Crimean Khanate

At a glance

What was the Crimean Khanate?

It was one of the khanates that formed when the Golden Horde, the western part of the Mongol Empire, fell apart in the fifteenth century. The others were Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia and the Great Horde on the lower Volga. The Crimean khans saw themselves as the Horde's true heirs. In their charters they called themselves "great padishah and great khan of the great Horde, the great Yurt, the Desht-i Kipchak and the throne of Crimea", according to Halil İnalcık's article on the dynasty in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam. The Desht-i Kipchak was the great steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian.

The khanate's core was the Crimean peninsula, about 26,000 km². Around it the khans claimed, and at times controlled, a far larger steppe: the lands between the Dnieper and the Don, the Kuban, and the Budjak in Bessarabia, where Nogay tribes under the khans' authority grazed their herds. The Ottoman sultans held the southern coast directly, including the ports of Caffa (Feodosia), Kerch and Mangup, so that the khanate and the empire shared the peninsula.

The khanate lasted more than three centuries, much longer than Kazan and Astrakhan, which fell to Moscow in the 1550s. İnalcık attributes its survival above all to the Ottoman alliance, which "for two and a half centuries" protected it against Moscow's advance.

When was the Crimean Khanate founded?

The usual date, 1441, is not the date of a known event. It is the date of the first known coin struck in the name of Hacı Giray, the founder, at Solkhat (today Stary Krym) in the Islamic year 845, which ran from May AD 1441 to May 1442. A second coin was struck at Kırkyer in 847 (1443).

Other dates circulate, and the article on Hacı Giray in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam (by Ahmet Mutu) lists them:

• 1420, after a war between two claimants to the Horde. Mutu calls it impossible, since Hacı Giray's uncle Devlet Berdi was ruling in Crimea as khan in 1429.
• 1428, with the help of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania.
• September 1449, with the help of King Casimir IV of Poland and Lithuania. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 1449 as the year the khanate became independent of the Horde.

Mutu concludes that the coins of 1441 and 1443 suggest that Hacı Giray took power late. The honest answer is that the khanate emerged in the 1430s and 1440s, and that 1441 is the first year for which we have hard evidence of a khan of the Giray line ruling in Crimea.

Who was Hacı Giray?

Hacı I Giray was a descendant of Genghis Khan through his eldest son Jochi and Jochi's youngest son Togay (Tuqa) Timur. According to Polish sources he was born near Trakai in Lithuania, where his family had taken refuge during the Horde's civil wars. The name Giray (Geray), which his descendants kept, probably came from the Kerey tribe of the man who raised him.

His early years as khan were spent fighting the Genoese, who held the Crimean ports. In July 1434, according to Mutu, he destroyed a Genoese army of 6,000 men that was marching on Solkhat. In 1454 he joined the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople the year before, in besieging Caffa: the khan with 7,000 horsemen by land, an Ottoman fleet by sea. The Genoese bought peace with tribute to both. Hacı Giray also allied himself with Poland-Lithuania against the Great Horde, and in 1465 he drew off a Horde army that was marching on Moscow.

He died in the late summer of 1466. His mausoleum stands at Salachık, at the edge of Bakhchisaray; his son Mengli Giray built it in 1501.

How did the khanate come under the Ottomans?

In the summer of 1475 an Ottoman fleet under Gedik Ahmed Pasha took Caffa and all the Genoese ports, and destroyed the Orthodox principality of Theodoro at Mangup. Mengli Giray, Hacı Giray's son, who had been held prisoner by the Genoese, was set free and accepted the sultan's protection. In a letter of July 1475 he promised to be "the friend of the sultan's friend and the enemy of his enemy".

Historians disagree about calling this vassalage. İnalcık, who studied the question in the 1940s, found no document of submission.

• In 1476 Khan Ahmed of the Great Horde invaded Crimea and Mengli was taken to Istanbul.
• In 1478 (883 in the Islamic calendar) he returned, in İnalcık's words, "as the first khan sent from Istanbul".
• Ottoman chronicles later mixed up the events of 1475 and 1478, which is why both dates are given for the start of Ottoman rule.

The Ottoman hold grew stronger step by step. From 1484 the sultan paid the khan an annual subsidy of 1.5 million akçe from the customs of Caffa, and the khanate joined its first Ottoman campaign, against Akkerman on the Dniester. Mengli Giray's daughter married the future sultan Selim I, and Mengli helped his son-in-law to the throne in 1512. In 1532 Sultan Süleyman sent Sahib Giray to Crimea with Ottoman gunners and musketeers, and İnalcık dates the real establishment of Ottoman authority to 1534. From 1584 the sultan's name was read in the Friday sermon in Crimea, but coins were always struck in the khans' own names.

Why did Crimea ally with Moscow, and then turn against it?

For a generation the khan and the grand prince of Moscow had a common enemy: the Great Horde of Khan Ahmed, which still claimed both as its subjects. In 1480 Ivan III and Mengli Giray made an alliance against it, the same year that Ahmed's army stood on the Ugra and withdrew without a battle. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya) notes that Ivan's position was secured "after Khan Mengli Giray's armies routed the Great Horde": in 1502 Mengli destroyed its capital, Saray, and the Horde ceased to exist.

With the common enemy gone, the alliance collapsed. Moscow and Crimea now competed for the same inheritance, the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. In 1511 Mengli turned to Poland-Lithuania. His son Mehmed I Giray put his brother Sahib Giray on the throne of Kazan in 1521, and the same year led an invasion of Muscovy that reached the outskirts of Moscow. When Ivan IV took Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, the Crimean khans lost their claim to the Volga and became Moscow's most dangerous enemy.

Who burned Moscow in 1571?

Devlet I Giray, khan from 1551 to 1577. In the spring of 1571, while most of Ivan IV's army was tied down in the Livonian War, he broke through the Russian defences on the Oka. A Russian military register (razriad) records: "And the Crimean tsar Devlet Giray came to Moscow on the 24th day of May, on Thursday, on Ascension Day, with all his men." The Tatars set fire to the suburbs, and the fire swept through the city; only the Kremlin held. In Crimea and Istanbul the victory was celebrated, and Devlet Giray took the title Taht algan, "the taker of the throne".

The death toll is unknown. The English envoy Giles Fletcher, writing in 1591, reported that "there perished at that time (as was sayd) by the fire and the presse, the number of 800,000 people or more". That is hearsay, and historians regard it as greatly exaggerated. Modern figures for the dead and enslaved of 1571 vary widely, and we have not found one based on a count.

The next year Devlet Giray came back, demanding Kazan and Astrakhan. On 30 July – 2 August 1572 he was beaten at Molodi, south of Moscow, by an army under Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky. Russian historians often describe it as a rout that saved Russia. Aider Sheikhumerov (2019) points out that the sources speak of a repelled assault and a retreat, not of panic and flight, and that the Crimean nobility did not suffer catastrophic losses. Either way, the khanate never again attempted to conquer Muscovy.

How was the Crimean Khanate governed?

The khan was not an absolute ruler, and the Ottomans were not the only limit on his power. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk speaks of "divided sovereignty".

• The khan. He had to be a Giray. From the sixteenth century the sultan chose him, usually after consulting the leading clans, who could send petitions to Istanbul asking for a khan to be removed or appointed. Many khans reigned more than once.
• The kalga and the nureddin. The kalga was the first heir, usually the khan's brother; Mengli Giray named the first one in 1475. The nureddin, the second heir, appears in the 1580s. The two had their own courts, lands and armies. In İnalcık's count, 24 of the khans had been kalga before taking the throne.
• The karachi beys. Four leading clans formed the top of the aristocracy. In the early khanate these were the Şirin, Argın, Barın and Kıpçak; by the mid-eighteenth century the Mansur (the Mangit clan) and the Sicuvut had replaced two of them. The Şirin bey was the most powerful man after the khan. One of them, Agısh, wrote to Moscow in the early sixteenth century: "Are there not two shafts to a cart? The right shaft is my lord the khan, and the left shaft am I, with my brothers and children."
• The council and the courts. The khan's council (divan) included the heirs, the governors of the steppe provinces, the Şirin bey, the mufti, the vizier and the chief judge. Justice was administered by qadis in 48 districts; their court registers, which survive in part, are a key source for Crimean society.

Kołodziejczyk shows that the kalga, the nureddin and even the Şirin bey sent their own letters and peace instruments to Poland-Lithuania, alongside the khan's. To him this undermines the old European picture of the khanate as an "Oriental despotism". Even in the last crisis of 1782, the khanate's assembly (kurultay) sent petitions to the sultan.

How large was the slave trade?

The khanate's raids into Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania and the Caucasus brought back captives who were ransomed, kept as labour, or sold through Caffa to the Ottoman Empire and beyond. The trade was one of the main sources of the khanate's income. Mikhail Kizilov, who has worked on it for two decades, calls it "one of the most important (if not the most important) sources of income of the Crimean Khanate in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries".

Contemporaries were shocked by it. The Lithuanian writer Michalo Lituanus, in the mid-sixteenth century, called Caffa, where the captives were driven from the market onto the ships, "not a city but an abyss of our blood". The French engineer Guillaume de Beauplan, who served Poland in Ukraine, wrote in 1660 that the merchants of Caffa "use slaves whom they buy from the Tatars, who have carried them off from Poland and Muscovy".

How many people were taken? Historians disagree, because the sources are uneven.

• About 2 million, 1500–1700. Kizilov (2007), citing Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, gives about 10,000 captives a year from Poland-Lithuania and Russia, not counting the Caucasus.
• 150,000–200,000 in the first half of the seventeenth century. Soviet-era estimates cited by Kizilov.
• At least 3.64 million, probably about 5 million, 1453–1774. Volha Charnysh and Ranjit Lall (2026) built a database of 2,511 raids. Their figures include raids by other Tatar groups such as the Nogays, and numbers are missing for 56 per cent of the raids, so the total is an estimate.

All these totals are reconstructions from chronicles, reports and court records, and every one has wide margins. What they agree on is the scale: millions of people over three centuries, most of them before 1700.

Captivity did not always mean slavery for life. Court records studied by Rustem Rustemov (2022) show that many captives in Crimea were freed after about six years of service, or bought their freedom. Others were ransomed by their families or their governments.

How did the Cossacks and Ukraine fit in?

The Cossacks were frontier communities of free men on the Dnieper and the Don, partly formed in response to the Tatar raids. From the late sixteenth century they raided the Crimean and Ottoman coasts in their turn. In 1616 Cossacks under Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny sacked Perekop and Caffa; in 1637 Don Cossacks took the Ottoman fortress of Azov and held it for five years.

Yet the khanate and the Cossacks were also allies. In 1648 Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky rose against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with the support of Khan İslam III Giray. Tatar cavalry fought beside the Cossacks at Korsun in 1648 and at Zboriv in 1649, where the khan mediated a settlement with the Polish king. In 1651, at Berestechko, the khan and his army left the battlefield, and the Cossacks were defeated. In 1654 Khmelnytsky turned to Moscow instead, at Pereiaslav. Crimean policy towards Ukraine kept switching sides for the rest of the century, as the khans tried to stop either Poland or Moscow from dominating it.

What was Bakhchisaray?

Bakhchisaray, "the garden palace", was the khanate's capital from the early sixteenth century. The khans first ruled from Solkhat and from the cliff fortress of Kırkyer (Chufut-Kale). Zafer Karatay, in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam, writes that Mengli Giray founded the town in 1503 by building a palace on the Churuk-Su river. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine says that a palace of about 1503 at Salachık did not survive, that a new large palace was built further up the valley in 1519, and that Sahib Giray made it the official residence in 1532.

The palace that stands today is not that sixteenth-century building. In 1736 a Russian army under Field Marshal Münnich took and burned Bakhchisaray; the Voennaya entsiklopediya (1911–1915) records that "the town was plundered and turned to ashes". The palace and about 2,000 houses were damaged, and the library of Khan Selim I Giray was destroyed. Later khans restored the palace. Its courtyard holds the Golden Fountain of 1733 and the Fountain of Tears of 1763, which Khan Kırım Giray built, according to Karatay, for his wife Dilara Bikeç.

The Fountain of Tears became famous in Russia through Alexander Pushkin's poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (written 1821–1823), which tells of a khan's grief for a captive Polish princess. The poem made the palace a place of literary pilgrimage. By the time of the annexation in 1783 Bakhchisaray had 1,561 houses, 31 mosques, two churches, two synagogues and 16 inns.

How did Russia defeat the khanate?

From the late seventeenth century the balance turned. Russia had pushed its fortified lines into the steppe, and its armies began to march on Crimea itself.

• 1687 and 1689. Prince Vasily Golitsyn led two great campaigns. In 1687 the steppe was burned before him and he turned back. In 1689 he reached Perekop on 20 May with over 100,000 men, faced the khan's army, and withdrew again for lack of water and bread.
• 1696. Peter the Great took Azov, and the khanate lost its Ottoman fortress on the Don.
• 1736–1738. Münnich stormed the Perekop lines on 20 May 1736, took Kezlev (Yevpatoria) on 5 June and burned Bakhchisaray. Field Marshal Lacy invaded again in 1737 and 1738.
• 1771. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, Prince Vasily Dolgorukov's army overran the peninsula.

The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed on 10 (21) July 1774, ended that war. Its third article declared that "all the Tatar peoples — Crimean, Budjak, Kuban, Yedisan, Jamboyluk and Yedichkul — … are to be recognised as free and entirely independent of any foreign power", under "their own khan of the Genghisid line". The sultan kept only his religious authority as caliph. Russia kept Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn. Independence was real on paper and a Russian protectorate in practice.

Who was Şahin Giray?

The last khan was a modernising prince who lost his country. Şahin Giray was born in Edirne in 1745, a grandson of Khan Devlet II Giray, and was educated partly in Venice, where he learned Italian and Greek. In December 1771 Catherine II received him in St Petersburg. With Russian troops behind him he became khan in 1777, and the Ottomans recognised him in 1779.

He tried to turn the khanate into a centralised state on a European model. According to Feridun Emecen, he planned a regular army of 20,000 men, abolished the feudal rights of the nobles, made everyone liable to tax and took over endowment lands. The reforms and the Russian presence made him hated. In 1778 Russia also removed the peninsula's Christian population, some 30,000 Greeks and Armenians, a blow to the khanate's economy. When revolt broke out in May 1782, Şahin Giray fled to the Russians at Kerch, and Russian troops under Grigory Potemkin brought him back that autumn.

When did Russia annex the Crimean Khanate?

On 8 April 1783 (19 April in the modern calendar), Catherine II signed a manifesto "on taking the Crimean peninsula, the island of Taman and the whole Kuban side under the Russian state". It justified the annexation by the "more than twelve million roubles" Russia said it had spent "on and for the Tatars", and by Ottoman interference, and promised the inhabitants protection of "their persons, property, temples and natural faith". It was published only after Şahin Giray had abdicated and left Crimea. The Ottomans recognised the annexation by a convention signed in Istanbul in January 1784.

Şahin Giray's end was grim. He lived at Voronezh on a Russian pension of 20,000 roubles a year under close watch, and in 1787 went over to the Ottomans. The Ottomans exiled him to Rhodes, where he was seized on 1 August 1787 and executed shortly afterwards.

What happened to the Crimean Tatars?

The annexation began a long emigration. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, "religious and economic repression" after 1783 caused the mass migration of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire, and their numbers on the peninsula fell steadily. Bakhchisaray remained a centre of Tatar culture: in 1883 Ismail Gasprinsky began publishing the newspaper Terciman there, and on 26 November 1917 a Crimean Tatar national assembly, the Kurultai, met in the khans' palace.

In May 1944 the Soviet government deported the entire Crimean Tatar people from Crimea. In November 2015 the Ukrainian parliament recognised the deportation as genocide. How the khanate is remembered is now part of political debate. Andrew Wilson (2021) describes popular Russian histories that stress "the robber-raids of the Crimean Tatars" and the "reunion" of Crimea with Russia in 1783, a Crimean Tatar claim to indigenous status, and a new Ukrainian historiography that "emphasises cooperation and parallel state-building, rather than confrontation".

Common myths about the Crimean Khanate

Timeline of the Crimean Khanate

What the map shows next

At 1450 the new khanate holds the peninsula, while the Golden Horde still rules the steppe and the Republic of Genoa and Theodoro hold the southern coast. By 1480 the Ottomans have taken the coast and the Grand Principality of Moscow is Crimea's ally against the Horde. At 1571 the khanate faces the Tsardom of Russia across the steppe. The last year the khanate is drawn is 1782; at 1783 Crimea belongs to the Russian Empire.