. Roxelana, in particular, is well-known throughout modern Ukraine and in Turkey itself. Consequently, Western historians of Europe and the Middle East, traditionally un- or ill-informed about Ukrainian history, and even the Ukrainian name, should take some account of these facts in their descriptions of early modern Ukrainian history, while Ukrainian scholars, and Russian, Polish, and eastern European scholars generally, should discard old Soviet and pre-Soviet stereotypes about the Tatars, and refrain from drawing a picture that is completely dark. We may modestly conclude by saying that in those days captivity was at times the only alternative to death, and while the Tatars, like many other warriors of this period, sometimes did some terrible things to their captives, at the very least, they did not eat them, as folk legend claimed.