Crimea: from the Golden Horde to Catherine the Great

Donald Rayfield returns for the second of three episodes on Crimea — this time taking the long view, from the Mongol Golden Horde to Catherine the Great's annexation and the early Soviet period.

At its height the Crimean Khanate was a sophisticated and surprisingly humane state. It was also, as Rayfield puts it, the self-appointed freeholder of the former Mongol empire — and it collected its rents in the form of money, livestock, and human captives. Eventually, the leaseholders rebelled.

A story of revival after disaster, and disaster after revival, ending in the grim absorption of the peninsula into the Russian imperial project.

Along the way we admire the fighting skills of the Tatars and learn about a mysterious shop in Venice which would sell you poisoned almonds!

Transcript

Welcome Back To Crimea’s Past

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hock. And this is part two of a three-part series I'm doing with Professor Donald Rayfield about the history of the Crimea. In the first episode, we talked about the Crimean War itself and the surprisingly civilized treatment of prisoners on both sides. And today we're going to go further back into the history of the Crimea. It has such a rich and and not always a very happy history, so there's no shortage of things to discuss. Anyway, welcome back, Donald, to the podcast. Thank you. Now I wasn't quite sure how far back we should go, but I thought probably as good a starting point as any is the Golden Horde.

The Golden Horde And Mongol Rule

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Um can you just give us a a picture of the Golden Horde and and what it was, when it was and and how it relates to the Crimea? The Golden Horde was something for which Jengiz Khan is noted as as a leader, a man from an obscure Mongolian tribe, who managed to unite a lot of Mongolian tribes, with Turkic tribes, with other people from Central Asia, into a a highly efficient army, riding small ponies very fast, with very skilled archery, and invading Europe as far as he could and Asia as far as he could, wherever horses could graze. So he got as far as Poland with the bogs and marshes that horses don't like, he got as far as Syria with the desert that horses couldn't graze in, and uh his empire gradually stabilized into an administrative, but mainly tax gathering. The main activity of the Mongols once they'd arrived was not killing people but gathering taxes and establishing administrations. And why is it called golden? Because I always I always have this picture of them sort of clanking across the steps, weighed down with all the jewelry that they've stolen from their enemies, but I'm not sure that's quite right. Gold was simply their colour. It was the most precious metal, and um th that was what they regarded themselves as, and later on they gave themselves different titles. So when when you say it was their colour, do you mean that was what the clothes they wore? The the emblems uh were the and the symbols. How does the Crimean bit emerge from the from the Golden Horde? Is it some kind of a breakaway? How does it develop? At first the the the Mongols uh established um sort of governorships under various Khans, because you couldn't possibly administer this enormous empire from one center when you stretched all the way from China to Poland. You had to have some delegation. And so Khanates evolved, particularly in Russia, or what future Russia, in uh at the mouth of the Volga, there was Astrachan, at the point where the Volga uh is joined by the Karma River at the Urals, that was the um the Kazan Khanate. And the Crimea was the most desirable one because it got you to the Black Sea, an important trading area, and they established uh governors there. The problem was, of course, whenever you delegate power, if it's sufficiently far from the center, it tends to break away and decide that it itself is going to be independent. And the Crimean Khanate managed to hang on to power as the rest of the Mongol Khanate split up, had civil wars, and uh was finally in the 16th century absorbed by the Russians, the Crimean Khanate survived. Was that the end of the Mongol Empire? Pretty well. They say that the the w what the Mongols brought back from from their expedition was three fatal things literacy, philosophy, and syphilis. Um that's why they they lost all their cultural and uh other importance. What is the Khanate in the Crimea? Is it fundamentally Mongolian with with you know the people are fundamentally Mongolian, or is it or is it just sitting on Crimean soil with a very thin layer of administrators? Rather like the Manchus in China, there was a thin basis of Manchu in China when the Manchu uh Empire started, and there was a thin basis in Mongol, but after the first few generations they only remembered a few phrases of Mongol, but they did have some Mongolian habits and customs which made them stand out, and was partly the reason why they were so successful. The Mongol Empire had become iz Islamic by 1300. The force of Jengis Khan was that he had no strong religious feelings, he tolerated all religions, he never oppressed or killed any any priests of any religion, but uh in the end he found in order to negotiate uh with the people he'd conquered that Islam was the safest thing to choose. Do you think the history of the world would be very different if they would have decided to be Christian? Yes, they could have, and they were invited by the Pope to take part in the Jubilee in 1300. The Pope was under the illusion that the Mongols had driven the Muslims out of Jerusalem, so he invited them. And a lot of uh people in Europe welcomed the Mongols on the grounds that they were killing Muslims. And they didn't realize too late that um the Mongols had other things in their mind. The the way in which they evolved was they kept certain things from Genghis Khan, the Crimean Khanate, and it's not generally appreciated that Genghis Khan was not a crude dictator. He had a system of government, rather like medieval Britain, with a king but a house of lords had considerable power. The Khanate had four clans, and they consulted, and um there was a lot of delegation. They were also free of the corruption uh that you uh find in the Ottoman Empire, which they inherited from the corrupt Byzantine Empire. They had a legal system which was admirable. Anyone who came across it right until the 18th century, and some of their legal uh uh registers are still preserved. It it was uh criminal and civil law was very highly developed. And we're talking here about the Crimean Carnate, so do they push out the Byzantine Empire when they the Byzantine Empire was already pushed out by the Ottomans in in Anatolia. It was reduced to a tiny thing, and the Crusaders nearly finished it off in the 13th century. So it was Boris Johnson put it, it was oven oven ready for for the Ottomans. So okay, so as I understand it, the Mongols, you know, are there in the first place, and then and then the Crimean Khanate is sort of descendants of the original Mongols. Yes. They have Mongol names. Very often they're Chris uh their names are not Islamic, some are called little deer, some are called birthmarks. Uh the two Khans call Mengli, which means having a birthmark, which is a sign of distinction by the gods in ancient Turkic religion, but they were primarily Turkic.

Crimea As An Ethnic Crossroads

SPEAKER_00 7:14

And when they got to the Crimea, they found already that they were just the latest lair in a very complex mix of people. The Crimean people existed, they were probably already Turkic. The mysterious Hazars who disappeared in the ninth century after taking on Judaism as their state religion. Hang on, no. Fleet. So for a while the state religion of the Crimea was Judaism. Well, at least the alien this was the Hazars who inspected all the religions. Uh what they liked about Christianity was uh was that um you could drink, and what you disliked about Islam that you couldn't. But the choice of Judaism, of course, that there was no army to defend you. If you chose Christianity, you'd have European armies. If you chose Islam, you would have Asiatic armies to come to your help. If you chose Judaism, nobody's going to help you. So that was a bad choice in the end. It was a destruction. And they survive actually as the Karaim, who are the non-rabbinical Jews who just uh only read the first five books of the Old Testament and nothing else. And when you say they survived, you mean that. Yes, the Karaim in there are a few hundred left. Oh, okay. In in Crimea, in Lithuania, who are probably descendants of the of the of the Khazars. There were probably the Huns uh were probably mainly Turkic. We don't know much about the Huns, but when they disappeared, the Crimea was a great place to disappear to if you were a defeated nation. The Visigoths, the sorry, the Ostrogoths, the Goths who came from Gotland in the Baltic, right across Russia, ended up in Crimea and established a Gothic kingdom, and uh Gothic language was written. Gothic was spoken in the Crimea in some villages right until the 17th century. So there were Goths. That's why when you go to the Crimea, you suddenly see someone who seems to come out of an Ingrid Bourbon film. And it doesn't look at all Tatar. They had Armenians, they had Jews, uh, Greeks, they had Italian traders, extraordinary mix of people. And uh even in the 20th century, these people would would uh would surface. There was a trial in Soviet times of rich landlords who were supposed to be exploiting the peasantry. And at the trial they were asked what their names were, and they said, Di Palucci, Giorgione. And they were descendants of uh Venetian traders who'd stayed. So the crime was an extraordinary ethnic mix. That may have been its strength, one of its strengths that it had these resources and different crafts. But anyway, the once the the Khans uh were established, they uh had very strict rules. They had a surname which nobody can has given an explanation called Gerai. I think it's because the first Khan spent a lot of his life as a refugee in Lithuania. And Lithuania, when you say OK, that's fine, you say Gerai. And I think it's his his nickname, because Gerai makes no sense in any Turkic language at all. But you could only rule if you were Gerai. And no sooner had they established themselves as as as rulers with their clan leaders and their House of Lords system, than the Ottomans, of course, decided now we conquered the Balkans, we will uh deal with the Crimea.

Ottoman Oversight And Khanate Wealth

SPEAKER_00 10:30

And they came to an agreement that Crimea was to surrender its main trading ports to the Ottomans, who would put a governor in places like what's today Feodosia, was then Kaffa, and one or two other places, and collect revenues. But it was rather like the the British Commonwealth, rather like Australia is in a sense governed by Britain, it has a governor general, but it it isn't interfered with. And there seems to be an agreement with the Ottomans that only a Gerai Khan could be appointed, and the Ottomans had to approve it, that no Girai Khan could ever be executed. There were, I think, three exceptions to that, of Girai Khan who really irritated the Sultan and did end up executed. And the third thing, most frightening, was that to the Turks was that if the Ottoman dynasty ever died out, then a Girai would take over. And in fact, the Ottoman dynasty nearly did die out in 1640, when Murad IV was dying. On his deathbed, he ordered the execution not only of all his doctors, but also of his surviving brother. Ah, yeah. Who was a bit of an idiot. And so the Khans were sort of, you know, their nearest preparation. The Khans came very close to ruling the whole of Turkey, except that the courtiers decided that they as he was not going to get out of bed ever again, they would ignore this last sentence. So before the well, maybe at the same time as they're taken over by the Ottomans, maybe maybe before, but but how is the Khan a making money? Because I sort of have a feeling they were pretty heavily involved in the slave trade. Oh, slave trade. It was then so were the Ottomans. For one thing, they were very successful in turning a nation of horsemen and warriors into a nation of farmers. So that they needed slaves because they weren't really happy digging the ground. But they became extremely efficient in everything, and they had no they may have been Islamic, but they had no Islamic prejudices. So they exported pork and bacon. They also produced, as they still do today, excellent wine. Above all, they had salt from the m what's called the rotten sea between the Crimea and the mainland. And salt in the Black Sea is a great rarity, and it was sometimes more valuable to export blocks of salt than slaves. And they had these enormous carts pulled by sixteen oxen, which they loaded to ships and distributed famous pink salt. So that that was a source of income. They were very, very enterprising in that way. But you're right, slave trading was the thing. When they went to war, they took a quiverful of arrows, and they took a lot of leather nooses. And the leather nooses were for the slaves they captured, and so one man would come back with perhaps twelve slaves, he put a couple on his horse, he'd have a couple on his spare horse, and the others would have to walk behind on a lead. And the slaves had a there was a big market in Kaffa, and the slaves were sold. Sometimes they fetched a lot of money. Unfortunately, if there was a very successful campaign, the price of slaves went so low that some of them they just threw away. Yeah. And even killed. But they were notorious, and um that was perhaps the reason for their eventual downfall. They overdid it. Where were they taking their slaves from? Uh they were taking the slaves from Poland, where Polish slaves were particularly appreciated because they tend to be educated and skilled. Russian slaves were not so much appreciated.

Slave Raids And The Market In Kaffa

SPEAKER_00 13:58

There was a handbook you could buy in in Istanbul, Guide to Slaves, and it recommended, beware of Italians, pretty lazy. Don't have Hungarians, because they will try and escape and they might try and kill you. I mean, some of these slaves would go on to do very well. I mean, I'm just thinking about Solomon Suleiman the Magnificent's one. Yes. Now that is true, but it wasn't true in the Crimea. In Turkey, the Sultans were very broad-minded about who they slept with and even who they married. So there are several uh slaves who rose to be effectively the Sultan's consort, Roxanne, and they turned out to be very wise. That was a source of uh of I think success for the uh sultans, that they had an enormous genetic pool because they married all over the place, uh, of all different nationalities, Italians, Russians, Albanians, Greeks, and so on. The Gerai's, uh, and this is their weakness, and I think probably contributed to their downfall, would only marry a daughter of another Khan. Right. Another uh either a Khan from Astra Khan or a Khan from Kazan or another Gerais, which meant the Jean pool got smaller and smaller. They also had this custom, a Mongolian custom, which is rather like an Old Testament custom, that if you had a widowed sister-in-law, you should marry her. And if you had a widowed stepmother, you should also consider marrying her. Well, the widowed stepmothers didn't contribute to the gene pool, they were too old. Right. But they were valuable as advisers because they'd been married to Khans before. Right. And they knew a lot about politics. And one of the advantages of the Girls was they had these senior women who on the payroll, Russians were told if you're negotiating with us, our foreign minister is in fact my uh my father's widow. At first they were allowed access to strange males, Russian males, Polish males, to negotiate, and later on it had to be done behind a curtain. But um so they the the attitude to women was uh was it was in some ways better, but they had a a low uh a very small gene pool. They didn't really believe in polygamy as much as the sultans did. On the other hand, it meant they didn't have these enormous harems, the sultans did, which was the weakness of Ottoman Turkey, because you had wives competing to see whose son were to become the next sultan and not be strangled in the next accession. And because these wives had to be regulated and controlled, you had eunuchs. Eunuchs were the only males allowed, unrelated males allowed in the harem, except for um clockmakers and piano tuners. Well, I always think that Henry VIII, it might have all gone better if Henry VIII would have had a harem rather than desperately trying to marry one woman after another and then in the Catholic Church telling him he couldn't. The trouble was the eunuchs decided the timetable sometimes, who slept with whom, and sometimes the senior wife also decided whose turn it was to sleep, and that way they managed the fertility. And the Sultan very often didn't have a choice. He couldn't say, I'll have wife number six. Yes, it's never quite it's never quite as simple as as you think. There's always all start and very corrupt spring up. So the Crimean Khan didn't didn't have that corruption. It had a very good education system too. It had the highest literacy in the Muslim world. Even girls were taught to read and write by the wives of the school teachers. And school teachers were paid quite a lot, particularly higher education. You know, salaries were something that a modern professor would envy. Judges were were were very uh were not corrupt. They had a penal system which was uh extremely effective. Well, I'm sort of guessing I mean this there's various ways to be effective. It was just it didn't require prisons. Uh executions were not as common as in is in uh Ottoman Turkey. But I guess prisons were actually quite uncommon until until recently, because uh you know I always heard that in England until quite recently you either executed you or or fundamentally they let you go. Oh, we had dungeons, and and uh in France you had uh uh you could put someone away in a dungeon with a lettre de cache. If your mother-in-law didn't like you, she could just write a letter to the authorities and like poor Marquis de Sad ended up that way. There were other things that were good about the way in which the Crimea ran things. They had a a system of intelligence, which was very, very effective. Um when they had prisoners of war of uh of any rank, they had uh they sent uh um an intelligence officer in disguise to his hometown, and this intelligence officer would assess the value of his house, his family house, and um how much they might be able to pay in ransom. I see. So that's quite crafty. And they also sold exemptions to townspeople in Hungary and Serbia, uh, so if the Tata army invaded, they could be exempt from looting. Sort of insurance policies. Highly organized uh i in many ways, but um the slavery they overdid. They overdid to such an extent that in Poland one bishop authorized his flock to remarry, even if the spouse was still alive, but alive in the Crimea. Right. That it was that bad. Uh it was severe depopulation, and that was why eventually in 1700, Poland, Russia, and other countries got together and forced the Ottoman Empire to forbid the trade in slaves. It still went on, but it went on very discreetly. And the Ottomans were quite discreet in since they tended to use the Horn of Africa or Libya and places

Italians, Trade Routes And The Black Death

SPEAKER_00 19:40

where the Europeans wouldn't object too much. Right. And and you mentioned that the Italians um were in the Crimea. So so is this at the same time as the Khan? At the first uh Khan. In fact, the first Khans uh spoke pretty good Italian, they even spoke and wrote a Ligurian dialect. And they used to send to Venice for poisoned almonds. There was a shop in Venice that that sold poisoned almonds. No, I don't I don't understand that. If you were a Khan and you wanted to get rid of somebody and you needed poison, there's a shop in Venice that was sell it to. They did ask what you wanted it for, and you wrote back and the Khan said, I need to get rid of some infidels. Here's a packet. But the uh so the Venetians hung on for time. They got they got rid of the Genoese, but the Venetians hung on for time, but then Venice started a war with the Ottomans over various islands in the Adriatic. The Ottomans decided to expel the Venetians. A few hung on, pretending to be Tatars, but the the the trade with Italy became weaker. And is there any truth, do you think, to the story that that when the Genoese were being besieged in Kaffa, I think, that that was that was when the Black Death was brought to to Europe? Certainly Kaffa was the uh was a key staging point for the Black Death because it was a trading place where diseases from the Mongol, Mongol Empire came and from Central Asia, and the Black Death originated partly from India, partly from uh from Central Asia through Kaffa, and it's said that infected sheep's wool was thrown over or a corpse was thrown over, and whether it was deliberate. It's rather like the uh uh stories we now have of how COVID uh originated, whether it was a laboratory or uh or whether it's a deliberate uh act of aggression. So it's certainly uh if you follow the timeline for the plague, Kaffa comes first and then uh it nearly wiped out or wiped out about half the population in the Crimea, and then it did much the same for Istanbul. And presumably the Genoese and the Venetians, were they were they trading wheat and things like that, or were they basically trading slaves as well? Um they weren't so interested in slaves. They they had a few slaves, but uh they probably Contributed more slaves of their own to the kaffir market than bought them. We still had the ship registers for the ports of Kuffer, 16th century and for the 18th century. And it's extraordinary the the the stuff that was imported and exported, uh you name it. And sorry to keep coming back to the slavery thing, but I think it it's terribly interesting. What sort of numbers are we talking about over what sort of period of time and and where do they all end up? Do they all end up in in in the Ottoman Empire or or are they used locally? Many of them were used locally. Some of them were it was an Islamic tradition, not always followed, that after seven years you had to free your slave. And if your slave worked in the house, they had to be treated as a member of the family. And that was generally uh observed, so it wasn't too bad a life. Um some of them uh were earned enough money to redeem themselves and even go home. There was a Captain John Smith, an Englishman who was captured and enslaved. Uh he escaped and he actually went he's one of the Mayflower people who went to Virginia. And he taught the uh the the his other uh Englishman how to make a a Tata yurt. Be a useful skill. Not to record. He didn't enjoy being a slave at all, but he managed to walk all the way through Russia until he found a found s some sort of civilization. So um yes, most of the most of the slaves went to the Istanbul market, and uh they they found work in in the Ottoman Empire, which is big enough to absorb a large number of slaves. A slave in the Ottoman Empire, as you, as you remarked, could could rise, for instance, you could become a bishop, bishop of Rimnik in Romania, who's responsible for printing presses in Romania. He was spotted as a slave in the bazaar, and someone admired his handwriting. Uh and he rose up, so i i it was it was you were upwardly mobile. It wasn't a bad thing necessarily to be a slave. Well, I suppose, you know, I suppose 90% or more and an absolute miserable life, and then but but there's that, you know, but if you were lucky and if you were talented, then the worst thing was the Ottoman habit of using rowing boats, even quite heavy boats, galleys, high speed what they call the swallow, a very high-speed boat could do twenty knots with slaves at the oars in three rows. Uh these were extra incredible boats. But uh you died either of drowning or exhaustion. Yes, you that would just eat. If you were lucky you were captured by a Russian boat or a or an Italian boat and freed, but um generally speaking

Tatars, Tartars And Cossacks Clarified

SPEAKER_00 24:35

it was a terrible, terrible life and death. I get so confused. And in fairness, this is just a lack of learning on my part. Um I don't think it's necessarily is that confusing, but I get confused between Tatars, Tartars, and even Cossacks, and I'm never quite sure what the relationship is. There is a i it's fairly easy. Tata with only one R at the end, is probably originally a Mongolian word to mean people who aren't Mongolian nobility. And as most of the the Golden Hall was in fact Turkic, rather like Napoleon's army is mostly German, the that name Tata was adopted by the Tur uh these Turkic peoples themselves, and is nowadays applied to uh Turkic-speaking peoples who speak a northern dialect of Turkic languages, like Kyrgyz and Uzbek and uh Crimean Tatars. Tartar with two R's, T-A-R-T-A-A-R, comes from confusion with the name of part of Hell in the Greek mythology, Tartarus. And it was assumed these dreadful people that came with Genghis Khan must have come from Hell. So people started spelling their name with two R's, assuming they were inhabitants of Hell, Tartari. Cossacks is um related actually to the word Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, but originally it meant they were Russian peasants or soldiers who'd fled authority and settled on the outskirts, who'd mingled with the local Turkic peoples interbred with them, but claimed to be still Christians, and they were tolerated by the Russian authorities on the grounds that if they didn't acknowledge serfdom or landowners, at least they would do army service. They provide men and horses in times of war, and they would defend the frontiers. So they were largely Russians, Russian speakers, who um uh who served as frontier men and um first defense against invaders, and they were tolerated until, of course, we had the religious reforms in Russia in the 17th century, when they decided to reform the Russian church, make the sign of the cross with two fingers instead of three, and so on. And there's those are highly important things that made made a lot of the Cossacks rebel. Uh, some of them uh took Polish nationality, some of them took no Ottoman nationality. There are still, I think, a couple of Cossack establishments in Turkey today. Uh Russian church tend to persecute anyone who dissented, anyone who decided they would they could drink milk in Lent, for instance, had to clear out the milk drinkers tended up to end up in Estonia or or in Turkey. So Cossacks are all over the place. It's amazing, isn't it, how these what you know to us seem like small religious differences, you know, people would burn for or or Yes, yes, because it was yours. They're sort of like Masonic Lodge signs, where the way you make the sign of the cross and the whether you add uh uh and from the spirit uh in your credo, it's a matter of of life and death. Extraordinary. So when does Russia absorb uh the Crimea?

Russia Becomes The Main Enemy

SPEAKER_00 27:48

When does it become Russia began uh Russia was actually quite friendly with the Crimea until about 1530. The Crimean Khan helped the Russians defeat uh what was left of the Mongol Horde. Uh hang on hang on. I thought I thought that the Khanade was sort of part of the Mongol Horde. Yes, but it it was already independent, and the Mongol Horde at times tried to what was left of it, not much, uh, tried to reconquer it, and um they collaborated with the Russians uh to suppress it. Uh and they also collaborated with the Lithuanians uh uh uh uh as a suit, and they collaborated with the Poles. They're very, very um practical and unreliable allies, the Crimean Khans. It seems like if they're not sort of carrying you off into slavery, they're quite helpful around them for they're making alliances, but it's a very expensive sort of alliance. And their general philosophy is you had two enemies, uh you um support the weaker one against the stronger one. Right. Because they appreciate your help. Until the weaker ones could become so weak that they're a liability. But anyway, after about 1530, Moscow was getting stronger and stronger with Grand Duke Vasil, and then they started calling themselves Tsars, and when Ivan the Terrible got to the throne, he managed to destroy the Khanate in Kazan and completely Russify it and massacre virtually everybody. And then he went to Astrachan down the Volga and did the same there. And that was the point in which uh the Crimean Khanate realized that their enemy was was Russia. And uh what the they initially had enormous success in 1571 they raided Moscow and they burnt it to the ground. That was never forgiven. No to this day. The odd thing is the French burnt Moscow to the ground in 1812, and within three years it had all forgotten and all nobody came. Came and said, Moscow's a much nicer place since we rebuilt it. Thank you very much for burning it down. But the Tatars were never forgiven for that, and they are perpetual war. And the irony is that the Turks themselves, the Ottoman Empire, didn't want to fight Russia, but they kept on getting dragged into wars with Russia because of the Tatars. The Ottoman Empire and the Tartars agreed that Poland should be kept in check. And their problem came when uh Russia took over Poland gradually under Catherine the Great. And Catherine the Great was the real problem for for both sides. Russia decided to deal with the Tatars in the beginning of the of the 18th century. And um they sent an enormous army down under the lover of the regent. Incredibly incompetent. They had no water, they had no food. That army nearly died of starvation and disease, but in the course of that they they killed half of the Crimea's population with uh disease, and they burnt the great library. The Khan had a wonderful library, the envy of the Islamic world. He had a wonderful archive that was also burnt down. A Jesuit mission had a great big library there. Uh the cultural loss in 1736 to 1739 was enormous, and the population was so reduced by disease and slaughter that it was thought they might never recover. Fortunately, however, the Crimean women have extraordinary fertility, and within two generations they were back where they started. Gosh. But hang on, just just say a bit more. These burnings of the library, was that just sort of insane? Drunken Cossacks. Drunken Cossacks, complete vandalism. They couldn't they they couldn't fight the Tatars face to face because the Tartars are far more skilled. Um the Tartars had extraordinary skills. It was really like British Army training, really. You sent your boy at the age of seven or eight away to boarding school. In the case of the Crimean Tartars, they sent them to the mountain tribes of the Caucasus, the Circassians, who are famed riders, and you acquired skills of a circus rider. They could ride a horse sitting backwards, as it's fleeing the enemy, and firing arrows over its tail. They ride bareback, they could turn in the stirrup, and they could fire arrows. Only a Tartar could handle a Tartar bow. It was very, very strong, very short, and made of a s laminated wood with secret resin nobody has yet analyzed. And it could fire arrows faster than uh rifles could fire bullets. They rode very light, and when they attacked, very often they they stripped off and they rode in their underpants. So the horse wouldn't be thing, and when they forted rivers, all they did was tie up their clothes and their arrows in a bundle, and they swam across rivers. They didn't wait for the river to freeze the way the Ottoman army did. They didn't wait for their artillery to catch up where the Ottoman army. So they increased as modern tank corps. They could move at twenty miles an hour for four days on end. They these ponies were unbelievably tough. So the boys would come back at the age of eighteen as circus riders, basically, as virtuoso archers, and no Russian army could compete with them in that. And it was only later, when the Russians brought in artillery, that the the the Tartars couldn't really do any much. But they did, they were destroyed uh uh in 1736 virtually. They resurrected, there was one extremely effective Khan called Kirim Khan, Kirim Giray, and he nearly resurrected the Tatars as a military force in 1760 when the king of Prussia was fighting Russia in the Seven Years' War, fighting Russia, and he decided his own army was getting exhausted, and he sent a German officer to the Khan and said, I'll hire your men, 60,000 men and all horses, for an enormous sum of money. And um, that was going to save the Khanate. And then unfortunately, there was a new Tsar in Russia, Peter III, and he was a great admirer of the Prussians, and he made peace. So that offer lapsed, and that was it. And the Khans after 1760 were a pretty hopeless lot. And the Ottomans there was an opinion among the Ottomans that really the Crimean Tatars were more of a hindrance than

War, Skill And The Burning Of Libraries

SPEAKER_00 34:06

a help, that they didn't want to make war in Russia, which was all the Tatars seemed to want, that they were just getting them into trouble with the European. And so when Catherine the Great proposed to the to the Crimean Khans, would you not like to be in independent totally? Some of the Crimean Tatars fell for this, and some of the Ottomans fell for it. And after the yet another defeat of the Ottomans by the Russians, the Russians proposed this the this treaty of Kuchik Kanaja, which is the only legal thing disposing of the Crimea, the last legal thing that was done, both sides agreed, the Russians and the Ottomans, that Crimea should be an independent Khanate, and there should be no Russian troops stationed there, there should be no Ottoman troops there, no foreign troops at all, their independence and territory should be recognized, and the only thing was that Turkey might have religious uh supervision. That was done, and then Captain Grade, of course, who was the most evil of and manipulative of of all rulers, uh, she installed a puppet khan. There was a rather foolish Khan who'd been educated unlike all the previous Khans, he had a Western education. He'd been to university in Venice. And she flattered him, she took him to her girls' school and let him watch all the girls dancing. She gave him presents and an allowance, and she persuaded the uh the Tatars to appoint him as Khan, and he decided he would be a miniature Catherine the Great, and he ordered an English carriage and rode about in a carriage on these tiny roads, and the Tatars hated it because they were used to a Khan who rode on horseback and who could go right up to. He brought in a bureaucracy, uh he brought in palaces, civil service, enormous taxation. He ruined the country and he brought in Russian army trainers. And the Tatars were horrified by Russian army training. In the Tartar army, you were never flogged. You were never even spoken to rudely. And that's not like the Russian army. So there were rebellions. And then Catherine the Great uh decided to c uh send an emissary to tell the Armenians and the Greeks that as Christians they were in great danger staying in the Crimea and they would have to leave for Russia. Unfortunately, those Armenians and Greeks were the mainstay of the business community and the trading community. Without them, the Crimea couldn't survive economically. But Catherine the Great persuaded them to move to Mariupol, and they were moved to Mariupol, and they found there was no shelter, no food, and three-quarters of them died in the first winter. Gosh. But the Crimea was completely wrecked, and Shahin uh went completely crazy. He even hanged the religious leader. The Mufti was like it's as if the king of Italy hanged the Pope. It was just something you didn't do. Even Stalin didn't hang the Mufti in the Crimea. And a rebellion broke out, and Catherine Great then said, It's too disorderly, the independent Crimea. Despite

Catherine’s Puppet Khan And Annexation

SPEAKER_00 37:08

the treaty, it's a source of great expense. I'm going to take it over. It is now a Russian province, part of New Russia. And that was the end of the carnate. And that was in on what date? That was 1783. And she took it over, and then she had it all beautified for foreign inspection. She took the Emperor of Austria on a tour of inspection. She said what a beautiful country. She said it's going to be a tourist paradise. We've got all these Greek antiquities to look at. Not many people were taken in by that. Some people who knew what it was said it was like the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve had been chucked out. And Tatars began to leave. They realized that it was hopeless they're going to be under Russian rule, and they began to leave for Anatolia, as a result of which there are four thousand villages in Anatolia where the Arabs are all Crimean Tatar by descent. And quite a few in Romania, a few in Bulgaria. To this day there's, I think, 20,000 Crimean Tatars still speaking Tatar in Romania. So it was depopulated, it was genocide began. And Tatars were taken off their land. It was given to Russian officials and Russian military officers. They were made serfs. They were taxed, they were executed. Horrific. The worst thing came in 1833 when Tsar Nicholas came and issued an edict saying that the Tatars are being corrupted by their by their uh heritage, by their documents, by their books. All Tatar documents are to be confiscated and burnt. Oh my God. He found a tame Tatar priest to organize this, and everything every sheet of paper, and papyrus was confident an enormous loss is worse than what happened in 1736. A few tourists who'd been collecting sheets of paper survived, and they forgot the court registries and the port registries, which are even today only recently been rediscovered and are now being studied. And so some books turn up in Leiden or Cairo, other places where Turkish or Ottoman people collected them. But generally speaking, it w it was a terrible disaster, 1833. It completely destroyed the culture and the language could

Russification And The 1833 Book Burnings

SPEAKER_00 39:18

not be written or spoken. There was a brief revival in the 1890s when Russian radicals became more aware of the treatment of minorities, and there was a sort of alliance between Tatars who, some of them, were now allowed to become schoolteachers and even teach their language. And there was a sort of revival, cultural revival, and various learned societies in Odessa and in the Crimea that collected and published articles on Crimean Tatar. And finally, um extraordinary man called Gasprinsky in Russian or Gaspirali in in Tatar set up a newspaper called the Interpreter, Terjuman, and he devised a special language for it. It was basically Crimean Tatar, but Crimean Tatar written in such a dialect in such a way that it could be read by Turks or even Turkic speaking peoples in in Central Asia. It was an enormous success. So 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, there was a sort of revival of uh the Tatars that were left. They were still they were now a minority. They were 20% of the population. And who was the rest of the population? Russians. Russians. The Tatar land's been given to the Russian church, Russian military, as it has today. Putin's men uh have taken over. Russian civil servants who came originally to collect taxes, then bought up land cheap or were given it for nothing. Foreigners, Germans, and Greeks were brought in as farmers. Uh they were very efficient farmers, though, the Germans. They brought in their sheep. They made sausages and they made cheese, but they didn't learn Tartar. Uh but the people who came, they found that the Tartar workers were much more reliable than the Russian workers, so they singled out the Tatars for good treatment. And Chekhov had his house in Yalta built by a Tartar builder, and he he had a Tartar gardener, but his mother w wouldn't have a Muslim in the house, so he couldn't develop relations any further. So this went on um Well, hang on, just just before we go on from there, and and we should go on, but I just want to go back to Casthen the Great because I don't think I don't know whether are I don't know a huge amount about Catherine the Great. You say she's one of the most evil people that lived, more or less, and I'm and I'm sort of interested to know why you say that. She would stop at nothing uh to get power. Um she maintained wonderful relationships with philosophers. She had a correspondence with Voltaire, who flattered her and approved everything she did, and even wrote biographies of her previous Tars at her dictation virtually. She supplied the papers. She had a relationship with Diderot, she bought his library when he was short of money, but let him keep it. So French philosophers gave her uh made her seem uh the enlightened monarch that everyone had dreamed of. She learnt Russian, became orthodox, but she spoke beautiful French, and she was written a German princess from a very minor principality, so minor that in fact the the court masseur was also the the the the country's hangman. Gosh. Um but uh she w she she was brought in as a as a suitable wife for Peter III, who was something of an idiot. And uh she just had him murdered, uh announced his death from either apoplexy or a stomach complaint, well she wasn't sure what to call it, but she had him murdered and took over, and then she uh to uh uh decided to make uh Russia much bigger. She did it by taking over Poland. Poland, as you brought me, uh elected a king from various people who had the rank of elector, and she made a lover of one of hers, or one of the electors, and um so he was pro-Russian, there's a pro-Russian party, there was a pro-Turkish party, there was a pro-nationalist party in Poland, and of course, as Catherine's lover, uh, the pro-Russian party won. And so Poland became effectively part of Russia, and gradually she absorbed it over, and other nations didn't seem to see what was happening, because the same thing happened to Georgia. That Georgia was offered a treaty of in 1783 in which Russia would come to its defense if it was ever attacked. But the the treaty was very subtly drawn up by her diplomat Petyomkin, another lover, too. And uh if you read the small print, you can see that um actually no king of Georgia can ever accede to the throne without the Tsar's or Catherine's approval. And having done signed this treaty, Catherine allowed a Persian warlord to come in and reduce Tbilisi to rubble, and didn't come to his defense at all, just waited till the country was reduced. To rubble, and then said, Oh, I'm sorry, you can't govern yourself anymore, you're wrecked. Uh, we'll take over. Under the next rulers, Paul and Alexander, uh, Georgia became just a province of of Russia. Exactly the same way as Stalin took over Warsaw. He stood by the banks of the river and let the Germans flatten the Warsaw rising, didn't help the Poles against the Germans, waited till the Germans had completely slaughtered them, and then moved in and announced the liberation of Poland. So uh Catherine Gate did that, and then of course she got Sweden, her successor, uh Alexander, who finally incorporated Sweden, uh Finland rather, from Sweden. So she she expanded Russia enormously. She got the everything from the Orland Islands to Warsaw to um to Tbilisi and with it Armenia. It extraordinary, uh with bare barely firing a single shot. Yeah, but I mean I mean we've had many people in history who have been um I don't know what to say, expansionist, aggressive, whatever. I mean, I'm just wondering what makes her stand out in your mind. Is it is it's the duplicity. While pretending to be an extreme liberal philosopher, not wanting power, wanting to free everybody, projects to free all the source, but doing nothing about it, of course. And then sleeping with whoever's necessary to sleep with. But well, I suppose if you're a woman you ca and you're a queen, you can do that more easily than perhaps more easily than a king can, but um uh making promises and and drawing up diplomatic agreements which only a professional diplomat can see the catch in. Captain So she was well, she was fantastically ruthless then. Oh, utterly utterly ruthless, yes. Um and indeed a murderer by your Oh yes, uh she uh uh she murdered a uh uh uh a princess who claimed to be leg have a right to the throne. There's a reason her son, Paul, hated her. Catherine had to f forbid performances of Hamlet in Russia, um, because she was too much like Gertrude. Just as Stalin also forbade it. I sort of diverted us. Um is there more that we should say about about the Crimea and the Khanate, or does it? You we can say a bit more about the Crimea, because they they had a couple of moments still to follow.

Revolution, Brief Hopes And Soviet Terror

SPEAKER_00 46:15

In the First World War, they suffered quite badly, uh having to fight in the Russian army. But when the revolution broke out, at first things seemed extraordinarily good. They had a group of talented, educated Tatars who had had their education in France and in Istanbul, who established a democratic republic called the Milifirka, the People's Parliament. Uh, and this man Noman Cheleby Jihan, who uh was a poet and a mufti and uh mayor of Simferopol, he was virtually everything. And then the moment the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, some Bolshevik sailors seized hold of this democratic government and tortured them and executed them, wiping out most of them. Then things got better for a while because uh under the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, when Lenin made concessions to Germany, Germany is still fighting the war, the Germans took over Ukraine and they took over Crimea. And in March 1918, the Germans proved to be extremely tolerant and understanding rulers. They re-established Crimean self-government, Tatar schools, they even established industries, scholarships to Berlin and so on. If only the Germans hadn't lost the war, Crimea would have been all right. Very nice for the Crimea, but I'm not sure. Well, the Ger the Germans had we think about the Germans, and even in the Second World War this applied, the Germans had a lot of very strong Oriental school. They were also interested in the Crimea because they regarded as Gothic heritage. After all, this is where the Ostrogoths had ended up. So they were good to the Crimeans. Things seemed to revive, trade revived, and of course then the Germans lost the war and had to leave Crimea and Ukraine, and the Russian whites took over. The Russian whites were being supervised by the British. And the British came in spring 1919, and they too were quite generous to the Tatars. They left them in peace at least. And the White Army is more concerned with getting out of Crimea, getting escaping to Europe from the Reds. Right. Yes, they so they had lost against the Reds. By 1920, of course, they completely lost. So 1919 wasn't bad, apparently. 1918, 1919 seemed to point a revival. And then, of course, the Bolsheviks came and the Red Terror began. Absolute hell, followed by a famine. 1921-1922 was a terrible year in which enormous numbers of people died of lack of food. Because food went to Moscow and Petersburg. That's what Lenin wanted. Food for the industrial working classes, not for the peasantry. That nearly destroyed them. And then 1927 there was an earthquake which killed a lot of people. But policy changed in the Soviet Union between what's called the New Economic Plan, about 1923. From 1923 to about 1928, it was a new liberalization. They thought we'll have to try capitalism, otherwise we all starve to death. And we have to be nice to our minorities. And suddenly there were people who were nice to the Tatars. The Soviets were nice to the Tatars. They had schools rebuilt, they had colleges, and they had all sorts of reforms. They had an enormous cultural reform. They had a drama theater, they had newspapers, they had magazines. It looked extremely hopeful. And they had a number of academics who were very pr internationally prestigious. They had this man called Bekat Chovanzadi, who had a professorship in Lausanne and a professorship somewhere else. He was regarded as one of the greatest Turkologists in science. So they had prestige. They then had a language reform, and this was, of course, something Ataturg did in Turkey and Lenin did, or Lenin's successors did in Russia. They decided that any alphabet that wasn't already established, like the Cyrillic alphabet or the Latin alphabet for the Baltic states, should be Latin. Even proposal make the Cyrillic alphabet Latin, but that was resisted. For Atatürk, the idea was that Turkey joins the modern world by using the Latin alphabet, and that cuts people off from the Quran. When you learnt uh Turkish before, you automatically read the Quran because you had the script for Arabic. And the Soviets also approved this. They tried reforming Arabic to get rid of the surplus letters to make it more finity, but Arabic doesn't have vowel sounds, basically short vowel sounds. Turkish has eight of them. And clearly the Arabic alphabet is not good for Turkish. It's a nightmare reading Turkish in an Arabic script. So it made sense, but it did cut people off from all the literature of the past. It was unreadable, unless you were you went to university and did special studies in Arabic script. So there was resistance of this. And uh so everyone had to learn Latin alphabet. That was fine. The language flourished, theatre flourished, books flourished. Then Stalin cracked down. He decided that all this new nationalist flavor was dangerous, particularly among nations that had connections abroad, and Tartars had relatives in Turkey, relatives in Romania, and so all the leading professionals tended to be arrested and executed as a nightmare. And then finally in the 30s, there was the Great Terror. Most of the Tatar intellectuals were shot in that, or sent to the Gulag, and publication of anything interesting was was forbidden. The one interesting thing about the Crimean Tatars, if you look at a guide to the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, every nationality is there. Russians, Jews, Latvians, Chinese, Koreans, every nationality. You can't find a single Crimean Tatar employed in the secret police. Huh. They most often got to trouble for failing to denounce. How interesting? They had a very strong tradition of solidarity there. So I mean it is it does something to be an extraordinary story there. You know, one times where where things go fantastically well and times where it's just absolute misery. I mean, what is it about the Crimea? Because you would think it would be a backwater, and yet and yet people the history seems to just charge through it from all

Why Crimea Keeps Drawing Empires

SPEAKER_00 52:33

sides. It's extraordinary. Well, it was originally a crossroads from east and west. All of uh it was the easiest way, avoiding mountains, uh, to get from uh China to Europe. Uh it was uh not a bad way to get from India to to to Europe or to Russia. Uh uh unfortunately the lack of roads from north to south was the drawback, but you had an easy sea route through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean. So that explains the prosperity. You had a climate which, compared with continental Russia, was very benign. You could grow anything there, famous for its fruits and vines and vegetables. And I would say that uh what went wrong was uh a matter of policy slave trading, they overdid it. It was indiscriminate, and it depopulated their neighbors and drove their neighbors to extreme measures. And the other was as inheritors of Genghis Khan, they made one big mistake, rather like, say, the Duke of Westminster in London, they held the freehold as far as they are concerned. Everything that Genghis Khan had conquered in Russia and Poland was inherited by them. And it's all very well for Russia and Poland and Lithuania to rule these places, but they were leaseholders, and they should pay their annual lease. And so Tartars would go out and say, uh, unless you um pay up, and it was quite expensive, we will come with our army, and it will be more expensive because we'll take a lot of slaves and we'll take all your cattle, and we'll burn a lot of your houses. And they usually paid up. And so it lived on on lease payments. And as you know, in the end the leaseholder rebels against the freeholder. So they would be widely hated, I suppose. They were widely feared, especially uh foreign em foreign countries saying, Please do not send an embassy. Uh please do not come, we can't afford it. Because when the Tatars came or sent an embassy, they demanded salaries for all their officials, gifts to take home for all their relatives and and dependents. It was a major budgetary expense dealing with the Tatars. And they they never learnt to moderate that. Okay, well, look, um I guess that's that's the Crimea in history, um, or at least in in I don't know what to call old history. And uh so let's leave this episode there, and we'll kind of try and bring it more up to the present day with uh twentieth century history uh in our next episode. So, Professor Donald Rayfield, thank you very much indeed. My pleasure.