(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The Moldavian imbroglio was, in turn, overshadowed by the far more fraught relationship with the Tatars of the Crimea. During the fifteenth century, the old Mongol realm of the Golden Horde had broken up into separate Khanates based in the Crimea and around the lower Volga. The Jagiellonians, as Grand Dukes of Lithuania, generally sought good relations with these Mongol groupings and tried as far as possible to manoeuvre them, when they were not fighting one another, against an increasingly powerful Moscow. After the Crimean submission to Ottoman overlordship in 1475, the Sultans had only a limited interest in restraining Tatar raids. If nothing else, they were a constant reminder to friend and foe alike of how great the Ottoman Porte’s reach could be. Plunder, primarily the seizure of captives for sale in the slave markets of Kaffa and Constantinople, was the mainstay of the Tatar economy. The damage their expeditions wreaked was far greater than anything that Turkey’s other unruly vassals, the Barbary pirates, inflicted on the coastlines of Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, Tatar incursions depopulated huge swathes of Lithuania’s Rus’ territories. In 1482, they sacked and burned much of Kiev. In 1505, they reached the outskirts of Vilnius. In 149°, they plunged deep into Poland itself, to within a few miles of Lublin. A decade later, they threatened Warsaw, capital of Masovia. One of the reasons why Poland was unable to give Moldavia more help was because of the constant need to divert forces against these intruders. Mobile and extremely hardy, the Tatars were an almost impossible foe to pin down, except after they had done their worst, as they returned home with their booty and their captives. Polish and Lithuanian forces won individual victories, but were unable to staunch the blizzard of raids. During the 1480s and 1490s, Lithuania lost its always tenuous control over the northern shores of the Black Sea. The devastation the Tatars wreaked in the last decades of the fifteenth century put an end to settlement and colonization efforts on the east bank of the Dnieper for two generations. Khan Mengli Gerei himself acknowledged that these lands along the borders, this ‘Ukraine’, had been turned into an empty wasteland. The only way in which the raids could be restricted was by the payment of ‘gifts’ - protection money - to the Crimean Khans, although even they admitted that they could not control the freebooting of many of their own subjects.

If, in Sigisnrund II’s reign, the intensity of Tatar raids into Polish and Lithuanian territory diminished, this owed much to the improved state of garrisons and fortifications in the Ukrainian lands and to the establishment of ‘cossacks’ - runaways, petty (and some not so petty) nobles, adventurers, or those who just wished to be free - on the fringes of more populated areas. The word ‘cossack’, of Turkic origin, meant, appropriately, both ‘watcher’ and ‘brigand’. Patronized by the kings and grand dukes and their officials, cossacks were a kind of Christian counterweight to the Tatars, giving as good as they got, raiding deep into Tatar territory and the Crimea itself. They were a volatile force, controllable (if at all) only by those who held their respect - the well-born, the ruthless and the daring, who cared as little for the commands of their own rulers as for the truces periodically negotiated between Poland, Lithuania, the Crimea and the Porte. Cossack activity did much to deter Crimean raids (and to strain relations with Constantinople). Probably an even more important factor in toning down Tatar raids was the appreciation by the Khans of the growing power of Moscow, especially in the wake of Ivan IV’s subjugation of Kazan and Astrakhan in T552 and 1556. Provided the kings of Poland remained ready to furnish them with generous gifts, the Crimean Mongols preferred to raid the territories of Moscow, rather than of Poland and Lithuania, whose further weakening could only encourage Muscovite expansion southwards, towards their own lands.