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1500–1600: PASTORALIST AND OASIS SOCIETIES OF INNER EURASIA

THE FIRST GLOBAL WORLD SYSTEM

After 1500, the world was transformed as European mariners, soldiers, and merchants began to weave together the first global exchange networks.1 For the first time in human history, societies in the Americas and Afro-Eurasia, and eventually in Australasia and the Pacific, began to exchange people, knowledge, religions, and trade goods, as well as crops, domesticated animals, and diseases. The “Columbian Exchange,” as A. W. Crosby described these global transfers, created a level of global connectedness not seen since the world's major landmasses had been united within Pangaea, 200 million years ago.² By the mid-sixteenth century, American maize was flourishing in regions of China unsuited to rice, American tobacco was being smoked in lounge rooms and hostelries in Europe, and sheep, cattle, and horses were running wild in parts of the Americas that had never known such beasts. Diseases traveled too, with disastrous results for the least disease-experienced regions, including the major civilizations of the Americas, which suffered a demographic, social, and political collapse worse than the Black Death. Like all pulses of globalization, this one destroyed as much as it created.

The first global networks would also transform knowledge. This transformation began in Europe, as a tsunami of new information and ideas struck its ports and cities, its academies and seminaries. New technologies, from printing to gunpowder, spread faster than ever before, along with new ideas about God and the cosmos, and human, social, cultural, and religious diversity, to jump start what would later be called the “Scientific Revolution.” Global networks energized commerce by offering new commodities and spectacular opportunities for arbitrage profits. Russian fur traders competed in European markets with fur traders from the Americas. The slave trade was globalized as trans-Atlantic exchanges began to rival the older slaving networks of Inner Eurasia and the Mediterranean world. By the second half of the sixteenth century, slave labor was being used to extract American silver cheaply from the mines of Mexico and Potosi, from where, transformed into Mexican pesos, silver traveled to Europe, where Dutch merchants and German bankers used it to pay for trade with China, whose growing populations and flourishing commercial networks demanded ever more silver for coinage and could pay high prices for it. When combined with the silver transported across the Pacific in the Manila galleons, these networks transferred to China about 75 percent of all the silver produced between 1500 and 1800.³ Such exchanges synergized commercial, cultural, and technological transfers throughout the world. They also yielded astonishing profits that helped fund European imperial projects from Chile to Japan.

No wonder world historians have treated the sixteenth century as a fundamental turning point in human history. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of Capital starts to unfold.”

Though the first pulse of globalization was carried mainly through the world's sea lanes, its reverberations would be felt even in land-locked Inner Eurasia. Here, two types of impact were particularly significant. First, trade networks expanded in scale and were increasingly reoriented towards Europe, whose merchants dominated the first global networks. Second, accelerating cultural exchanges speeded the transfer and adoption of new technologies such as printing and gunpowder weapons.

Formerly at the margins of Eurasia's major exchange networks, Europe now found itself at the center of the world's first global networks. This revolution in the global topology of wealth and power particularly affected those parts of Inner Eurasia closest to Europe, including Muscovy. Increasing European and Mediterranean demand for grain, timber, and furs stimulated agrarian production in Poland, the hunt for furs in northern Russia, and the demand for Inner Eurasian slaves.⁴ Europe's expanding markets drove the rulers of Moscow to seek easier and cheaper outlets to the West because the land trade through Poland was expensive; trade through Reval (Tallinn since 1918) incurred heavy tolls; and the trade through Archangel, which began in the 1550s, exacted high transportation costs.⁵ But Muscovite rulers also tried to protect themselves from some of the more corrosive ideas and technologies emerging in Europe, from Protestantism to printing. Church leaders resisted European religious influences, and as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, foreigners in Moscow were forced to live apart from Russians in a special nemetskaia sloboda, or “German quarter.”⁶

Though gunpowder was invented in Song China, gunpowder weaponry advanced most rapidly in Europe's brutally competitive state system, during what Michael Roberts called the “Military Revolution.”⁷ Ship-borne cannons helped Europeans force their way into the rich trading networks of the Indian Ocean, where they built new maritime empires, while the growing cost of gunpowder armies drove the search for new ways of mobilizing wealth and improved technologies. From the mid-fifteenth century, French armies started using cast bronze barrels instead of welded and bound iron guns, which often blew apart when fired. Cannon increased the cost of sieges for both attackers and defenders. As fortifications improved, military engineers had to design and build larger, more powerful, and more expensive cannons to breach thicker and better designed walls.

The first references to handguns are to mid-fourteenth-century harquebuses. Matchlock muskets appeared early in the sixteenth century. But even in the early sixteenth century, harquebusiers and musketeers were usually less effective than archers: “a well-trained archer could discharge ten arrows a minute, with reasonable accuracy up to 200 metres, but the arquebus of the earlier sixteenth century took several minutes to reload and was accurate only up to 100 metres.”⁸ On the other hand, harquebusiers were cheaper and easier to mobilize. They needed just a few days’ training (until used in large formations when they needed to be drilled), while archers and cavalry acquired their skills over many years. So, as a general rule, infantry armies equipped with handguns were cheaper, soldier for soldier, than cavalry armies, and easier to manage and drill. But competition ensured that infantry armies would be mobilized more permanently, and would grow in size and cost, so the long-term result of the Military Revolution was to increase the financial and administrative costs of warfare. Gunpowder warfare favored the largest and wealthiest states.

In Inner Eurasia, distance and the mobility of pastoralist armies slowed the introduction of gunpowder weapons. But by the early sixteenth century, they could no longer be ignored, particularly along Muscovy's western borderlands. Muscovite armies incorporated units of musketeers from early in the sixteenth century, and fort building intensified along Muscovy's steppe borders as cannon proved their effectiveness against nomadic cavalry.⁹

All in all, globalization and gunpowder increased both the possibilities for mobilization and its urgency. In the long run that benefited the agrarian societies of northwestern Inner Eurasia whose prospects for long-term growth were greater than those of the pastoralist world, or the geographically bound oasis polities of Central Asia.

This chapter will describe the history of societies in Mongolia, in central Inner Eurasia, and in the Pontic steppes in the sixteenth century. These regions were relatively insulated from the larger changes that were transforming other parts of the world. But they were increasingly influenced by material and cultural transfers from agrarian regions such as Europe and China, and eventually those transfers would bring even the remotest parts of Inner Eurasia into a new, globalized world system. The next chapter will describe the sixteenth-century history of Muscovy, a region that was closer to Europe and affected more immediately by the global changes of the sixteenth century.

MONGOLIA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In sixteenth-century Mongolia, political and military power shifted from the Oirat tribes of the west to the Khalkha tribes of central and eastern Mongolia. There is no obvious large-scale reason for the shift, so it may simply reflect the skills of particular leaders.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the most powerful leader of the Khalkha Mongols was a Chinggisid, Dayan Khan (b. 1475?, r. 1480?–1517?).10 In 1480, while still a child, he was proclaimed heir to the Yuan dynasty. By the early 1500s, after sending several unsuccessful tribute missions to the Ming, he began launching raids into north China. In 1510 Dayan Khan became overall leader of the Khalkha tribes. He now ruled in his own right, and launched new raids into north China, with armies of up to 70,000 soldiers. By his death in 1517, he had crushed the Oirat and united most Mongol tribes for the first time in a century.¹¹

The most successful of Dayan Khan's successors was his grandson, Altan (“Golden”) Khan (1508–1582). As the second son of his father, he could not inherit the title of Khagan, but did become the leader of the Tumed Mongols, based near modern Hohehot, the city Altan Khan founded in Inner Mongolia. Like his father, Altan Khan worked hard to find the right balance of trading and raiding along the Chinese borders. In 1541, after many years of raiding, which prompted the Ming to start building the modern forms of the Great Wall, Altan Khan tried to negotiate a reopening of border markets. His envoy was hacked to pieces. Not until the 1550s would Mongol raids force the Ming to reopen border markets. But they opened them with extreme reluctance. Officials argued that in the long run border trade would prove more costly than military defense, and that granting the right to trade was tantamount to a humiliating military defeat.¹² Others feared that a peaceful policy would reduce military vigilance and allow covert raiding. In 1551, a Chinese official wrote:

These dogs and sheep are untrustworthy and constantly changing. Now, when we send an important minister to carry gold and silk to the border, they may not abide by the agreement and may refuse to come. Or, because of the markets they may attack the customs area and invade. Or, they may come to the market to trade today but to invade tomorrow. Or, they may send their masses to invade and say that it was done by other tribes. Or, they may bring weak horses but ask for a high price. Or, because they sell horses, they may ask for excessive rewards.

Yet the alternative to border trade seemed to be prolonged and expensive frontier wars. In 1550, Altan Khan's armies demonstrated the costs of a purely military strategy by attacking Beijing itself. By the late 1550s even the Oirat tribes had accepted Altan Khan's suzerainty, having become his marriage allies or quda. He also established relations with the Chinggisid rulers of Turfan and Hami, the gateways to the Silk Roads.

In 1571, the Ming government finally reopened border markets. But they insisted on detailed ground rules, devised by an official called Ch'ung-ku, whose biographer described how the system worked.

[Wang] Ch'ung-ku then broadly summoned [Chinese] merchants and traders to trade cotton, cloth, and cereal for fur and hide. [They came] from far away … and gathered under the fortresses along the border. [The officials] collected tax from them to meet the need for bestowals and rewards. The government provided gold and cloth to the greater and lesser tribal heads who yearly traded horses of a definite quota. [Wang] Ch'ung-ku usually appeared at Hung-ssu pu each year to publicize the magnificence and mercy [of the Court]. All the tribal [people] bowed before [him] and no one dared to quarrel.¹³

Altan Khan explained why the trade was so crucial to the Mongols in a petition to the Chinese court in 1571 that highlights growing Mongolian dependence on Chinese products:

We, your vassals, have suffered an increase of population and a shortage of clothing … and on none of the borders were markets permitted to open. There was no way to satisfy our needs for clothing. Our felts and furs wear poorly in the summer heat, but it has been impossible to get even a piece of cloth.¹⁴

Such comments illustrate the difficulties that population growth and an increasing taste for luxury goods could create in flourishing pastoral nomadic societies.

We have some idea of what border markets were like from a description of Shirokalga [Kalgan, called Zhangjiakou, since 1949] by Ivan Petlin, one of the first Russian envoys to China. He visited in 1619. Having traveled through a gate in the wall, he entered the town, which was built of stone, surrounded by high walls fortified with cannon, and full of shops.

In the market places there are stone shops painted various colors and decorated with dried grasses. There are all manner of goods in these shops; in addition to woollen fabrics there are velvets and silks embroidered with gold and many silks in all colors. But there are no precious stones. They do have all kinds of garden produce such as various kinds of sugar, cloves, cinnamon, anise, apples, muskmelons, watermelons, cucumbers, onions, garlic radishes, carrots, cabbage, poppyseed, turnips, nutmeg, violets, almonds, ginger, rhubarb, and many other vegetables about which we know nothing at all, not even their names. They have eating places and taverns. The taverns serve all kinds of things to drink, and there are many drunkards and prostitutes. There are stone prisons along the streets. A person is hanged for theft; for brigandry the punishment is impalement and decapitation; for forgery, the hands are cut off.¹⁵

After the 1571 agreement, Altan Khan tried hard to police his side of the border, but after encouraging raids for many years, it was not easy to rein in his followers. In 1580, followers of his son captured large numbers of people and animals in Kansu. The emperor closed the Kansu markets, and opened them only after Altan Khan forced the return of all captured booty. There followed a further period of peace along the borders policed by Altan Khan, and populations increased in border regions as did the amount of cultivated land.

As in the time of the Türk and Uighur empires, peace and trade encouraged the Sinicization of Mongol nobles. The change was particularly evident in the new Mongol city of Kokhe-Khota, modern Hohehot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. The town was founded by Altan Khan, who built a lamasery here in the 1550s. It was one of the first large towns to appear in Mongolia since the thirteenth century. From this period, large numbers of Chinese farmers migrated into Inner Mongolia south of the Gobi, just as Russian peasants would eventually migrate into the Pontic steppes. Mongol leaders in the region began to rely on them for supplies of grain.¹⁶

For a decade, it looked as if Altan Khan might build a relatively stable version of the smychka based on trade, but backed up with the always credible threat of Mongol raids. This was similar to the tribute relationship established by the Xiongnu almost 2,000 years earlier, and described by Thomas Barfield as the “Outer Frontier Strategy.”¹⁷ But the system broke apart after Altan Khan's death in 1582, partly because Altan Khan's power depended more on his personal skills than on his rank. He remained merely Khan of the Tumed so his heirs lacked legitimacy beyond their own tribes. He also failed to monopolize control over the trade and tributary relationship with China. Much border trade escaped his control, allowing regional princes to establish their own trading and tributary relationships with northern China.¹⁸ In short, Altan Khan failed to build a unified, disciplined, Mongolian-wide elite loyal to himself and his family. After his death, even the semblance of unity vanished. Three distinct Khalkha khanates appeared, as well as the Chakhar khanate, which was in the true Chinggisid line.

While mobilizing the wealth of north China proved extremely difficult, mobilizing its cultural resources was much easier, and sometimes those resources could help brace structures of power and authority in the steppes. This helps explain another important aspect of Altan Khan's rule: his adoption of Buddhism. This was a decision with immense consequence for Mongolia's future.

There were many precedents for Altan Khan's decision to adopt Buddhism. In the first millennium CE, both the Khazar and Uighur empires had adopted organized religions from Outer Eurasia, respectively Judaism and Manichaeism. In both societies, institutionalized religions were introduced from above, and, despite clashing with many elements of traditional steppeland religions, they eventually put down deep roots and incorporated older steppeland religious traditions. In any case, Buddhism was not entirely alien to Mongolia. Khagan Ogodei built a Buddhist stupa in Karakorum. Qubilai kept Tibetan Buddhist monks at his court.¹⁹ Under the Yuan dynasty, many Buddhist scriptures were translated into Mongolian, and after the collapse of the Yuan dynasty Mongol nobles brought Buddhist traditions with them on their return to Mongolia. However, Buddhism declined after the expulsion from China, as it slowly dissolved within traditional religious practices and beliefs.²⁰ Walther Heissig argued that by the sixteenth century, its influence had disappeared almost entirely, though this may be an exaggeration.²¹ Forms of Buddhism almost certainly survived, though mingled with traditional shamanic practices.

Altan Khan initiated what is often described as a “second conversion” to Buddhism. He was converted in 1573, during the peaceful final years of his reign, by two captured lamas of the Yellow Hat (dGe-lugs-pa) or reformed faith, founded by Tsong Kapa (1357–1419).²² Altan Khan's conversion may have been sincere, but political calculations surely played a role too, because the localized and individualistic practices of shamanic traditions could not provide the broad institutional bracing offered by Outer Eurasia's institutionalized religions.²³

In 1576, in Tibet, Altan Khan conferred the title of (third) Dalai Lama on bSod-nams rGya-mtsho, the leading Lama of the Tibetan Yellow Hat Sect. This event marks the real beginning of Mongolia's “second conversion” to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama reciprocated by proclaiming Altan Khan a Boddhisatva and the reincarnation of Qubilai Khan. This, perhaps, was what Altan Khan had really been looking for. Within Buddhist tradition he could now be described as a Chinggisid. When the Dalai Lama died, it was found, conveniently, that he had been reincarnated in a great-grandson of Altan Khan.²⁴ Such close relations between Mongol and Buddhist leaders would become common, in part because Yellow Hat Buddhism was as politically and commercially activist as the Naqshbandiyya Sufism of Central Asia. Altan Khan made lamas equal in status to nobles, creating a new social class in Mongolia that would acquire immense political, ideological, and economic influence.²⁵

After Altan Khan's death in 1582, rival khans in different parts of Mongolia converted to Buddhism, built monasteries, and supported the translation of Tibetan scriptures.²⁶ In 1585, Abatai Khan built the great lamasery of Erdeni Zuu, in Karakorum. Perhaps because of Karakorum's close association with the Mongol Empire, Erdeni Zuu would soon become one of the most sacred places of Mongolian Buddhism (Figure 5.1). At first, Mongolian Buddhist leaders tried to resist contamination from traditional steppe religion by burning shamanic effigies or ongghons, or by demonstrating their claims to superior medical knowledge. The Torgut lama, Neichi Toyin (1577–1653), managed more than once to cure powerful leaders, after which most of their followers converted to Buddhism.²⁷ In 1577, Altan Khan banned the killing of women or slaves or animals as sacrificial gifts, as well as the possession of ongghons.²⁸

Figure 5.1 Erdeni Zuu Monastery today. Bouette, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Erdene_Zuu_Monastery#/media/File:Monast%C3%A8re_d%27Erdene_Zuu_2.jpg. Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

Lamaist Buddhism soon wove its way deep into the social, political, and cultural fabric of Mongolian life. Traditional gods entered the Buddhist pantheon, becoming ancestor spirits, or minor deities or demons. As early as 1594, a Chinese writer claimed that Mongolia was undergoing a profound cultural transformation, which he saw as the result of beneficial Chinese influences:

The customs of the barbarians used to be savage and cruel, and for a long time it was impossible to civilize them. But since they submitted and began to pay tribute [a reference to the trade agreement of 1571], they have conceived a great regard for the Buddhist faith. Within their tents they constantly adore an image of the Buddha, and they make him an offering whenever they eat or drink. The rich … invite the lamas to recite prayers, offer incense, and bow reverently. All the money they can get goes for casting statuettes of the Buddha or stupas. Men and women, old and young, always have a rosary in their hands. Some of them make a little box of silver or gold, about two or three inches in height, into which they put amulets. They carry this box beneath the left arm, and are never without it, either sitting or lying, sleeping or eating.²⁹

Altan Khan's religious policies suggest, as do his complex negotiations with China, that he understood well the difficulties of recreating a unified Mongolian polity that could mobilize the wealth of north China, particularly for a non-Chinggisid ruler such as himself. Managing cultural transfers from neighboring regions was easier, and Buddhism offered Mongolian leaders new forms of legitimation. However, increasing reliance on institutionalized religion was also a sign of political, military, and economic weakness, of the limited possibilities for ecological mobilization in the steppes, and the growing difficulty of exacting large tribute payments from an increasingly populous, wealthy, and powerful China.

THE KAZAKH STEPPES

Even further away from major agrarian civilizations, pastoral nomadic elites in the Kazakh steppes found it even harder to mobilize agrarian resources on a large scale. But they, too, were influenced by the cultural traditions of nearby agrarian regions. However, while most khans identified themselves as Muslims, and were regarded as Muslims by others, in practice only those who lived for long periods in cities had any formal understanding of Islam. Reverence for Allah as the one god, some familiarity with Muslim stories of Muhammad and Allah, which filtered into folk literature, and some influence from sharia law on traditional law – this was the extent of Islamic influence in the Kazakh steppes for several centuries. Even in the eighteenth century, there were no mosques or madrasas in the steppe, and most steppe nomads encountered Islamic ideas and practices only through traveling Sufi. Popular religious practices remained shamanic. In the nineteenth century, the Kazakh ethnographer Chokan Valikhanov wrote that Kazakh religious traditions had barely changed since the time of Timur.30

In the old heartlands of the Golden Horde, south of the Urals, there lived several pastoralist groups, including the Nogai. Here, political fragmentation deprived leaders of any chance to extort sustained tributes, so they relied largely on casual raiding to exact tributes and slaves from sedentary regions. These were simple, crude, and volatile forms of the smychka. Political alliances shifted with bewildering speed as ambitious local leaders cut deals with nomadic and sedentary neighbors, often creating systems that lasted no longer than the leaders who had created them.³¹

Further east, in the Kazakh steppes, at a safer distance from the rising powers of Muscovy and Crimea, there appeared several large and reasonably durable pastoral confederations. For much of the sixteenth century, under Khans Buyunduk (r. 1480–1511) and Kasim (r. 1509–1523), and again under Khan Haqq-Nazar (r. 1538–1580), Kazakh leaders claimed hegemony over the entire Kazakh steppe, including all the lands of Orda and Shiban, the former White and Blue Hordes. Like their predecessors, the Kazakhs maintained winter camps along the Syr Darya and traded with the region's major cities. As long as the Oirats (to the east) and the Nogai (to the west) remained relatively weak, the Kazakh could dominate the central steppes. Kasim may have tried to establish a durable general law code for the Kazakhs, modeled perhaps on the Mongolian “yasa,” and influenced in some degree by sharia law, but it has not survived.³²

After Kasim's death, in 1523, the Kazakh confederation split into three “hordes” (literally “hundreds” or “zhüz”). The Great (or Senior) Horde remained in the Semirechie, migrating along the Chu, Talas, and Ili rivers, and exacting tributes from the region's many small agrarian settlements and trading towns. The Middle Horde migrated in central Kazakhstan from the Aral Sea and the Syr Darya as far north as Omsk in southern Siberia, and as far east as the Altai. Its members traded with and sometimes extorted resources from the cities of the Syr Darya. The Small (Junior) Horde migrated from the lower Syr Darya to the Yaik (Ural) river in the lands once known as the Uzbek steppes. The three Kazakh hordes retained a sense of Kazakh unity, and reunified briefly under Kasim's son, Haqq-Nazar, and again during the reign of Taulkel Khan (r. 1586–1598), the last ruler of a united Kazakh federation.³³ But unity was fragile, partly because the khans had limited power over their followers, except during major wars.

Kazakh khans were elected from Jochid lineages. They ruled loose coalitions whose leaders presided over clans headed by sultans or beys. The Kazakh aristocracy included those who could claim Chinggisid descent and were therefore known as “white bone,” as opposed to the majority of “black bones.” Khans were elected at meetings of the beys. Similar meetings were held each year to decide on the annual migrations for each clan and aul.³⁴ Clans were divided into family groups, or auls, each consisting of 30–40 yurts and each headed by its own elder, or aksakal (white beard).³⁵ Locally, power was exercised by clan elders who determined the pasturelands that could be used by each aul or family. Aksakals also had the right to mobilize soldiers and levy taxes on the herds of each family and to administer customary law (adat). Local beys administered justice, generally by requiring payback or blood-price from those accused of crimes.

In a region with limited agrarian resources, these relatively democratic structures made it difficult to build mobilizational systems large and disciplined enough to mobilize significant resources from neighboring agrarian regions. Khans had no automatic right to levy troops, but had to negotiate with local sultans or beys to form armies for particular campaigns. They could levy taxes only for special occasions, such as wars.³⁶ The khans continued to nomadize, like the rest of the population, if in slightly higher style. Like their beys, they lived in white rather than black felt tents.

The difficulty of mobilizing large flows of tribute from the Kazakh steppes also reflected the ancient balance of power between cities and steppes in Central Asia. Taxing trade caravans traveling through the steppes could be lucrative, which is why, in the late sixteenth century, Khan Haqq-Nazar (r. c.1538–1580) established friendly relations with Muscovy, the destination of many steppe caravans. But commercial revenues were not enough to build a powerful mobilizational system, and Kazakh leaders were generally too weak to mobilize enough power to exact more than the occasional tribute from nearby lands.

Demographic and economic growth might have increased the opportunities for empire building. But there was not much room for growth in the steppes. Pastoral nomadic societies were extensive by their very nature and had long since achieved levels of ecological efficiency that left little room for intensification. It is possible, as we have seen, that the Little Ice Age increased rainfall in the steppes, stimulating growth in both livestock and human populations, but if so, there is no sign that population growth translated automatically into increased military power. Rather, as in Mongolia, it may have intensified conflicts over scarce pastures. So the challenges faced by Haqq-Nazar were really little different from those faced by Qaidu or Timur. Success meant mobilizing resources from the oases of Transoxiana, or the cities of Khorasan and northern Afghanistan. And, with the Uzbek entrenched in Transoxiana, doing that seemed just beyond the reach of the Kazakh khans.

OASIS POLITIES OF CENTRAL ASIA AND THE TARIM BASIN

In the more urbanized regions of Transoxiana and the Tarim basin, we see the other half of the smychka. Here, there was plenty of agricultural and commercial wealth, but the geography of irrigation oases limited possibilities for military mobilization. This created a highly unstable balance of power with nomadic neighbors, whose tribes were also fragmented by the region's geography (particularly in Transoxiana), or settled in pasturelands far from the major cities (particularly in northern Moghulistan). This prolonged stasis, imposed by Central Asia's geography and ecology, made it difficult to build powerful mobilization systems based either in the steppes of Transoxiana, or in its farming oases.

From 1500, the Uzbeks had established themselves as rulers of Transoxiana under Abul-Khayr's grandson, Muhammad Shibani Khan (r. 1496–1510). The Jochid line of Chinggisids now controlled Transoxiana, while rulers of Chagatayid descent ruled in Moghulistan in eastern Central Asia.37 As Adeeb Khalid reminds us, it is important to think of groups such as the Uzbek not as nations but rather as dynasties; the idea of an Uzbek or Kazakh nation is really a creation of the Soviet period.³⁸

Between 1501 and 1507, when he was defeated and killed by the Safawid Shah Ismail near Merv, Muhammad Shibani conquered most of the major Transoxianian cities. His successors, Köchkunju (r. 1512–1531) and Ubaydullah (1533–1539), consolidated Shibanid control of Transoxiana and the well-watered and densely populated Ferghana valley, ruling from the twin capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. In Khorezm, another Shibanid dynasty, the Yadigarid, established themselves as regional khans in 1515, renewing Khorezm's ancient traditions of independence. Khorezm would retain a degree of independence until the creation of a Russian protectorate in 1873, though its capital shifted from Urgench to Khiva after the Amu Darya river changed its course in the sixteenth century.

Shibanid dynasties dominated sedentary Central Asia for most of the sixteenth century. However, they failed to build a durable smychka between the region's cities and steppelands. Though each khan controlled a central region around a capital city (Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Balkh all played this role under different rulers), beyond the core regions, khans ruled through complex alliances of cities and tribes that had to be constantly renegotiated.³⁹ These difficulties help explain the growing importance of religious legitimation in Central Asia and Moghulistan, and the increasing power of Sufi organizations.

After Ubaydullah's death in 1539, there followed 40 years of conflict before another powerful leader, Abdullah II (1583–1598), recreated a unified Uzbek polity, and undertook reforms of its irrigation systems and monetary system. The English traveler Anthony Jenkinson described Bukhara after visiting it in 1558.

This Bokhara is situated in the lowest part of all the land, walled about with a high wall of earth, with divers gates into the same: it is divided into 3 partitions, whereof two parts are the king's, and the third part is for merchants and markets, and every science hath their dwelling and market by themselves. The city is very great, and the houses for the most part of earth, but there are also many houses, temples and monuments of stone sumptuously builded, and gilt, and specially bath stoves so artificially built, that the like thereof is not in the world. There is a little river running through the middle of the said city, but the water thereof is most unwholesome.⁴⁰

Jenkinson reported that merchants came to Bukhara from India, Persia, Russia, and China. Indian and Persian traders brought cotton, woolen and linen cloths, and took back silks, hides, slaves, and horses. Chinese goods included musk, rhubarb, and satin, and traders from Russia brought hides, sheepskins, woolen cloth, bridles, and saddles, purchasing in return cotton and silks.⁴¹ Curiously, Jenkinson himself, though English, counts as the first person to make formal diplomatic contacts between Muscovy and Central Asia, because he brought a message from Tsar Ivan IV. Jenkinson was also the first to raise the issue of Russian slaves in Central Asia, which would loom large in future negotiations between Muscovy/Russia and Central Asia.⁴²

Abdullah's death in 1598 (the same year in which the Muscovite Riurikid dynasty ended) marked the end of Shibanid power over Transoxiana. Apart from a brief period of unity within the Persian Empire of Nadir Shah (1740–1747), Transoxiana would not be united again until the Russian conquests of the late nineteenth century. The Tashkent region drifted into the control of the Kazakhs, while Bukhara fell to another Jochid dynasty, the Ashtarkhanids or Janids (1599–1785), who were descended from the khans of Astrakhan.

There was much continuity between Shibanid rule and that of the Timurid era. Both dynasties were of Turkic pastoralist origin, and both displayed the key features of the smychka, with a military wing dominated by Turkic tribal leaders and an administrative and urban wing dominated by the (often Persian-speaking) towns.⁴³ Under both the later Timurids and the Shibanids, the military wing of the smychka declined in importance after the initial conquests, as increasing numbers of pastoralists settled in the region's villages and towns, and as Uzbek leaders settled into the cultural and commercial world of the cities. It was probably in the sixteenth century, under the Shibanids, that Turkic speakers began to dominate the urban regions of Transoxiana as well as its steppelands.⁴⁴

We have no evidence of sustained population growth in Transoxiana, and evidence on commercial growth is ambiguous. Increasing sea-borne trade from China through the Indian Ocean may have reduced the amount of trade along the traditional Silk Roads, while the rise of Shia Iran from 1500 severed commercial links to the Mediterranean. On the other hand, other trade routes increased in importance, particularly the north–south routes linking Transoxiana with Russia and Mughal India. Furthermore, even trade with China seems to have been substantial for much of the sixteenth century.⁴⁵ All in all, there is no clear evidence of commercial decline in Central Asia in the sixteenth century, nor is there clear evidence of significant growth.

Periods of peace and stability may have allowed for modest agricultural growth. Several of the Shibanid khans supported agriculture, maintained irrigation works, and encouraged artisan crafts. Abdullah II, in particular, patronized architecture and the arts in the 1580s and 1590s, though scholarship fared less well under the increasing influence of the Naqshbandiyya Sufis.⁴⁶

The growing influence of the Sufi orders in the urbanized lands of Transoxiana and Moghulistan parallels the introduction of Yellow Hat Buddhism in Mongolia. Like Lamaism, Central Asian Islam was both decentralized and shaped by shamanic ritual practices. But it was also politically and commercially engaged. Uzbek rulers had close ties to the Sufi orders; the Yasawiyya order had provided the troops that helped Muhammad Shibani build his power.⁴⁷ Members of the Naqshbandiyya order advised Uzbek khans, married into ruling lineages, and often controlled large amounts of wealth through endowments or waqf that were free of taxes. The Sufi orders owed much of their prestige to claims of descent from the prophet Muhammad. They ran madrasas and holy sites such as the tombs of saints, conducted missionary work amongst pastoral nomads, influenced craft guilds, and maintained extensive and profitable commercial networks.⁴⁸

The increasingly theocratic tone of government under the Uzbek is apparent in the following nearly contemporary account of Khan Ubaydullah (khan from 1533–1539).

First of all he was a Muslim ruler, devout, pious, abstinent. He scrupulously applied the tenets of the Holy Law to all matters of religion, confession, commonwealth, state, the army, and the populace, and would not suffer a deviation from this law by a hair's breadth. In the thicket of valor he was [like] a charging lion, in the sea of generosity his palm was [like] a pearl-bearing shell – an individual adorned with an array of good qualities. He wrote the seven styles of calligraphy … He copied several exemplars of God's Word [i.e., the Qur'an].⁴⁹

East of Transoxiana, in Moghulistan, it makes sense to distinguish between three distinct zones: in the north-west, Semirechie and Zungharia; in the south, the “Altishahr” or “six cities” of the Tarim basin; and Uighuristan, the region around Turfan and Hami in the north-east. In name at least, Chagatayid khans ruled all these regions, but in reality they were often controlled by members of the powerful Dughlat clans from Chagatay's old capital of Almaligh in Zungharia, or by Sufi khwajas.⁵⁰ All these regions were periodically threatened by pastoral nomads to their north. These included the Kazakh, the Oirat, and also the Kyrgyz, who originated in the Upper Yenisei region but moved towards Semirechie and Zungharia from the late fifteenth century, probably as allies of the Oirat.⁵¹

Early in the sixteenth century, a Chagatayid ruler of Kashgaria, Sa'id Khan (r. 1514–1533), established peaceful relations with his brother, Mansur, the ruler of much of Moghulistan and Turfan (r. 1503–1543), and also with China. Peaceful relations allowed a revival of trade with China for much of the sixteenth century. The Tarikh-i Rashidi records that:

From this peace and reconciliation between the two brothers resulted such security and prosperity for the people that any one might travel alone between Kamul [Hami] or Khitai [China] and the country of Farghana without provision for the journey and without fear of molestation.⁵²

We have a fascinating account of trade in this region from slightly later, in 1603, when a Jesuit, Bento de Goes, traveled from India through Kabul to the Tarim basin.⁵³ In Yarkand, he bought a stock of jade to trade with before spending a year waiting for a caravan he could join. During this period, the Chagatayid ruler of Kashgaria auctioned the right to lead a caravan, and the successful bidder (who had offered 200 bags of musk) sold the right to join the caravan. The caravan with which De Goes traveled set off with 72 merchants, each with a passport from the khan naming them as “ambassadors” for what the Chinese would regard, inevitably, as a tribute rather than a trade mission. De Goes himself seems to have been poisoned as the caravan approached the Chinese border, by other members of the caravan to whom he had lent money.

In Moghulistan, as in Transoxiana, Sufis gained increasing influence through their wealth, their political influence, and, in an increasingly theocratic environment, their reputation for holiness. Khoja Taj ad-Din, a disciple of Khoja Ahrar, entered the service of the Moghulistan ruler Ahmed Khan and his successor Mansur Khan (r. 1503–1543) in Turfan. According to a hagiographical contemporary history, the Tarikh-i Rashidi:

He [Taj ad-Din] was in attendance on [the two Chagatayid khans] for fifty years …. And he accepted, during all this period, neither offering nor gift, whether it were from the Khans or the Sultans or the generals of the army, or from peasants or merchants. The Khwaja occupied himself, also, with commerce and agriculture. And from these occupations there accrued to him, by the blessing of the Most High God, great wealth. … The poor and indigent – nay, more, the peasant, the villager, the artisan and the merchant all profited [by his wealth]. For this reason no one denied him anything, and all the affairs of the kingdom were laid before him in detail.⁵⁴

In reality, Taj ad-Din clearly did accept gifts and was so actively involved in politics that he died in 1533 in battle against the Chinese.

The increasing importance of such religious figures in early modern Central Asia has several explanations. First, their reputation for probity gave legitimacy to rulers with limited military power, and in an era before nation-states, religious identities provided a powerful connective tissue linking different levels of society. Second, Sufi leaders were active in trade, and the religious networks they created linked cities, reached deep into the steppes, and helped create commercial partnerships across geographical, linguistic, and ecological frontiers. Third, their religious prestige, commercial networks, and engagement with politics gave Sufi khwajas great political influence, so that many ended up playing important political roles. The networks they created forged powerful links in regions where political and military networks were in decline and the prospects for long-term economic and demographic growth were limited. As Millward puts it, effective mobilization in this region involved “both politico-military and religio-ideological forms of power,” and as political and military power declined, religious forms of power increased in importance.⁵⁵

THE PONTIC STEPPES

West of the Urals, khanates survived as remnants of the Golden Horde. One of them, the Crimean khanate, would play an important political, military, and economic role for much of the sixteenth century.

In 1500, the khanates of Kazan’, Astrakhan, and Crimea were severely cut-down versions of the Golden Horde. They had pastoralist armies, capitals in major trading cities, control of significant trade flows, Chinggisid dynasties, and Muslim traditions, but limited demographic and material resources. By 1500, the khanate of Astrakhan was a rump state of the Great Horde, based on the Volga delta and sharing the lands once held by the Great Horde with parts of the Nogai Horde. The khanate of Kazan’ was, briefly, a more powerful polity, controlling the cities and pastures of the middle Volga, and the trade routes that passed through them. But internal conflicts, dynastic divisions, and limited resources ensured that the Kazan’ khanate never emerged as a major regional power.

In contrast, the Crimean khanate, despite its formal subordination to the Ottoman Empire, would play a major role in the Pontic steppes for two centuries. The khans of Crimea collected tributes from Moscow (between 7,000 and 12,000 rubles a year in the early seventeenth century), and from Lithuania/Poland and several Danube principalities.56 Their armies checked Muscovite and Polish expansion in the Pontic steppes, and raiding for slaves and livestock enriched its rulers and nobles and drained resources from Muscovy and Lithuania/Poland.

The khanate loomed large in the diplomatic, military, and commercial calculations of both Muscovy and Lithuania/Poland. In the late fifteenth century, during the reign of Ivan III, Crimea and Muscovy were allies, and Crimea directed its armies against Lithuania/Poland. But after the defeat of the Great Horde, in 1502, Crimean claims on Kazan’ and raids on Muscovy's southern borders undermined the alliance. War broke out in 1521, after Moscow installed its own candidate in Kazan’. Allied with the new khanate of Astrakhan, in 1521 Crimea launched a huge raid that reached Moscow itself and drove Tsar Vasilii III from his capital. Warfare between Muscovy and the Crimean khanate would continue for much of the sixteenth century.

What was the source of the khanate's power? First, its khans enjoyed genealogical legitimacy. The Girays were Chinggisids. After they crushed the Great Horde in 1502, they could also claim to be the legitimate heirs to the Golden Horde. These claims counted both in the steppes and in Istanbul. Second, the Girays ruled a variegated territory with diverse resources. In the cities of Crimea, the khans ruled a polyglot urban population of Italians, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and Caucasians.⁵⁷ Crimea's trading cities had once provided significant direct revenues, but after the Ottoman Empire took Caffa and most of the Crimean south coast in 1475, the khans lost most of their commercial revenues. Ottoman control of Azov and the coast of Moldavia also cut Crimea off from the rich trade routes through the Black Sea and the Balkans.

However, Ottoman suzerainty offered some compensation for the loss of the Crimean port cities. Even if the Ottomans sometimes dabbled in the elections for a new khan, the khans themselves were relatively independent, even issuing their own coinage. The Ottomans provided subsidies and sometimes military support. Khan Saadet Giray I (r. 1524–1532) received a bodyguard of Ottoman troops, and in 1541, Khan Sahib-Giray was able to take his troops across the Oka river with the protection of Ottoman artillery and contingents of Janissaries. Ottoman protection shielded the khanate, because its enemies feared Ottoman reprisals.⁵⁸ Ottoman protection also made the khans attractive patrons and allies for groups such as the “lesser” Nogai, who formed a durable alliance with the khanate for much of the sixteenth century. In addition to Ottoman subsidies, the Crimean khans also claimed and received (as heirs of the Golden Horde) substantial tributes from Muscovy and Lithuania/Poland. Finally, the khanate had access to rich markets in Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Ottoman protectorates along the western shores of the Black Sea for timber, salt, grains, fish, livestock products, and slaves.

But the khanate also wielded more traditional forms of power. Its military power arose from its authority in the Pontic steppes. That control was never complete:

the Crimean khanate … directly administered little land beyond the Crimean peninsula. The khan's nomadic Tatar subjects seasonally utilized portions of the steppe north of the Black Sea and his forces regularly mounted raids across the steppe into Muscovite territories, but in effect for much of the year the steppe was a huge, unpoliced, no-man's-land.⁵⁹

Nevertheless, the Crimean khan had considerable influence in the steppes, and could raise formidable steppe armies. So the khanate offers a clear example of the smychka. The Crimean khans mobilized steppe armies partly through the four qarachi beys, the leaders of the four major Crimean clans. By 1550, the four clans controlled some 500,000 “souls,” which gave them in effect a veto over major military decisions.

In the sixteenth century steppe armies were still easy to mobilize, and very effective. Neither Muscovite nor Lithuanian/Polish armies really got their measure. Before 1550 there were 43 major Crimean attacks on Muscovy.⁶⁰ Sigismund von Herberstein, the Austrian diplomat who visited Moscow early in the century, described the 1521 raid. Though Moscow itself was protected by fortifications built under Ivan III, the devastating raids on the surrounding countryside were ended only when the government agreed to hand over massive tributes, and Crimean leaders began to fear an attack by the khanate of Astrakhan. As they retreated, Crimean armies took large numbers of prisoners, many of whom were massacred because they were too old or infirm to be worth transporting to the Black Sea slave markets. Herberstein writes:

For the elderly and sick, who do not fetch much and are unfit for work, are given by the Tatars to their young men, much as one gives a hare to a hound to make it snappish; they are stoned to death or thrown into the sea …⁶¹

Crimean raids continued for much of the sixteenth century. Most destructive of all was the 1571 attack by an army of 40,000 that included Nogai and Cherkess allies. It burnt Moscow and took thousands of captives.

At the core of the khan's armies was a personal guard of up to 1,000 musketeers, organized like the Ottoman Janissaries and accompanied by light artillery. But most of the army consisted of traditional pastoralist cavalry. They usually traveled with two or three horses, which could be eaten if necessary, and carried provisions that would be supplemented by foraging en route. Crimean armies advanced north along seven main invasion routes, usually at harvest time when villagers were well fed and their barns were full.⁶² The armies traveled in columns with their spare mounts, preceded by advance guards and scouts, so that a French observer, Beauplan, described an army of 80,000 soldiers with its 200,000 horse as like a huge forest in motion. However, even the largest raiding armies preferred to avoid formal battles, as their main goal was to harvest people, livestock, and booty from unprotected villages, which they would burn, killing all who resisted. Then they would retreat, moving along different routes to avoid being intercepted, before stopping to share the spoils, at least a fifth or tenth of which went to the leader. A normal ratio of slaves to raiding soldiers was 1:3 so that the number of slaves harvested would normally be about one third of the size of the raiding army, or about 10,000 captives for a raiding army of 30,000.⁶³

After the khanate lost control of the Black Sea ports, the slave trade, whose roots go back at least to the first millennium BCE, became the most important of all trades for Crimean pastoralists. That is why small raids, often undertaken on the initiative of local leaders and without the khan's permission, were almost annual affairs in the sixteenth century. The slave trade paid for the Crimean army, by providing soldiers and their leaders with booty. It was cheap and easy to allow slave raids, or turn a blind eye to them, even when the khan might have preferred peaceful relations with his northern neighbors.⁶⁴ Slave raiding shows the smychka at work in looting zones, as it was really a way of levying erratic tributes from agrarian lands. Slaves were sold through the markets of Caffa or Bakhchesaray or Evpatoria, from where they ended up in the Ottoman army or administration or as laborers or galley slaves or domestic servants, while some were traded to other countries, or put to work in Crimea itself as farm laborers or used as herders in the steppes or offered for ransom.⁶⁵ In 1642, 280 rowers were freed from an Ottoman galley after a mutiny. Over 200 turned out to be from Ukraine and 20 from Muscovy. Some had been galley slaves for 40 years. Generally, Crimea had a free hand for its slaving operations in the northern Caucasus, Muscovy, and Lithuania/Poland. But the slave trade may have reduced other forms of trade between Muscovy and Crimea in furs, textiles, and other goods, a cost worth paying because the slave trade was so profitable, so critical to military mobilization, and so damaging to Muscovy.⁶⁶

The Crimean khanate illustrates the benefits and limitations of the traditional smychka. Military mobilization depended on the support of the leading clans, and their support had to be bought by allowing them to raid and trade. The Crimean khans were never true autocrats. Nevertheless, unlike Lithuania/Poland, the khanate enjoyed considerable cultural cohesion (its Christian and Jewish city dwellers had little significance for military mobilization), and Chinggisid lineage lent prestige to its khans. But like the Golden Horde in its later years, the khanate was threatened by the same fault line between its urban and pastoral wings, particularly as its khans resided in the cities. Early in the sixteenth century, Khan Mengli-Giray began to beautify his capital, Solgat (Eski Kirim). He built a palace, the Aşlama Saray, designed by the Venetian architect Aleviz, who was detained in Crimea in 1502 as he returned from building extensions to the Moscow Kremlin.⁶⁷ Mengli-Giray also built mosques and madrasas, and established an administrative system that would endure, in its essentials, until the conquest of the khanate in 1783. Little of this urban work was of interest to the nomads who made up the core of the Crimean army. But the eventual decline of the khanate would owe less to internal splits than to the slow shift in the balance of power between Inner Eurasia's nomadic and agrarian regions.

NOTES

1 This is why the year 1500 counts as a threshold in the history of what John and William McNeill have called The Human Web.

² Crosby, The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism; for a general survey of globalization, see Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization.

³ Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 80.

⁴ Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories,” 292.

⁵ On these difficulties, see Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 33–34.

⁶ Poe, “A People Born to Slavery,” 84.

⁷ On the “Military Revolution,” the classic studies are Roberts, “The Military Revolution” and Parker, The Military Revolution; see also McNeill, The Pursuit of Power; more recent reviews of the idea include Black, “Patterns of Warfare,” 33–36, and Childs, “The Military Revolution 1”; the most recent study is Andrade, The Gunpowder Age.

⁸ Parker, The Military Revolution, 17.

⁹ Davies, “Development of Russian Military Power,” 177–178; Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 159.

¹⁰ See Atwood, Encyclopedia, 138.

¹¹ Perdue, China Marches West, 57, 60–61.

¹² Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War, and Trade, 202; and 201–203 for Yang Chi-sheng's long critique of the trading policy, written in 1551.

¹³ Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War, and Trade, 104.

¹⁴ Cited in Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War, and Trade, 50–51; the full memorandum is at 206–208.

¹⁵ Dmytryshyn et al., Russia's Conquest of Siberia, 1: 86–87.

¹⁶ Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War, and Trade, 106, 173; Jagchid and Hyer, Mongolia's Culture, 69.

¹⁷ Barfield, The Perilous Frontier.

¹⁸ Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, 247.

¹⁹ Bawden, Modern History, 26; Lamas of Gangdanthekchending Monastery, Buddhism in Mongolia, 15–16; Heissig, Religions of Mongolia, 24.

²⁰ Lamas of Gangdanthekchending Monastery, Buddhism in Mongolia, 21, 27–28.

²¹ Heissig, Religions of Mongolia, 25; Serruys, “Early Lamaism in Mongolia,” 2: 538, argues that Lamaism never really disappeared so that what happened in the late sixteenth century was really a “revival.”

²² On his “conversion,” see Serruys, “Early Lamaism in Mongolia,” and Heissig, “A Mongolian Source”; see also Atwood, Encyclopedia, 490.

²³ Bawden, Modern History, 28.

²⁴ Moses and Halkovic, Introduction, 104.

²⁵ Bawden, Modern History, 32.

²⁶ Heissig describes this rapid process in Religions of Mongolia, Ch. 3.

²⁷ Jagchid and Hyer, Mongolia's Culture, 98; Bawden, Modern History, 32.

²⁸ Heissig, Religions of Mongolia, 26–27; Altan Khan himself had been a devout shamanist, and reportedly tried to treat his gout in the traditional way, by placing his feet in the opened body of a man.

²⁹ Bawden, Modern History, 27–28.

³⁰ Olcott, Kazakhs, 19.

³¹ The complex military, diplomatic, and commercial games played in these borderland environments are described superbly in Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier.

³² On Kasim's “law code,” see Klyashtornyi and Sultanov, Kazakhstan, 276.

³³ Olcott, Kazakhs, 11; Klyashtornyi and Sultanov, Kazakhstan, 293ff.

³⁴ Wheeler, Modern History, 32; Olcott, Kazakhs, 13.

³⁵ There is a good account of Kazakh society in Olcott, Kazakhs, 13ff.

³⁶ Olcott, Kazakhs, 14.

³⁷ McChesney, “The Chinggisid Restoration.”

³⁸ Khalid, “Nation into History,” 127.

³⁹ Golden, Central Asia in World History; and see the discussion of the different political, cultural, and religious worlds of the cities and the steppe in Geiss, Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia, Chs. 1–2.

⁴⁰ Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries, 84–85.

⁴¹ Levi and Sela, Islamic Central Asia, 220.

⁴² Bregel, “The New Uzbek States,” 405; Sela, “Prescribing the Boundaries of Knowledge,” 73.

⁴³ Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 424.

⁴⁴ Hambly, Zentralasien, 184.

⁴⁵ Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 150; Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 74–77, for a good discussion of the Silk Roads in this period.

⁴⁶ Golden, Central Asia in World History, 106.

⁴⁷ Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 425–426; Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 81.

⁴⁸ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 80.

⁴⁹ Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 155, from Haydar Mirza (1499–1551), a cousin of Babur, and author of the Tarikh-i Rashidi, a history of the Chagatayids, on whom see Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 161.

⁵⁰ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 70–71.

⁵¹ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 70–71; on the Kyrgyz, see Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 159.

⁵² Cited in Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 75.

⁵³ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 75–76.

⁵⁴ Cited from Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 85.

⁵⁵ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 78.

⁵⁶ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 22.

⁵⁷ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 6.

⁵⁸ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 12, 8.

⁵⁹ Boeck, Imperial Boundaries, 15.

⁶⁰ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 6, 23, 14.

⁶¹ Cited in Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 16.

⁶² These are described in Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 18–20.

⁶³ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 21–24.

⁶⁴ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 23.

⁶⁵ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 25: “In 1646 Sultan Ibrahim allegedly authorized Crimean raids upon Poland and Muscovy so as to requisition rowers for 100 galleys then under construction.”

⁶⁶ Davies, Warfare, State and Society, 26.

⁶⁷ Fisher, The Crimean Tatars, 16.

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