the THREE-HUNDRED-PLus-YEAR history of the Crimean Khanate (1441-1783), which extended northward from the Black Sea to include much of the Ukrainian, or “Pontic” Steppe, has generally been ignored by Western historians.

No recent general history exists in any western European language, and Crimean Tatar slave raiding into Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian lands, though frequently noted in the sources, has attracted little attention.¹ Indeed, even in the Soviet Union after the 1930s, discussion of the khanate's place in eastern European history was strictly forbidden, and the Tatars were assigned a solely negative role in Russian and Ukrainian history: they were ostensibly aggressive and destructive nomads attacking a peaceful Slavonic agricultural population or, to use an older vocabulary, wild Muslim steppe folk threatening Christian civilization.

This chapter seeks to address these issues in several ways. It presents evidence about Tatar raids on Ukrainian lands and outlines their great impact on the Ukrainian psyche and culture. It also challenges the stereotypes about the Crimean Khanate in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian scholarship and presents a more nuanced and refined picture of its place in Ukrainian history and of Ukrainian captives' fate in the khanate and in the Ottoman Empire. I examine early modern documents, histories, travelogues, and such, and also older Ukrainian folklore collected and codified in the nineteenth century, to explore Tatar slave raiding and Turkish captivity. I also look at why Western historians have neglected these phenomena and whether Ukrainian folk tradition is accurate.³

During the last twenty years or so scholars have examined the history of slavery in the Middle East and Europe - for its tentacles spread wide - and this literature too occasionally mentions our subject.⁴ With regard to Ukraine in particular, the echo of Edward Said and Bernard Lewis's debate about the “Orientalist” bias in scholarship gradually began to influence the work of Ukrainian historians, whose Soviet-era predecessors were almost completely cut off from Western developments. The resulting critique, as we see below, questioned the traditional stark juxtaposition of forest versus steppe, agriculturalist versus nomad, civilization versus barbarism, and Christian versus Muslim.⁵