Download PDF | Brian Davies - Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700 (2007).
273 Pages
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Muscovy waged a costly struggle against the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for control of the fertile steppe above the Black Sea. This was a region of great strategic and economic importance – arguably the pivot of Eurasia at the time. Yet, this crucial period in Russia’s history has, up until now, been neglected by historians. Brian L. Davies’s study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power. The long campaign took a great toll upon Russia’s population, economy, and institutions, and repeatedly frustrated or redefi ned Russian military and diplomatic projects in the West.
The struggle was every bit as important as Russia’s wars in northern and central Europe for driving the Russian state-building process, forcing military reform and shaping Russia’s visions of Empire. Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 examines the course of this struggle and explains how Russia’s ultimate prevalence resulted from new strategies of military colonization in addition to improvements in army command-and-control, logistics, and tactics. Brian L. Davies is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His publications include State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia: The Case of Kozlov, 1635–1649 (2004).
Acknowledgments
My fi rst debt of thanks is to Jeremy Black, for inviting me to contribute to Routledge’s Warfare and History series, and to Emma Langley and Philippa Grant, my patient editors at Routledge. I also wish to thank the staffs of the Lenin State Library, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the British Library, the Library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London, and the Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at ChampaignUrbana for access to their collections. Opportunities to conduct research in Moscow were made possible by the International Research and Exchanges Board. The Military History Summer Seminar at the US Army Academy, West Point, provided an introductory overview on how to write military operational history.
The University of Texas at San Antonio provided a semester’s leave from teaching. I am forever grateful for the encouragement and insights offered by my friends and colleagues Richard Hellie, Daniel Kaiser, Carol Belkin Stevens, Philip Uninsky, Robert Frost, Janet Martin, Wing chung Ng, Beverly Davis, Kolleen Guy, and William Bishel. My greatest gratitude is, of course, to my wife Paula for her love and her unfailing ability to brighten my life. I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, Bruce Karl Davies (1923– 1965) and Jeanne Kay Starnes (1929–2006).
Colonization, war, and slaveraiding on the Black Sea steppe in the sixteenth century For nearly four centuries – from the reign of Moscow Grand Prince Vasilii III through the reign of Russian Empress Catherine the Great – the Russian government, army, and people confronted the threats of Crimean Tatar invasion and raiding on their southern frontier. Russia’s military confl ict with the Crimean Khanate had a profound impact on the course of Russian colonization of the black soil forest-steppe and steppe above the Black Sea; it often frustrated Russian military and diplomatic efforts in the Baltic and central Europe; and it exerted as much impact on Russian military reform as the empire’s wars with Poland-Lithuania, Livonia, and Sweden. It is especially the connection between the threat from the Crimean Khanate and Russian efforts to improve military organization, command-and-control, logistics, and tactics that is the focus of this study.
This book examines the fi rst phase of the Russo-Crimean struggle, from the early sixteenth century down to the fall of Azov to the army and fl eet of Peter the Great. In this phase the theater of war gradually shifted from east to west, from the Volga towards the Dnepr and beyond, and eventually embroiled the Muscovite state in war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the hetmans of Ukraine, and the Ottoman Turks. At the end of this phase the threat from the Crimean Khanate had been signifi cantly reduced; Poland-Lithuania had been rendered a second-rate power; and Russia was in control of most of the Pontic steppe east of the Crimean peninsula.
But her further advance southwest towards the Danube was still blocked by the Ottomans, against whom the Russians would have to wage four more wars in the eighteenth century. Early Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite expansion towards the Black Sea In the middle of the fourteenth century Mongol power on the steppe above the Black Sea and Caspian began to weaken, creating a political vacuum that Muscovy and especially Lithuania and Poland scrambled to fi ll.
There were several reasons for the declining power of the Mongol Kipchak Horde (Golden Horde) after 1350: depopulation and the disruption of trade resulting from the Black Death; dynastic crisis within the Juchid house, leading to the concentration of power in the hands of a non-Juchid emir, Mamai, in turn provoking revolt against Mamai by Tokhtamysh, at the time supported by Timur Leng; a subsequent savage war between Tokhtamysh and Timur on the lower Volga, in the Caucasus and Transoxiana; and fi nally, the failure of Khan Edigei’s last-ditch attempt to recentralize the Horde (1411). By the 1420s, Crimea had broken away from the Kipchak Horde; by the 1440s, so had Kazan’ on the upper Volga.
What remained to the Kipchak khans was the lower Volga and the old capital of Sarai. As they no longer controlled all of the Tatar tribes of the Kipchak steppe, their domain was increasingly referred to simply as the Great Horde. The succession wars and the war with Timur had been waged mostly in the eastern reaches of the Kipchak Horde. But these wars had also weakened the hold of the Kipchak khans on their lands in the west: Crimea, the trading cities of the northern Black Sea coast, and the steppe hinterland from the Danube to the Don. The important Venetian-controlled port of Tana (Azov) had been seized by Timur, and the Genoese, in return for military assistance against Mamai, had extorted from Tokhtamysh recognition of their own sovereignty over Kaffa and the other port cities of Crimea and the northwestern Black Sea coast. The Kipchak Horde’s trade routes to Persia and Transoxiana had been cut by Timur, and now its Great Horde remnant had less control over the Black Sea trade with Constantinople and Trebizond. The Genoese were able to draw more Black Sea commerce to their ports at Licostomo and Maurocastro, which stepped up their trade along the Danube into Hungary and across the Dnestr into Poland.1 This further eroded the Great Horde’s position in the Danubian region by promoting the formation of new states – Wallachia shook off Hungarian rule and Moldavia became an independent principality – and then setting Hungary, Poland, and the Ottoman Turks in compe tition to vassalize them.
The new opportunities for territorial aggrandizement in the Danube region in turn produced greater enthusiasm in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria for crusade coalition, fi rst against the Tatars, and by the end of the century, against the Ottoman Turks. Above all the declining power of the Great Horde encouraged the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Principality of Moscow to begin expanding their territory southward towards the Black Sea. In 1362 the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas had defeated the Kipchak khan near the mouth of the Bug and annexed Chernigov, Novgorod-Severskii, Kiev, Pereiaslav, and Podolia. The incorporation of Podolia extended Lithuanian territory all the way to the coast of the Black Sea. Meanwhile the Polish kings were working to annex Galicia and the Chelm-Belz region and extend their power over the trade routes leading from the Black Sea into central Europe. Algirdas’ heir Jogaila had to resume paying tribute to the khan but was left in de facto control of eastern Ukraine, where he allowed Lithuanian nobles to establish new estates.
The conversion of many of these Lithuanian landlords to Orthodoxy, their support for the establishment of an Orthodox metropolitanate at Kiev, and their acceptance of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) legal traditions and local institutions helped them legitimate their authority over the Orthodox majority. It also promoted the Ruthenization of Lithuanian administration in the original core of the Grand Duchy. In 1386 Jogaila, facing a revolt by his cousin supported by the Teutonic Order, accepted the offer of the Polish nobility and converted to the Roman rite, married Jadwiga, the daughter of the late King Kazimierz III, and took the throne of Poland as King Władysław II Jagiełło (r. 1386–1434). The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were henceforth in dynastic union.
Lithuania preserved its autonomy within this union and its nobles were soon admitted into the same noble estate (szlachta) with the privileges and rights enjoyed by the Polish nobility, with whom they now shared responsibility for electing Lithuania’s Grand Duke and regulating union relations. The union of Poland and Lithuania under a Jagiełłonian dynasty expanded the Polish sphere of infl uence in central Europe, making it possible to vassalize Moldavia for a time and, in the 1440s, place Jagiełłonians on the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. It strengthened Polish-Lithuanian military and administrative power in Ukraine. But it also had the longer-term effect of aggravating social and religious tensions in Ukraine by introducing Polish royal castles and royal offi cials and allowing Catholic Polish magnates to obtain vast estates there, often at the expense of the Orthodox Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobles and gentry.
After Poland recovered the port of Danzig from the Teutonic Order (1455) it was able to partici pate in the Baltic trade – particularly the grain trade – on a much larger scale. With capital investment from Western European merchants Polish nobles were able to establish vast latifundia in western Ukraine (Rus’ Czerwona, western Volhynia) to produce grain for shipment down the Vistula to Danzig. This was followed by the gradual enserfment of the peasantry, a process culminating in the 1588 Third Lithuanian Statute, which abolished peasant tenants’ right to transfer residence. The spread of manorial economy also affected eastern Ukraine, although in a different fashion. The sparser population here made it harder to impose serfdom and the greater distance from the Vistula made it more rational for landlords to specialize in cattle ranching, supplemented by revenue from taverns and mills, tolls, and duties on hunting and fi shing. The tendency in the east, therefore, was towards smaller folwark manor farms. But the landlords’ dependence on excise dues, tolls, and fees had its own feudalizing effect on their relations with the peasantry and lesser gentry, especially as these same landlords often received life appointments as crown offi cials.
The availability of uncolonized virgin land enabled a few magnates to establish latifundia of enormous size by winning vast grants of crown land in return for pledges to settle and defend them. In the 1590s the Palatine of Kiev, Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi, won title to lands in Volhynia, Galicia, and Kiev holding about 1,300 villages, 100 towns, and 40 castles. He defended these lands with a private army of 2,000 retainers, about the number of troops in the Crown army in Ukraine.2 In the early sixteenth century the Muscovite grand princes Ivan III and Vasilii III succeeded in wresting from Lithuania much of western Rus’ – NovgorodSeverskii, Starodub, part of Chernigov, and the strategically crucial fortress of Smolensk. In the 1560s the Muscovite tsar Ivan IV invaded Lithuania and seized Polotsk and the districts just north of the Western Dvina River. This fi nally pressed the Lithuanian nobility to renegotiate terms of union with Poland and accept the new Union of Lublin (1569), which joined Poland and Lithuania in a federal Commonwealth (Rzecz Pospolita) under one Diet (Sejm) and a Polish King confi rmed (and from 1573, elected) by both realms. The Union of Lublin had important consequences for Ukraine.
Before 1569 the Polish Crown had directly administered only the western Ukrainian palatinates of Rus’ Czerwona, Belz, and Podolia, holding about 570,000 subjects; now it assumed responsibility for the defense and administration of the eastern Ukrainian palatinates as well (Bratslav, Volhynia, and Kiev, with about 930,000 subjects). Polish royal castles and Quarter Army deployments held a southern Ukrainian frontier running from Kamianets in Podolia through Bar, Vinnitsa, and Bila Tserkva to Cherkasy.3 The southward expansion of the Grand Principality of Moscow was a slower process and did not begin in earnest until the last decade of the fi fteenth century. Part of the reason it was comparatively delayed was Muscovy’s remoteness from the Baltic trade and the Black Sea trade with central Europe, which reduced the economic stimulus for southward economic expansion and left security concerns the most important interest driving Muscovite southward expansion.
Another reason was Muscovy’s proximity to the Great Horde, rendering Muscovy more vulnerable to entanglement in Horde civil wars and wars with other steppe polities. Thus Moscow’s Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi had sided with Tokhtamysh against the usurper Mamai and helped defeat Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380; but two years later Tokhtamysh had in turn besieged Moscow in order to reimpose Moscow’s tribute obligations to the Great Horde. After Timur Leng’s destruc tion of Tokhtamysh, Timur’s emir Edigei, Nogai Khan and de facto Khan of the Great Horde, attacked Moscow yet again, taking thousands of prisoners (1408).4 The Lithuanian grand dukes also strove to weaken Moscow by support ing Tver’, Moscow’s principal rival in the race to unify northeast Rus’. In 1425–1453 succession confl ict within the Grand Principality of Moscow esca lated into civil war and nearly resulted in the disintegration of the principality and its hegemony over northeastern Rus’. On balance the period 1380–1480 did see signifi cant Muscovite territorial expansion, but it was mostly to the north, at the expense of Novgorod, and to the northeast, to secure the lower Oka and push across the upper Volga.
The most assertive Muscovite operation to alter the balance of power on the steppe in this period occurred along the Volga: the establishment in the 1450s of a vassal khanate at Kasimov, to shield central Muscovy against raids out of the new Kazan’ Khanate. Three developments permitted and encouraged Grand Prince Ivan III to turn his attention to the forest-steppe and steppe south of the Oka after 1480. The fi rst of these was his annexation of Novgorod in 1478, which deprived Kazimierz IV, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, of one of his most coveted prizes and so pushed Kazimierz into alliance with Khan Akhmet of the Great Horde. To counter this Ivan III negotiated his own alliance with Crimean Khan Mengli Girei, thereby strengthening Mengli Girei in his struggle to overthrow Akhmet and “reunite” the Kipchak Khanate under his own sovereignty. In 1480 Khan Akhmet marched on central Muscovy but was blocked by Muscovite forces deployed along the Ugra River and forced to withdraw. Akhmet had expected Lithuanian reinforcements, but diversionary attacks upon Lithuanian Ukraine by the Crimean Tatars had prevented them from arriving.5 The second development was the escalating confl ict between Muscovy and Lithuania, which proceeded from the Muscovite annexation of Tver’ and Novgorod (1478–1485) and culminated in Moscow’s conquest of much of the western Rus’ lands incorporated into Lithuania a century before.
The Muscovite-Lithuanian War of 1494 gave Ivan III control of the Viaz’ma road to Moscow, the towns of Velizh, Belyi, and Toropets, and forced Lithuania to renounce its claims to Novgorod and Pskov. It also placed Kozel’sk, Novosil’, Vorotynsk, Peremyshl’, and Belev under Muscovite control, thereby extending Muscovy’s southwestern frontier closer to the Starodub and Chernigov domains on the upper Dnepr. A second war in 1503–1505 resulted in the Muscovite annexation of the basins of the Seim and Desna rivers with the towns of Ryl’sk, Putivl’, Briansk, Novgorod-Severskii, Trubchevsk, Chernigov, and Starodub (the Seversk region). Most of western Rus’ had come under the sovereignty of the Grand Prince of Moscow. “It needed only the cities of Smolensk and Kiev to complete the picture; but Ivan had little reason to complain. Smolensk was under forty miles from the Muscovite frontier; Kiev was within easy reach both of Chernigov and Lyubech on the Dnepr.”6 The Lithuanians were defeated in their attempt to retake these territories in the war of 1507–1508. In 1514 Moscow Grand Prince Vasilii III fi nally seized Smolensk. The third development occurred at the eastern end of Muscovy’s Oka frontier, just to the southwest from Kasimov and the Volga. The old frontier principality of Riazan’, the “trampled land” traditionally most exposed to Tatar attack, had been transformed into an appanage within the principality of Moscow upon the death of Prince Ivan Fedorovich in 1456. In 1521 Grand Prince Vasilii III annexed Riazan’ outright by deposing its last prince for allegedly conspiring with the Crimean Khan.
This moved Muscovy’s defense perimeter far to the south, to the upper reaches of the Voronezh, Tsna, and Moksha rivers. The annexation of Riazan’ had great economic consequences as well. It reconnected the Oka-Volga trade route to the old southern trade route descending the Don to Azov and the Black Sea, and it opened to Muscovite colonization and cultivation much of the vast belt of fertile black soil (chernozem) running along the Pontic forest-steppe and steppe from Moldavia to the Volga. Yields for wheat and rye were higher on Riazan’s black soil than in central Muscovy. A century later the Dutch envoy Adam Olearius judged that Riazan’ “surpassed all the neighboring provinces in grain growing, livestock raising, and abundance of grain.”7 Riazan’ quickly became the primary provisioner of central Muscovy. Settlement of its once-sparsely populated southern reaches encouraged further colonization to its west, towards the Volga, and to its southwest, towards the newly annexed Seversk lands. The Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire The emergence of the Crimean Khanate in the 1440s was further sign of the disintegration of the Great Horde. By the 1480s the Crimean Khanate had acquired, through strategic partnership with the Ottoman Empire, enough military power to constitute its own threat to Polish-Lithuanian colonization of the Black Sea steppe, and after 1509, to Muscovite colonization as well.
The Crimean Khanate was formed in the course of the civil war attending the succession struggles within the Great Horde nomadizing on the lower Volga. The founder of its ruling dynasty, Khan Haji Girei, was a Chingisid prince forced into exile in Lithuania and invited to rule in Crimea by certain aristocratic Tatar clans – the Shirins, Barins, Argins, and Kipchaks – that had likewise broken from the Great Horde. Haji Girei established his capital at Bakhchisarai on the Crimean peninsula but continued to lay claim to the title of “Great Khan of the Great Horde, of the Crimean Throne, and of the Kipchak Steppe,” thereby assserting his sovereignty over the Pontic steppe and forest-steppe from Moldavia to the Volga and as far north as Seversk and the upper Don. The four clans who had invited him to rule over them nomadized across the southern edge of the steppe, just above Perekop and the Black Sea and Azov coasts. By the end of the century there were about 200,000 souls in their domains (ulusy), rising to 500,000 by 1550. A smaller Tatar population sedentarized in the towns and villages of the Crimean peninsula.
Large numbers of Genoese, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, and Karaim Jews resided in the largest Crimean towns (Kaffa, Evpatoriya, Azov) as subject millets and paid the çizje capitation tax into the khan’s treasury; taxes and duties on their trade yielded even greater revenue.8 Haji Girei had relied alternately upon alliances with the Poles and Lithuanians or with Muscovy to win and preserve his khanate’s independence from the Golden Horde. But the fall of Constantinople in 1453 changed the balance of power in the Black Sea region. Sultan Mehmet II now embarked on a campaign to establish Ottoman hegemony over all the coastal trading towns of the Black Sea. This included the towns of the Crimean coast, the Genoese merchant colonies that had been so important for the commerce of the Byzantine empire and promised comparable benefi t for the commercial development of Ottoman Rumelia. After their Byzantine patrons had passed from the stage the Crimean Genoese had placed themselves under the protection of the king of Poland (1462), had begun hiring Polish mercenaries, and had interfered in factional confl icts within the Muslim Crimean Khanate. This raised the danger that the Genoese might bring all of Crimea under Polish hegemony and extend Polish power along the Black Sea coast as far as the Danube.
To prevent this Sultans Mehmet II and Bayezit II moved to vassalize the Crimean Genoese and Crimean khan. This served his additional goal of weakening independent Moldavia, the fi nal obstacle to Ottoman domination of the entire Black Sea coast, by starving Stefan the Great’s treasury of the Crimean trade revenues Stefan received through the fortress ports of Kilia and Akkerman he had recently seized. By 1475 the Turks had seized control of Kaffa, imposed tribute on the Genoese merchants, and annexed most of the Crimean coast and foothills between Inkerman and Kaffa – about a tenth of the Crimean peninsula. They achieved this by recruiting the support of the Shirin clan, whose bey held the rights to a share of Kaffa’s tolls, and by pitting the Shirins, the khan Haji Girei, and the Genoese against each other. Khan Mengli Girei was spared his life and restored to his throne after pledging vassalage to the sultan. In 1484 he led Crimean Tatar forces in their fi rst joint operation with an Ottoman army – to retake the fortresses of Kilia and Akkerman from the Moldavians. The recapture of Kilia and Akkerman reestablished Ottoman control over the western coast of the Black Sea as far north as the Dnestr – and bounded the Khanate on the west with the Ottoman pashalik of Silistria.
An Ottoman garrison was also founded at Azov (old Tana), near the Don’s mouth at the Sea of Azov – thereby bounding the Khanate on the east. Ottoman garrisons were established within the Khanate at Perekop, Gozlev, Arabat, and Yenikale. The Black Sea had been transformed into the “Ottoman lake” and the vassalage imposed upon Mengli Girei and his successors assured that Ottoman sultans could make use of Crimean Tatar cavalry in their campaigns in Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Ukraine and generally rely upon the Khanate to deter the Poles and Muscovites from entering anti-Ottoman coalitions or carrying their colonization of the steppe too close to the Turkish garrisons along the Black Sea coast. Meanwhile Crimea provided Istanbul, Rumelia, and northern Anatolia with slaves, grain, salt, fi sh, meat, and lumber. In principle the khans’ vassalage was of the kind the sultans were imposing upon the hospodarates of the Danube.
The khan was under obligation to the sultan to be “the enemy of thy enemy, the friend of thy friend,” to contribute troops when the sultan called for them, and pay tribute gifts to the sultan; otherwise the khan remained sovereign over his own domains, minting his own coins, and collecting his own tribute from the Poles, Muscovites, and the other nomadic peoples of the Kipchak steppe. He frequently received Ottoman subsidies as well. In practice this vassalage did not fully constrain the khan’s diplomatic and military power. In some periods – during the reign of Sultan Selim II, and the fi rst decade of Suleiman I’s rule – the Porte closely controlled the foreign policy of the Khanate, directing Crimean Tatar military power against its primary enemy of the moment and preventing Crimean raiding against neutral or potentially friendly powers.
In other periods the Crimean khans ignored or openly defi ed the sultans because they needed war plunder to pacify their own restless nobles or because the Ottomans had taken actions (annexing Bucak, attempting to establish an Ottoman military presence on the lower Volga) that threatened to reduce their sovereignty over their own domains. On several occasions the Ottomans found it necessary to depose troublesome khans and exile them to Rhodes. Over time the weakening of the khans’ authority over their beys and mirzas encouraged the growth of a separatist spirit in the khanate.9 For most of the sixteenth century, however, the khans strove to serve their Ottoman suzerains. The sultan’s protectorate was still of great strategic advantage to them. Although the Turkish garrisons founded at Azov and on the lower Dnepr served fi rst of all to maintain Ottoman control over the termini of the Dnepr and Don river trades, they also stood as reminders to the khans’ enemies that the might of the Ottoman Empire protected the Crimean Khanate.
This put PolandLithuania and Muscovy on warning that cossack raids upon the khanate or the Turkish tripwire garrisons along the northern Black Sea coast could provoke retaliation by Ottoman armies. The khans’ alliance with the Porte also enabled them to draw other nomadic peoples of the western Kipchak steppe into military confederation. In the sixteenth century part of the Nogai Horde abandoned the steppes along the Volga between Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ to relocate farther west on the grasslands between the Kuban River and the Don; these Nogai émigrés were called the Lesser Nogais or the Kazyev ulus, to distinguish them from the Great Nogais who continued to roam east of the Volga. The Lesser Nogais recognized the suzerainty of the Crimean khan and the sultan, and because they preserved their nomadic way of life they came to comprise a large part of the khan’s army, replacing the increasingly sedentarized Crimean peninsula farmers who had been allowed to purchase exemptions from military service. Other fragments of the Nogai Horde resettled on the steppes between the Dnestr and Bug as the Edisan Tatars, and in Bessarabia as the Bucak or Belgorod Tatars.10 In this manner the Pontic steppes between the Danube and the Kuban came under the control of a new Tatar confederation. Poland and Muscovy had to come to terms with the enhanced power of the Crimean Khanate. Both courted the khans’ neutrality with payments of tribute, part of which was sent on to Istanbul. On several occasions each bid to enlist Crimean military assistance against the other. The khans often switched alliances between Poland and Muscovy in the fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries according to which bid higher in tribute. From the 1520s large-scale Crimean operations in the north (as opposed to smaller-scale raids for captives) were more often directed against the Muscovites, and the Khanate and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acted in close concert against Muscovy in 1607–1617.
Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman–Tatar alliance The foreign policy pursued by Poland’s Jagiełłonian kings in the late fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries placed them in frequent military confl ict with the Crimean Khanate and at risk of war with the Ottomans as well. From the 1460s the Crimean khans had been locked in struggle with the khans of the Great Horde for mastery of the Kipchak steppe as far as the Volga, so King Kazimierz IV’s 1470 decision to ally with Great Horde Khan Akhmet against Ivan III of Moscow drove Crimean Khan Mengli Girei into a thirty-seven-year alliance with Muscovy and subjected Poland-Lithuania to a series of reprisal raids. Almost every year saw a Crimean Tatar incur sion into Podolia, Volhynia, Małopolska, Rus’ Czerwona, or Lithuanian Belarus’.11 Jagiełłonian intervention in the affairs of the Danubian principalities was frustrating Ottoman plans, too: they had allied with Stefan the Great of Moldavia in 1484–1487, in unsuccessful efforts to recover Kilia and Cetatea Alba from the Turks; had subsequently turned upon Stefan and invaded Moldavia in 1497, to try to install Zygmunt Jagiełło on the Moldavian throne; and with Władysław II, son of Kazimierz IV, occupying the thrones of Bohemia (1471–1516) and Hungary (1490–1516) they had appeared poised to complete the formal dynastic union of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia.
Such provocations gave the Ottomans reason to further encourage Mengli Girei to raid Poland-Lithuania and to prepare their own retaliation. In 1498 an Ottoman army of 40–60,000 men under Bali Pasha, beylerbey of Silistria, invaded Poland, striking deep into Małopolska and Mazovia and taking perhaps 10,000 prisoners.12 A second Ottoman expedition later that year was supposed to join with Tatar forces and attack Cracow or Vilnius; sudden cold weather forced its early withdrawal, but the Poles had been put on warning. Subsequent territorial losses in Lithuania to the armies of Ivan III provided further reason for King Aleksander to seek rapprochement with the Ottomans and the Khanate. In 1503 he signed a fi ve-year peace with Sultan Bayezit II. After losing Smolensk to the Muscovites (1514) King Zygmunt I signed an alliance with the Crimean Khanate (1516) and a peace treaty with Sultan Selim I (1519). An “eternal peace” between the Porte and Poland-Lithuania was signed in 1533 and renewed in 1547.
These treaties, along with annual payments of tribute “gifts” (pominki) to the khan amounting to about 15,000 złoties, did not entirely spare Poland-Lithuania from Tatar raiding. Polish and Lithuanian magnates holding estates in Podolia sometimes conducted their own expeditions across the border, provoking Tatar retaliation; and the khans treated as pretext for war any overt move by the Polish crown threaten ing Ottoman interests in the Danubian region. In 1519 Tatar forces ravaged the Kiev and Volhynian palatinates and even struck Lublin. Podolia and Galicia were invaded in 1526. Invariably the khan and sultan offered plausible denials of responsi bility for these attacks. These attacks succeeded in discouraging Zygmunt I from further involvement in the affairs of the Danubian principalities, which fell under more direct Ottoman domination. Louis II, the Jagiełłonian King of Hungary and Bohemia, was left isolated; he and his army were destroyed by the Turks at Mohacs in 1526, and Hungary was divided among the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and the Magyar nobles supporting Transylvanian voivode Janos Zapolyai, who soon offered his vassalage to Suleiman I. The expansion of Ottoman hegemony in Hungary in turn undermined Moldavia’s independence, whose voivode, Petru Rares, was over thrown in 1538. Moldavia was fully vassalized; its southeastern corner, between the Dnestr and the Pruth, was annexed to the Ottoman pashalik of Silistria. Zygmunt I and the last Jagiełłonian king of Poland, Zygmunt II Avgust (r. 1548–1572), were both strong proponents of strengthening royal authority and military power by courting the support of the lesser nobility against the senatorial oligarchy and expanding the crowns’ fi scal machinery. But neither dared risk returning to a more assertive foreign policy in the southwest lest this provoke Tatar or Ottoman retaliation. They had to content themselves with the gradual strengthening of their small border defense army in Ukraine and concentrating their military resources in the northwest against Muscovite threats to Lithuania and Livonia. The shadow of the Ottoman–Tatar alliance even infl uenced the royal succession. Upon the death of the intestate Zygmunt II in 1572, the French candidate Henri de Valois was elected in part because this promised less provocation to the Turks than the election of either of the Habsburg candidates, archdukes Ernst and Maximilian, who appeared to expect Poland-Lithuania to support the Habsburg reconquest of Hungary in exchange for Habsburg permission for the Polish conquest of Moldavia. When Henri abandoned the Polish throne in 1575 the Polish nobility again rejected the Habsburg candidate, Maximilian, for Istvan (Stefan) Bathory, Prince of Transylvania. Bathory had won the Transylvanian throne in 1571 with Ottoman assistance; he was fervently anti-Habsburg, and intended to use the resources of the Polish monarchy to press his own claim to the Hungarian throne. Eventually this project would have set the Ottomans against him as well, but it remained unattempted at the end of his life in 1586. It was only in the 1590s that the “eternal peace” with the Ottoman Empire began to unravel. Initially this was due more to Zaporozhian raids upon Crimea and the Ottoman fortresses at Kilia and Bendery than to any provocation presented by the Polish crown, despite King Zygmunt III Waza’s obvious Habsburg sympathies and his impatience with the Sejm’s restraints upon his ability to raise revenue and wage war. Over the longer term the Polish–Ottoman peace was undermined by new Polish adventurism in Moldavia. But this was not the work of the king but of his Chancellor and Grand Hetman Jan Zamoyski, and it was motivated by Zamoyski’s hostility towards the Habsburgs rather than defi ance of the Ottomans. Zamoyski invaded Moldavia with 9,000 men in 1595 to take advantage of the Habsburg–Ottoman war in Hungary and install his own puppet hospodar, Ieremiia Movila, to preempt Habsburg vassalization of Moldavia. Although this led to brief confl ict with Crimean Tatar forces, Sultan Mehmet III soon agreed to recognize Movila as hospodar provided he accept Polish–Ottoman condominium over Moldavia. By 1600, however, Movila had been overthrown by Mihai Viteazul, hospodar of Wallachia, who aimed at uniting the Danubian principalities under Habsburg protec tion. This sparked the Magnate Wars, a long and confusing series of interventions by Polish hetmans using private armies, cossacks, and Moldavian allies to try to restore the rule of the Movila family. During it all direct confl ict with Ottoman forces was avoided, but there was fi ghting with the Crimean Tatars on Moldavian and Polish territory. Upon the end of the Habsburg–Ottoman war the Ottomans had reason to view the Polish magnates as the most immediate obstacle to reconsoli dating their control over the Danubian provinces. The treaty of Jaruga (1617) therefore required that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth restrain cossack raiders, restore Khotin to the Turks, and refrain from further interference in the Danubian principalities.
Muscovy and the Ottoman–Tatar alliance Healthy respect for Ottoman military power likewise inclined the Muscovite grand princes and tsars to a Pontic steppe policy that tried to avoid provoking the Porte. For the most part they were successful in this. In the sixteenth century there was only one brief and limited military confl ict between Muscovite and Ottoman forces, on the lower Volga in 1569. The more imposing and immediate threat Muscovy faced was the Crimean Khanate, the khans having their own confl icts of interest with Moscow not bearing directly on the sultans’ interests. The breakdown of the Muscovite–Crimean alliance against Poland-Lithuania and the Great Horde had not immediately affected Ottoman–Muscovite relations. Up to 1512 Muscovy’s confl ict with the Crimean Khanate mattered far less to Ottoman ruling circles than the civil war to reunify their Empire or the threats from Venice and Persia; and under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1522) the Muscovite–Crimean confl ict did not warrant Ottoman intervention because Muscovy was valued as a counterweight to Poland-Lithuania. The fl ashpoint of the Muscovite–Crimean confl ict lay far to the east, in Kazan’, and affected Ottoman security much less than Polish adventurism in Moldavia. Selim I therefore encouraged Muscovite diplomats to discuss friendship and even alliance, and the Ottoman governors of Azov and Kaffa even shared with Moscow intelligence of Khan Mehmet Girei’s preparations to invade Muscovy. The deterioration of Muscovite–Ottoman relations began only in Suleiman I’s reign, in 1523, and derived from confl ict between obligations to client polities rather than from any direct clash of Muscovite and Ottoman interests. The death of Khan Mehmet Girei I had set off a succession struggle in Crimea and led to the Shirin clan asking Suleiman I to intervene. Suleiman I had settled Saadet Girei I (r. 1524–1532) on the Crimean throne, and to keep him in power had given him an infantry bodyguard of Ottoman kapikulu and expanded the Ottoman garrisons in Crimea. Henceforth Ottoman units were expected to play a larger role in supporting the khan’s military operations, and this involved them in the power struggle in Kazan’ and in attacks on Muscovy. In 1541, for example, Khan Sahib Girei was able to take his army across the Oka on rafts under covering fi re from Ottoman gunners.13
The Ottoman–Muscovite peace was also periodically endangered by the actions of Moscow’s clients on the steppe. The Don Cossacks raided the Turkish fortress town of Azov with greater frequency and tenacity after 1550. Ivan IV’s success in coopting Ismail and Tinekhmat (Din-Akhmet), mirzas of the Great Nogai Horde, made it possible for the tsar to rely on Nogai support to conquer and annex the khanates of Kazan’ (October 1552) and Astrakhan’ (1554–1556). As Great Khan of the Great Horde, Crimean Khan Devlet Girei had claimed sovereignty over Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ and had long struggled to place his kinsmen on their thrones. Ivan IV’s subjugation of the two Volga khanates was therefore an intolerable act of aggression in his eyes. Istanbul had no interest in using Ottoman forces to help him drive the Muscovites from Kazan’, but a campaign to recover Astrakhan’ was another matter. Muscovite control of Astrakhan’ more directly endangered lines of communication between Ottoman Azov and the Empire’s Sunni coreligionists and trade partners in the Uzbek khanates beyond the Caspian; in fact the Khan of Khiva was already complaining the Muscovite garrison at Astrakhan’ was harassing merchants and pilgrims traveling between Khiva and Azov. The Lesser Nogais, who had split off from the Great Nogai Horde in protest against its alliance with Muscovy, were clamoring for an Ottoman–Crimean campaign to retake Astrakhan’, as was the last Astrakhan’ khan, then living in exile in Anatolia. But Istanbul’s greatest concern was that Ivan IV would use Astrakhan’ as a base for Muscovite intervention in the northern Caucasus. In 1567 Ivan IV had a fortress built on the Terek River to establish his protectorate over the Kabardan Circassians. This blocked Azov’s line of communication with Derbent, the Ottoman fortress on the Caspian, and thereby threatened to upset the Ottoman–Safavid balance of power in the Caucasus and northern Iran.
The armistice signed with the Habsburgs in 1568 fi nally freed Sultan Selim II to take action against the Muscovite garrison at Astrakhan’. In 1569 Kasim Pasha, beylerbey of Kaffa, led a fl otilla out of Azov carrying 3,000 janissaries, 7,000 other troops, and 5,000 laborers. Their mission was to join with Crimean Tatar cavalry and ascend the Don to Perevolok, where it bent eastward towards the Volga; to dig a great canal linking these rivers; and to establish a base there, to liberate Astrakhan’ and support future Ottoman expeditionary forces using the canal to descend the Volga, sail across the Caspian, and reconquer Shirwan in northern Iran. Kasim Pasha’s expedition reached Perevolok but found the canal project technically impossible. The evidence is unclear as to whether they came under attack by Muscovite forces under Prince Petr Serebrianyi, sent down the Volga to reinforce Astrakhan’, or whether Kassim Pasha made a real effort to besiege Astrakhan’. In late September Kasim Pasha made a diffi cult withdrawal across the North Caucasus steppe to Azov, losing many men and horses on the march. His Crimean allies do not seem to have given him much support. The Muscovite diplomat Mal’tsev, in detention in Kasim Pasha’s train, thought the Tatars deliberately led them across waterless wastes to discourage them from ever returning. Devlet Girei may have decided to let the operation fail lest the Turks cheat him of his Astrakhan’ yurt and incorporate Astrakhan’ into some Ottoman eyalet. According to some reports only a third of Kasim Pasha’s force survived to reach Azov alive, and all but 700 of them subsequently perished in a storm while sailing back to Istanbul.14 The Perevolok episode did not lead to further confl ict between Muscovy and the Porte. Ivan IV could not afford to divert resources from his war in Livonia and therefore sent reassurances he wanted to remain in friendship with the sultan and intended no harm to Muslim merchants and pilgrims. In 1571 or 1572 he dismantled his fortress on the Terek, after which the Crimean Tatars drove the remaining Muscovites from Kabarda. Sultan Selim II, now occupied with war with Venice, accepted these developments as grounds to disengage from the Volga problem; he made no further claims to protectorate over Astrakhan’, indicating he chose not to contest the tsar’s annexation of that region. On the whole Ottoman interests had received no serious setback, for they were again able to move Turkish and Crimean Tatar troops out of Azov across the Kuban and Terek steppe to Derbent to complete their conquest of Shirwan and Azerbaijan.15 With the exception of Muscovite encroachment on the Ottoman sphere of infl u ence in the Caucasus, Muscovy’s southern steppe policy before the 1650s presented less challenge than Poland-Lithuania’s to Ottoman strategic interests. There was therefore no strategic pretext for signifi cant direct military confl ict as opposed to proxy confl ict involving Tatar and cossack client polities. Nor did religion militate against coexistence. The Muscovite government and Orthodox church sometimes invoked religion in the struggle against the Kazan’, Astrakhan’, and Crimean khanates, characterizing military campaigns and the founding of new frontier towns as measures to “free the Orthodox peasants from the clutches of the busurmany [Muslims].”16 But a coherent pan-Slavist and anti-Islamic reconquista propaganda linking the war against the Tatars to the larger struggle of Christian Europe against the Turk would not emerge until the 1670s, when Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire fi nally came into direct confl ict over control of Ukraine. It was therefore the Crimean Khanate, not the Ottoman Empire, that presented the greater threat to Muscovite frontier security in the sixteenth century. The long alliance between Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate (1470–1509) had enabled Ivan III to secure central Muscovy against attack by the Great Horde and gain territory in the west at the expense of Lithuania; it had enabled Mengli Girei to conquer the Great Horde and extort heavy tribute from PolandLithuania. But by 1509 Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate no longer had suffi cient shared interests to preserve the alliance. The differences now dividing them were in fact sharper than those dividing the Khanate from PolandLithuania. It was strategic calculation, not just King Zygmunt I’s offer of new tribute gifts, that convinced Khan Mengli Girei to abandon alliance with the Muscovites that year. The territories Ivan III and Vasilii III had wrested from Lithuania by 1508 – Chernigov, Starodub, Bel’sk, Seversk – gave Muscovite armies a stronger position from which to resume war against Lithuania for mastery of Smolensk and the other west Rus’ districts just south of the Western Dvina. Muscovite annexation of these territories also raised for Mengli Girei the specter of eventual Muscovite expansion down the Dnepr into the Kipchak steppe. Mengli Girei therefore realigned the khanate with Poland-Lithuania and pledged to reward Zygmunt I with the patent (iarlyk) to the lands Muscovy had seized from Lithuania, as well as Tula and Riazan’ and other districts along the Oka, the patent the khan’s to award because these districts had formerly paid tribute to the Great Horde. For the time being Mengli Girei remained offi cially at peace with the Muscovites – he left the leadership of the 1507 and 1512 raids into Muscovy to the kalga-sultan and his nobles so he could disavow responsibility for them. But the fall of Smolensk to the Muscovites in 1514 forced Mengli Girei to issue a fi nal ultimatum: Smolensk, a tributary of the Great Horde, must be returned to Zygmunt I on the grounds the khan had awarded the king the patent to this town, while the districts of Briansk, Starodub, NovgorodSeverskii, Ryl’sk, Putivl’, and Karachev must be “restored” to the khan. These districts were attacked by Tatar forces in the winter of 1514–1515, probably not to seize and hold them but to extort further tribute from them and press Vasilii III to abandon Smolensk. Mengli Girei’s successor Khan Muhammad Girei (r. 1515–1523) continued to demand the restoration of these districts as his pretext for more punitive raiding into Muscovy. A 1517 incursion involved more than 20,000 Tatars. In July 1521 the khan himself led an army reportedly exceeding 50,000 men up the Murava trail, crossed the Oka near Kolomna, and ravaged the southern environs of Moscow for two weeks, forcing Vasilii III to evacuate his court to Volokolamsk.17 A second reason for the breakdown of Muscovite–Crimean cooperation had been the attempts of Ivan III and Vasilii III to tighten their protectorate over the Kazan’ Khanate. This was intolerable to Mengli Girei and Muhammad Girei in that it repudiated their own claims of sovereignty over Kazan’ as Great Khans of the Great Horde, and because it weakened their suzerainty over the Nogais, who depended heavily on Kazan’ as a trading partner. Intervening in Kazan’ succession politics in fact proved a dangerous game for the Muscovites to play, for they overestimated the strength of the pro-Moscow faction among the Kazan’ nobility. In late 1518 Kazan’s khan Muhammad-emin died without an heir. Muscovite troops under Podzhogin helped install on the Kazan’ throne the thirteen-year-old Shah Ali, tsarevich of the Muscovite vassal khanate of Kasimov. But a revolt by Kazan’ nobles supported by Crimean Tatar forces drove Shah Ali from Kazan’ in 1521 and enthroned Sahib Girei, the son of Mengli Girei. Sahib Girei’s army then advanced on Moscow from the Volga, raiding Nizhnii Novgorod and Vladimir en route, while Crimean Khan Muhammad Girei’s army marched on Moscow from the south. Thousands of Russians were taken captive and Vasilii III was forced to recognize the Girei dynastic reunifi cation of the Kazan’ and Crimean khanates.18 Fortunately for the Muscovites, Khan Muhammad Girei soon overreached. He led his army against Astrakhan’ to overthrow its pro-Moscow khan and complete the reunifi cation of the Great Horde, but the Nogais defeated him and killed him and both of his sons in 1523. The next three Crimean khans (Gazy Girei I, r. 1523–1524; Saadet Girei I, r. 1524–1532; and Islam Girei I, r. 1532) were unwilling to provide enough direct support to keep Sahib Girei secure on the throne of Kazan’ and fi rmly in control of the Nogai Horde; their own power in Crimea was limited, too, for some of their beys intrigued against them. Sahib Girei therefore turned to Sultan Suleiman I for assistance. In 1524 Sahib Girei abdicated the throne of Kazan’ for his nephew Safa Girei and placed Kazan’ under de facto Ottoman protection; then, with Ottoman support, he began to struggle for the throne of Crimea. Fear of Ottoman retaliation soon forced the usurper Islam Girei I to abdicate, and the Turks helped install Sahib Girei I as khan in 1532.
For most of the reign of Sahib Girei I (1532–1551) the Crimean Khanate was in its closest strategic partnership with the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul monitored and partly directed Sahib Girei by surrounding him with a large entourage of Ottoman kapikulu offi cials and guards. This provided Sahib Girei with a counterweight to his karachi beys and encouraged him to assert a more autocratic style of rule; he enlarged the army, claimed more sources of regular revenue, and even began styling himself as padishah. It allowed Istanbul to rely on him to maintain the balance of power between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy to Ottoman benefi t, instructing him to attack whichever seemed in ascendance at the moment, but on grounds that allowed the sultan to disavow any responsibility. The Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi called this the Stratagem of Selim I.19 The Crimean Tatars therefore raided Volhynia in 1549 even though PolandLithuania was still formally at peace with the Khanate. Crimean attacks on Muscovy, especially on the Muscovite districts nearest the Volga, were more frequent and larger in scale because the khan had his own interest in keeping a Girei on Kazan’s throne and denying Kazan’ to the Muscovites. Moscow’s attempts to vassalize the Nogais gave Sahib Girei I further reason to wage war on Muscovy. In 1541 Sahib Girei I attempted an invasion of central Muscovy, and he supported Kazan’ Khan Safa Girei’s 1536–1537 and 1545 campaigns against the Muscovites. The Kazan’ campaigns greatly escalated the Crimean–Muscovite confl ict by showing Ivan IV that central Muscovy’s security demanded a fi nal resolution of the problem of Kazan’. When Safa Girei died in 1549 Ivan IV moved to reinstall his puppet Shah Ali on the Kazan’ throne. This ignited a new war with the pro-Crimean party in Kazan’ (1549–1552). Ultimately the escalating Kazan’ crisis alarmed the Ottoman authorities in Kaffa, who reported to Suleiman I their concern that Sahib Girei I was pursuing too independent a policy in the northeast. The khan now has too powerful an army and has become too ambitious. He thinks he is better than you in every way.
The proof of it is that he now dares to oppose your orders and to make excuses for not sending auxiliary forces [into Iran]. The moment you pass away he thinks he will gain possession of all the Ottoman territories in the Crimea. He does not show the slightest respect to the envoys sent from the Porte. If he unites his forces with the Nogais no one can be a match for him and resist.20 Istanbul therefore threw its support to the beys chafi ng under Sahib Girei’s autocratic rule. Sahib Girei I was overthrown and executed along with his infant sons and grandsons. Devlet Girei I (r. 1551–1577) took the throne of Crimea with the approval of the sultan. Khan Devlet Girei I led a large army into southern Muscovy in spring 1552 and managed to place Tula under bombardment by his Ottoman guns. But the approach of Muscovite corps from Kashira and Kolomna forced him to withdraw down the Murava Trail. This freed Ivan IV to concentrate his forces against Kazan’, which fell on 2 October 1552. A Muscovite vicegerent was installed in Kazan’. The fall of Kazan’ in turn brought the beys of the larger Nogai tribes into closer dependency on Moscow and helped the tsar isolate and conquer the Khanate of Astrakhan’ (1554–1556). But the beys of the Kazyev ulus (Lesser Nogais) refused to accept vassalage to the tsar and migrated to the Azov steppe to place themselves under the protec tion of Devlet Girei. Although Devlet Girei made attacks on Poland-Lithuania in 1557–1558 his primary concern of the next several years was punishing Muscovy. He led large Crimean Tatar armies into Muscovy in 1555, 1562, 1564, 1565, 1571, and 1572; he provided some support for the Ottoman expedition against Astrakhan’ in 1569; and his sons commanded campaigns into Muscovy in 1558, 1563, 1568, 1570, and 1571. These incursions caused great destruction – especially the 1571 invasion, which resulted in the burning of Moscow, the abduction of several thousand captives, and Ivan IV’s pledge (soon reneged upon) to abandon Astrakhan’. But the last of Devlet Girei’s major incursions into Muscovy, in 1572, ended in his decisive defeat at Molodi.
Thereafter Devlet Girei persisted in demanding the restoration of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ but had to limit himself to diplomatic means to pursue these goals. His sons Muhammad Girei II (r. 1577–1584) and Islam Girei II largely kept to the same policy because they lacked the power to mobilize military resources on the scale their father had commanded. Muhammad Girei was eventually deposed for turning upon the Ottoman governor of Kaffa, who had intervened in the selection of the khan’s heir apparent; Islam Girei II strove to be the faithful servant of the sultan but provoked an uprising by the Lesser Nogais. The Muscovite government took advantage of this breathing spell to pursue detente with sultans Murat III and Mehmet III. Istanbul indicated it was prepared to maintain peace if the tsar would rein in the Don Cossacks and prevent them from raiding Ottoman territory. Moscow then cited its commitment to curb the Don Cossacks to justify its construction of new garrison towns on the Voronezh and Don rivers. In 1589 the Muscovites built a major new garrison town, Tsaritsyn, on the Volga near Perevolok to connect their Voronezh and Don colonies to Astrakhan’ and the Volga garrison network and secure them against Tatar attack from the east. It was not until the reign of Khan Gazy Girei II (1588–1597, 1597–1607) that the Khanate resumed large-scale military operations: against Poland in 1589, Muscovy in 1591, and in support of the Ottoman army in Hungary in 1592–1606. Smaller raids along the Oka River also kept Muscovite forces busy in 1592–1593, and there was a major invasion alert in 1598. Gazy Girei continued to justify his operations against the Muscovites partly on his claims to Kazan’ and Astrakhan’, but the likelihood he could actually recover them was quickly receding, so the actual motives for his attacks on Muscovy were to extort more tribute gifts, take prisoners for sale in the slavemarkets of Kaffa, and discourage Muscovite military colonization of the forest-steppe and steppe. He told Moscow’s envoy he considered the tsar’s founding of new garrison towns on the frontier a threat to the Crimean Khanate: Your ruler thus wishes to do as he did with Kazan’: at fi rst he established a town close by, then afterwards seized Kazan’; but the Crimea is not Kazan’, in the Crimea there are many hands and eyes; it will be necessary for your ruler to go beyond the towns to the very heart (of Crimea).21
Crimean Tatar invasions There were forty-three major Crimean and Nogai attacks on Muscovite territory just in the fi rst half of the sixteenth century; Lithuania and Poland experienced seventy-fi ve incursions over the period 1474–1569.22 Large Tatar forces were able to penetrate into the heartland of Muscovy even in years when truce with the Commonwealth had allowed the Russians to increase regimental strengths along their southern frontier. In 1571 Khan Devlet Girei invaded with an army of 40,000 Crimeans, Nogais, and Circassians and burned much of Moscow, allegedly killing 80,000 and carrying off 150,000 captives. The Tatars burned the suburbs of Moscow again in 1592 while the bulk of Russian forces were busy fi ghting the Swedes on the northwestern frontier. In 1633, while the tsar’s army was preoccupied in a western campaign to recover Smolensk from the Poles, the Crimeans and Nogais launched devastating attacks upon the interior districts of Kashira and Serpukhov.
The Crimean Tatar armies invading Poland-Lithuania in the early sixteenth century usually numbered 10–20,000 warriors at most, but by mid-century the khan was assembling invasion forces of 30,000, according to Mikhalon Litvin. In the 1630s Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, a French engineer stationed with the Polish army in Ukraine, estimated the maximum size of these invasion armies at about 80,000 if the khan took the fi eld himself and enjoyed the full support of his Nogai confederates. Khan Dzhanibek Girei led 50,000 men to reinforce the 250,000 Turks marching on Khotyn in Polish Ukraine in 1621. Major invasions personally led by the khan were less frequent after the reign of Devlet Girei I, however, for his successors had less power over their beys and mirzas, who were now more likely to undertake campaigns on their own initiative, sometimes even in defi ance of the khan, to obtain slaves and livestock or because they had been suborned by Polish or Muscovite bribes.23 Map I shows the seven main invasion trails (shliakhi) into Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania the Crimean Tatars and Great and Lesser Nogais followed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The westernmost road into Muscovy was the Murava Trail, which began at the narrow fortifi ed isthmus of Perekop, where the Crimean peninsula joins the mainland. From Perekop it made a sharp turn to the east, running between the Konskaia and Kalchik rivers. Then it moved north, skirting to the west of the Northern Donets River and the Russian steppe towns of Tsarev-Borisov and Belgorod. From Oskol’ the road ran due north, crossing the Bystraia Sosna River at Livny and passing between the towns of Novosil’ and Dankov to hit Tula and the other towns of the Borderland Front (the districts just below the Oka, east of the Zhizdra, and west of the Osetr). Tula overlooked the Kostomarov ford of the Upa River, which led invading armies on to Serpukhov and Moscow. Near Oskol’ smaller tributary roads ran westward from the main Murava road, allowing raiders to attack the Seversk Front towns of Putivl’, Ryl’sk, Sevsk, and Kromy and the Trans-Oka Front towns of the Briansk forest massif to their north. An Iziuma Trail branched off from the Murava Trail near the Kalicha and Kal’miuss rivers in the steppes above the Sea of Azov. It crossed the Northern Donets much nearer Tsarev-Borisov, ran between Valuiki and Belgorod, and rejoined the Murava Trail at Oskol’. The third road, the Kal’miuss Trail, also left the Murava road in the Azov steppes near the Kal’miuss River, but then swung farther east, crossing the Northern Donets east of Tsarev-Borisov. It passed east of Valuiki, crossed the Tikhaia Sosna River, and then rejoined the Murava Trail just south of Livny on the Bystraia Sosna. A later branch of this Kal’miuss Trail, used by the Lesser Nogais, started in the steppes just north of the Turkish fortress of Azov and merged with the main Kal’miuss road at the Tikhaia Sosna River. East of the Kal’miuss Trail Road lay the Nogai Road (Nogaiskaia doroga), used most frequently by the Lesser Nogais, or by those Great Nogais roaming the steppes west of the Volga. It started from the southern Don River, at a point halfway between the Azov fortress and the Russian town of Tsaritsyn’ on the lower Volga. It ran along the eastern branch of the Khoper River and passed between the sources of the Bitiug and Tsna rivers. At the confl uence of the Lesnoi Voronezh and Pol’noi Voronezh rivers it forked – due north towards the towns of Shatsk and Riazan’, and northwest towards the towns of Riazhsk, Lebedian’, and Dankov. The Great Nogais and later the Kalmyks and Bashkirs could also advance up the Volga to raid the Russian towns of Tetiushi, Kazan’, Sviiazhsk, and Cheboksarai, then drop south through the villages of the Chuvashi and Mordva to blockade the Russian garrisons at Alatyr’, Temnikov, Kadom, and Mokshansk or push farther west against Shatsk and the Riazan’ region. The Muscovite territory endangered by these invasion roads thus stretched from Putivl’ in the west to the Volga in the east, a front over 1,000 km long at its broadest point, the eastward bend of the Volga at Samara. The southernmost points of Russian military colonization before 1635 were at Putivl’, Belgorod, Tsarev-Borisov, Valuiki, Voronezh, and Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan’ on the lower Volga. Tsarev-Borisov and Valuiki lay the closest to the border of the Crimean Khanate, standing 150 and 300 km from the juncture of the Murava, Iziuma and Kal’miuss roads. But both towns were too small and isolated from other garrisons to permit further colonization of their environs. Tsarev-Borisov, for example, stood about 150 km from Belgorod and 300 km from Voronezh, and these were its closest neighbors. During the Polish intervention of 1617–1618 it proved too diffi cult to reinforce Tsarev-Borisov and the town had to be abandoned. As for Valuiki, its population in the 1620s was still huddling behind its walls, unable to safely cultivate their outlying service lands.24 Thus the territory actually under Russian control could be said to arc from Belgorod through Oskol’ to Livny and Elets on the Bystraia Sosna, retreating northward in the face of the wedge formed by the union of the Iziuma and Kal’miuss roads, before dipping south again along the edge of the Voronezh River. And from the town of Voronezh the frontier veered north again, forming a vast indentation of steppeland between the Voronezh and Tsna rivers all the way up to Dankov and Riazhsk, from where dense forests running eastward along the Alatyr’ to Tetiushi on the upper Volga fi nally provided some protective cover for Muscovite colonization.25 Three invasion roads also led from Perekop into Ukraine and PolandLithuania. The easternmost of these, the Czarny Trail, crossed the Bug and headed due north between Bratslav and Chyhyryn, then forked – one branch continuing northward against Kiev, the other branch turning west into Rus’ Czerwona north of Bar. A Kuczman Trail kept to the south of the Bug and came out into Rus’ Czerwona near Bar. A Woloski Trail ran along the coast of the Black Sea, crossed the Dnestr into Moldavia, ran along the Pruth River, and entered Rus’ Czerwona near Kolomyja, then turned north in the direction of Pamosc, Chelm, and Lublin.
The Polish-Lithuanian territory vulnerable to Tatar attack thus ran from the Putivl’ border in the east to Małopolska and the approaches to Cracow in the west. Some Tatar incursions reached as far north as Vilnius and Vitebsk in Lithuania.26 The Crimean Tatars preferred to invade Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy around harvest time so as to forage and plunder for several weeks. Shorter incursions were often planned for early winter, when the rivers had frozen over and there was suffi cient snow on the ground to keep their horses’ unshod hooves from cracking from the frost. The most disciplined core of the Crimean Khan’s army was a small personal guard of 200–1,000 musketeer foot (tufenkçi), organized along janissary lines and supported by some light fi eld guns (zarbuzan). The bulk of the army comprised several thousand light mounted archers – the nomadic tribal cavalry mobilized by the karachi beys, the chiefs of the four nomadic tribes residing on the steppe above Perekop. Although gunpowder was produced at Kaffa and fi rearms manufactured at Bakchisarai, they were expensive and wheellocks were very rare, so the Tatar cavalry relied primarily on their short refl ex bows, easily fi red from horseback and having a longer range and much faster rate of fi re than muskets. Tatar horsemen also carried sabers and lances for close combat. The more prosperous of them might wear chain mail hauberks and iron helmets. Their stirrups were set high; they urged on their horses with whips rather than spurs. In principle, the khan could order total mobilization of all able-bodied males age 15–70 under the karachi beys: No one is to remain in the land, the entire people or army is to go on war footing, and if there is anyone who is not at the khan’s side after Or Agzi [the Ditch at Perekop, where the army usually assembled], his property is to be raided and his head struck down.27 In periods when the khan was well in control of his nobles he could expect a good response to his summons to war within just two to four weeks: his invocation of ghaza (the duty of religious war), combined with the promise of plunder, helped in this, and every Crimean and Nogai village and tribe was supposedly decimally organized and their units recorded in registers. After the army had assembled at Perekop it rode north, where it might be joined by several thousand Nogai allies. To maximize mobility each warrior took two or three mounts and traveled lightly equipped, taking just a few pounds of roasted millet, bread, or cooked meat and resorting to foraging and raiding to meet the rest of their needs on the fi fty-fi ve-day journey to the outskirts of Moscow. If the army did carry additional provisions and arms, it was usually by horse or camel pack train rather than by carts; the exception to this was the khan’s infantry guard and artillery, which circled their carts in wagenburg in battle. The Crimean Tatar army traveled in columns several riders in breadth, spaced at greater intervals in hot weather. Beauplan estimated the front of each column at 800 to 1,000 paces across; extended, a column might be ten leagues in length, compacting to three to four leagues in length when tightly massed. “It is an amazing sight, since 80,000 Tatars are accompanied by more than 200,000 horses. Trees are not thicker in a forest than hoses are at such times on the plain.” Ahead of them rode an advance guard of about 100 warriors, each leading two mounts for use as relays. Sometimes they encountered diffi culties crossing ice or rocky terrain, but snow gave them no trouble – their horses often wore leather stockings in winter – and they could cross all but the deepest and most violent rivers. They avoided marshes and dense forests and tended to keep to the shelter of those valleys with which they were familiar from previous raids. Every hour they halted to rest their horses for a few minutes. Some three or four leagues short of the edge of enemy territory they camped for two or three days, lighting no fi res and maintaining many mounted sentinels; once reassured there were no large enemy forces in the area they resumed their advance, at greater speed, in one large mass if they were intent on penetrating far into the interior, or in several independent groups if intent upon raiding across a broad front. They surrounded and blockaded towns, capturing the inhabitants of outlying villages for sale as slaves and rustling cattle and horses, but because they usually lacked artillery and sappers they did not attempt to take towns by siege. They avoided pitched battles with the enemy unless forced to defend their camps or their columns of prisoners and livestock. When confronted with large Polish or Muscovite forces, the Tatars tried to split them by attacking at several points simultaneously, resorting to their reserve mounts so as to be able to keep up such skirmishing for an entire day if necessary. “When charging the enemy,” L. J. D. Collins writes, “the Tatars would take up a formation in the shape of a half moon about forty men broad, ‘their leaders placed at the front, rear, and fl anks’; the men would scream and ululate.” Sometimes they fi red their arrows in devastating arcade, and by the seventeenth century the Crimean Tatars (although apparently not the Nogais) were less likely to be broken by enemy artillery or musketfi re, as they had come to recognize its inaccuracy.28 Even the largest incursions aimed more at raiding villages for captives and livestock rather than at routing enemy armies. Beauplan has decribed the tactics of such raiding. Upon entering hostile territory, the Tatar army split into three corps, two of which rode together in close parallel while the third divided further into left and right wings of 8–10,000 men each. After they had advanced some sixty to eighty leagues into enemy territory, the wings separated to roam ten or twelve leagues from each fl ank of the main corps. The wings swept across the enemy’s villages, placing four groups of guards around each village and burning great bonfi res all night long, for fear lest even one peasant should escape them. Then they sack and burn it, killing all those inhabitants who resist, and taking away all those who yield, not only men, women, and children at their mother’s breast, but also livestock such as, horses, oxen, cattle sheep, goats, etc.29 When the wings returned to the main corps with their slaves and booty two more wings were dispatched in the same manner so as not to diminish the strength of the main corps. After “harvesting” the region to their satisfaction they withdrew along a different route to escape interception and then reassembled at camp to divide up their spoils, a fi fth or tenth of which accrued to the commander. This was the point at which they were most vulnerable to surprise attack by the Poles or Muscovites, who tried to separate them from their horses and liberate their prisoners. In 1672 King Jan Sobieski allegedly freed 44,000 captives from one routed Tatar army. In the summer and autumn individual mirzas led smaller expeditions for slaves and livestock, which penetrated less deeply into enemy territory and withdrew after a few days. The order of battle followed on the great winter campaigns was impractical for such operations; instead, the Crimeans and Nogais entered hostile territory in ten or twelve detachments of one thousand men deployed across the plain like a great net ten or twelve leagues across, with scouts riding a league ahead to take prisoners for interrogation and look for approaching enemy forces. Such an array made it easier to sweep up captives along a broad front while circumventing enemy patrols. Each evening they rendezvoused at a prearranged campsite near the border or in a protected area. If the enemy caught sight of them – usually by spotting the smoke from burning villages – and gave pursuit, the Tatars divided again, riding off in all four directions in small bands (chambuly) of 100 men. These bands in turn divided into thirds, and again into parties of ten or twelve men; after scattering for a dozen leagues or so, they reassembled to resume their raiding. Their hardier mounts usually allowed them to outrun their Polish or Muscovite pursuers. While major Crimean invasions like those of 1571 and 1633 may not by themselves have altered the course of the Livonian and Smolensk Wars, the prospect of Tatar invasion restricted Muscovy’s freedom of diplomatic and military action on other fronts. The threat to the Muscovite interior was suffi cient to require vast expenditures to refortify the Abatis Line (1638) and to station larger fi eld regiments along it. This in turn limited the manpower and cash and grain resources available for campaigns against Poland-Lithuania on the western front, and on top of that Moscow had to pay some 7–12,000 rubles annually in tribute to the Crimean khans over the years 1613–1650.30 The logistical problems involved in sending a Muscovite army across the steppes to invade the Khanate were considerable, and the Crimean peninsula was fortifi ed across the isthmus of Perekop. It would therefore take until 1774 for Russia to fi nally eliminate the military threat posed by the Crimean Khanate.
Crimean Tatar slaveraiding Even if Muscovy had not provoked the Crimean khans by seizing the Volga khanates and the Ottoman grand strategy had not required the khans to periodically invade Muscovy to restore the balance of power, Muscovy would still have suffered frequent Crimean and Nogai raids for slaves because slaveraiding was essential to the economy of the Crimean Khanate. And if Tatar slaveraiding was a lower-intensity threat than invasion, it was also a nearly constant threat and infl icted heavy costs. It was not enough to maintain defenses capable of keeping the khan’s army from crossing the Oka. Tatar attacks harvesting slaves from frontier communities south of the Oka humiliated the government, drained even more state revenue into ransom payments, and above all confi ned Russian colonization to the forest and forest-steppe zones. While small Russian settlements of hunters, beekeepers, and fi shermen could survive under shelter of the wildwoods along the Voronezh and upper Don, larger communities required outlying plowlands, where their cultivators were exposed to attack; and Tatar slavers raided the southernmost Muscovite colonies almost every summer, capturing servicemen and peasants working in their fi elds, driving off herds of livestock, burning villages and town suburbs, and ambushing patrols and merchant caravans. Most of these raids were undertaken by chambuly of a few hundred men yet were able to do a great deal of damage. In the summer of 1643, for example, 600 Tatars and 200 Zaporozhian Cossacks attacked the villages of Iarok and Krivets just west of Kozlov. They killed 19 Russians, all males, and abducted 262 others (almost all women and children) as captives for sale in the Crimean slave markets.31 Ironically, such slaveraiding resulted from the weakness of the khans vis-à-vis their tribal aristocracy and from the costs to the Crimean economy of its partnership with the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean khan could not act without the cooperation of the beys and mirzas of the great clans, which controlled most of the productive land and tenant labor on the Crimean peninsula and could fi eld larger client forces than the khan. The khan had to offer them frequent opportunities to raid for prisoners to ransom, sell at the Kaffa slave market, or resettle on Crimean lands as agriculturalists. Otherwise the beys and mirzas would undertake raids for slaves on their own initiative, without the khan’s approval, thereby undermining his efforts to improve relations with Muscovy or Poland-Lithuania. Before Mengli Girei had become the vassal of the Ottoman sultan, the khan’s wealth and power had derived chiefl y from the protection money he extorted from merchant caravans and fl otillas and the taxes he collected from the Genoese towns along the coast. The feeding of the coastal towns had also encouraged many Crimean Tatar commoners to abandon pastoral nomadism for agriculture in the hills above the coast. But once the Turks took the merchant colonies for themselves in 1475, occupying Kaffa, Akkerman, Bendery, Kilburun, Kerch, and Azov, and governing them directly as the eyalet of Kaffa, the khan lost much of his revenue from these towns and the Tatar grain trade with the coastal towns began to decline. Istanbul had converted the entire Pontic coastland into a vast and valuable hinterland. Correspondingly, the slender but vigorous urban fringe in the Crimea and near the mouths of the principal rivers that fl owed into the Black Sea lost its earlier independent entrepreneurial function vis-à-vis the upcountry. For the Ottomans, the decline of the Crimean grain trade was easily offset by the grain imports now received from Dobruja and the lower Danube, but the Crimean market had to cast around for a new specialization – and found it in the revival of the Black Sea slave trade originally organized by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages. The core of the Ottoman Empire could now benefi t from the new “division of labor between the two portions of . . . [its] Pontic hinterland . . . drawing grain from the closer region and human livestock from the further parts of Pontic Europe,” while the Crimean Tatars had found an easy way to reintegrate into the Black Sea economy, as slavers, by returning to their traditions of nomadic predation on agricultural communities and cooperation with the middlemen in the coastal merchant communities.32 The dependence of the Ottoman economy, army, and administration on slave manpower in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well known. The devshirme levies continued to be an important source of elite kapikulu slave manpower down to the 1630s, but the Empire also depended on common slavery, which required the capture of prisoners in war and on slaving expeditions beyond its frontiers. After 1550 the prisoners taken by the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine, Muscovy, and the Caucasus probably accounted for the larger part of this human booty (iasyri). It is diffi cult to quantify the yield of the Crimean slave trade. Alan Fisher has tried, by tabulating the fi gures reported or estimated for the number of Polish, Ukrainian, and Muscovite captives taken on sixty-fi ve major raids and invasions between 1468 and 1694. But some of the numbers offered by contemporary sources – European travelers and Polish and Muscovite annalists – were probably exaggerated for purposes of religious propaganda. For example, Isaak Massa claimed 200,000 Russians were carried off just in 1555. This was unlikely because the need to guard and escort captives usually kept the ratio of war captives to raiders to 1:3; an invading force of 30,000 Tatars would therefore have found it diffi cult to abduct more than 10,000 captives.33 There was consensus among contemporary observers that the cumulative effect of Tatar slaveraiding was considerable, however. Giovanni Botero speculated that Muscovy’s sparse population must be due to Crimean slavers, while the Lithuanian Mikhalon Litvin (c. 1550), watching the procession of captives past Perekop, recalled being asked by a customs collector whether Crimean raids had left any living inhabitants in his country. Litvin wrote of Kaffa, the principal Crimean slave market, that it was “not a town, but an abyss into which our blood is pouring.” A century later the Ottoman writer Evlyia Çelebi estimated that Crimea contained about 400,000 slaves but only 187,000 free Muslims.34 Muscovy’s Military Chancellery kept records of losses from Crimean and Nogai attacks, and these records suggest that Russian losses to the Crimean slave trade were very heavy. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Muscovites were captured by Tatar slavers in the period 1600–1650. This was a large proportion of the Muscovite population settled in the central black soil region, which approached 850,000 by the time of the 1678 census.35 In Kursk district alone 15,115 Russians were killed or captured by Tatars in the years 1633–1646, and most of those lost were probably captured rather than killed, as it was in the Tatars’ interests to avoid battles and the slaughter of potential human booty. For example, total Russian losses to Tatar raids in 1637 were 2,280, of whom only 37 were killed; in 1645 they totalled 5,750, of whom 20 were killed.36 The human toll may have been much heavier in Poland and Ukraine. The Crimeans reportedly took 40,000 captives in Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia in 1676, and Bohdan Baranowski has estimated that an average of 20,000 Poles were captured each year, with total losses for the period 1500–1644 numbering about a million.37 A fi fth of the prisoners taken on Crimean military expeditions may have been turned over to the sultan as tribute. Other captives were distributed to the khan’s court offi cials, and the tribal aristocrats and Crimean and Nogai warriors kept some as herdsmen, fi eld laborers, and domestics. The rest were sold at the slave markets of Bakhchisarai, Karaseibazar, Evpatoria, and especially Kaffa, where Mikhalon Litvin claimed that at least 30,000 slaves could always be found. Muslim merchants supplanted the Italians as the principal dealers after 1475. Judging from Muscovite diplomatic records and the testimonies of European travelers, the price of a healthy male Russian slave ranged from ten to one hundred rubles and averaged fi fty rubles. From their sale the khan took duties of 10 percent. Poles and Ukrainians allegedly fetched higher prices “because they hold cheaper the Muscovite nation, as perfi dious and deceptive.”38 Some Slavic slaves were exported from the Crimean markets to distant regions of the Dar-al-Islam; the archimandrite of a Sinai monastery purchased on the Alexandria market a serviceman from the southern Muscovite town of Kozlov, for example. Many Russian and Polish slaves became rowers on Ottoman galleys. In 1646 Sultan Ibrahim allegedly authorized Crimean raids upon Poland and Muscovy so as to requisition rowers for 100 galleys then under construction. Of 280 rowers freed during a mutiny aboard a Turkish galley in 1642, 207 were Ukrainians and 20 were Muscovites; some of them had spent as much as forty years in captivity. Other slaves exported from the Crimea were used as construction laborers, agriculturalists, and domestic servants. Those remaining in the Crimea, neither sold abroad nor ransomed, were usually manumitted after six years but without the right to return home. They became factors, craftsmen, or farmers. Some converted to Islam to enhance their upward social mobility and may even have found brighter opportunities in the Crimea than awaited them at home, like the former bondsman of boyar V. B. Sheremetev, who chose to convert to Islam so as to serve as an interpreter at the khan’s court. The Chronicle of Samuil Velichko (1675) relates that the Zaporozhian ataman Sirko freed 3,000 Ukrainians during one of his raids on Crimea but had to put them to the sword when they opted to return to Crimea.39 Ransoms were a lucrative supplement to revenues from the sale of slaves, especially as a prisoner of prominence might command a much higher ransom than a sale price. Privately arranged ransoms of servicemen could exceed 100 rubles apiece; a Voronezh gunner who had accumulated considerable wealth as a merchant fetched a ransom of 700 rubles. In 1551, upon the urging of the Orthodox clergy, Ivan IV had instituted a special tax to ransom captives brought to Moscow by Ottoman, Greek, and Armenian merchants and captives brought to Muscovite envoys at the Crimean towns, Kazan’, Astrakhan’, and Istanbul, but the ransom rates it authorized tended to fall considerably below going market price; the 1649 Ulozhenie code, for example, provided for no more than twenty-fi ve rubles towards the ransom of a captured musketeer or garrison cossack, the treasury sometimes refused to ransom subjects captured through their own fault after refusing to repair to the town citadel during a siege alert. The treasury paid out just 8,500 rubles for ransoms in 1644, and 7,337 rubles in 1645, so there may have been more ransoming through private channels – particularly through the Don Cossacks – than through the government’s authority.40 Crimean specialization in the slave trade discouraged peaceful trade between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire and thereby limited opportunities for closer political cooperation between the two powers. In 1488 and again in 1496 Sultan Bayezit II informed Grand Prince Ivan III that he desired friendship and would be pleased to see Muscovite merchants bring their wares to Crimean markets. Muscovite merchants were indeed journeying to Kaffa, and especially to Azov, to trade furs, leather goods, salt, and linen for silks, spices, carpets, and precious stones. But their trade never reached signifi cant proportions because it could not compete with Tatar slaveraiding in terms of profi tability and advantage to the Ottoman economy. The subsequent Ottoman annexation of Kaffa and the other Crimean coastal towns, the imposition of new customs duties and tolls at these towns, and the establishment of the sultan’s monopoly over fur imports further limited Muscovite commercial opportunities at Kaffa and Azov and forced Muscovite merchants to reroute their trade with the Ottomans through Poland and Moldavia. Muscovite–Ottoman trade appears to have declined further after 1580, perhaps due to the heightened tension in Russo–Ottoman relations after the annexation of Astrakhan’ and the Perevolok expedition or because of Don Cossack attacks on Ottoman merchants and Tatar raids on Muscovite caravans. In 1593 an Ottoman offi cial, Hussein Çelebi, complained to Moscow that the Don Cossacks had destroyed Azov’s commerce, from which the sultan’s treasury had used to receive 80,000 pieces of gold; by 1630 the only goods reportedly being traded at Azov were wares the cossacks had plundered along the Black Sea coast and now offered for redemption.41
The Nogais and Kalmyks Since its appeals to the sultan to restrain his Crimean Tatar vassals were usually futile it made sense for Moscow to try to weaken the Khanate militarily by suborning its nomadic allies, particularly the Great Nogais. Ismail and Ishterek, beys of the Great Nogai Horde, gave oaths of fealty (shert’) to the tsar; they may not have understood that Moscow treated these as pledges of vassalage, but they generally refrained from aggression against Muscovy in 1557–1563 and 1616– 1630. Moscow had various tactics at its disposal to obtain the loyalty of the Nogai beys, including bribes (Ishterek received 1,064 rubles) and occasional military intervention to guarantee their victory in succession struggles within their Horde. The lesser Nogai nobles were also coopted or coerced by gift plying, registration in the tsar’s service from estates in Kasimov and Romanov (worked by Christian Finnic and Russian peasants), or by treaty requiring them to turn over kinsmen as elite hostages to be housed under close surveillance at Moscow or Astrakhan’. The Russian town governors at Astrakhan’ were instructed to protect the Nogais from violence and enslavement by Russians, to respect their rights to roam their traditional grazing lands on the eastern Volga steppes, and to defend them from attacks by the Kalmyks and by the Volga and Don Cossacks. The main problem in managing the Nogais was not that of fi nding a bey ready to be suborned but fi nding a bey to back who had real control over most of the Nogai Horde. The gifts sent to Ismail, and after him to Tinakhmet and Urus’, could have helped them consolidate their control over the lesser beys and mirzas if shared among the latter as bounty accessible only through the power of the supreme bey, who alone could treat with the tsar; but Ismail and his successors never got the opportunity to establish their monopoly over the fl ow of bounty because the lesser beys and mirzas from the start demanded their own gifts from Moscow in proportion to their genealogical status within the Horde.42 Moscow tried to play it safe by paying them off as well. Over the longer term this tamed the Nogai Horde, but at the cost of its unity; the danger it presented to Muscovy declined with the Horde’s political disintegration, but this also meant the Horde was of declining military value as a counterweight to the Crimean Khanate. On the whole it was the Great Nogais’ own strategic vulnerability that held them to vassalage to the tsar. Periodically Don Cossack or Kalmyk pressure had forced the Great Nogais to abandon the lower Volga steppe and cross the Don onto the Crimean steppes, only to be repulsed by Crimeans or Lesser Nogais unwilling to share these grasslands with them (1574). In 1588–1590 the Crimean khan incited the Nogais to attack Russian towns but then refused to support them. In 1646 one Nogai mirza even asked the tsar to establish three new forts in the steppe to defend his ulus against the Crimeans, Kalmyks, and Lesser Nogais. Under such circumstances the Great Nogais felt the limits of Muslim solidarity and the necessity of peaceful relations with Muscovy, which had fi rmly established its presence at Astrakhan’, in the middle of their traditional grazing lands, and was sending them talented diplomats like the Mal’tsevs, fl uent in Tatar and untiring in arguing that Muscovy was the true successor to the Golden Horde. There was not much risk that Muscovite diplomacy wooing the Nogais away from the Crimean Khanate would antagonize the Ottomans as the Ottomans had their own concerns that too close a Crimean–Nogai rapprochement might make the Crimean khans less dependent on Ottoman protection and more willing to lay claim to the Ottoman eyalet in the Crimea.43 Ivan IV’s conquest of Astrakhan’ and the formation of the Don Cossack Host assisted in the pacifi cation of the Great Nogais by demonstrating militarily the growing risks and declining profi tability of Great Nogai involvement in the Crimean slave trade, and over time the expanding scale of Nogai trade with Muscovy presented a more attractive alternative to selling slaves to the Crimean Tatars. Nogai livestock was in great demand in Moscow; in some years Nogai traders accompanying envoys to Moscow brought as many as 27,000 horses and 4,000 sheep for sale. Generally speaking, Muscovite merchants, dealing in metalwares, fi rearms, cloth, and grain, had more to offer the steppe-dwellers than did the Crimean Tatars. . . . An agrarian economy possessing skilled, towndwelling craftsmen and a society based on a pastoral economy could work out in the short run a symbiotic relationship profi table to both. . . . Ottoman traders could have fi lled the economic gap, but the Crimean Tatars, by continuing the fi ction of the Golden Horde prerogatives and by putting obstacles in the way of smooth relations with the Ottomans, may have alienated the steppe market and also the Ottoman traders.44 Some obstacles to further Muscovite–Nogai rapprochement remained, however. As long as Muscovy’s southern frontier remained vulnerable to Tatar chambuly it would be impossible to entirely suppress Nogai slaveraiding; Moscow still needed to fi nd ways to keep a closer eye on the governors of Astrakhan’ lest they oppress the Nogais and provoke them to break their shert’. Above all there was the growing danger from the Kalmyk hordes, who had abandoned their grazing lands in Dzhungaria to trek westward towards the Iaik, where they began to hammer at the Great Nogais, sometimes pushing them across the Volga into Muscovite territory. The early Kalmyk incursions had been sporadic and brief, so that the Great Nogais had eventually been able to return to their reservation on the eastern side of the Volga. But the Kalmyks made a more concerted push under Taishi Daichin in 1634, driving the Great Nogais across the Volga and Don en masse to fall upon the Don Cossacks, unite with the Lesser Nogais from the eastern wing of the Crimean Khanate, and begin pushing up the Don, Khoper, and Medveditsa to fi nd themselves new grazing lands. This brought them into confl ict with the Muscovite frontier towns. Meanwhile the Kalmyks had become the dominant nomadic power east of the Volga and would eventually follow the Great Nogais in making their own raids on Russian towns.
The formation of the cossack Hosts Above all Moscow had to rein in the Don Cossacks, who often raided the Nogais, the Crimean Tatars, and even the Turkish garrisons and towns on their own initiative, provoking retaliations against Muscovite border towns. The relationship between Muscovy and the Don Cossacks mirrored the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars. The Don Cossacks were a client polity which often performed great military services for their patron as a buffer and gatherer of intelligence; and when it was too dangerous for Muscovy to undertake its own aggressive or punitive attacks on the other great powers of the region, the Don Cossacks did so as proxies whose actions the tsar could disavow as the work of brigands. Although they were heavily dependent on Muscovite subsidies of cash, grain, powder, and shot, until 1671 they maintained formal independence from Muscovy (refl ected in the fact that the Ambassadors’ Chancellery treated with them as with a foreign power), and they periodically demonstrated their “sovereignty” by taking military action on their own initiative, against Moscow’s wishes and interests. Survival impelled them to this: like the Crimean Khanate, their economic specialization was raiding for plunder (in their case mostly for livestock and trade goods, but they also sold some Muslim captives to the Muscovites). The fi rst Don kazaki were not Slavs but Tatars whose original tribal affi liations had been broken during the disintegration of the Kipchak Khanate and who survived by turning to independent freebooters. By the early sixteenth century there was a sparse Russian population on the steppe with which they could fuse, for the Mongol invasions had not rolled back all Russian colonization along the Voronezh and northern Don; a few small scattered settlements of Russian hunters, fi shermen, and bee-keepers had survived, and some of these settlers had adopted the cossack way of life, supplementing their hunting and gathering with raiding and mercenary activity. They were subsequently joined by fugitives from the north – baptized “service Tatars” from the Volga, runaway peasants and slaves from central Muscovy, and Riazan’ servicemen displaced by such confl icts as the civil war in Vasilii II’s reign – so that the Slavic element prevailed among the cossacks by the beginning of the sixteenth century and conversion to Orthodoxy had become required for acceptance in their communities. In calling themselves “free cossacks” they saw themselves as standing outside the Muscovite sociopolitical system: they were neither the Sovereign’s servicemen (sluzhilye liudi) nor his taxbearing “men of draft” (tiaglye liudi), but reserved for themselves the right to choose their own masters.45
By the 1580s the core of the cossack population had shifted southward down the Don towards the Donets River and Azov. The smaller cossack population remaining in the Upper Reaches – the northern Don – was less stable because this region tended to be a waystation rather than fi nal destination for fugitives and because the proximity of the tsar’s new borderland garrison towns provided an alternative calling to free cossackizing here, the opportunity to register as garrison servicemen and receive the tsar’s bounty in land and grain. Larger, more permanent cossack communities and more formal independent cossack political organization had a better chance of developing farther beyond the Muscovite frontier, on the Don’s Lower Reaches, where there was greater opportunity for marauding into Tatar and Ottoman territory. By the early seventeenth century some of the temporary cossack encampments on the Lower Reaches had grown into permanent fortifi ed settlements (Manych, Monastyrskii gorodok, Cherkassk, Razdory). These settlements were of modest size, usually holding no more than a few hundred cossacks each, but they were enough to serve as the nucleus of a self-governing cossack polity – the Don Host (Donskoe voisko) – which by the 1620s would claim authority over all Lower Reaches cossacks as well as those Upper Reaches cossacks who had not yet been absorbed into the Muscovite army (about 5,000 men altogether).46 Unlike the Crimean Khanate, cossack society on the lower Don lacked the division of labor necessary for the construction of a true state. The Host was a loose military union built from below by the detachments (stanitsy) operating out of the scattered camps and fortifi ed settlements; perhaps modeled partly upon Russian peasant communal organization as well as upon traditional nomadic military organization. The stanitsy, which varied in size, met in assembly (krug) to elect a commander (ataman) and lieutenant (esaul) for such tasks as confl ict resolution, the division of booty, and military leadership. Sometimes a separate campaign ataman was chosen, and on occasion stanitsy joined together on campaign under a single ataman or a team of them. Although a Muscovite document of 1593 speaks of one Don Host, this was wishful thinking on Moscow’s part – it wanted a unifi ed Host under a single permanent commander, ideally one that Moscow appointed. But a permanent union of all the stanitsy had not yet been achieved, and the stanitsy had repudiated Petr Khruschev, Moscow’s choice for Host Captain (golova), so that the Ambassadors’ Chancellery had to continue addressing multiple atamans and dealing separately with different stanitsy. A more formal and centralized Host administration fi nally emerged in the 1620s. Representatives from both the Upper and Lower Reaches were now periodically summoned into general krug council at Razdory to elect a voiskovyi ataman, voiskovyi esaul, and d’iak (secretary); and Moscow began recognizing this voiskovyi ataman, headquartered at this time at Monastyrskii gorodok, as commander of all the Don Cossacks.47 Although the unifi cation of the Host detachments strengthened the Don Host as a Pontic steppe power, it also heralded the erosion of the Host’s independence, for the process of Host unifi cation was welcomed and probably encouraged by Moscow, which had grown alarmed at the growing power of the cossack detachments since the turn of the century. During the Troubles free cossack detachments had intervened militarily and politically at several crucial junctures, throwing their support to the Pretenders, withdrawing their support, and fi nally endorsing the enthronement of a Romanov tsar; thereafter the Muscovite government had been required to devote considerable resources to suppressing cossack “brigandage” in the interior and to registering the cossack population of the Upper Reaches in the tsar’s service; and meanwhile the escalating confl ict between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottomans, provoked in part by Zaporozhian Cossack raids on Tatar and Ottoman lands, had convinced Moscow its own security called for reining in Don Cossack raiding. Host unifi cation therefore promised to make the Host more amenable to Muscovite control. On the one hand, the unifi cation of the Host through krug “democracy” enabled the Host to represent itself as a regime of liberty antithetical to Muscovite authoritarianism, a refuge to runaway serfs and ruined servicemen, and a brotherhood of equals (“they have no ‘best men’ among them, they are all equal to each other”). In reality there were from the start powerful restraints upon the fuller development of cossack democracy. The cossacks of the Lower Reaches practiced patriarchal slavery, deprived their bondsmen “apprentices” (chury) of the right to vote in the krug assembly, and permitted the formation of a cossack elite (starshina) consisting of the more militarily experienced men likely to monopolize elected offi ce and the subsidies sent from Moscow, which they used to expand their own trading and animal husbandry. The starshina bought up forests, fi shing sites, and pastures and in some instances turned poorer cossacks into their debtors and dependent laborers. The principle of krug deliberation declined in importance as the voiskovyi ataman and starshina increasingly decided important issues on their own and as less prosperous cossacks and representatives of the smaller settlements were excluded from the voiskovyi krug. According to a 1689 report from the governor of Astrakhan’, rank-and-fi le Don Cossacks had come to refer to their elite with contempt as “the boyars and voevody of the stanitsy.”48 What the Host lacked in numbers (most of its operations on land involved no more than 500 or 600 men) it made up for in strategic location. The ataman’s headquarters at Monastyrskii gorodok was only 60 km from the Ottoman fortress of Azov, which the cossacks attacked in 1574, 1593, 1620, and 1625; the Host was well-positioned to intercept and repulse smaller Crimean and Nogai war parties moving up the Kal’miuss and Nogai trails, and therefore to police these trails on the tsar’s request, to protect his borderland towns; and the Host could undertake its own raids upon the camps of the Lesser Nogai Horde, just across the Manych River, or attack them for the tsar, to bring the Lesser Nogais back under fealty to him (as in 1623, when they struck the encampment of mirza Sultan Murat on the Ei River, killing his family and taking some 700 prisoners). The Great Nogai Horde could be more easily controlled when caught between the Don Host to the west and the Astrakhan’ governors or Iaik cossacks to the east. As long as the Zaporozhian Cossacks of the lower Dnepr were faithful subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the Don Host had a role to play in blocking Zaporozhian raids on southern Muscovy. The Don Host was also capable of mounting naval expeditions (sometimes of 2– 6,000 men when acting in concert with the Zaporozhians), raiding not only the towns of the Crimean coast but Trebizond and Sinope, which they even briefl y held in 1625. Six thousand cossacks landed by longboat to plunder the outskirts of Istanbul itself in 1623. These naval raids threatened to embroil Muscovy in war with the Khanate and Porte and therefore showed Moscow the need for tighter control over the Host.49 In Lithuanian Ukraine the cossack way of life began to appear in the late fi fteenth century, about the same time as on the Upper Reaches of the Don and Voronezh. Ukrainian townsmen and petty gentry from Cherkasy, Kiev, Kanev, and the Seversk towns had been engaging in seasonal foraging on the steppeland to the south, turning to hunting, fi shing, horsetrading, and some small-scale farming to supplement their livings in the “Settled Lands.” Of course this put them in confl ict with nomadizing or raiding Tatars and forced them to form armed bands (vatagi) for their steppe undertakings. These bands soon turned to their own marauding, attacking Tatar villages and herds on the lower Dnepr, and even striking near Ochakov (1528), forcing the Turks to strengthen their garrison there. The greater their profi t from these raids, the more quickly they put aside steppe foraging for the warrior trade; and this in turn made the cossack calling more attractive to the Ukrainian gentry, who made themselves captains (atamans) of cossack bands. The Lithuanian border offi cials, the palatines and starostas, began building retinues of hired cossacks and using them to run reconnaissance patrols, hunt down Tatar chambuly, defend castles, and raid the Tatars so they could levy duties on the plunder they brought back. The border offi cials’ profi teering from these raids thereby encouraged the spread and militarization of cossack activity. The royal government viewed this process with some ambivalence, welcoming the strengthening of frontier defenses but worrying that cossack raiding would provoke Tatar retaliation.50 A turning point in the formation of Ukrainian cossackdom came in the 1550s when the marchlord Dymitro Vyshnevets’kyi (in Polish, Wiśniowiecki) assembled a cossack force and established a permanent camp (kosh) on Khortytsa island on the lower Dnepr. This camp remained in use after Vyshnevets’kyi perished in Moldavia, and by the reign of Stefan Bathory there were some 3,000 cossacks residing in winter settlements connected by palisade and blockhouse to the kosh. They abandoned informal vataga association for more uniform organization in decuries (desiatki), centuries (sotni), and corps (polki) of three to fi ve centuries, and they came together periodically to deliberate on campaign plans and elect their own supreme commander, the koshevoi ataman. The emergence of this new organization in the 1580s–1590s was accompanied by a change of name: henceforth they called themselves the Zaporozhian Sich. In the seventeenth century their numbers increased signifi cantly. By the 1670s koshevoi ataman Ivan Sirko was able to mobilize up to 15,000 Zaporozhian cossacks for major campaigns. The emergence of this Zaporozhian Host, free and beyond the reach of Crown authority, eroded Crown control over the Settled Lands in several ways. It offered a refuge for fugitives from manorial exploitation and political oppression. It accelerated the colonization of eastern (Left Bank) Ukraine by better shielding that region from Tatar raiding, and it encouraged subaltern elements on the Left Bank to aspire to cossack status on a scale the government simply could not accommodate. It presented an additional problem for state authority by endangering the Pontic peace through its raids on Crimea and on Ottoman domains.
Poland-Lithuania’s southern frontier defense system Polish-Lithuanian Ukraine had been settled earlier than southern Muscovy and was more densely populated, especially west of the Dnepr. But its defense system was remarkably thin throughout the sixteenth century. In theory the king’s levee en masse of the nobility and gentry (pospolite ruszenie) could have mobilized up to 50,000 men at mid-century. But there were restrictions on how the pospolite ruszenie militia could be used. It was forbidden to take it abroad – say, into Moldavia – unless the Sejm gave its consent, and then only for defensive purposes, and for no more than three months. When used within the borders of the realm it could be kept in the fi eld for no more than two weeks and it could not be divided into separate forces. Because it took so long to mobilize it could not provide a very proactive defense against Tatar incursions. Therefore it was used only on a few emergency occasions after 1454. Its rout at Pyliavtsi in 1648 revealed how tactically obsolete it had become. In the 1490s Tatar raiding became a chronic problem and made it necessary to entrust the defense of the southern frontier to a more regular, if smaller, professional force under tighter Crown control. A new border defense army of 2–4,000 men called the General Defense (Obrona potoczna), annually recruited and paid out of the Royal Treasury, was therefore established. This was a permanent but not a standing force, since it served in four seasonal shifts per year and the majority of its troops enrolled for just one or two quarters’ active duty. Most of its recruits were gentry from Rus’ Czerwona or Podolia, or magnates’ sons interested in starting military careers – the Obrona potoczna now offering more opportunity for this than the largely defunct pospolite ruszenie. Zygmunt I had tried to make the nobility fund the Obrona potoczna by offering to accept cash payments in place of their obligation to serve in the pospolite ruszenie, but the nobility had rejected this. In the 1520s the Sejm fi nally agreed to recognize the king’s right to devote certain categories of royal revenue to the upkeep of the Obrona potoczna, but royal expenditure on the force was still usually capped at 150,000 złoties a year. It was therefore diffi cult to expand the Obrona potoczna beyond 4,000 men. In emergencies the Sejm might agree to vote special funds to hire more recruits for a quarter or two, or frontier defense could be reinforced temporarily by summoning the pospolite ruszenie, militias raised ad hoc by the provincial dietines, and magnates’ private armies. In 1563 the Obrona potoczna was renamed the Quarter Army (Wojsko kwarciane), refl ecting the fact that it was now paid from one-quarter of the annual revenues from Crown properties, collected into a special Rawa treasury under the joint supervision of the Crown and the Sejm. 51 The reign of Stefan Bathory (r. 1576– 1586) saw improvements in the equipment of the Quarter Army and some expansion of its infantry contingent. This was possible because of the increased revenue made available to the Crown through the federal union of Lithuania and Poland and the shifting of responsibility for the defense of Ukraine from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Polish Crown. Military buildup had Bathory’s unwavering support because of his ultimate goal of winning for himself the Hungarian crown; and it also owed something to the considerable political infl uence of Grand Crown Hetman Jan Zamoyski, who cultivated the support of the szlachta and reconciled them to greater investment in formations other than the old pospolite ruszenie. The main shortcoming of the Quarter Army was that it was no larger than the Obrona potoczna yet was responsible for holding a frontier almost 1,000 km long. It stood some chance of intercepting Tatar forces while they were still moving up the invasion roads into Podolia but it was not of much use against chambuly that had already penetrated deep into the interior and scattered across a broad front to raid. Its tactics “fi nally boiled down to endless movement in an endless circle.”52 In 1577 the main body of the Quarter Army, stationed in Podolia, numbered just 2,009 horse and 850 foot, the latter garrisoning frontier fortresses in small detachments of 50–200 men. In 1582 the Quarter Army’s fi eld force consisted of 1,200 horse and 530 registered cossacks, with another 500 infantrymen distributed among the major castles, and it became necessary to reinforce it with another 2,100 horse transferred out of the Livonian theater, the pospolite ruszenie, and some of the private forces of the magnates.53 Once the Quarter Army had intercepted the enemy, however, it usually displayed a tactical effectiveness out of all proportion to its size. The restraints upon its size had encouraged compensatory tactical experimentation. Perhaps inspired by the recommendation of Konstantin Mihailovic, a Serb émigré who had served in the Ottoman janissaries, the commanders of the Obrona potoczna had ceased relying on heavy armored cavalry in the 1490s in favor of racowie, an unarmored light cavalry of Serbian model equipped with 3 m lances, small wooden shields, and Turkish curved sabers. In the early sixteenth century their preference shifted to husarze, Hungarian-style hussars wearing light sziszak helmets and breastplates and armed with 5 m lances and long straight-bladed koncerz swords of the type used by Ottoman deli cavalry. By 1550 the husarze comprised about half the Obrona potoczna and established a fearsome reputation for their ability to break and rout much larger masses of cavalry or infantry. They had became the favored formation for magnates’ sons and had taken to sumptuous caparison – leopardskin pelisses and, attached to their backplates, light wooden-frame “wings” sporting eagle feathers. Their armament also diversifi ed: they added light sabers, warhammers, bows, and, from 1576, a brace of pistols. For reconnaissance and support on the fl anks the Quarter Army came to rely as well upon pancerni, chain-mailed cavalry in misiurka skullcap helmets and chain-mail hoods. In the sixteenth century the pancerni carried short lances or boarspears and round wooden shields, and by the seventeenth century they were equipped with wheellock carbines. Pancerni comprised about a tenth of the Quarter Army in the sixteenth century and about half the force by the 1650s because of their usefulness in patrolling the steppe. Most were recruited from the Ukrainian cossacks. The Quarter Army also continued to use some German mounted pistoleers (reitary) and Lithuanian service Tatar archers.54 One-third to one-quarter of the Obrona potoczna and Quarter Army consisted of infantry. Infantry were needed to garrison the main fortresses along the steppe frontier (Kiev, Bila Tserkva, Kanev, Cherkasy, Bratslav, Oster, Kamianets) and were also tactically useful in the fi eld when the Quarter Army deployed behind earthworks or wagenburg athwart an invasion road to intercept the Crimean Tatar army returning from the interior laden with iasyri. Commissioning offi cers to hire volunteers, very effective in forming companies of horse, was of limited utility to forming companies of foot because of the gentry’s distaste for infantry duty; so in 1575 King Stefan Bathory proposed a national levy to raise one foot soldier and one mounted soldier from every sixteen commoners. The Sejm rejected this but did approve in 1578 the establishment of a Select Infantry (Wybraniecka piechota) for the Quarter Army and for service in Livonia, to be levied largely from royal estates at the rate of one soldier from every 320–500 hectares. The most successful of these levies, the levy of 1590, brought in 2,306 recruits. Those taken into the Select Infantry were exempted from taxes but required to train three months per year.55 The royal castles could not play an important role in frontier defense strategy. There were too few of them, especially in the eastern half of Ukraine. This left the inhabitants of many eastern districts with no refuge in time of attack other than crude fortifi cations they built for themselves or the private fortifi cations of the magnates. Royal castles in the more densely populated western half of Ukraine were often of stone, but those in eastern Ukraine were usually wooden – built of earth-fi lled oaken cradles in the style known in Muscovy as po gorodovomu – and quite small, about the size of a manor courtyard; often they had no more than two or three guns. They provided some ability to monitor enemy movements and give refuge to the inhabitants of the town and a few of the nearest villages, but they could not “dominate the territory to any extent.”56 The burden of frontier defense therefore fell primarily upon the mobile element of the small Quarter Army.
Although the infantry element of the Quarter Army was conscripted, its cavalry element was mobilized by combining royal commission recruiting and feudal retinue obligation. The captains (rotmistrzy) commanding the companies (chora‚giew) of the Quarter Army recruited only part of their commands on their own, on royal commission; typically they aimed at recruiting a limited number of noblemen as their own comrades in arms (towarzysze), counting on the towarzysze in turn to bring into service their own retinues (poczty) of two to six cavalrymen at their own expense. By passing some of the cost of equipping and paying cavalrymen down to the towarzysze this saved on expenditure out of the Rawa treasury; and the towarzysze were willing to shoulder these costs because bringing poczet retinues into service gave them the opportunity to build their own political clienteles among the gentry and display their own wealth and social power, thereby recommending themselves to the patronage of loftier nobles higher in the army command. Thus the elite husarz lancers could afford fi rearms as well as ostentatious panoply. The towarzysz system of mobilization improved morale and unit cohesion. A typical cavalry company of 150 to 300 horse would have a solid core of 50 to 80 towarzysz knights sharing responsibility with the captain in kola (circle) military council and exercising social as well as tactical authority over the poczet squires comprising the rest of the company. Robert Frost considers that this ensured that units were able to carry out the rapid manuevers and swift regrouping that was the key to battlefi eld success. It was a structure ideally suited to the requirements of warfare in eastern Europe, which consisted largely of scouting, raiding, and actions by small mobile units, often operating far from their bases.57 The Quarter Army also relied upon towarzysz solidarity in developing effective tactics against large masses of enemy troops. Its infantry companies and fi eld guns would take shelter behind a tabor (a wagon-circle, or, if time allowed, rough earthworks, or both in combination), with the husarze and pancerni cavalry on its wings or hidden behind the tabor. The pancerni would advance on the wings to protect against outfl anking while the main blow against the weakest part of the enemy’s line was dealt by the husarze. The husarze charged in two to four echelons, the front rank comprising the elite towarzysze and the ranks behind them comprising their squires. On the walk, trot, and canter they kept enough space among themselves so that they could react quickly and change course. As the front rank came within 30 m of the enemy’s line they increased their speed from fast canter to gallop, closing up until they were almost kneeto-knee, in order to present a front outnumbering the targeted section of enemy infantry line by 2:1. Because of the limited accuracy of unrifl ed musket fi re the front rank of husarze were generally exposed to just one volley between the moment they came into musket range and the moment they struck the enemy line; and enemy pikes were of limited effectiveness against them because the husarz lances were a good 2 m longer. If they failed to break through the enemy line, the front rank of husarze would fall away and regroup just as the second rank of husarze – their squires – were hitting the enemy line. A fallen lancer could usually be confi dent his squires would come to his aid and help him remount.58 Against highly mobile Tatar mounted archers riding in loose or no formation the husarz echelon charge with lance was less effective. The Quarter Army cavalry would have to rely more on their pistols and carbines and attack in smaller clusters of a few poczty to try to drive the Tatars into denser formations more vulnerable to infantry and artillery fi re or lance charge; and they would have to be ready to fall back to the cover of the tabor if counterattacked by too large a mass of the enemy. A tabor of wagenburg type was especially useful to the Quarter Army because it could be formed quickly in response to a surprise attack. Wagenburg tactics were ideally suited to the demands of steppe warfare and could be traced back at least as far as the Pechenegs and Mongols.59 Prince Mstislav Romanich of Kiev had used them against the Mongols at Kalka in 1223; and Jan Zizka’s Hussite army pioneered in combining wagon defense with fi rearm and artillery fi repower in the 1430s. The designation of a fortifi ed wagon-circle as a tabor probably began with the Hussites, who invoked the image of Mt. Tabor as a metaphor for their insurgency. Hussite wagenburg tactics quickly spread across Hungary and Moldavia and were then adopted by the Polish, Muscovite, Ottoman, and even Crimean Tatar commanders. Because the Quarter Army was too small to patrol the frontier alone the defense of Ukraine required coordination with cossack forces. Zygmunt I had tried to form a standing cossack militia of 1–2,000 men for frontier defense in 1523–1524 but the Council of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had refused to vote the funds. In 1541 Zygmunt I ordered a general inspection and the compilation of a register of all local cossacks so that his starostas could arrest cossacks making unauthorized raids upon the Tatars that might disrupt the peace; this of course failed because the cossack social condition was fl uid, the cossack population uncountable, and the starostas unable to maintain effective surveillance. More concerted efforts to integrate the cossack population into the Crown’s southern frontier defense system were made in the 1560s following Vyshnevets’kyi’s founding of a base for cossack mercenaries on Khortytsa island. The emergence of an independent Zaporozhian Sich inclined to unauthorized raiding, endangering the Commonwealth’s peace with the Khanate and the Porte, pushed the royal government to revive the idea of a cossack register for purposes of control. In 1568 Zygmunt II Avgust ordered the cossacks of the Sich to abandon their raiding, return to the towns of the settled districts, and take royal service on the king’s stipend. Cossacks registered in royal service would receive special rights, including exemption from the judicial authority of the hated palatines and starostas; they would instead be under the direct authority of a starshyi appointed by the king. This amounted to the establishment of a privileged cossack estate, which appealed strongly to cossacks in the settled districts seeking regular pay, elevated status, and protection from enserfment and oppression at the hands of royal offi cials. It did much to develop a cossack ethos of frontier defense service. It did not, however, guarantee royal control over cossackdom. Quite the opposite: “By introducing cossack immunity . . . it created a vacuum within the framework of the Polish state, a sphere free from the laws of the Polish lords, in which the Ukrainian element could again take shape according to its traditional, almost immanent features.”60 To make matters worse the register was unable to accommodate all those striving to obtain cossack privileges, because the Sejm denied the Crown the funds to pay more than a few hundred men. In 1572 the register was set at just 300 men; 3,000 were enrolled in the early 1590s, during the breakdown of relations with the Ottomans, but most were dismissed when the crisis passed; the register was expanded to 6,000 in 1625, but only after cossack militias had saved the Crown army from the Turks at Khotyn. The register thereby became a source of cossack confl ict with the government rather than an effective instrument for cooptation and control. Henceforth the cossacks of the settled districts demanded that cossack privileges be expanded to all those “living the cossack way” regardless of whether they had been put on the register. It was not through the register but through independent action that the Ukrainian cossack population made its most signifi cant contributions to frontier defense. By the reign of Stefan Bathory the Zaporozhian Sich was playing the kind of tripwire/forward defense function the Don Host was performing for Muscovy. Zaporozhian infantry in small boats patrolled the lower reaches of the Dnepr and maintained pickets at river crossings; Zaporozhian cavalry patrolled the steppe and pursued Tatar chambuly along the invasion trails; and the rapid expansion of the cossack population in the Settled Lands by century’s end provided a large manpower pool for volunteer militias supporting Crown and magnate forces for campaigns in the fi eld, including campaigns abroad in Moldavia and Muscovy. By the 1620s the cossacks of the Settled districts of Bila Tserkva, Kanev, Korsun, Cherkasy, Pereiaslav, Chyhyryn, and Lubny had formed their own standing territorial corps (polki) with a total strength of 10,000 men. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were by Beauplan’s estimate 120,000 cossacks, “all ready for war, and ready to answer in less than a week the slightest command to serve the king.”61 Beauplan considered cossack infantry to be of higher tactical value than cossack cavalry. They show the most fi ghting skill and competence when they are sheltered in a tabor (for they are excellent shots with fi rearms, their usual weapons), and when they are defending their positions. . . . On horseback they are not the best. I remember having seen only two hundred Polish horse rout 2,000 of their best men. It is true that one hundred of these cossacks, protected by their tabor, have no fear of a thousand Poles, nor even of a like number of Tatars.6
The Zaporozhian Sich also developed the means to strike by sea against Crimean and Ottoman territory. Their small single-mast chaika or baidak vessels, propelled by twenty or thirty oarsmen, with additional crew of twenty or so and three or four falconets, were able to slip past the Ottoman garrisons on the Dnepr estuary and reach the Anatolian coast in just thirty-six to forty hours, land, plunder and burn, and rush back out to sea. They attacked the towns along the Crimean coast, the Dobruja coast, and occasionally raided the environs of Istanbul. Because their boats sat so low in the water their crews could usually spot Ottoman galleys before they themselves were sighted; and they could attack and board Ottoman galleys by approaching on oar, with mast down, in the darkness of night.63 On occasion the Crown might turn a blind eye to Zaporozhian piracy or even secretly encourage it, to throw the Crimean Tatars or the Ottomans on the defensive; it would then deny responsibility for deeds committed by “licentious Cossacks” defying their king. But the Zaporozhian Sich, like the Crimean Khanate, lived partly off freebooting and therefore often raided on its own, in genuine defi ance of the Crown, endangering its peace treaties and provoking military retaliation by the Tatars and the Turks. Through most of the sixteenth century Poland-Lithuania was anxious to preserve peace with the Ottomans, so on balance Zaporozhian naval raids created more security problems for the Crown than they resolved. There was no easy solution to this, either: moving to suppress the Sich threatened to provoke armed resistance by its supporters among the larger cossack population of the settled districts, while redirecting Zaporozhian raiding against Muscovy and other powers risked broadening the confl ict in Pontic Europe and encouraging anti-Polish coalition. Meanwhile the unregistered cossacks of the Settled Lands were increasingly angry at the Crown’s inability to expand the cossack register or extend register privileges to the rest of cossackdom. The cossack rebellions led by Kryshtof Kosynskyi and Severyn Nalyvaiko in the 1590s were partly driven by this anger, and over the next few decades the spread of Polish manorial authority into eastern Ukraine and the perception that Orthodoxy was in danger from the Trojan horse of the new Uniate Church would provide cossackdom with additional grievances. The defense of Ukraine was increasingly dependent upon unregistered cossack elements estranged from the Polish nobility and from royal offi cialdom, if not from the person of the king.64
Southern frontier security: the Muscovite approach The Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, comparing the PolishLithuanian defense system in Ukraine with the security system developing in southern Muscovy over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, concluded: What was conducted weakly and fi tfully and came out chaotically and illogically in the Polish-Lithuanian state, given its disorganization, with its chronic lack of funds and feeble executive, the Muscovite state, with its infi nitely well-developed bureaucratism, carried out systematically and according to plan, and executed quite precisely and accurately.65 Hrushevsky overstates the effi ciency of Muscovy’s southern frontier strategy, but over the longer term it did provide better security against Tatar raids, and in the second half of the seventeenth century it made it possible to mobilize manpower and other military resources on such a scale as to enable the tsars to occupy and hold Left Bank Ukraine and eliminate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a serious competitor for hegemony on the Pontic steppe. Hrushevsky was also correct to identify “lack of funds and a feeble executive” as a principal reason for the comparative weakness of the Commonwealth’s southern frontier defense system. There were no Henrician Articles limiting the Moscow tsars’ powers of resource mobilization for war; there was no Muscovite equivalent to the Ukrainian marchlords, palatines for life, and Senatorial oligarchy commanding private armies larger than the Crown’s and sometimes taking up arms against the sovereign in confederatio; there was no chance in Muscovy that the private economic interests of magnates would prevail for long against purely strategic considerations in regard to the geographic patterning and pace of frontier colonization. Instead of relying upon a small mobile fi eld army placed near the edge of a fi xed frontier for early interception of the enemy, augmented in times of crisis by cossack militias of increasingly doubtful loyalty, the Muscovite government pursued a strategy of planned military colonization coordinated across a broad front – establishing good-sized garrisons ever farther south, then linking them together along fortifi ed lines, and fi nally, moving the corps of the frontier defense army down to the new perimeter formed by the fortifi ed line. This process was then repeated – the founding of more garrison towns deeper in the steppe, the construction of an outer fortifi ed line, the redeployment of the fi eld army farther south. This was a long and expensive project, but the principle of universal obligation for service and draft (sluzhba i tiaglo) allowed the government to substitute corvée and cheap service-land-based military duty for tax revenue. Central chancellery control over the town governors (gorodovye voevody) made it possible to subject the frontier lands enclosed behind the advancing outer perimeter to heavy exploitation to support continued forward expansion. The Commonwealth’s cossack problem was largely avoided, too; there was no limit on the size of the cossack register, so Ivan IV, Fedor Ivanovich, and Boris Godunov were able to offer registration on the tsar’s bounty to thousands of cossacks on the Upper Reaches of the Don and Voronezh, and the voevoda remilitarization of local government after the Troubles made it possible by the 1620s to break the spirit of cossack insurgency within the borders of the Muscovite state.
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