Giray who used Italian architects to build the large khan’s palace and the important Zincirli Medrese in Bah?e Saray and, through patronizing artists and writers, establishing the khanate as a Sunni Muslim cultural center.
The khanate had a special relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Never Ottoman subjects, the Khanate’s Giray dynasty was considered the crucial link between the Ottomans and the Mongols, particularly Ghenghis Khan. Had the Ottoman dynasty died out, the next Ottoman sultan would have been selected from the Giray family. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Gi-rays often provided military support for Ottoman campaigns, in Hungary and in Iran. Crimean mounted archers were considered by the Ottomans to be among the most reliable and effective elements of their armies.
So far as the Russians were concerned, the most important feature of the khanate was the latter’s dependence on raiding Muscovite lands for economic benefit. Crimean Tatars frequently “harvested the steppe” and brought Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish peasants to Crimea for sale. Slave markets operated in Kefe and Gozleve, where merchants from the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Egypt purchased Slavic slaves for export. Several raids reached as far as Moscow itself. Slave market tax records indicate that more than a million were sold in Crimea in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
CRIMEAN TATARS
Eighteenth-century Russian governments tried to bring an end to these raids. An invasion of Crimea in 1736 succeeded in destroying much of the khanate’s capital Bah?esaray, including the palace, though the Russian army soon abandoned that effort. The Girays were able to rebuild much of the city over the next ten years.
It was left to Catherine II to bring an end the khanate, in 1783. Russian victories over the Ottomans resulted in, first, the Treaty of Karasu Bazaar between Russia and the Khanate in November 1772, followed by the Treaty of K???k Kaynarca between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1774. Karasu Bazaar established an “alliance and eternal friendship” between the khanate and Russia; the second cut all ties between the khanate and the Ottoman Empire.
For nine years, Catherine II worked with the last Crimean Khan, ?ahin Giray, in an experiment in “independence,” implementing some of her “enlightened” political ideas in a Muslim, Tatar society. Recognizing failure in this venture, Catherine annexed the khanate and the rest of the Crimean peninsula to the empire in 1783. See also: CATHERINE II; CRIMEAN TATARS; GOLDEN HORDE; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fisher, Alan. (1970). The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772-1783. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Alan. (1999). A Precarious Balance: Conflict, Trade, and Diplomacy on the Russian- Ottoman Frontier. Istanbul: Isis Press.
A Turkic people who settled the Crimean peninsula over the two hundred years after Batu Khan’s conquest, the Tatars of the Crimea came from Central Asia and Anatolia. By 1450, almost the whole of the peninsula north of the coastal mountains was Tatar land. The Tartat language was a combination of the Turkish of the Anatolian Seljuks and the Chagatay Turkic of the Tatar rulers of the Volga region, though by the end of the fifteenth century, Crimean Tatar was a dialect different from both. In the fifteenth century, the Crimean Tatars established a state (khanate) and a ruling dynasty (Giray) with its political center first in Solhat and later in Bah?esaray. This khanate was closely associated with the Ottoman Empire to the south, though it retained its sovereignty. No Ottoman officials exercised authority within the lands of these Tatars. Crimean Tatar authors wrote histories and chronicles that emphasized distinctions between Tatars and other Turkic peoples, including the Ottomans.
As the Crimean Tatar economy depended on the slave trade and raids into Russian and other Slavic lands, it was inevitable that Russia would strive to gain dominance over the peninsula. But it was only in the eighteenth century that Russia had sufficient power to defeat, and, ultimately, annex the peninsula and incorporate the remaining Tatars into their empire. The annexation took place in 1783.
Russian domination put enormous pressures on the Tatars-causing many to emigrate to the Balkans and Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. One of the Tatar intellectuals, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, tried to establish an educational system for the Tatars that would allow them to survive, as Tatars and as Muslims, within the Russian Empire. He had substantial influence over other Turkic Muslims within the empire, an influence that spread also to Turkish intellectuals in Istanbul.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Russian government encouraged Russian and Ukrainian peasants to settle on the peninsula, placing ever greater pressures on the Tatar population. Although the Revolution of 1917 promised some relief to the Tatars, with the emergence of “national communism” in non-Russian lands, the Tatar intellectual and political elites were destroyed during the Stalinist purges.
The German occupation of Crimea after 1941 produced some Crimean Tatar collaboration, though no greater proportion of Tatars fought against the USSR than did Ukrainians or Belorus-sians. Nevertheless, the entire Crimean Tatar nationality was collectively punished in 1944, and deported en masse to Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan. In the 1950s, Crimea was assigned to the Ukrainian SSR, at the three hundredth anniversary of Ukraine’s annexation to the Russian Empire. Ukrainians and Russians resettled Tatar homes and villages.
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Crimean Tatars mark the fifty-fourth anniversary of Stalin’s order to deport their ancestors from the Crimean peninsula, May 18, 1998. PHOTOGRAPH BY SERGEI SVETLITSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
Many Tatars fled to Turkey, where they joined descendants of Tatars who had emigrated from Crimea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early 2000s it was estimated that there were more than 5 million Crimean Tatar descendants who were citizens of the Republic of Turkey. They have been thoroughly assimilated as Turks, though they continue Tatar cultural and literary activities.
During the next thirty-five years, Tatars in Central Asian exile continued to maintain their national identity, through cultural and political means. They published, in Tatar, a newspaper in Tashkent, Lenin Bayrag?, and united their efforts with various Soviet dissident groups. Some attempted to return to the Crimean peninsula, with modest success.
With the collapse of the USSR, and the new independence of the Ukraine, continued efforts have been made by Tatars to reestablish some of their communities on the peninsula. Crimean Tatars, however, remain one of the many “nationalities” of the former USSR that have not been able to establish a new nation. See also: DEPORTATIONS; GASPIRALI, ISMAIL BEY; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allworth, Edward A., ed. (1998). The Tatars of Crimea : Return to the Homeland: Studies and Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, Alan. (1978). Crimean Tatars. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Fisher, Alan. (1998). Between Russians, Ottomans and Turks: Crimea and Crimean Tatars. Istanbul: Isis Press.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) was Europe’s greatest war between 1815 and 1914, pitting first Turkey, then France and England, and finally Piedmont-Sardinia against Russia.
The incautious and miscalculated decision by Nicholas I to activate his southern army corps and Black Sea fleet in late December 1852 can be attributed to several general misperceptions: the official myth that Russia legally protected the Ottoman Orthodox; disinformative claims of Ottoman perfidy regarding the Orthodox-Catholic dispute over Christian Holy Places; and illusions of Austrian loyalty and British friendship. Attempts to interest the British in a partition of the Ottoman Empire failed. Britain followed France in sending a fleet to the Aegean to back Turkey, after Russia’s extraordinary ambassador to Istanbul, Alexander Menshikov, acted peremptorily, following the tsar’s instructions, in March 1852. Blaming Turkish obstinacy on the British ambassador Stratford de Redcliffe,
