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Old October 20th, 2020 #1
Átilla Szeinfild
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Unhappy White slavery in Crimea

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Islamic History
The Slave Trade in the Crimean Khanate
Islamic History Team 28 minutes reading
Text by: Mikhail Kizilov
I made a traditional Ukrainian song: ” D The fire burns behind the river, the Tartars are dividing their captives, Our village has been burned, and our property has been looted. The old mother was put to the edge of the saber, and my love is taken into captivity . ”


The Crimean Peninsula on the border between the Christian West and the Muslim East, was a place where traders from across the Black Sea region from east to west of the Mediterranean, Anatolia, Russia and Western European countries came to buy, sell and exchange their goods . In this trade, "live cargo" - reluctant travelers, captured by the Tatars in the adjacent countries - were one of the most common products to be traded. Various archived and published sources (accounts of European and Ottoman travelers, letters and memoirs of prisoners, Turkish defters, Russian and Ottoman chronicles to name a few) made up of Muslim, Christian and Jewish authors, provide not only an account detail of the slave trade in the region in the beginning of modern times, but also a discussion of some moral implications related to this type of commercial activity. Although most authors expressed their disapproval of the Tatar predatory attacks and the cruel treatment of the captives, none of them, it seems, opposed the existence of the slave trade itself, considering it just another branch of international trade. Another problem frequently discussed in the sources was the problem of the conversion of slaves.


Located at the junction of the trade routes that led from Italy and the Byzantine Empire (and, later, the Ottoman Empire) to Poland, Russia and the countries of the East, Crimea has always been an attractive place for international trade. The administrative, political and economic center of Crimea moved from the west coast to the east as soon as the Genoese established their trading stations in the 13th and 14th centuries. However, after the Ottoman conquest in 1475, this situation changed completely. The peninsula was divided into two parts: Ottoman and Tatar. Those regions, ports and cities that were most useful from a mercantile and administrative perspective came under Ottoman jurisdiction, while the rest of Crimea, together with the southern part of contemporary Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, was ruled by the Crimean Khanate. Caffa (or, Theodosia), often referred to in contemporary sources as “Küçük Istanbul” (“Little Istanbul”), the largest maritime city in Crimea in the 14th and 15th centuries, became the center of the Elayet (province) of Caffa after from 1475. Half independent from the Ottomans, the Crimean Khanate existed until 1783, when it was annexed by the Russian Empire.
Numerous sources testify that, before 1475, in addition to the Tatars, they were mainly Genoese traders, known as merciless slave traders, who were taking large numbers of captives from the port of Caffa to Genoa or to the ports of Moldova and then to the West . The number of Tatar races in search of slaves increased considerably soon after the Ottoman conquest. The economy of the Crimean Khanate was not particularly prosperous. The looting of neighboring countries was, therefore, one of the easiest ways to keep the country's economic situation at an adequate level - slaves were always among the most necessary and required goods to be sold both inside and outside the Khanate. The slave trade was the cornerstone of the Crimean economy in the early modern period - and a decrease in slave prices also meant a worsening of the general economic situation in the country. Thousands of slaves - a very large number for the needs of its inhabitants - were sold annually in the slave markets of the Ottoman Crimea and the Crimean Khanate. The number of slaves sold in Caffa was so great that a mid-16th century Christian visitor to this city scornfully wrote that "because of this practice, the city of Caffa can be called a pagan giant that feeds on our blood". The weight of Crimean slavery is also reflected in some proverbs.
According to almost all written sources, the main income of the Crimean Khanate came from raids in the territories of adjacent countries and from the slave trade captured during these military campaigns. The first great Tatar invasion in search of captives occurred in 1468 and was directed to Galicia. According to some estimates, in the first half of the 17th century, the number of captives brought to Crimea was about 150,000 to 200,000 people. About 100,000 of them were captured in the period between 1607 and 1617. Crimean Tatars invaded the Slavic lands 38 times between 1654 and 1657; 52,000 people were seized by the Tatars in the spring of 1655 in the course of an invasion into the territory of Ukraine and southern Russia. The number of Tatar attacks appears to have declined in the 18th century due to the growth of Russian strength in the southern regions and some Russian-Turkish wars, which occurred partly in the territory of Crimea. However, in 1758 there were about 40,000 slaves captured during an invasion in Moldova and in 1769, during one of the last Tatar incursions into Russian and Polish territory, the amount of "living loot" was around 20,000 souls.
The demographic importance of the slave trade in Crimea and the Ottoman Empire should also not be underestimated. Thousands and thousands of Christian slave women and children converted to Islam annually. Soon these neophytes forgot about their non-Turkish origins and their offspring were often not even aware of their Christian past. The descendants of slaves in the Crimean Khanate used to be called by a generic term: “çora”. One of such “çoras”, who was not a slave, but whose lower social status was still remembered by the local Tatars, was found in 1916 in North Crimea by Alexander Samoilovich. This çora, who spoke pure Tatar and was a faithful Muslim, had the distinctive appearance of a Russian peasant from the Riazan region.
Some authors have proposed that Crimean Tatars, in general, preferred to take foreign slaves as wives because of the rather ugly appearance of Tatar women. In fact, Circassian women, while known for their beauty, were often taken as concubines by the criminal khan and Ottoman sultans; As a result, many Crimean princes and Ottomans were in fact of Circassian origin (and sultans consecutively). A Ruthenian captive, Alexandra-Roxolana (better known as Hurrem Sultan), Suleiman's favorite wife, the Magnificent, was perhaps one of the most influential women in the history of the Ottoman Empire. The legend about the Crimean khan who fell in love with the Polish captive Maria Potocka inspired the famous Russian poet Alexandre Pushkin to compose the poem "The fountain of Bahçesaray" (. "Bakhchisaraiskii fontan"). The practice of taking foreign slaves as concubines and wives was also frequent among common Tartars and Turks.
Marcin Broniewski (Broniovius) described how the Crimean Tatars conducted their military invasions, captured and tortured their prisoners, shrewdly forcing them to pay as much money as they could to rescue the prisoners. According to his reports, the katar of the Tatars ordered his soldiers to begin preparations for an invasion three or four weeks before the proposed campaign date. Winter, when all marches, rivers and muddy roads were solidly frozen, was the usual time for incursions. Several experienced and skilled soldiers were sent to capture informants from the country that they were to plunder for information. After entering a rival's territory, they avoided a direct and open confrontation, moving quickly from place to place and trying to capture as
many captive people as possible, while stealing and burning everything in their path. The Tartar army consisted mainly of men on horseback. During an invasion, each Tatar had two or four horses to increase the speed of the army's movement. As a special military characteristic of the Tatars, many travelers have noted its surprising speed and mobility.
When the Tatar army was headed by the khan himself, his strength was 80,000 soldiers, 50,000 when led by a kalga sultan (second in authority after the khan) and 40,000 when led by a nureddin sultan (third in the hierarchy). Upon completion of a campaign, the khan received a tenth of all prisoners. Baron de Tott, who witnessed the last Tartar attack on Polish and Russian lands (1769), left the following emotional description of a Tartar returning home with his loot:
”Five or six slaves of all ages, sixty sheep and twenty oxen. . . The children with their heads out of a bag tied to the saddle, a young girl sitting in front of him supported by his left arm, the mother behind, the father on a led horse, the son on the other, and the sheep and oxen ahead, All are seen, all managed, nothing escapes the master's watchful eye. He sets up, directs, provides for himself and walks to relieve his slaves. . . The image would be truly interesting, if avarice and the cruelest Injustice were not the source of what happened. ”
The majority of Tatar land incursions were made in the adjacent regions and countries of: Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Mingelia and Circassia. On the way back they had to pass through the narrow isthmus defended by the Fortress of Or (Perekop). Customs should be paid there first, and later in Kırk Yer (Çufut-Kale); fees were charged by special officers called tamğacı and tartnaqcı.
Then, the fate of the captives brought to Crimea could differ. Some remained in the hands of the Tartars, who used them for their own purposes as domestic and agricultural workers or artisans. According to Marcin Broniewski (1578), Tatars rarely cultivated the soil, with most of their land cultivated by Hungarian, Ruthenian, Russian and Valakian slaves. It is especially worth mentioning that it was the POWs of war - Zaporozian and Don Christian Cossacks, who formed the intrepid hordes of pirates from southern Ukraine and Russia, whose frequent maritime and inland raids ravaged many ports and cities in the Crimea and Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Most captives were delivered to Caffa, the region's largest port, located in the Ottoman part of Crimea. Among other important centers of the slave trade, there were the ports of Azak, Kerş and Gözleve (Eupatório). The largest slave market in the Crimean Khanate was in Karasubazar (Belogorsk), located near the border with the Ottoman Crimea. The most important and captive were taken to the mountain fortress of Çufut-Kale, not far from the capital of the khanate, Bahçeseray. Among the “reluctant travelers” trapped in Çufut-Kale, there were people as famous as the Transylvanian prince Janos Kemeny (1657), Polish hetmans like Potocki and Kalinowski (1648), the Russian boyar Vasily Borisovich Sheremetev (1660-1681), the ambassadors V. Aytemirov (1692-1695), A. Romodanovski (1681) and many others.
Prisoners were not always sold. They were often exchanged for other goods: Pierre Chevalier (1663) mentioned that Tartars often accept Turkish horses, weapons, clothing and other goods as payment. Sometimes, Slavic captives in the Ottoman Empire or Crimea could be exchanged for Tatar captives. It is worth mentioning that, although the most common way of obtaining prisoners was through military attacks, there were frequent cases when family members sold their own relatives (especially children) in times of famine or to avoid paying taxes. Sometimes captives were donated to important people as a symbolic representation of the humiliation of the defeated enemy.
The price of captives at different times also varied widely, depending on the number of captives captured during recent military campaigns, and also on the quality, age, strength, beauty, skills and gender of a slave. It seems, however, that at the time of successful military campaigns, when each Tatar soldier could bring about 10 to 20 captives with him, prices fell rapidly. Respected and important captives (wealthy merchants, military commanders, nobles and the like) could bring a royal fortune to the rescue. Thus, by the noble Russian boyar Vasily Borisovich Sheremetev, the khan of Crimea demanded from the tsar, no less than the cities of Kazan and Astrakhan, requirements that were certainly very high even for a person as important as Sheremetev.
What was the general image of the slave trade in Ottoman and Tatar Crimea, as described in early modern sources? In addition to purely factual information, some authors have paid attention to the moral side of the slave trade, often using this part of their narratives to extract some kind of didactic class for contemporaries. Such didactic interludes, written by Christian, Muslim and Jewish authors, were generally included in a larger narrative context and played an important role in shaping public opinion about the slave trade and the image of Tatars, Turks and Tatar Crimea in general.
Contemporary European sources are full of descriptions of the Tartars as "the detestable people of Satan" who should be "sent to their Tartary (or Hell)". In describing the siege of Caffa in 1348, the chroniclers described the Crimean Tatars as one of the worst unfaithful nations, struck by God with a terrible demise (that is, the black plague), which later spread to Christians. Many European thinkers were contemplating reasons for the existence of phenomena like slavery and often explained it as some kind of divine punishment for not maintaining Christian faith and morals. One of the leading Crimean historians, the Armenian priest Xacatur of Caffa, who witnessed the arrival of countless crowds of Christian captives from Poland to the Crimean slave markets in the 1650s, also explained his misfortunes in the Crimean "Tartar" for the loss of faith.
The first modern Christian sources are full of descriptions of the sufferings of Christian slaves captured by the Crimean Tatars during their invasions in the adjacent countries:
”Among these unfortunates there are many strong ones; if they [the Tartars] don't castrate them, they cut off their ears and nostrils, burn their cheeks and forehead with burning iron and force them to work with their chains and shackles during daylight, putting them in prisons for at night; They are supported by the scarce food that consists of the flesh of dead, rotten animals, full of worms, that even a dog would not eat. Younger women are kept for pleasure ... ”
The same source described the plight of Polish slaves in the slave market in Caffa. Blaise de Vigenere, who never visited Tartar lands, left an even more depressing description of the Tatar captivity. He said that old people and children used to be tortured by young Tartars, so that the latter learned how to kill; "The way that hunters give partridges to be destroyed by young hawks". One of the Crimean Muslim chroniclers, Hacı Mehmed Senai, also mentioned that after a successful invasion of Poland and Ukraine during the Khmel'nyts'kyi (Chmielnicki) Rebellion (1648), each Tatar soldier killed about 10 to 15 prisoners for pure fun.
It seems, however, that most European sources that describe the terrible and unbearable suffering of Christian slaves in Crimean captivity were strongly distorted by the political and didactic agenda of the time and were based on rumors and not really firsthand by their authors. . So, a question arises: was the position of the slaves really as bad as described in Christian sources?
The answer is not so easy. Even the aforementioned sources are not unanimous in their assessment of Tartar captivity. Michalon Lituanus (Litvin), for example, sometimes describes the terrible suffering of Christian slaves in the mid-17th century of Crimea. However, a few pages later, Michalon contradicts himself and claims that the Tatars properly treat their captives and free them in the seventh year of their bondage - unlike Christians, who keep slaves in captivity forever. Baron de Tott, who wrote with deep compassion on the difficulties of Tatar slavery, but also confessed that “Europeans alone mistreat their slaves. The cause of this, no doubt, is because, in the East, they accumulated wealth to buy them; But here they buy them to accumulate wealth. In the East they are the enjoyment of greed; in Europe it is your instrument ... ”
Despite what travelers have reported on the topic, archival and legal sources provide us with more accurate information about the living conditions of Crimean slaves. The fate of the captives who remained in Crimea and were not rescued was not uniform. It seems that the position and daily conditions of a slave depended largely on its owner or mistress. Some slaves could indeed spend the rest of their lives doing strenuous work: as Crimean vizier Sefer Gazi Aga mentions in one of his letters, slaves were often “a plow and sickle” to their owners. The most terrible thing, perhaps, was the fate of those who became slaves of galley, whose sufferings were poetized in many Ukrainian dumas. Subsequently, the Turkish word “kadırga” (galera) in the form “katorga” became synonymous with “prison” in the Russian language.
However, many slaves were able to marry - and their offspring also often remained a slave. Some masters took care of their slaves so as not to exhaust them and keep them alive and able to work as long as possible. Others, however, were entirely indifferent to the fate of their human possessions. Slaves, when driven to despair, could easily turn against their masters. In the Crimea in the 1650s, because of the excessive number of captured slaves, an attempt was made to organize a major revolt against slave owners. Unfortunately, this plan was discovered and its leaders severely punished. Like other movable and immovable properties, slaves were transferred from a deceased owner to their heirs. Both men and women were often used for sexual purposes.
Especially interesting for our topic is a conversation between the French ambassador to Crimea Baron de Tott and khan Kırım Giray, which took place in the middle of the last Tatar raid of slaves in Russia and Ukraine in 1769. The discussion started after the khan received their slave tithe (about 2,000 souls) and decide to donate six young Russian slaves to de Tott. The diplomat did not like this idea very much and, in order to avoid this strange gift, he refused to accept the slaves. De Tott pretended that he could not accept Russian slaves because of the friendly relations between his country, France and Russia. A little surprised, the khan suggested that Baron accept six Georgians instead of the Russians and observed: "War makes slaves, friendship gives and friendship receives them, which is all our concern". Baron, however, found another excuse saying that in his religion he would not allow it. The khan found this argument sufficiently convincing and did not insist: “I, my friend, also have my religion; which allows me to give male slaves to Christians, but orders me to keep women to convert them. ”
Here, both interlocutors entered into a very important part of all discussions related to the problem of slavery: the religious affiliation of slaves and their conversion to the religion of their new masters. In fact, the problem of the conversion of slaves was often seen as the main problem related to the trade in “live merchandise”. Some questions disturbed Christian Europe at the time: could Christians use non-Christian slaves or should they first be baptized? Could Christians let their former countrymen, who were captured by Muslims, spend the rest of their lives in the Muslim religion? What should be done with a slave if he willingly (or involuntarily) accepted a new religion?
The legal systems of different European countries have had different answers to these questions. In most European countries, ownership of Christian slaves was limited to other Christians. According to the Spanish traveler Pero Tafur, the Christian population in 15th century Europe was authorized to buy and keep Christian slaves by a special papal bull to "prevent them from falling into the hands of the Moors and renouncing the faith". In Muscovite Russia, however, Muslims were allowed to buy Russian slaves until 1649. After 1649, only Orthodox believers were allowed to own Orthodox slaves in Russia. Any slave who wished to convert to Orthodoxy should be released, and then its owner should receive fifteen rubles in compensation. However, a group of Lithuanians and Poles (perhaps because they belonged to a type of unorthodox Christianity) was sold by the Russians to the Tatars until 1665. In Moscow, the Crimean Tatar traders could not only sell their captives, but also buy new ones
mainly Lithuanian, Polish and German. Even in the early 17th century, Kazakh Tatars could come to Novgorod to buy Russian girls. "Can you imagine Africans buying beautiful southerners (in the context of American society)?" - rhetorically asked a scholar while discussing the non-racist character of slavery in Russia.
All of the moral, religious and legal issues mentioned above about the slave trade were reflected in the Crimean context. Even for Christian Zaporozian Cossacks, who often did not hesitate to steal Crimean Christian monasteries and kill local Christians, the religious aspect of slavery was quite important. In 1675, the Cossack ataman, Ivan Sirko, massacred the three thousand Slavic slaves who decided to return to their Muslim masters in Crimea. In a funeral speech about the dismembered bodies of the murdered Slavic captives, he sadly stated: “Forgive me, brothers, and sleep until the Day of Judgment - instead of multiplying in Crimea among the infidels and instead of bringing ruin on our brave heads and his own eternal damnation without the cross ”. In addition, he later vigorously converted about 1,500 Tatars captured in Crimea to Christianity. It is worth mentioning that, when capturing Jews during the Chmielnicki rebellion in 1648, the Cossacks used to suggest that they convert to Christianity. Those of the Jews who converted to the new religion were able to save their own lives.
The theme of Tatar slavery played an important role in Ukrainian folk songs, usually sung by kobzars, blind musicians, often victims of unsuccessful attempts to escape slavery. Tartar and Turkish captivity (nevolia or polon) was a recurring topic in many Cossack songs. In one of them, Cossack slaves complain about the impossibility of celebrating Christian holidays and curse “the Turkish land and the Muslim faith”. Even Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, a key figure in separating Ukraine from Poland during the 1648 Cossack rebellion, was imprisoned in Istanbul for about two years. His son, Yurii Khmel'nyts'kyi, was also taken captive to Crimea in 1677, where he was denounced by a renegade Cossack Nicolo (Ali).
Not only the Zaporozhians, but also Don Cossacks attacked Muslim Crimea. Some of them were also captured and enslaved there. Especially interesting was the case of the Cossack Ivashko (Ivan) Vergunenok, who, when caught by the Tatars c.1660, claimed that he was the son of the Tsarevich (prince) Dmitrii, the heir to the Russian throne. It had been sold to a Jewish merchant in Caffa, and then purchased by the khan of Crimea, who apparently wanted to use it in the planned war with Russia. The khan kept him chained to Zhidovskii Gorodok ("Jewish city", the Russian name Çufut-Kale) for three years, and later (1646) sold it to the Ottoman sultan ...
The audacious incursions of the Cossacks, which devastated much of the Ottoman Black Sea and the Crimean Khanate, were irritating not only from an economic point of view, but also from a religious point of view. The Cossacks, named in Ottoman sources by the epithet mel'un (cursed), broke the stability of the Black Sea region and threatened the whole concept of "Darü'l-Islam", that is, the lands governed by Islamic laws and religion. That is why Cossacks were generally not sold as regular slaves, but were executed "with the most violent punishment" - as was the case with some Cossacks captured during the reign of Mehmed Giray IV (1641-1644, 1654-1666) and executed in Crimea. Another Cossack, who tried to organize a slave uprising, was impaled in the main square of Bahçesaray in 1656 / 1657. In general, however, slaves were rarely killed - the usual punishment for bad behavior was to be sold to row galleys.
A group of Russian Cossacks from the "old believers" sect (starovertsy), on the contrary, fought on the Tartar side. In the 18th century, led by their leader Ignat Nekrasov, they escaped Russia to avoid persecution by Peter the Great. Surprisingly, they found refuge among Muslim Tatars. The Tatars called them Cossacks-inat in reference to their leader. Despite participating in military actions by the Crimean Tatar army, they preserved the Christian faith and had privileges that allowed them to consume pork.
Local Christians have often tried to rescue their co-religionists from captivity. In 1650, during the Chmielnicki uprising, the Tatars captured 300 Polish Armenians and took them to Crimea. Most of them were rescued by local Christians. However, the Christian population of Crimea, as well as all other religious and ethnic groups that inhabited the peninsula, also used slave labor. Surprisingly, Russians have rarely been helped by their Buddhist allies - the ethnically calm Mongolians from the Nogais regions, who have agreed to return to Russia any Russian captives acquired in combat with the Crimean Tatars.
Muslim sources also devoted considerable attention to the problem of the conversion of slaves. It appears, however, that Islamic laws were much more tolerant of this issue than those of European countries. Adult men and slaves were generally allowed to retain and, moreover, even practiced their non-Muslim religions. However, young women, who were supposed to produce new Muslims, were generally converted; The same fate usually awaited small children. As Kırım Giray mentioned Tott's, women were generally much easier to convert:
“Men, being, by their nature, independent, even in slavery, preserve a strength that fear can hardly contain [. . .] The conversion of such a man is always a miracle; while that of women, on the contrary, is the most natural and simple thing possible. They are always from their lover's religion. ”
Those slave men who, under some circumstances, converted to Islam generally received a new Muslim name. Many of these names were typical only of slaves, such as Salur (attached to the root sal- (“letting go”)), Devlet (“good fortune”), derivations of the word gül (“rose”) and other flower-related names were generally given to slaves. A Patronic Abd-allah (“Servant of Allah”) was usually added to the first name. These newly converted Muslims were treated like all other Islamic believers - and were prohibited from being rescued by their former Christian brothers.
Conversion to Islam was often the means to achieve a higher social status and obtain freedom, or escape capital punishment. Russian streltsy Timofei Akundinov, who pretended to be a son of the late Tsar Vasilii, escaped captivity in Istanbul, but was forgiven and not punished on condition of his conversion to Islam. He, however, managed to escape a second time. Upon being caught again, he was forcibly circumcised and converted to the Muslim faith (1647). Even more interesting was the case of a certain Draco, a slave owner from Istanbul, whose Christian slave was accused of setting his house on fire. She testified to the Sultan's vizier that she was Muslim, while Draco wanted to convert her to Christianity. His evidence, like the testimony of a Muslim woman, was found to be more solid than that of his Christian master, and Draco was soon hanged right in front of his still smoking house.
Also very interesting is the opposite situation, that is, the attitude towards Muslim Tatar captives in Christian Europe and the problem of their conversion. In fact, the Tatars themselves were often captured by the Russians, Poles and Cossacks in the course of military campaigns. To give an example, ataman Sirko captured some 6,000 Tatars during his invasion of Crimea in 1675. According to Spaniard Pero Tafur, in the 15th century, slaves of Tatar origin were three times more expensive than other slaves; they had a reputation for being absolutely loyal to the master. In early modern Europe, Tatars, unlike Africans, were used primarily as a kind of "decorative slaves". The wonderful fidelity of the Tartar slaves in Poland was also mentioned by Pierre Chevalier, who noted that the Polish nobility was accustomed to trusting their Tartar servants "more than anyone else in their household".
It seems that Christian Europe was much less tolerant of the problem of converting slaves than the Muslim East. Tartar slaves in Europe were generally forced to convert to Christianity. The documents testify to a very cruel treatment of Tatar captives in Russian prisons in the 16th century: Tartars (including seven children) died in Pskov prison in 1535. Only eight captive Tatars survived in the Novgorod prison of 84; These were later beaten, while women were converted to Christianity and forcibly married (1535-1536). As the source says, "they [the newly converted Tartars] were very zealous in the Christian faith."
Muslim sources seem to pay much less attention to the moral aspects of the Tartar slave trade in Crimea. In the Islamic legal system, slaves were called "mal-i natik" (speaking property), a similar category for the Latin term "Instrumenti vocali". In Turkish languages, slaves were generally called esir (hence the Russian "yasyr" and the plural for slave in the Polish "jasyr"). According to Islamic law, it was forbidden to enslave Muslims. This is why a conversion to Islam often meant freedom from slavery for non-Muslim slaves.
Although the Koran has prescribed the treatment of slaves humanely, it seems that this principle was not always followed in Crimea and Ottoman lands. Completely different was the situation in Mameluk Egypt, where the government and the ruling dynasty consisted of converted slaves, often of Slavic or Circassian origin - the status of slaves was sometimes even greater than that of the ordinary inhabitants of the country.
One of the Ottoman chroniclers tried to justify the Tatars' attacks by saying that the Tatars had "neither land nor trade". If they didn't make inroads, how could they live? ”The hypocrisy of this statement is obvious. Crimea with its warm climate, plows, gardens and vineyards, fruits, sea products, minerals and other natural resources was a very advantageous place for trade and agriculture. Most
Muslim authors admired the victorious incursions of the Turkish army and Tartar into the lands of the infidels and were not concerned with thinking about the sufferings of the slaves. However, some Muslim authors have taken a less clear approach to this problem.
One of them, Evliya Çelebi (1611-da1679, who visited Crimea in 1665-1666), had a very ambivalent attitude towards the slave trade. On the one hand, as a devout Muslim, he saw further evidence of the justice of his faith and the power of the Ottoman Empire in the successful military campaigns of the Tatar army. That is why his descriptions of the Tatar attacks and apprehension of captives are full of admiration inspired by the courage of Muslim warriors, while the misery of Christian slaves was generally seen by him as a consequence of the weakness of Christian countries.
Thus, for example, in describing the military incursions of the Crimean khan, Islam Giray III, Evliya Çelebi proudly declared that, in the years 1640 and 1650, the Tatars invaded Polish lands 71 ​​times and took 200,000 Jews from there, then selling each Jew at the price of a pipe full of tobacco. In describing the useless number of slaves in Crimea, Evliya Çelebi mentioned that even the absence of the Tatar soldiers was not a problem - to control the slaves it was sufficient for the Tatar women to take the sabers of the men and control the work of the captives in the fields without their men. . Furthermore, the traveler himself never lost his chance to obtain a new slave or two during these invasions.
On the other hand, while he was an intelligent person with the best Islamic education at the time, he often made contemptuous observations about the primitiveness and harshness of the Tartar state and people. Furthermore, as an educated and educated person, he generally felt compassion for the tortured and humiliated Christians. This attitude can be seen especially in Evliya's description of the slave market in Karasubazar:
”A man who has not seen this market, has seen nothing in this world. The mother is separated from her son and daughter, the son of her father and brother, and they are sold amid lamentations, cries for help, crying and sadness. ”
However, such human expressions of disapproval of the immorality of the slave trade can rarely be found in the Muslim sources of the time.
Numerous European sources tell us about Jewish slave traders as early as the 10th and 11th centuries. The Jewish population of Crimea was also actively involved in the slave trade. The "Vita" of the monk Eustratios de Kiev (1096) talks about how the cleric was subjected to horrible tortures and crucifixion in Cherson carried out by his merciless Jewish master, who wanted to convert the monk and his colleagues to Judaism. Despite the fact that some didactic parts of the story can hardly be trusted, most modern scholars believe that the story contains grains of historical data about Jewish slave traders, who were expelled from Cherson about a year later.
From the 13th century onwards, the Jewish population of Crimea
was divided into two distinct groups: non-Talmudic Karaite Jews and Talmudic Rabbanite Jews. These despite this, the two religious groups adopted the language and daily customs of their Turkish-speaking Tatar neighbors. The Jews, being skilled and cunning traders, also participated in the slave and prisoner trade in later periods. A certain Crimean Jew was the head of the administration (teloneum) in the mid-16th century in the city of Or (Perekop).
Observing countless numbers of Christian captives taken to Crimea, he asked Michalon Litvin if his land "was still abundant with people even though we [Poles and Lithuanians] were taking such a large number of mortals". Marcin Broniewski (1578) mentioned that ambassadors from Christian countries generally tried to bribe Jews or Tartars (corrupt Judaeos vel Tartaros pecunia) to rescue Christian captives at a lower price than what would
be offered to them in the case of direct trade with Tatar officers.
In his opinion, the participation of these bribed Jews and Tartars was highly important for the successful rescue of the captives. This traveller's information about Jewish mediators in rescuing slaves is confirmed by other sources.
In 1614, a Crimean Jew (probably a Karaite from Çufut-Kale), Abraham ben Berakhah, rescued a Nogay prisoner, Mamay bin Mohammed, at the price of 120 guilders, which the latter was supposed to pay back. A Caffa merchant, Hoca Bike (in Russian sources Hozia Kokoz), who was perhaps the most influential medieval Crimean Jew, had special relationships with Russian Tsar Ivan III about the recovery of Russian prisoners in the 1470s.
Although Russian merchants, who were captured by bey Şirin Mamaq, thanked Hoca very much and even donated some money to him, the Jewish merchant tried to earn more money and outwit the Russian tsar. However, he certainly played a crucial role in the release of these prisoners. Very interesting is the fate of another Jewish merchant, Meir Ashkenazi (d. In the second half of the 16th century), who was born in Poland, lived for some time in Ottoman Caffa, and was appointed Tatar ambassador to Poland c.1567. He frequently traveled to countries as remote as Egypt and India, and was killed by privateers near Genoa, while taking slaves from Egypt there.
According to Alan Fisher, there was a guild of Jewish slave traders in Istanbul, which consisted of 2000 Jewish traders.
Crimean Jews also owned slaves for domestic purposes. the Caffa records of 1542 mention six women, who were slaves (esir) belonging to members of the Caffa Karaite Jewish community. A document from 1613 mentions the Russian slave Servinaz, who was kept in slavery by a Karaite Jewess of Çufut-Kale Malkah, daughter of Elijah. The sources in the archive mentioned a curious case when a Karaite Jew, Samuel ben Daniel, received a certain "kazak" (that is, a Zaporozhian Cossack captured by the Tatars) to be kept on his property. During the night, however, the Cossack managed to escape.
Very interesting is the case of an 18th century Crimean Jew who owned slaves, who was killed by his slave in his own vineyard. By order of khan Maksud Giray, the murderer was sentenced to death and handed over to the Jewish community. However, a serious obstacle appeared: the Jews, who were not allowed to spill human blood, were unable to comply with this sentence. Therefore, Maksud Giray allowed the Jewish community to use biblical precepts, and the culprit was stoned to death.
In addition to other inhabitants of the region, Jews often became victims of military incursions and slave traders. The life and vicissitudes of Rabbi Moses ben Jakob ha-Gole ("the exile") from Kiev (1440-1520), one of the most famous European Jewish thinkers of the time, are closely related to the military campaigns of the Crimean Tatars. As early as 1482-1483, their children were taken captive during Tartar sacking to Kiev and taken to Crimea as slaves.
The rabbi himself was captured during the Tartar siege of Lida in 1506 and taken to the city Eski Kırım (Sulkhat). Despite his bitter controversy with Karaite leaders, Moses ben Jacob was rescued through the joint efforts of the local Rabbanite and Karaite communities. After being freed, the rabbi remained in Caffa until the end of his days and became the leader of the local rabbanite community. It is only through their
spiritual authority and the introduction of this new amalgamated tradition that a local community, hitherto made up of some rival groups, has become a united group with a common religious identity. Thus, paradoxically, the slave tartar trade played a decisive role in shaping the local Jewish community.
Equally paradoxical was the fate of a Karaite pilgrim to Jerusalem, Joseph ben Jeshuah of Deraûno (Poland), who composed a sad piyut (poem) in the Karaimo-Kipchak language entitled “Karanhy bulut“ (“black cloud”). The poem was dedicated to his stay in Crimea in 1666, where he was taken to a terrible prison in Bahçesaray "at
the khan's palace with the chain around his neck". Joseph ben Jeshuah's prayer for deliverance from “harsh captivity” was soon heard. Even so, the khan (probably Mehmed Giray IV) confiscated the money that the Jewish pilgrim needed to travel to Jerusalem. Therefore, Joseph ben Jeshuah failed to carry out his plans and was forced to remain in Çufut-Kale
for three years, where he studied the Torah with local sages. Therefore,
for him, prison in Crimea turned out to be a very important
part of his life and religious education.
In general, however, Jewish sources tell us much less about the moral side of the problem of the slave trade. Christianity and Islam, the two main rival forces, were the main participants in the debates related to this issue.
To conclude, we must say that the particularly serious criticism of the slave trade in Crimea was expressed by Christian authors from Eastern Europe (Russians, Polish-Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Armenians). They could not tolerate the idea that thousands of their supporters were constantly underestimated and humiliated by infidel Muslims and exposed to the “vicious” influence of Islam.
However, it appears that not many Christian authors of that time expressed equal disapproval of the Tartar and African slave trade. Muslim authors, who considered the slave trade to be a usual phenomenon of everyday life in their countries, certainly cared much less about the fate of Christian slaves apprehended by the Tatars.
However, more educated scholars (such as Evliya Çelebi) wrote with deep compassion about the sufferings of unfortunate slaves, taken from their homeland, friends and relatives. The position of Jewish sources appears to be more pragmatic than that of Muslims and Christians - while criticizing the cases of enslavement of their brothers in faith, Jews in Crimea actively practiced slave trade in the region as slave owners, traders, guards and rescue mediators.
Thus, while censoring the slave trade among its compatriots, modern sources (15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries) did not oppose the existence of the slave trade itself and considered that it was just another branch of the business activity.
The most essential part of the didactic discourse referring to the Tartar slave trade in the early modern era was religious - the issue of converting slaves into the religion of the new masters. Modern and Muslim and Christian sources were quite inconsistent when discussing this problem - when considering the conversion of their compatriots into an alien religion as an absolute evil, they certainly approved opposite cases, that is, the conversion of slaves from other countries to their religion. . However, many Crimean Christian slaves converted to Islam to acquire a higher social status. Likewise, several prisoner Tatars continued their lives in Russia as the so-called "kriashcheny" ("baptized"). After conversion, they generally received a new social status and were normally integrated into the ordinary daily life of the Russian state with the same rights as other lower social strata in Russian society at the time. In fact, many of these kriashcheny became founders of the famous Russian aristocratic clans (e. Nabokovs, Naryshkins, Sheremetevs, Nashchokins etc.).
For Jews, the idea of ​​converting to another religion was perhaps less acceptable - and thousands of Jews preferred death to baptism in the course of the 1648-1654 Chmielnicki rebellion. However, we know of some cases where some converted Jews, who joined the Cossack forces, became distinguished Cossack military leaders. We have no data on the conversion of Crimean captives to Judaism - unlike Christianity and Islam. Early modern Judaism did not welcome any newcomers of non-Jewish descent. Even in the 18th century, at the time of European enlightenment and emancipation, Crimea continued to be a symbol of dark Muslim power, slave trade, captivity and humiliation in the eyes of Christian Europe. It was only in 1774-1783 that the Russian annexation of the peninsula stopped this inhumane trade in living goods for good.
The slave trade has never been revived in the region and now only Ukrainian folk songs, such as the one quoted in the title of this article, remind us of the fact that, once this land heard the cries and cries of sadness from the most unhappy visitors to Crimea - slaves, captives and prisoners of war - taken against their will far from home to be sold as a kind of “living object” and spend the end of their days in misery and exhausting physical work.
Source:
´-Mikhail Kizilov (2007) ” Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea From the Perspective of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources ”: https://is.gd/zTm74B

Translated to English.
 
Old October 21st, 2020 #2
Átilla Szeinfild
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Was a brazilian text, that I find so good, that I decide to translate to English.
 
Old October 22nd, 2020 #3
Fico
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As Slav,for me is this nothing strange. Slavs are enemies between themselves in general and they can only work in cooperation with west who must put their influence among them. Slavic areas are paradise for criminals across the world. They fall under under Mongol invasions and communism and I think that it is irreversible genetic devastation.
 
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