Crimean Tatars
Nation | Active
1378 CE to 2057 CE
Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group native to the Crimean peninsula.
They forms the majority population in Crimea from the time of their ethnogenesis in the 15th century until their 1944 deportation under Soviet rule.Crimean Tatars are allowed to return to Crimea in the 1980s, where they now form a 10% minority.
There remains a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey and Uzbekistan.The Crimean Tatar language is of Kipchak stock, and a such related to the Tatar language spoken by the Volga Tatars, with which it is however not mutually intelligible, as Crimean Tatar is strongly influenced by Ottoman Turkish during the 15th to 18th centuries, and Crimean Tatars in the early 20th centuries consider them ethnically Turkish rather than Tatar.
Related Events
Showing 10 events out of 50 total
The Golden Horde of Batu has more time and more room for expansion of its territories than any other Mongol khanate.
The Mongols will maintain sovereignty over eastern Russia from 1240 to 1480, and they control the upper Volga area, the territories of the former Volga Bulgar state, Siberia, the northern Caucasus, Bulgaria (for a time), the Crimea, and Khwarezm.
By applying the principle of indirect rule, the Golden Horde Mongols will be able to preserve the Mongol ruling class and the local dynasties for more than two hundred years.
The influence that the Golden Horde Mongols come to have over medieval Russia and other area is immense and lasting.
They play a role in unifying the future Russian state, provide new political institutions, influence imperial visions, and, through indirect rule, facilitate the appearance of a Muscovite autocracy.
The Golden Horde Mongols and the Mongol Tatars, although still nomads, lose their original identities over time and—as happens to Mongols in China and Iran—become largely synonymous with the local Turkic peoples, the Kipchaks.
Arabic and Tatar replace Mongol as the official language of the Golden Horde, and increasing political fragmentation occurs.
The power of the Golden Horde khans slowly declines, particularly as a powerful new state rises in central Russia.
The Mongols' vast contacts open Russia to new influences, both Eastern and Western.
The reason the Mongols do not occupy Russia itself, but leave its administration to local princes, is not inability to administer a society that is both urban and agrarian, or Russian resistance.
Rather, some historians believe that Russia had little to offer the Mongols in terms of produce or trade routes, and even tax revenues were insignificant compared with the wealth of the southern realms under their control.
The inability of cavalry to operate in forests and swamps—a factor that limits the northward advance of the Mongols and largely determines the northern frontier of their empire—is undoubtedly a distinct disincentive as well.
The Golden Horde in the mid-thirteenth century had been administratively and militarily an integral part of the Mongol empire with its capital at Karakorum.
By the early fourteenth century, however, this allegiance has become largely symbolic and ceremonial.
Although certain Mongol administrative forms—such as census and postal systems—are maintained, other customs are not.
The Golden Horde embraces Islam as its state religion and, with it, adopts new and more complex administrative forms to replace those of the old regime that had been devised for conquest.
Even though most Mongols remain steppe nomads, new cities are founded, and a permanent urbanized bureaucracy and social structure takes shape at Sarai.
The Golden Horde allies itself with the Mamluks and negotiates with Constantinople to combat the Ilkhans in a struggle to control Azerbaijan.
Rather than isolating Russia, the Mongol presence and extensive diplomatic system brings envoys to Sarai from central and southern Europe, the Pope, Southwest Asia, Egypt, Iran, Inner Asia, China, and Mongolia.
The Golden Horde capital at Sarai becomes a prosperous center of commerce.
Here, as in China, Mongol rule means free trade, the exchange of goods between the East and the West, and also broad religious toleration.
The change in Mongol cultural patterns that occurs inevitably exacerbates natural divisions in the Mongol Empire.
As different areas adopted different foreign religions, Mongol cohesiveness dissolves.
The nomadic Mongols have been able to conquer the Eurasian land mass through a combination of organizational ability, military skill, and fierce warlike prowess, but they fall prey to alien cultures, to the disparity between their way of life and the needs of empire, and to the size of their domain, which prove too large to hold together.
The Mongols decline when their sheer momentum can no longer sustain them.
The Mongols experience a relatively rapid decline as an influential power.
One important factor is their failure to acculturate their subjects to Mongol social traditions.
Another is the fundamental contradiction of a feudal, essentially nomadic, society's attempting to perpetuate a stable, centrally administered empire.
The sheer size of the empire is reason enough for the Mongol collapse.
It is too large for one person to administer, as Genghis had realized, yet adequate coordination is impossible among the ruling elements after the split into khanates.
Possibly the most important single reason is the disproportionately small number of Mongol conquerors compared with the masses of subject peoples.
At that time, the Golden Horde of the Mongol empire had governed the Crimean peninsula as an ulus since 1239, with its capital at Qirim (Staryi Krym).
The local separatists had invited a Genghisid contender for the Golden Horde throne, Hacı Giray, to become their khan.
Hacı Giray accepts their invitation and travels from exile in Lithuania.
He wars for independence against the Horde from 1420 to 1441, in the end achieving success, but Hacı Giray now has to fight off internal rivals before he can ascend the throne of the khanate in 1449, after which he moves its capital to Qırq Yer (today part of Bahçeseray).
The khanate includes the Crimean Peninsula (except the south and southwest coast and ports, controlled by the Republic of Genoa) as well as the adjacent steppe.
A bitter war with Timur, also known as Timur Lenk (or Timur the Lame, from which Tamerlane is derived), has contributed to the eventual Mongol decline in Eurasia.
He is a man of aristocratic Transoxianian birth who falsely claims descent from Chinggis.
Timur had reunited Turkestan and the lands of the Ilkhans; in 1391 he had invaded the Eurasian steppes and defeated the Golden Horde.
He ravaged the Caucasus and southern Russia in 1395.
Timur's empire disintegrates, however, soon after his death in 1405.
The Mongols' influence and their intermarriage with the Russian aristocracy has a lasting effect on Russia.
Despite the destruction caused by their invasion, the Mongols have made valuable contributions to administrative practices.
Through their presence, which in some ways had checked the influence of European Renaissance ideas in Russia, they have helped reemphasize traditional ways.
This Mongol—or Tatar as it becomes known—heritage has much to do with Russia's distinctiveness from the other nations of Europe.