“According to almost all written sources, the main income of the Crimean Khanate came from raids upon the territories of adjacent countries and from the trade in slaves captured during these military campaigns. The first major Tatar raid for captives took place in 1468 and was directed into Galicia. According to some estimates, in the first half of the seventeenth century the number of the captives taken to the Crimea was around 150,000-200,000 persons. About 100,000 of them were captured in the period between 1607 and 1617. The Crimean Tatars invaded Slavic lands 38 times from 1654 to 1657; 52,000 people were seized by the Tatars in the spring of 1655 in the course of a raid into the territory of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The number of Tatar raids seems to have diminished in the eighteenth century due to the growth of Russian strength in the southern regions and a few Russo-Turkish wars, which partially took place in the Crimean territory. Nevertheless, in 1758 there were around 40,000 slaves captured during a raid on Moldavia and in 1769, during one of the very last Tatar incursions into Russian and Polish territory, the amount of “live booty” was about 20,000 souls.

The demographic importance of the slave trade in the Early Modern Crimea and Ottoman Empire also should not be underestimated. Thousands and thousands of Christian female slaves and children were converted to Islam annually. Soon these neophytes forgot about their non-Turkic origins and their offspring often would not even be aware of their Christian past.”
noot 11: “When this article was already in print, I received a copy of a study by Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, where the author very convincingly suggested that the whole number of slaves taken from Russia and Poland-Lithuania between 1500 and 1700 might roughly be estimated at two million (Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, “Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: the Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,”
Oriente Moderno n.s. 25:1 (2006): 149-59, esp. 151).”

(SLAVE TRADE IN THE EARLY MODERN CRIMEA FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHRISTIAN,MUSLIM, AND JEWISH SOURCES.

MIKHAIL KIZILOV

Oxford University)