sign in sign up
<<
Home , Bey, Crimean Khanate, Wallachia

The Military Co-operation of the Crimean with the in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*

Mária Ivanics

Among the European vassals of the Ottoman Empire there was only one Muslim state: the Khanate of . The international literature gener- ally takes 1475, the conquest of the Genoese colonies on the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula, as the year when its vassal status was estab- lished. However, recently a growing number of historians have expressed the opinion that the khanate should be seen as an ally and not as a vas- sal until the mid-seventeenth century, as it was only in the early eigh- teenth century that the state’s political scope became so narrow that it depended unilaterally on the .1 The contacts between these two Muslim states were characterized by common religious ground and a ­ centuries-long mutual geopolitical dependence. Until the , the politi- cal interests of the Crimean were linked to the , but the emerg- ing power of Muscovy pushed them out of the sphere of steppe politics. The had no other direction left than to establish a closer cooperation with the Ottoman Empire and acknowledge the interests of the Sublime Porte. The military potential of the , freed from its earlier involvements, fortunately met the needs of the Ottoman Empire, which stood at the height of its power and was enjoying a period of expansion on both land and sea. Apart from military ­cooperation, the

* The research for this paper has been carried out with the support of the Research Group of Turcology of Hungarian Academy of Science at the University of Szeged. 1 On the history of the Crimean Khanate, see V.D. Smirnov, Krymskoe Khanstvo pod ver- hovenstvom Otomanskoi Porty [The Crimean Khanate under Ottoman sovereignty], vol. 1 (Sanktpeterburg, 1887); and vol. 2 (, 1889), both reprinted , 2005; Benningsen, et al. Le Khanat de Crimée dans les Archives du Musée du Palais de Topkapı (Paris and The Hague, 1968); Alan W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars, Studies of Nationalities in the USSR, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich (Stanford, 1978); Alan W. Fisher, “Crimean Separatism in the Ottoman Empire,” in Nationalism in a Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, ed. William W. Haddad and William Ochsenwald (Columbus, OH, 1977), 57–76; Halil İnalcık, “The and the Tribal Aristocracy: The Crimean Khanate under Giray I,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979–80), 445–466. 276 mária ivanics slave trade also played an important part in this process; without the gal- ley slaves provided by the Crimean Tatars, the Ottoman fleet would not have been capable of maritime activities. The geographic proximity of the khanate could also be easily used to keep the Ottoman Empire’s Christian vassals (, , and ) at bay.

The Legal Bases of the Cooperation between the Ottomans and Tatars

It was the renowned Turkish historian of Crimean origin, Halil İnalcık, who addressed the problem of the establishment of Ottoman protec- tion over the Crimea for the first time in 1944, along with the question of whether there was a treaty (‘ahdname) between these two Muslim ­powers.2 The fact that, although it has been touched upon in several works, no one has taken up the task of writing a new analysis of the prob- lem tells us a great deal about the complexity of the question.3 In his long essay, İnalcık consulted the relevant narrative and documentary sources and concluded that neither the Turkish nor the Tatar sources suggest that a document was drafted after the occupation of the Genoese colonies in 1475 to formalize the relationship of vassalage between the Tatars and Ottomans. The single contemporary reference to a treaty can be found in a letter sent by Khan Mengli Giray to the Porte on 15 July 1475: “We concluded an agreement with Ahmed [that is, Gedik Ahmed Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman fleet that was besieging Kaffa] that we shall be a friend of the friend of the , as well as the enemy of His enemy.”4 Evliya Çelebi—referring to an unknown Eastern Turkish (Chagatai) chronicle, the tarih of Tohta —also reports that Mengli Giray concluded an agreement with Bayezid [sic],5 according to

2 Halil İnalcık, “Yeni vesikalara göre Kırım Hanlığının Osmanlı tâbiliğine girmesi ve ahidname meselesi” [The establishment of Ottoman sovereignty over the Crimean Khanate and the problem of the treaty according to new documents], Belleten 8 (1944): 185–229. 3 Alexander Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Le Khanat de Crimée au début du XVIe siècle: De la Tradition Mongole à la Suzeraineté Ottomane d’après un docu- ment inédit des Archives Ottomanes,” Cahier du Monde Russe et Sovietique 13, no. 3 (1972): 321–337; Iliia V. Zaitsev, Krymskaia istoriograficheskaia traditsiia XV–XIX vekov [Crimean historiographic tradition, fifteenth to nineteenth centuries] (Moscow, 2009), 142–146. 4 “Aḥmed paşa birle ‘ahd ü şart ḳılduḳ kim pādişāhning dostına dost düşmenine düşmen bolġaymız” A. Melek Özyetgin, Altın Ordu, Kırım ve Kazan sahasına ait yarlık ve bitiklerin dil üslûp incelemesi [Analysis of the language and style of decrees and documents related to the , the Crimea, and Kazan] (, 1996), 118. 5 Sultan Bayezid II ruled between 1481 and 1512, thus he could not have concluded a treaty with Mengli Giray in 1475.