Geopolitical Context
Slave raiding in the region antedated the Crimean Khanate and the conflict between Christendom and the Lands of Islam. Eastern Europe, especially the Ukrainian Steppe lands (ancient Scythia and Sarmatia), had been sources of slaves for the Mediterranean basin for ages.
Ancient Rome and Byzantium used people from this area, whom they considered “barbarians,” in their galleys. Early medieval Moorish rulers of Islamic Spain and other Muslim countries highly valued their slaves from Kyivan Rus' and neighbouring countries, called Saqaliba in Arabic (from “Slavs”/“Slavonians”), who included eunuchs, castrated in Christian southern France, as Islam forbade the barbarous practice. Ibn Butlan (d. 1063) and later Muslim writers generally praised the bravery and other warlike characteristics of the Slavs and recommended use of the males as military slaves.6 Females slaves too were long in great demand. “All my troubles,” complained the Persian poet Nasir-i Khusraw, “come from the [Volga] Bulgars; they constantly bring mistresses from Bulgar to tempt a man; they are as beautiful as the moon; their lips and teeth should not be so beautiful, because the passion for their lips and little teeth is so great that it makes a man bite his own lips.”7Establishment of Italian trading colonies in the Crimea after the Fourth Crusade (1202-04) allowed direct commerce between the Ukrainian steppelands and Italy. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records of the Italian slave trade reveal large numbers of Slavic, Circassian, and other bondsmen from the Black Sea area. During this period Genoese in the Crimean city of Kaffa (Caffa in Italian orthography) made this place a major centre of the European and Middle East slave trade, and the ethnic term “Slav” (Sclavus) entered Latin to mean “slave” (replacing the ancient servus), a usage that spread to most western European languages, including English.
Thus the Tatars under the Giray clan who laid claim to the Mongol inheritance of the Golden Horde and established themselves in the Crimea in the early fifteenth century, and the Ottoman Turks who conquered Kaffa and the other Genoese colonies in the Crimea in 1475, only continued and augmented the Black Sea slave trade, and Christian merchants from Italy gave us the modern English term “slave.”8
Indeed, under founder Haji Giray (d. 1466), the independent Crimean Khanate was friendly to the Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, after the decline of Kyivan Rus' and the Mongols' retreat, ruled most of the Ukrainian-populated areas north and west of the Black Sea. It was only under Haji's successor, Mengli Giray (who ruled intermittently between 1466 and 1478 and then 1479-1515), that the Crimean Tatars recognized the overlordship of the Ottoman sultan (1478), allied with Orthodox Muscovy, and carried out their great sack of Kyiv (1482), launching their long conflict with the Ukrainians of the settled agricultural lands. Liturgical vessels plundered from Kyiv's cathedral of St Sophia, founded in 1011 (Figure 4), near where stood the Golden Gate of Kyiv (Figure 5), were later handed over to Ivan III of Muscovy, and, it seems, a great many captives ended up on the slave markets of the Crimean peninsula.9
Russian historians traditionally downplayed Muscovite instigation of this great raid on a Christian city, but they did emphasize that thereafter Tatar slave raiding of Ukrainian-populated territories became an almost annual event. When the Tatars were not doing that in alliance with Muscovy, they were raiding Muscovy in alliance with Poland-Lithuania or on their own. That general pattern of alliances and raiding would last some three hundred years, almost until the destruction of the Crimean Khanate in 1783. In general, these alliances involved practical politics and had very little to do with religion or any generalized Christian-Muslim enmity, even though, as William H. McNeill pointed out many years ago, a steppe “noman's land” came to separate these two worlds throughout our period.