Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700

Brian Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134552825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This crucial period in Russia's history has, up until now, been neglected by historians, but here Brian L. Davies' study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power.

For nearly three centuries, Russia vied with the Crimean Khanate, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire for mastery of the Ukraine and the fertile steppes above the Black Sea, a region of great strategic and economic importance – arguably the pivot of Eurasia at the time.

The long campaign took a great toll upon Russia's population, economy and institutions, and repeatedly frustrated or redefined Russian military and diplomatic projects in the West.

The struggle was every bit as important as Russia's wars in northern and central Europe for driving the Russian state-building process, forcing military reform and shaping Russia's visions of Empire.

Chapter One

Colonization, war, and slaveraiding on the Black Sea steppe in the sixteenth century

For nearly four centuries – from the reign of Moscow Grand Prince Vasilii III through the reign of Russian Empress Catherine the Great – the Russian government, army, and people confronted the threats of Crimean Tatar invasion and raiding on their southern frontier. Russia’s military conflict with the Crimean Khanate had a profound impact on the course of Russian colonization of the black soil forest-steppe and steppe above the Black Sea; it often frustrated Russian military and diplomatic efforts in the Baltic and central Europe; and it exerted as much impact on Russian military reform as the empire’s wars with Poland-Lithuania, Livonia, and Sweden. It is especially the connection between the threat from the Crimean Khanate and Russian efforts to improve military organization, command-and-control, logistics, and tactics that is the focus of this study.

This book examines the first phase of the Russo-Crimean struggle, from the early sixteenth century down to the fall of Azov to the army and fleet of Peter the Great. In this phase the theater of war gradually shifted from east to west, from the Volga towards the Dnepr and beyond, and eventually embroiled the Muscovite state in war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the hetmans of Ukraine, and the Ottoman Turks. At the end of this phase the threat from the Crimean Khanate had been significantly reduced; Poland-Lithuania had been rendered a second-rate power; and Russia was in control of most of the Pontic steppe east of the Crimean peninsula. But her further advance southwest towards the Danube was still blocked by the Ottomans, against whom the Russians would have to wage four more wars in the eighteenth century.

Early Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite expansion towards the Black Sea

In the middle of the fourteenth century Mongol power on the steppe above the Black Sea and Caspian began to weaken, creating a political vacuum that Muscovy and especially Lithuania and Poland scrambled to fill.

There were several reasons for the declining power of the Mongol Kipchak Horde (Golden Horde) after 1350: depopulation and the disruption of trade resulting from the Black Death; dynastic crisis within the Juchid house, leading to the concentration of power in the hands of a non-Juchid emir, Mamai, in turn provoking revolt against Mamai by Tokhtamysh, at the time supported by Timur Leng; a subsequent savage war between Tokhtamysh and Timur on the lower Volga, in the Caucasus and Transoxiana; and finally, the failure of Khan Edigei’s last-ditch attempt to recentralize the Horde (1411). By the 1420s, Crimea had broken away from the Kipchak Horde; by the 1440s, so had Kazan’ on the upper Volga. What remained to the Kipchak khans was the lower Volga and the old capital of Sarai. As they no longer controlled all of the Tatar tribes of the Kipchak steppe, their domain was increasingly referred to simply as the Great Horde.

The succession wars and the war with Timur had been waged mostly in the eastern reaches of the Kipchak Horde. But these wars had also weakened the hold of the Kipchak khans on their lands in the west: Crimea, the trading cities of the northern Black Sea coast, and the steppe hinterland from the Danube to the Don. The important Venetian-controlled port of Tana (Azov) had been seized by Timur, and the Genoese, in return for military assistance against Mamai, had extorted from Tokhtamysh recognition of their own sovereignty over Kaffa and the other port cities of Crimea and the northwestern Black Sea coast. The Kipchak Horde’s trade routes to Persia and Transoxiana had been cut by Timur, and now its Great Horde remnant had less control over the Black Sea trade with Constantinople and Trebizond. The Genoese were able to draw more Black Sea commerce to their ports at Licostomo and Maurocastro, which stepped up their trade along the Danube into Hungary and across the Dnestr into Poland.¹ This further eroded the Great Horde’s position in the Danubian region by promoting the formation of new states – Wallachia shook off Hungarian rule and Moldavia became an independent principality – and then setting Hungary, Poland, and the Ottoman Turks in competition to vassalize them. The new opportunities for territorial aggrandizement in the Danube region in turn produced greater enthusiasm in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria for crusade coalition, first against the Tatars, and by the end of the century, against the Ottoman Turks.

Above all the declining power of the Great Horde encouraged the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Principality of Moscow to begin expanding their territory southward towards the Black Sea.

In 1362 the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas had defeated the Kipchak khan near the mouth of the Bug and annexed Chernigov, Novgorod-Severskii, Kiev, Pereiaslav, and Podolia. The incorporation of Podolia extended Lithuanian territory all the way to the coast of the Black Sea. Meanwhile the Polish kings were working to annex Galicia and the Chelm-Belz region and extend their power over the trade routes leading from the Black Sea into central Europe.

Algirdas’ heir Jogaila had to resume paying tribute to the khan but was left in de facto control of eastern Ukraine, where he allowed Lithuanian nobles to establish new estates. The conversion of many of these Lithuanian landlords to Orthodoxy, their support for the establishment of an Orthodox metropolitanate at Kiev, and their acceptance of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) legal traditions and local institutions helped them legitimate their authority over the Orthodox majority. It also promoted the Ruthenization of Lithuanian administration in the original core of the Grand Duchy. In 1386 Jogaila, facing a revolt by his cousin supported by the Teutonic Order, accepted the offer of the Polish nobility and converted to the Roman rite, married Jadwiga, the daughter of the late King Kazimierz III, and took the throne of Poland as King Władysław II Jagiełło (r. 1386–1434). The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were henceforth in dynastic union. Lithuania preserved its autonomy within this union and its nobles were soon admitted into the same noble estate (szlachta) with the privileges and rights enjoyed by the Polish nobility, with whom they now shared responsibility for electing Lithuania’s Grand Duke and regulating union relations.

The union of Poland and Lithuania under a Jagiełłonian dynasty expanded the Polish sphere of influence in central Europe, making it possible to vassalize Moldavia for a time and, in the 1440s, place Jagiełłonians on the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. It strengthened Polish-Lithuanian military and administrative power in Ukraine. But it also had the longer-term effect of aggravating social and religious tensions in Ukraine by introducing Polish royal castles and royal officials and allowing Catholic Polish magnates to obtain vast estates there, often at the expense of the Orthodox Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobles and gentry. After Poland recovered the port of Danzig from the Teutonic Order (1455) it was able to partici pate in the Baltic trade – particularly the grain trade – on a much larger scale. With capital investment from Western European merchants Polish nobles were able to establish vast latifundia in western Ukraine (Rus’ Czerwona, western Volhynia) to produce grain for shipment down the Vistula to Danzig. This was followed by the gradual enserfment of the peasantry, a process culminating in the 1588 Third Lithuanian Statute, which abolished peasant tenants’ right to transfer residence.

The spread of manorial economy also affected eastern Ukraine, although in a different fashion. The sparser population here made it harder to impose serfdom and the greater distance from the Vistula made it more rational for landlords to specialize in cattle ranching, supplemented by revenue from taverns and mills, tolls, and duties on hunting and fishing. The tendency in the east, therefore, was towards smaller folwark manor farms. But the landlords’ dependence on excise dues, tolls, and fees had its own feudalizing effect on their relations with the peasantry and lesser gentry, especially as these same landlords often received life appointments as crown officials. The availability of uncolonized virgin land enabled a few magnates to establish latifundia of enormous size by winning vast grants of crown land in return for pledges to settle and defend them. In the 1590s the Palatine of Kiev, Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi, won title to lands in Volhynia, Galicia, and Kiev holding about 1,300 villages, 100 towns, and 40 castles. He defended these lands with a private army of 2,000 retainers, about the number of troops in the Crown army in Ukraine.²

In the early sixteenth century the Muscovite grand princes Ivan III and Vasilii III succeeded in wresting from Lithuania much of western Rus’ – Novgorod-Severskii, Starodub, part of Chernigov, and the strategically crucial fortress of Smolensk. In the 1560s the Muscovite tsar Ivan IV invaded Lithuania and seized Polotsk and the districts just north of the Western Dvina River. This finally pressed the Lithuanian nobility to renegotiate terms of union with Poland and accept the new Union of Lublin (1569), which joined Poland and Lithuania in a federal Commonwealth (Rzecz Pospolita) under one Diet (Sejm) and a Polish King confirmed (and from 1573, elected) by both realms. The Union of Lublin had important consequences for Ukraine. Before 1569 the Polish Crown had directly administered only the western Ukrainian palatinates of Rus’ Czerwona, Belz, and Podolia, holding about 570,000 subjects; now it assumed responsibility for the defense and administration of the eastern Ukrainian palatinates as well (Bratslav, Volhynia, and Kiev, with about 930,000 subjects). Polish royal castles and Quarter Army deployments held a southern Ukrainian frontier running from Kamianets in Podolia through Bar, Vinnitsa, and Bila Tserkva to Cherkasy.³

The southward expansion of the Grand Principality of Moscow was a slower process and did not begin in earnest until the last decade of the fifteenth century. Part of the reason it was comparatively delayed was Muscovy’s remoteness from the Baltic trade and the Black Sea trade with central Europe, which reduced the economic stimulus for southward economic expansion and left security concerns the most important interest driving Muscovite southward expansion. Another reason was Muscovy’s proximity to the Great Horde, rendering Muscovy more vulnerable to entanglement in Horde civil wars and wars with other steppe polities. Thus Moscow’s Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi had sided with Tokhtamysh against the usurper Mamai and helped defeat Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380; but two years later Tokhtamysh had in turn besieged Moscow in order to reimpose Moscow’s tribute obligations to the Great Horde. After Timur Leng’s destruction of Tokhtamysh, Timur’s emir Edigei, Nogai Khan and de facto Khan of the Great Horde, attacked Moscow yet again, taking thousands of prisoners (1408).⁴ The Lithuanian grand dukes also strove to weaken Moscow by supporting Tver’, Moscow’s principal rival in the race to unify northeast Rus’. In 1425–1453 succession conflict within the Grand Principality of Moscow escalated into civil war and nearly resulted in the disintegration of the principality and its hegemony over northeastern Rus’.

On balance the period 1380–1480 did see significant Muscovite territorial expansion, but it was mostly to the north, at the expense of Novgorod, and to the northeast, to secure the lower Oka and push across the upper Volga. The most assertive Muscovite operation to alter the balance of power on the steppe in this period occurred along the Volga: the establishment in the 1450s of a vassal khanate at Kasimov, to shield central Muscovy against raids out of the new Kazan’ Khanate.

Three developments permitted and encouraged Grand Prince Ivan III to turn his attention to the forest-steppe and steppe south of the Oka after 1480. The first of these was his annexation of Novgorod in 1478, which deprived Kazimierz IV, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, of one of his most coveted prizes and so pushed Kazimierz into alliance with Khan Akhmet of the Great Horde. To counter this Ivan III negotiated his own alliance with Crimean Khan Mengli Girei, thereby strengthening Mengli Girei in his struggle to overthrow Akhmet and “reunite” the Kipchak Khanate under his own sovereignty. In 1480 Khan Akhmet marched on central Muscovy but was blocked by Muscovite forces deployed along the Ugra River and forced to withdraw. Akhmet had expected Lithuanian reinforcements, but diversionary attacks upon Lithuanian Ukraine by the Crimean Tatars had prevented them from arriving.⁵

The second development was the escalating conflict between Muscovy and Lithuania, which proceeded from the Muscovite annexation of Tver’ and Novgorod (1478–1485) and culminated in Moscow’s conquest of much of the western Rus’ lands incorporated into Lithuania a century before. The Muscovite-Lithuanian War of 1494 gave Ivan III control of the Viaz’ma road to Moscow, the towns of Velizh, Belyi, and Toropets, and forced Lithuania to renounce its claims to Novgorod and Pskov. It also placed Kozel’sk, Novosil’, Vorotynsk, Peremyshl’, and Belev under Muscovite control, thereby extending Muscovy’s southwestern frontier closer to the Starodub and Chernigov domains on the upper Dnepr. A second war in 1503–1505 resulted in the Muscovite annexation of the basins of the Seim and Desna rivers with the towns of Ryl’sk, Putivl’, Briansk, Novgorod-Severskii, Trubchevsk, Chernigov, and Starodub (the Seversk region). Most of western Rus’ had come under the sovereignty of the Grand Prince of Moscow. “It needed only the cities of Smolensk and Kiev to complete the picture; but Ivan had little reason to complain. Smolensk was under forty miles from the Muscovite frontier; Kiev was within easy reach both of Chernigov and Lyubech on the Dnepr.”⁶ The Lithuanians were defeated in their attempt to retake these territories in the war of 1507–1508. In 1514 Moscow Grand Prince Vasilii III finally seized Smolensk.

The third development occurred at the eastern end of Muscovy’s Oka frontier, just to the southwest from Kasimov and the Volga. The old frontier principality of Riazan’, the “trampled land” traditionally most exposed to Tatar attack, had been transformed into an appanage within the principality of Moscow upon the death of Prince Ivan Fedorovich in 1456. In 1521 Grand Prince Vasilii III annexed Riazan’ outright by deposing its last prince for allegedly conspiring with the Crimean Khan. This moved Muscovy’s defense perimeter far to the south, to the upper reaches of the Voronezh, Tsna, and Moksha rivers. The annexation of Riazan’ had great economic consequences as well. It reconnected the Oka-Volga trade route to the old southern trade route descending the Don to Azov and the Black Sea, and it opened to Muscovite colonization and cultivation much of the vast belt of fertile black soil (chernozem) running along the Pontic forest-steppe and steppe from Moldavia to the Volga. Yields for wheat and rye were higher on Riazan’s black soil than in central Muscovy. A century later the Dutch envoy Adam Olearius judged that Riazan’ “surpassed all the neighboring provinces in grain growing, livestock raising, and abundance of grain.”⁷ Riazan’ quickly became the primary provisioner of central Muscovy. Settlement of its once-sparsely populated southern reaches encouraged further colonization to its west, towards the Volga, and to its south-west, towards the newly annexed Seversk lands.

The Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire

The emergence of the Crimean Khanate in the 1440s was further sign of the disintegration of the Great Horde. By the 1480s the Crimean Khanate had acquired, through strategic partnership with the Ottoman Empire, enough military power to constitute its own threat to Polish-Lithuanian colonization of the Black Sea steppe, and after 1509, to Muscovite colonization as well.

The Crimean Khanate was formed in the course of the civil war attending the succession struggles within the Great Horde nomadizing on the lower Volga. The founder of its ruling dynasty, Khan Haji Girei, was a Chingisid prince forced into exile in Lithuania and invited to rule in Crimea by certain aristocratic Tatar clans – the Shirins, Barins, Argins, and Kipchaks – that had likewise broken from the Great Horde. Haji Girei established his capital at Bakhchisarai on the Crimean peninsula but continued to lay claim to the title of “Great Khan of the Great Horde, of the Crimean Throne, and of the Kipchak Steppe,” thereby assserting his sovereignty over the Pontic steppe and forest-steppe from Moldavia to the Volga and as far north as Seversk and the upper Don. The four clans who had invited him to rule over them nomadized across the southern edge of the steppe, just above Perekop and the Black Sea and Azov coasts. By the end of the century there were about 200,000 souls in their domains (ulusy), rising to 500,000 by 1550. A smaller Tatar population sedentarized in the towns and villages of the Crimean peninsula. Large numbers of Genoese, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, and Karaim Jews resided in the largest Crimean towns (Kaffa, Evpatoriya, Azov) as subject millets and paid the çizje capit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of archival sources
• List of abbreviations
• Frontispiece Map I
• Frontispiece Map II
• 1. Colonization, war, and slaveraiding on the Black Sea steppe in the sixteenth century
• 2. Muscovy’s southern borderland defense strategy, 1500–1635
• 3. The Belgorod Line
• 4. The Ukrainian quagmire
• 5. The Chyhyryn campaigns and the wars of the Holy League
• 6. The balance of power at century’s end
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index