Bear With Me, This Goes Back a Bit
This is the first instalment of a long story—one we shall keep returning to as we walk about Erzurum and Kars. The fortresses of eastern Anatolia were built and rebuilt against an enemy some thousand miles away, and there is no understanding them without first understanding where that enemy came from.
For both the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy, the fifteenth century was when the civil wars ended and the state began. It was also when the two powers started fighting each other, and they would go on doing so for more than four hundred years: the first Russo-Turkish war ran from 1568 to 1570, the last from 1877 to 1878. We shall take them episode by episode. It all began with a peninsula—Crimea.
Who was there first
The first Turkic state to reach Crimea was the Turkic Khaganate, which took Bosporus in 576, though the Huns—Turkic-speaking on the prevailing view—had turned up a century or so earlier. In the seventh century the Khazar khaganate grew out of the western edge of the collapsed Western Turkic realm; the Pechenegs followed; and at the beginning of the eleventh century the Black Sea steppes were taken over by the Kipchaks.
Anglophone readers have almost certainly met them, though probably without noticing. They are the Polovtsians of Borodin’s Prince Igor—the ones responsible for the dances. Polovtsy was what the Rus called them; the Byzantines and western Europeans called them Cumans; they called themselves Kipchaks. Tatar was a name applied to them first by the Mongols and then by everyone else, and it became their own name for themselves a good deal later—precisely when is still argued over.
In the thirteenth century Crimea became part of the Golden Horde, which changed the population not at all: the Kipchaks went on living in the central steppes of the peninsula as before. With the Genoese trading posts on the coast they coexisted—allowing for the fact that in 1298 Nogai sacked Caffa (which had grown up on the site of Greek Theodosia), and that between 1343 and 1347 Khan Jani Beg besieged it so thoroughly that the Black Death left for Europe from its harbour. By the standards of the age, that is coexistence.
The centre of the Crimean province was the town of Qırım, Solkhat to the Genoese, today Staryi Krym. Where the name comes from is disputed. The standard toponymic dictionaries offer either Mongolian kherem, “rampart, wall,” or Turkic qırım, “ditch,” after the great ditch cut across the isthmus—which is also why the Russian name for that isthmus, Perekop, means “dug through,” a straight calque of the Turkic. A third reading takes it from qır, “hill, high ground,” with the possessive suffix: qır + -ım, “my hill.” There is a fourth that derives it from ancient Cimmeria, but that is folk etymology: the resemblance is there, the mechanism is not. The state that later grew up here called itself Taht-ı Qırım ve Deşt-i Qıpçaq, “the Throne of Crimea and the Kipchak Steppe”; Europeans made do with Little Tartary. What survives is a peninsula called Crimea and the Crimean Tatars, who speak Crimean Tatar.
How Crimea became Ottoman
After Timur’s man Edigu, the Golden Horde lost its grip on Crimea, and in 1441 the Crimean beys, led by the Şirin clan, called to the throne Hacı Giray—a Chinggisid who had until then been living in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He reigned for a long time, though not undisturbed: in 1456 he was briefly deposed by his own son. His descendants had a thinner time of it. Having taken Constantinople, Mehmed II set about the remaining fragments of Byzantium, and in 1475 Gedik Ahmed Pasha arrived with a fleet and took Caffa, the Genoese colonies along the southern coast, the forts on the Black Sea, the Azov and the Kuban, and the Principality of Theodoro into the bargain. Khan Meñli I Giray, who was at that moment a prisoner of the Genoese, was extracted from captivity and restored to his throne as the sultan’s vassal. From this point on, Russo-Crimean quarrels can fairly be called Russo-Turkish.
Except that there were as yet no quarrels. Meñli Giray was Ivan III’s ally: together they fought the Great Horde and Lithuania, and the alliance held into the 1510s. The break comes in 1521, when Meñli’s son, Khan Mehmed I Giray, rode up to Moscow with his horde. That is where we begin.
An accomplice in that campaign was Mehmed’s younger brother and Meñli’s youngest son, Sahib I Giray, whom tradition makes the uncle of Süleyman the Magnificent. Tradition is mistaken. The claim that Süleyman’s mother Hafsa Sultan was Meñli Giray’s daughter was set going in the sixteenth century by Paolo Giovio, and modern Ottomanists—Fisher, Peirce, Emecen—reject it: Meñli’s daughter was another of Selim’s wives, Ayşe Hatun, while the Ottoman documents point to slave origins for Hafsa. None of which will help anyone who learned the period from Magnificent Century, where the Valide Sultan is a Crimean princess in good standing, Sahib is her brother, and the forty-fourth episode produces a niece, Aybige, invented outright.
A model Giray
Sahib is worth a closer look, being a fair specimen of the material from which the next century was made.
When his elder brother Mehmed became khan, he had the fourteen-year-old Sahib put in prison, presumably having taken his measure. Four years later, when the childless khan of Kazan died and the Kazan throne fell vacant, Mehmed proposed his brother for it without hesitation, delighted at the chance to be rid of him. Moscow insisted on its own man, the Qasim khan Shah Ali, of whom the Kazan nobility thought little; in 1521 the murzas got up a conspiracy and sent for the Crimean prince themselves. Sahib entered Kazan and immediately distinguished himself by declaring war on Moscow: that same summer he sacked Nizhny Novgorod and Vladimir and joined his brother outside the Moscow suburbs.
While it was a matter of raiding, Crimea was happy to indulge its excitable younger brother. But Mehmed was killed in 1523, and when the Russian army turned to Kazan in earnest, the new khan, Saadet, declined to send the guns, arquebuses and janissaries requested. Sahib then applied to the Ottoman sultan, declaring himself his vassal, and got nothing there either.
Leaving his thirteen-year-old nephew Safa behind in Kazan—the one who would marry Söyembikä, of the tower in the Kazan Kremlin—Sahib fled to Crimea ahead of a hundred thousand men under the boyar Ivan Belsky. The name is worth remembering. Saadet evidently knew his brother equally well, since he had him thrown into the gaol at Balaklava, and let him out again only when he needed help against another restless nephew, İslâm, who had designs on the Crimean throne. Having seen him off, Sahib spent five years as his brother’s kalga—heir apparent and second man in the khanate—and then moved to Istanbul. In May 1532 Saadet abdicated of his own accord and followed him there. İslâm returned to Crimea and was proclaimed khan, but Sultan Süleyman refused to recognise him and five months later sent Sahib back with a detachment of janissaries, a sable hat and a sabre. The nephew took another five years to dispose of: he raised a revolt, entrenched himself at Perekop, declared himself khan, and was not beaten until 1537, dying shortly afterwards at the hands of a murza sent for the purpose.
The capital had by then moved twice—Hacı Giray had taken it from Qırım to Qırq Yer, Meñli to Salaçık. Sahib moved it once more, founding Bahçesaray, and was seldom there, being permanently on campaign: the North Caucasus, Moldavia, Lithuania, Astrakhan. When another adventurer of much the same stamp, the boyar Semyon Belsky, turned up at his court—having decamped from Moscow to Lithuania in 1534 and thence to Istanbul—Sahib let himself be talked into marching on Moscow. In 1541 he reached the Oka and could not cross it: waiting on the far bank were arquebuses, artillery and the main regiment under Dmitry Belsky, brother of the defector and brother of the commander Sahib had fled in Kazan. Wherever Sahib went, another Belsky was standing there.
In 1551 Süleyman, at war with Persia, ordered the khan to march against the Safavids. Sahib declined, explaining that his men were poor, ill-clothed and unequal to a long campaign. The sultan began to doubt his loyalty—one wonders why—and appointed his nephew Devlet Giray khan in his place; and to get Sahib out of Crimea, the sultan’s officials sent him orders to march against the Circassian Zhaney, said to be molesting pilgrims. While Sahib looked for Circassians in the mountains, Devlet sailed into Gözleve and occupied Bahçesaray. The army went over to him, Sahib’s eldest son was killed on the Alma, and Sahib himself was shut up in the fortress at Taman, where he was dispatched by a great-nephew acting on Devlet’s instructions—Devlet having also ordered the deaths of his uncle’s remaining children and grandchildren. He then had the body brought to Bahçesaray and buried it with full honours in the family mausoleum.
So the Crimean throne passed to the man who twenty years later would burn Moscow—the suburbs, at any rate; the Kremlin survived. Among those who did not was the commander of the Russian army, who suffocated in a cellar as the city went up. His name was Ivan Belsky, and he was Dmitry’s son.
