Paper long abstract:

A successor state of the Golden Horde and a vassal of the Ottoman Empire in 1475-1774, the Crimean Khanate (1441-1783) possessed its own institution of slavery which, similar to other Muslim polities of the time, was shaped and regulated by Islamic law. This paper will argue that Crimean slavery was also to a large degree a product of the khanate's location at the east European steppe frontier and its Turko-Mongol tribal legacy, and that these circumstances set the Khanate's system of slavery apart from that of the Ottoman Empire.

The human geography of the Crimean side of the steppe frontier was characterized by the presence of nomadic and semi-nomadic Turkic tribal groups, the Nogays and Crimean Tatars. During the heyday of the Crimean slave raiding (late 15th-17th centuries) the khanate's slaving zone (to use Jeff Fynn-Paul's theoretical concept) was Poland-Lithuania (especially Ukraine), southern Muscovy, and the North Caucasus.

With the Black Sea and a huge Ottoman slave market to the south and wide-open frontier zone to the north the khanate elevated its slaving to the level of a commercial enterprise. With the majority of the Slaves being of Slavic origin, likewise the Crimean terminology of slavery included Slavic loan-words (e.g., devke, kopna). A three-directional movement of chattel developed: from east Europe to the khanate; from the khanate to the Ottomans; and from the khanate back to countries of origin, through ransom or exchange. The profits accrued from all these transactions constituted a key source of revenue sustaining the khanate's economy of predation until the turn of the 18th century.

The Crimean system of slavery also appears to have been influenced by the Khanate's Turko-Mongol tribal ethos. The well-known tendency of nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralist groups to perceive themselves superior to the sedentary populations which also lacked a tribal affiliation, may explain the Khanate's willingness to release its slaves and ex-slaves to their countries of origin as well its reluctance to fully integrate former slaves and their descendants into the Crimean society, as evidenced by the survival of such descendants (çora, tuma) as a separate group. This sense of superiority was likely boosted by the Chinggisid legacy of the Khanate's ruling dynasty, which as shown by Alan Fisher, and more recently by Natalia Królikowska-Jedlińska and Ilya Zaytsev, was an enduring trope in the Khanate's political theory and historiographical tradition.