Class 11. Ottoman Retreat, Ukrainian Populism (2)
And then the history of post Mongol statehood
is the Golden Hoard breaking up into smaller units.
One of those units is Moscow, as we've discussed, right?
The Moscow state is a post Mongol state,
a post Mongol vassal state.
Another one of these states is called the Crimean Khanate.
So Khanate, K-H-A-N-A-T-E.
It's called a Khanate because the ruler is called Khan,
K-H-A-N.
So, Muscovite is a post Mongol state
as we've seen in the sense that
there were princes of Rus there
who were able to maintain power by collecting the tribute
for their Mongol overlords.
And then eventually after a couple of centuries,
they break free, and then they break out spectacularly
against other European cities and then southward
against Muslims,
and then eastward all the way to the Pacific
in a kind of spectacular moment of expansion,
which is not really our subject,
but which is very important for our subject
because it explains how the Russian Empire
is gonna be able to dominate by the 18th century.
The Crimean Khanate is a successor state in a different way.
The Crimean Khanate is ruled by princes
who are direct successors,
direct descendants of Genghis Khan,
the Princely class and the Crimean Peninsula
and the Crimean Khanate are direct successors,
by blood, at least so they claim, of Genghis Khan
and they are ruling the people.
The people who were there before are Turkic speakers
mainly, I don't think I put this on the list,
mainly from a group that we call the Cuman.
And the people who come into being as the Crimean Tatars,
who were still known as the Crimean Tatars
are a synthesis of the local Turkic speakers
plus the Mongolian ruling classes who come in later.
Okay so the Crimean Khanate has a political system,
which is interestingly not so different
from Poland, Lithuania.
They have an assembly of nobles,
which is called the (indistinct).
The Assembly of Nobles theoretically elects the Khan,
just like the Polish Lithuanian parliament
theoretically elects the king, although in both cases,
strangely, it's the same family
that gets elected again and again for a couple of centuries,
which is nice if you can work it out.
We know that the Khan who is the ruler
had a second in command who was called the (indistinct).
We know that state functions were held by nobles
from various post Mongol families.
We know that women played a public role
until about the 1560s when they disappear more or less
from the sources.
And then we also know,
and this is where things get very interesting,
that the Crimean Tatars and the Crimean Khanate
had a centuries long encounter with Lithuania,
which, if you look at your map, will begin to make sense.
If you remember in the 14th centuries
on one of your maps, on the one from Magoshi,
you can see the dates he gives for the Lithuanians
moving south into what's now Belarus, what's now Ukraine.
The Lithuanians move relentlessly south
as a result of the pressure of Teutonic Knights, right?
Remember, they move relentlessly south,
they gather in the lens of Rus, to coin a phrase.
And they also, so if you gather in the lens of Rus,
you are going to push up against the Crimean Tatars.
So the Lithuanians and the Crimean Tatars
are fighting regular wars against each other
for decades and decades and decades.
And the Lithuanians, as one does,
are also constantly trying to take advantage
of the various power struggles and succession crises
inside the Crimean Khanate,
which means that the Lithuanians are actually recruiting
dissenters, the people who lose in these power struggles.
There are also prisoners of war.
They're recruiting Crimean Tatars into their own state.
So up until now, we've talked about Lithuania
as being, oh, it's not just a little Baltic state,
look it also controls Belarus,
look, it also controls Ukraine,
look, most of the population is Orthodox.
Oh, and hey, the Lithuanian Grand Duke
married the Polish King, who was a girl.
And so Lithuania becomes a much bigger, bigger,
much bigger historical entity
than we're used to thinking about.
But I now wanna add one more dimension.
The Lithuanians had a very meaningful encounter
with the Crimean Tatars,
which meant that among other things,
inside the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,
there were lots of Muslims.
For centuries, for centuries,
there were mosques in (indistinct),
there were mosques in basically every meaningful town
in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
We've come across the city of Ostroh,
which one of the students kindly asked about,
which is the place where the first full Slavonic Bible
was printed.
When the first full Slavonic Bible was printed,
there was a mosque in Ostroh.
The famous romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz,
was born in a town called Novogrudok,
or in Belorussian, Navahrudak.
That town also had a mosque
because of the Crimean Tatars, right?
Every town that mattered in the Grand Dutch of Lithuania
had a mosque because of the Crimean Tatars.
So the point here is that for centuries,
there's an encounter between Lithuania and the Tatars
because they are at war
and because they have a common border.
And when Lithuania and Poland come together,
then Poland Lithuania, we can think about it like that,
from 1386 onward, Poland Lithuania also has durable contact
with the Crimean Tatars.
And this is a very important part
of Polish Lithuanian identity.
If you go to the Royal Museum in Warsaw,
which I recommend, and you walk into it,
you'll wonder why like you were in the first room
and suddenly there are all these scimitars with gems
and things like this, and you think, wow,
this must be like war booty that the Poles
took from their enemies.
But it's not, it's the swords they used themselves
because they synthesized what they learned
from their long encounter with the Crimean Tatars.
Okay, so the Crimean Tatars are an important state
for several hundred years.
The tragedy of the Crimean Khanate is that they fall under
Ottoman dependency at about the same time
that the Ottoman Empire itself begins to weaken.
That's it in a word.
So somewhere around 1650,
the Crimean Khanate yields to the Ottomans
in terms of setting its own policy.
There had been a kind of interaction of equals
for a couple of hundred years where the Ottomans
basically farmed out their northern foreign policy
to the Crimean Khanate
and the Crimean Khanate, you know,
decided what was going to happen with Moscow,
with the Poles, with the Lithuanians.
Around 1650, it looks like the Ottomans
are basically taking control.
And the problem with this is that it's around this time
that the Ottoman Empire becomes weak.
Okay, so let me briefly now try to do the Ottoman Empire.
From our point of view, what's crucial for the Ottomans
is the Ottoman Empire as a European power.
Of course, the Ottoman Empire also controls Northern Africa.
It also controls Arab lands.
It also controls the Near East into Persia.
But the Ottoman Empire, from our point of view
in this very brief synthesis,
we have to think of it as a European power
which is pulling back from Europe in the 17th century, okay?
That's the crucial thing.
The Ottoman Empire is gaining control
over the Crimean Khanate,
but losing control of everything else.
So you can justify thinking of the Ottoman Empire
as a European power.
The Ottomans, so the Osman family,
that's why they're called the Ottomans, the Osman family,
O-S-M-O-N, they gain control of Anatolia, today's Turkey,
for the same reason that the Lithuanians
gain control of territory north of the Black Sea.
The Osman family gains control of territory
south of the Black Sea, because the Mongols fragment
and pull back, right?
So whereas the Lithuanians rush in north of the Black Sea,
the Ottomans rush in south of the Black Sea,
and they conquer Anatolia.
The next thing they do is they conquer the Balkans.
So the Ottomans are a European power,
basically from the beginning.
They conquer other things as well,
but they're a European power from the start.
From our point of view, again, there's much else to say,
but from our point of view, the crucial struggle,
and I'm afraid this is where the geography
has to add one more dimension.
The crucial struggle is between the Ottomans
and the Hapsburgs.
The Hapsburgs, who we're gonna hear a lot about
after the exam a week from now,
the Hapsburgs are the family that rules from Vienna,
which also has a big age of exploration, age of discovery,
world empire, which we're gonna talk about.
The Ottomans are a very important land empire,
which has been boxed up in the Eastern Mediterranean
by superior navys,
and never breaks out into the wider world, right?
So the Ottomans are in this category of powers
that don't make it into this, if you want, globalization,
this age of discovery.
They're very powerful, they control an awful lot of land.
But unlike the Russian Empire, unlike, and of course,
unlike the Portuguese, the Spanish and so on,
they don't break outta the Mediterranean.
They're stuck in the Mediterranean.
So from the point of view of Istanbul,
the natural vector of expansion is northward.
And the story of the 16th and 17th centuries
is a couple of attempts to besiege and control
the Hapsburg capital, which is Vienna.
In my other class,
I spent a lot of time talking about this.
Here we can only do it very briefly,
but the crucial point is that a couple of times
the Ottomans try and fail to take Vienna.
They try and fail in 1526.
In 1526, they gain control of a lot of territory.
They gain control of the land
which is on the west side of the Black Sea, Moldavia,
Wallachia, the west side of the Black Sea.
They gain control of most of Hungary,
but they don't take Vienna.
They're gonna sit in Hungary for 150 years,
but they don't get to Vienna.
They try again in 1683.
And this is a crucial turning point for a lot of people.
1683 is the famous moment
when the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth
lifts the Ottoman siege of Vienna.
In sort of conventional histories of Europe
and how Europe is built, this is a hugely important moment
because it's counter-reformation, Catholicism,
Vienna and Warsaw together
defeating this Islamic army around Vienna.
So huge amounts of Baroque painting and symbolism
and recollection along those lines of this event.
From our point of view, this has some different resonances.
So the king of Poland, who liberates Vienna,
who raises the Ottoman siege of Vienna,
who's called Sobieski,
I probably forgot to put his name on there.
By the way, there are two sides on the term sheet today,
because that's the kind of day we're having.
Jan Sobieski is the king of Poland.
When he liberates, as Ukrainians will tell you,
so you should visit this if you're in Vienna,
which I know you all now will be,
if you're in Vienna, the little mountain
from which the Polish Lithuanian army comes down
is called the Kahlenberg.
And you can walk up it, it's a nice hike.
You can take the bus up and walk down,
if you're not that energetic, there's ice cream at the top.
Lovely views, strongly recommend.
Oh, and on the way down there are these places called
(indistinct), which have fresh wine
and like very simple food, and it's lovely.
So you should definitely all do this.
But as any Ukrainian will tell you,
when the Polish Lithuanian army comes crashing down
that mountain, they have 5,000 Ukrainian Cossacks with them,
okay?
5,000 Ukrainian Cossacks.
And then this brings us to the more interesting thing.
There was a problem, there were many interesting problems
between the Austrian command and the Polish command.
