Crimean Khanate

The line that lasted

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)formation

Every other state founded by the house of Chinggis was gone by 1600. The Crimean khanate was abolished in 1783, by a manifesto, three hundred and forty years after it was founded and a century and a half after the last Chinggisid had ruled anywhere else in Europe.

That is the fact worth putting first, because everything else about the khanate is usually described as decline.

Where it came from

The Golden Horde broke up in the fifteenth century into hordes that were not territorial units so much as followings — a prince, his clans, and the pasture they used. The Crimean peninsula had been a Jochid province with a governor, a mint and a Genoese coast; what made it a separate state was that one branch of the family settled on it and stopped moving.

Hacı Giray was brought in from exile in Lithuania in the 1440s by the peninsula's great clans, of which the Şirin were the first. He was a Jochid, which the clans required; he had no following of his own, which suited them; and the arrangement that resulted — a khan who could not rule without the clan begs and clan begs who could not rule without a khan — outlived him by three centuries.

What made it permanent

The peninsula itself. Crimea is joined to the steppe by an isthmus a few miles wide, and the Tatars fortified it and called it Perekop, the ditch. A horde on open grass can be ridden down by another horde; a horde behind a ditch cannot, and neither the Great Horde nor the Nogai nor Muscovy ever forced it.

Behind the ditch was something no other steppe polity had: agriculture, towns, a coastline with ports on it, and a settled tax base. The khanate was not a nomadic state that happened to own a peninsula. It was a peninsula with a nomadic army attached, and the two halves paid for each other.

The three relationships

From 1475 the khan was a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, who took the coastal cities and left him the interior. From the 1480s Moscow was an ally against the Great Horde and then an enemy. From the 1490s Poland–Lithuania was whichever of those Moscow was not.

Each of the three paid the khan. The Ottomans paid in subsidy and appointments; Moscow and Poland paid in what they called gifts and the khan's chancery called tribute. None of them could afford to have him on the other side, and he was perfectly aware of it.

What the state was for

The other income was slaves, and it is not possible to write about this khanate honestly without putting that near the front.

Crimean and Nogai horsemen raided the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish lands annually for two and a half centuries and took captives on a scale that depopulated the frontier. The captives went down to the coast, were sold in the Ottoman ports, and were shipped across the Black Sea. Moscow and Warsaw ran standing ransom funds. The steppe between the forest and the Black Sea was empty in the sixteenth century because of it, and the Russian advance south in the seventeenth and eighteenth was in the first instance an attempt to stop it.

A state can be described by its exports. This one exported people.

Presents from both

Drafted from Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1851)expansion

A Habsburg ambassador spent 1517 in Moscow trying to make peace between the prince of Muscovy and the king of Poland, and failed, and explained why in a sentence about a third party.

Sigismund von Herberstein is the fullest outside witness to the Jochid successor states while they still existed. He never went to the Crimea. What he had was what the Muscovite court knew, and the Muscovite court had been dealing with the khan for thirty years.

The position

The prince of Muscovy also used from time to time to conciliate him by sending presents, which he did because, as they were constantly embroiled in mutual wars, each strove to overwhelm the other by engaging the cooperation of the Tartar forces. He being aware of this, deluded both with vain hopes while he accepted presents from each.

Herberstein watched the mechanism operate against his own embassy. Unable to get Moscow to accept terms, the king of Poland bribed the khan to attack Moscow from the south while Poland attacked from the west. Moscow, finding this out, sent its own envoys to the khan to point out that Lithuania was unguarded and off its watch. The Tartar, consulting only his own advantage, followed his advice.

The Crimean khanate's foreign policy for two centuries is in that sentence. Two Christian powers at war with each other, each paying the same third power to attack the other, and the third power taking both payments and choosing the softer target.

What it bought him

Herberstein is clear that this was not parasitism but accumulation: as his power thus increased by the quarrels of these princes … his ambition enlarged itself in proportion. He also names what the increase paid for. The khan compelled the king of Poland to a fixed annual stipend, on the understanding that Polish forces could call on Tatar help in an emergency — which made a tribute look like a retainer, and was easier for a Christian king to explain at home.

The limit

And then Herberstein records what happened when the khan tried to convert the position into an empire, which is the subject of the next thing in his account and the reason the Crimean khanate stayed a peninsula.

Mehmed Giray, allied with one of the Nogai princes, marched in January 1523, took Astrakhan, and stayed in the city. His ally's brother pointed out that a neighbour that strong was a danger to them both. The Nogai then sent the khan some professional advice: that he should not corrupt his soldiers and neglect their discipline by keeping them housed, but should come out and live in the open field according to the custom of the Tartars.

He took the advice, brought his army out of Astrakhan and camped in the country. The Nogai joined forces, attacked him at dinner with no warning, killed him, destroyed most of his army and pursued the rest across the Don to the gates of Perekop, where they gave up.

The khan who had been playing two kingdoms against each other was removed by an argument about military discipline from people whose interest he had not considered.

Forty thousand in seven days

Drafted from Tott, Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars (1786)peak

The French consul in the Crimea in 1758 watched a Tatar army come back from Moldavia, and what he wrote down is the clearest description anybody has left of what the raid economy actually looked like when it was unloaded.

Charles de Peyssonnel's account was printed in English as a hostile appendix to the memoirs of his successor, whose facts he spent a hundred pages correcting. On this he was not correcting anybody. He was there.

The numbers

Krim Giray had seized the throne during a disturbance and had brought his army back through Moldavia on the way. Peyssonnel and the consul sent to replace him went out to meet the new khan at his camp.

It is scarcely possible to form any idea of a pillage so sudden and rapid; and it is difficult to conceive how an army of eighty thousand men could in seven days overrun a great Province, and carry off forty thousand slaves and all the flocks, herds, and tents in which they were kept, besides an enormous quantity of other plunder.

Then the sight:

We saw the plain of Kichela covered, as far as the eye could reach, with male and female Slaves of every age, oxen, camels, horses, sheep, and utensils of every kind piled up at different distances.

Forty thousand people, sorted into lots on a plain with the livestock and the household goods, waiting to be moved to the coast.

What a raid was

It was not war and it was not banditry. It was a harvest, and it was organised like one.

The army that did this was raised the way the khanate always raised armies: the clans brought their followings, every man found his own remounts, and nobody was paid a wage. What they were paid in was what they carried off, of which the khan took a fixed share. Eighty thousand men who provision themselves and are compensated in captives can be put into the field at very short notice and cost the treasury nothing, which is the whole reason the institution lasted three centuries.

The destination was the Black Sea ports, and from there the markets of the Ottoman world. Caffa was the largest slave market in Europe, and the Crimean khanate was its principal supplier for two hundred and fifty years.

The gesture

Peyssonnel then records what the new khan did next, and reports it as a piece of statecraft rather than as mercy.

Krim Guerai, after having given the Ottoman Government a proof of his power, was willing also to give as striking an example of his justice. He sent back all the Slaves who did not consent to remain.

Moldavia was Ottoman territory. The khan had just demonstrated that he could strip a province of the sultan's own empire in a week, which was the argument for recognising him; and then returned the people, which was the argument for not punishing him for it. Peyssonnel notes, without softening it, that many had died in the meantime.

What the account is worth

Peyssonnel was a professional consul in the trade the khanate lived on, writing to correct another Frenchman's book, and his purpose throughout is to show that he understood the country better than his successor did. That gives him no reason to inflate the figures and every reason to have them right.

It also means the passage is not an indictment. He describes eighty thousand men carrying off forty thousand people in seven days in the tone of a man explaining a commercial system to readers in Paris, because that is what it was to everybody involved except the forty thousand.

The ditch

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)peak

The khanate's constitution was a bargain between a dynasty that could not be replaced and four clans that could not be removed, and it worked for three hundred years because neither side could win.

The Girays

Only a descendant of Chinggis could be khan, and in the Crimea that meant only a Giray. The rule was never broken. It removed at a stroke the commonest cause of death for steppe polities — a successful general deciding he would do the job himself — because no general was eligible.

What it did not do was say which Giray. There were always many, they were distributed among the Ottoman provinces and the Circassian mountains, and the sultan kept a supply of them at Rhodes and in Rumelia. A khan who displeased Istanbul was replaced with a cousin; a khan who displeased the clans found the cousin already being discussed. Over three centuries the throne changed hands more than forty times, and a substantial majority of those changes were depositions rather than deaths.

The clans

The other half was the karaçı begs — the heads of the four great clans, of whom the Şirin were first and could put more horsemen in the field than the khan. Their consent was required for a new khan's recognition, their leaders held the frontier commands, and the Şirin beg's own relations with Moscow were conducted partly in his own name.

Alongside them sat the kalgay, the designated heir, and later a second deputy, the nureddin — both Girays, both with their own establishments. A khanate with a khan, two official heirs and four clan chiefs who could not be sacked is a state with a great many people entitled to disagree.

The Nogai

Beyond the ditch, on the mainland steppe, were the Nogai hordes, who were not Crimean subjects and are not always usefully described as allies either.

They pastured between the Dnieper and the Kuban, provided a large part of the manpower for the raids, took the khan's orders when it suited them and raided on their own account when it did not. The khanate's ability to put eighty thousand horsemen into Poland depended on them, and so did its frequent inability to stop a raid that the Porte had forbidden.

Why the arrangement held

Because each component was indispensable to the others and none could absorb the rest.

The clans needed a Chinggisid to legitimise a levy and could not produce one. The khan needed the clans to raise the levy and could not conscript them. The Ottomans needed the khanate as the shield of their northern frontier and the supplier of their slave markets, and had no interest in governing a peninsula they could not feed from Anatolia. Moscow and Poland needed the khan on their side more than they needed him destroyed, until the day they did not.

That day came in the eighteenth century, when Russia acquired an army that could cross the steppe in strength and supply itself at the far end. The ditch had never been forced. In 1771 a Russian army went through it.

The last raid

Drafted from Tott, Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars (1786)contraction

In January 1769 a French officer rode out of the Crimea with a Tatar army into Russian territory, and wrote up the last great raid the khanate ever made.

Baron de Tott had been sent to reside with the khan by the duc de Choiseul in 1767. He was there to keep the Tatars in the war on the French side and to report; he had not solicited the posting and accepted it, he says, as a favour. Two years later the khan Kırım Giray took him along.

What the army was

De Tott's value is that he was a professional soldier looking at a system he did not understand and describing its mechanics.

There was no commissariat, no baggage train in any European sense, and no pay. Every man brought remounts and rode in the depth of winter because that was when the rivers and the marshes were hard and a horse could cross ground that was impassable in summer. The column moved at a speed European armies could not match and arrived where it was not expected.

It was also the last time it worked. The raid burned a stretch of the Russian frontier and came home, and Kırım Giray died within weeks — poisoned, de Tott believed, by a Greek physician in Ottoman pay.

The two years after

What followed is the reason the campaign is worth a chapter rather than a line.

The Russian army that came south in 1771 did not raid. It came with siege artillery and a supply system, went through the lines at Perekop that had held for three centuries, and occupied the peninsula. The khan fled to Istanbul. The Russians installed one of his relatives, and then another.

The treaty that ended the war in 1774 declared the khanate independent of the Ottoman empire. That was the Russian demand, and it was granted, and it destroyed the state: the only power with an interest in defending the Crimea was contractually removed from it, and the Girays were left as the sovereigns of a peninsula with a Russian garrison on it.

Nine years later Catherine II annexed it by manifesto. The last khan abdicated and died in Ottoman exile.

The word independence

It is worth stopping on, because it is the least obvious mechanism in the whole of this history.

The Crimean khanate had spent three centuries as a client. Every khan since 1475 had been appointed and removable by a sultan in Istanbul, which is the standard description of a subordinate state and the thing an eighteenth-century European cabinet would call a loss of sovereignty.

It was also the thing that kept it alive. The protectorate meant that an attack on the Crimea was an attack on the Ottoman empire, and for three hundred years nobody attempted it. When Russia could not conquer the khanate cheaply, it arranged for the khanate to be freed — and then took it in a decade, from a position no one was obliged to defend.

De Tott was gone by then, reorganising Ottoman artillery at the Dardanelles. His book came out in 1785, two years after the state he had been posted to had ceased to exist, and he does not say so.

1783

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (2009)end

On 8 April 1783 Catherine II signed a manifesto announcing that the Crimea, the Taman peninsula and the Kuban were taken under Russian rule. There was no battle and no treaty of cession. A document was issued, and the oldest surviving state founded by the house of Chinggis stopped existing.

The sequence

It took twelve years and almost no fighting.

In 1771 a Russian army forced the isthmus and occupied the peninsula. In 1774 the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca declared the khanate independent of the Ottoman empire and left Russia in possession of the keys to the Black Sea. Between 1774 and 1783 Russia installed and reinstalled Şahin Giray, a khan who had been educated partly in Europe and who attempted to reform the state along Russian lines — a standing army, a treasury, taxes on the clans — and provoked exactly the revolt that any Crimean khan attacking the clan begs would have provoked. Russian troops put the revolt down on his behalf, twice.

By 1783 there was a khan who could not govern without a foreign army, a clan aristocracy that had twice risen against him, and no protector. The manifesto recorded a fact.

What was lost with it

A dynasty, a language of government, and about three hundred thousand people who subsequently left.

The emigration is the part that is usually passed over. Tatars left the peninsula for Ottoman territory in waves from the 1780s and in very large numbers after the Crimean War in the 1850s and 1860s; the modern Crimean Tatar population of Turkey and the Dobruja is the result. The peninsula was then settled with Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Germans under a deliberate policy, and the Tatars were a minority in their own country within a century of the annexation.

What was also lost was the slave trade, and the honest account of the annexation has to say so. The raids had stopped a generation earlier, under Ottoman and then Russian pressure; the market at Caffa was finished; and the Russian frontier settlement of the southern steppe, which had been impossible for three centuries, began immediately.

The last Chinggisid state in Europe

Şahin Giray left for Russia, then for Ottoman territory, and was executed on Rhodes in 1787.

He was the fortieth-odd khan of a line that had ruled continuously since the 1440s, in unbroken male descent from Jochi, the eldest son of Chinggis Khan. There had been Chinggisid rulers somewhere on the Eurasian steppe since 1206. In the Kazakh hordes there would be khans of the same descent until the 1840s, but as subjects of the Russian empire.

The state that Hacı Giray was brought from Lithuania to rule outlasted the Golden Horde by two hundred and eighty-one years, the khanate of Kazan by two hundred and thirty-one, and the Ottoman capacity to protect it by nine.

What the steppe became

Drafted from Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (1985)afterlife

The Crimean khanate is remembered, where it is remembered, as the last of the Tatars. What it actually left behind is a map.

The empty quarter

For two and a half centuries the grassland between the forest edge and the Black Sea was uninhabitable by settled people, and the reason was the raid.

Russian and Polish sources call it the wild field. It was not empty because it was poor — it is some of the best soil in Europe — but because anybody farming it would be taken. The Muscovite state built and rebuilt fortified lines across the approaches for three hundred years, moving them south a few dozen miles at a time, each line an admission that the previous one had not worked.

When the raids stopped, the field filled up within two generations. The agricultural south of Russia and Ukraine, the grain export that made Odessa, and the whole nineteenth-century Russian position on the Black Sea are consequences of the khanate ceasing to exist.

What Moscow learned from the Tatars

The older argument — that Muscovite autocracy was a Mongol inheritance — has been argued over for two centuries and Halperin's position is that it is mostly wrong and partly indispensable.

What is not in dispute is the specific and the administrative. The Russian postal relay system, the yam, is Mongol in name and organisation. The military census, the household tax, the customs vocabulary and a good deal of the chancery's technical language came the same way. So did the practice of regarding the ruler's servitors as his to dispose of, which the Muscovite state took much further than the Horde ever had.

What Halperin insists on is that the Russians never said so. The Mongol yoke was something to be expunged from the record, not a model to be acknowledged; the borrowing happened silently and was attributed to Byzantium.

The Girays afterwards

The dynasty did not die out. Girays served in the Ottoman army, a few in the Russian; one commanded a Crimean Tatar cavalry regiment for the tsar in the Napoleonic wars. The family is still extant.

What ended was the political fact that a Chinggisid on a throne meant something to anybody. For four hundred years, from the Volga to the Amu Darya, descent from the eldest son of Chinggis Khan had been a qualification that could not be acquired by any other means and that no amount of power could substitute for. Amir Timur, who ruled from Delhi to Damascus, never called himself khan; he married a Chinggisid princess and ruled through puppets who could.

The Crimean khanate was the last place where the rule still had force. When it went, the qualification became a genealogical curiosity, which is what it had been in every other part of the world for a century and a half.