The ethnogenesis of the Crimean Tatars. An historical reinterpretation

Abstract

One must not of course take this analysis of Crimean Tatar history too far. While there was, as has been demonstrated, a sedentary, agrarian core or sub-ethnie to the Crimean Tatar ethnos whose origin can be traced to the ancient, pre-Mongol ethnic groups inhabiting the Crimea, there was certainly a strong Kipçak nomadic element to the Crimean Khanate dating from the 1000s, which was bolstered by later Nogai migrations to the Crimea, as well. The Crimean Khans, who lived in the southern sedentary region of the Crimea in a valley town known as Bahçesaray (Garden Palace) did actively recruit nomadic Kipçak speaking Tatar-Nogais from the steppes into their realm. While many of the great Tatar clans did sedentarize and blend with the older Crimean populations, the Nogai Tatars maintained a strictly nomadic lifestyle and disdained the settled Tat-Tatar population. It was the Kipçak-Tatar Nogai element, which was distinguished by its Altaic-"Mongol" features and nomadic lifestyle, with which most westerners came in contact with, not those inhabiting the setded core of the seldom visited Crimean Khanate. The claims by outsiders, such as Giles Fletcher, a sixteenth-century English visitor to Moscow, that the Crimean Tatars lived only in yurts (felt tents) as nomads in actuality applied only to the Tatar-Nogai element of the Crimean steppe.75 Long after Devlet Giray Khan's famous raid on Moscow in 1571, this element continued to be a danger to the surrounding sedentary peoples. The surrounding Christian peoples were in fact justified in their fears of the catde and slave raids of the Nogai inhabitants of the Dikoe Pole (Wild Field) as the southern Ukraine was known. It must also be acknowleged that the Crimea was, from the time of its founding to the late seventeenth century a centre for a thriving slave trade which deprived the neighbouring Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and others of tens of thousands of peasants who were sold to the Ottomans. As this study indicates, however, the nomadic Tatar-Nogai element of the Crimean Khanate was limited to the Crimean steppe and neighbouring plains of the Ukrainian mainland and formed only a portion of the Crimean Khanate's population. A larger percentage of the Crimea's population actually lived in the coastal hamlets and terraced mountain villages of the south and in many ways ran the Khanate's government, bazaars, Islamic institutions and agrarian sector. Seen in these socio-economic terms, the Crimean Tatars were certainly more than just the "thieving, catde-lifting, kidnapping neighbours" they have been portrayed by Soviet propaganda and traditional western sources.76 The very nature of the southern Crimean Tatars' communal identity and their socio-economic links to the land of the Crimea must, as gradually becomes obvious, be revised. While only a preliminary study, it is hoped that this work will lead to further analysis of the complex ethnology and history of the Crimean Tatars and perhaps produce a more three dimensional interpretation of this understudied ethnos.