The Crimea and the Last Khan

1784, Bakhchisaray

The previous article left Igelström on the eve of his real career. The war with the Ottomans had ended in 1774 with the Peace of Küçük Kaynarca, which on paper declared the Crimean Khanate independent of Constantinople, and in that war the Baltic baron had learned the craft of governing: not merely to take, but to order what has been taken. Now there awaited him the assignment in which he would apply that craft for the first time on a large scale, and in which he would test the method that he would later, in Ufa, raise into an institution. The assignment lay in the south, on a peninsula that for three centuries had been the heart of a Muslim people, and it bore the name of a man: Şahin Giray, the last khan of the Crimea.

This article tells how an old khanate vanished and how a new kind of rule took its place. It is the power story of this period at its barest, without the wrapping of printed Qur’ans or spiritual assemblies that the following articles will bring. Here the mirror is not yet smiling; here it first shows its teeth. But it was precisely in this naked exercise of power that Igelström learned something he would remember, something that made the later gentleness possible: that one need not break a people in order to possess it, and that fitting its institutions into place is more durable than destroying them. The conquest of the Crimea was thereby not only the end of an old khanate, but also the school in which the administrator tested the method he would elevate into an institution. Whoever wishes to understand how the apparatus of Ufa could arise must first see how its designer learned the craft in the Crimea, and for that reason this story of the last khan is at the same time the story of the first step toward state-directed Islam.

The Khanate and the Caliph

To understand what was lost in the Crimea in the 1780s, one must know what the Crimea had been. The Crimean Khanate was one of the last heirs of the Golden Horde, the great Mongol and Turkic empire that for centuries had ruled the steppes of Eastern Europe. When the Horde fell apart, there remained on the peninsula by the Black Sea a khanate governed by the house of Giray, a dynasty that traced its descent back to Genghis Khan and that could rightly regard itself as one of the oldest and most distinguished ruling houses of the Muslim world.

The khanate was no marginal phenomenon in the history of Eastern Europe but a power that had to be reckoned with for centuries. From the steppe the Crimean Tatars carried out their raids deep into the Polish and Russian lands, and the captives they carried off fed a slave trade that made the ports of the Black Sea into centers of wealth. More than once the khans had exacted tribute from the Russian princes; as late as the sixteenth century they had set Moscow itself ablaze. That a power which for centuries had been the terror of the Russian cities became, within the span of a single lifetime, a province of that same Russia, is one of the great upheavals of early modern history, and contemporaries were keenly aware of it. The fall of the Crimea was not the demise of some insignificant principality; it was the end of a world that had lasted for centuries.

The khanate was Islamic to its very roots. Bakhchisaray, the capital, was a city of mosques and madrasas, with a palace whose fountains and courtyards mirrored the refinement of Islamic architecture. The Crimean Tatars had been Muslims for centuries, and their faith was not a thin layer over an older culture but the fabric of their society itself. Their administration of justice, their education, their calendar, their festivals, their sense of honor and community: all of this was suffused with Islam as it had taken shape in the Turkic world.

The prestige of the house of Giray was unsurpassed in the world of the steppe. Only one who descended from Genghis Khan could rightly bear the title of khan in that world, and the Giray could; they belonged to the few dynasties that carried the blood of the great conqueror within them, and that made their standing greater than their actual power. In the order of rank of the Muslim princes tributary to the Ottoman sultan, the Crimean khans held a special place: it was said that, should the house of Osman ever die out, the house of Giray possessed the claim to the succession. Thus the khanate bound together the world of the old steppe, the world of the Horde and the nomadic warriors, with the world of settled Islam, the world of the mosque and the madrasa and the caliph.

And the khanate did not stand alone. Since the fifteenth century, since the year 1475, it had been a vassal and ally of the Ottoman Empire, and the sultan in Constantinople was not merely an ally: he was the caliph, the bearer of the highest religious authority in the Sunni world, the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. For the Crimean Tatars the bond with the Ottoman caliph meant that they were part of the great community of the believers, the umma, which the Prophet ﷺ had founded and which transcended the borders of every single empire. They were no isolated little people at the edge of the world; they were a link in a chain that reached from the steppe to the Ka’bah.

This bond with the caliph was precisely what the Peace of Küçük Kaynarca severed in 1774, and it is worth seeing how cunningly that operation was carried out. The treaty did not declare the Crimea a Russian possession; that would have been too open, too naked a robbery. It declared the Crimea an independent state, detached from the Ottoman sultan. In name this was a gift of freedom: the Crimean Tatars were liberated from their subjection to Constantinople. In reality it was the removal of the only protector that could have shielded them from Russia. A khanate under the protection of the caliph was a khanate that Russia could not simply annex without turning the whole Islamic world against itself. An independent khanate, by contrast, was a fruit that only remained to be plucked. The sultan retained in the treaty a shadow of spiritual authority over the Crimean Tatars as caliph, but the political walls had been razed, and behind those walls Russia stood waiting.

The Deposed Reformer

On the throne of this weakened khanate sat a remarkable man. Şahin Giray, born in 1745 at Edirne, was no ordinary steppe prince. He had enjoyed a Western upbringing, had studied in Venice, spoke, besides Crimean Tatar and Ottoman Turkish, also Italian and Greek, and he bore the ambition of a reformer. When he became khan, he wished to make of his khanate a modern state after the example he had seen in Europe. He wanted to reform the administration, to equalize taxation, to reorganize the army along new lines, and he even considered enrolling the religious minorities of the peninsula in the army and moving the capital from Bakhchisaray to Caffa.

There is something moving about the figure of Şahin Giray, and it is worth not judging him too hastily. He was, in his own way, a mirror image of Catherine herself: a ruler of the Enlightenment, an admirer of the European example, a prince who believed that one could reform a society from above according to the demands of reason. What the empress did for her vast empire, the khan wished to do for his small peninsula. But what power permitted to Catherine, powerlessness denied to Şahin Giray. She could reform because she was strong; he weakened himself by reforming because he was weak. And the tragedy was completed by the fact that the same empress who might have admired him as a reformer used him as an instrument and discarded him as a burden. The Enlightenment that made the one into the Great made the other into the last, and the difference lay not in their insight but in their power.

The tragedy of Şahin Giray is that his reforms made him not stronger but weaker. His plans aroused the resistance of the nobility and of the clergy, who saw in his innovations a threat to the old order on which their authority rested. In 1777 a revolt broke out against him, and he could hold on to his throne only with Russian military aid, which restored him in 1778. With that the fate of the khanate was sealed, for a khan who remains upright only through foreign bayonets is no longer a ruler but a hostage. Şahin Giray thought to use Russia to force through his reforms; in reality Russia used him to ripen the khanate for its fall. His drive to modernize, which in a free state could have been a blessing, became in an encircled state the crowbar with which its own foundations were pried loose.

Here lies a painful lesson that this theme must not pass over in silence, and it cuts in two directions. Şahin Giray was in many respects a man ahead of his time, a Muslim prince who embraced modernity, and one would be inclined to sympathize with him against the conservative forces that opposed him. But his tragedy also shows that reform imposed from above and against the community, and resting upon foreign power, does not strengthen the community but uproots it. The clergy and the nobility who opposed him were not merely reactionary; they also defended an order that the people recognized as their own, against a prince who leaned ever more heavily on foreign support. Once that foreign support was inside, it stayed, and it stayed not for the khan but for itself.

The Captive Khan

The civil war and the persistent unrest in the Crimea gave Catherine the pretext she sought. At court the driving force behind the annexation was Prince Grigory Potemkin, the most powerful man in Catherine’s circle, who at the end of 1782 put it to her that the acquisition of the Crimea would bring the empire peace and quiet, and who took the act of conquest itself upon himself. On 8 April 1783, by the old Russian calendar, the empress signed the manifesto that added the peninsula, together with Taman and the Kuban, to her empire and made of it the new province of Tauris, with Potemkin as its administrator; for that service he would bear the honorific title that referred to the annexed land. Thus the khanate that had existed for three centuries became, with a stroke of the pen, a Russian province.

Şahin Giray had already been dethroned in that same year, and the last khan of the Crimea consented to the annexation of his own realm; it was the final humiliation of a man who had dreamed of renewal and who ended as the signatory of the abolition of his own throne. Generations of the Giray, the inheritance of the Golden Horde, three centuries of an Islamic state on the Black Sea, were absorbed into the empire of the tsarina.

The manifesto of 1783 contained a promise that is of the greatest importance for this theme, for it is the false mirror in a single sentence. The empress promised that the Crimean Tatars would be made equal to her native subjects, and that their persons, their property, their houses of worship, and their ancestral faith would be protected and defended. Let those words be read well, for they are sincere and calculated at once. Sincere, because they were no empty promise: the mosques were indeed not demolished, the faith was indeed not persecuted, and after the two centuries of Kazan that was a genuine reversal. Calculated, because the protection of the faith here sprang not from reverence for the faith but from the wish to keep the new subjects quiet. The empire promised to protect Islam in the same breath in which it abolished the Islamic state. It took the khanate and it spared the mosque, and it did both for the same reason: the durability of its rule.

It was in the following year, in 1784, that Igelström held command over the Russian troops on the peninsula and took the last khan prisoner. Şahin Giray, who had thought that his collaboration with Russia would secure him a place, discovered that for the empire a deposed prince is no longer an ally but a risk. For four years he was held by the Russians. Repeatedly he addressed pleas to Catherine to set him free, the entreaties of a man who had helped tear down his own throne and who now discovered that the demolishers had left no place for the owner.

There is in the captivity of Şahin Giray a painful logic that reveals the nature of power. As long as he sat on his throne, he was useful, for his consent lent the annexation a semblance of legitimacy; a khan who handed over his own realm was worth more than a realm one simply conquered. But as soon as the transfer was accomplished, his value turned into a danger. A living khan, even a discarded one, was a name around which the discontented could rally, a possible focal point of resistance, a reminder of the state that no longer existed. The empire had no further interest in him; it had an interest only in his harmlessness. And so the man who had believed himself a partner of Russia discovered that he had never been a partner but an instrument, and that an instrument is laid aside as soon as it has done its service.

The end of his story is as bitter as the rest. In 1787 the empress finally let him go. Şahin Giray traveled to Ottoman territory, to Edirne, the city of his birth, in the hope of finding refuge with the sultan. But the sultan saw in him no persecuted fellow believer; he saw a traitor who had handed over his khanate to the infidels, and a possible rival besides. Şahin Giray was arrested, taken to the island of Rhodes, and there in that same year executed by order of the sultan. Thus ended the last khan of the Crimea: cast out by the power that had taken his realm and killed by the power that should have protected it, caught between two dominions that both had no place for him.

It is tempting to put a conversation into the mouth of Şahin Giray, a last exchange of words with the baron who took him prisoner or with the empress who first held him and then released him. But the sources give no such words, and this theme places no words into the mouth of a tragic figure merely to enliven the narrative. What we know is enough, and it speaks for itself: a man who embraced modernity, who wished to renew his people, and who ended as the prisoner of the one and the victim of the other. His death is the epitaph of the Crimean Khanate, and it is at the same time a warning about the nature of the freedom that the treaty of 1774 had promised. The “independence” that the Crimea received in that year ended in the annexation of the peninsula and the execution of its last khan. So much was that freedom worth. It is a lesson that this theme faces again and again: that the freedom which a great power grants to a small community is all too often the freedom to be annexed, and that a gift from the hand of one who holds power must be weighed by what the giver gains from it and not by what it seems at first sight to offer.

Fitting In Instead of Breaking

Now comes the part of this story that is most essential for the theme, for it concerns not the fall of the khanate but what Russia did afterward. One would expect that the annexation of the Crimea was accompanied by the old method, the method of Kazan: demolishing mosques, persecuting the clergy, pressuring the population to convert. That, after all, was how the empire had dealt with conquered Muslims for two centuries. But that did not happen, and that it did not happen is the sign that something had changed in the way Russia intended to govern its Muslims.

The mosques of the Crimea remained standing. The Islamic clergy were not persecuted but, where possible, fitted in: recognized, sometimes taken onto the payroll, incorporated into the administrative order of the empire instead of driven out of it. The Islamic administration of justice, the education, the customs of the Crimean Tatars were largely left in peace, as long as they did not challenge Russian authority. Instead of destroying the institutions of the khanate, the empire took them over, as one takes over a building instead of demolishing it: one changes the owner and leaves the walls standing. This was, according to the historian Robert Crews who has described this history, the core of the new method, and Igelström was one of the foremost architects of the administrative incorporation of the khanate.

This method moreover had a prehistory and an instrument upon which it could build. Even before the fall of the Crimea the empire had discovered that the Tatar Muslims of the Volga, with their learning and their trading networks, could be useful intermediaries in dealing with the other Muslim peoples of the empire. It was easier to reach a Kazakh nomad or a Crimean Tatar through a Tatar scholar who shared his language and his faith than through a Russian official who knew neither. Thus one Muslim community was employed to govern another, and the scholar ﵀ who had acquired his knowledge in order to serve his community became a link in the administrative chain of the empire. In the Crimea this pattern was applied and refined, and it would, as we shall see, become the core of the apparatus that Igelström built in Ufa: not to oppress the Muslim with foreign power, but to govern him with the help of his own scholars, who came to stand on the payroll of the empire.

One must be honest about what this meant for the ordinary Muslim of the Crimea, and the honesty cuts in two directions here too. For the Crimean Tatar who remembered his great-grandfathers’ stories of Kazan, of the demolished mosques and the forced baptisms, the gentleness of the Russian annexation must have seemed a relief. His mosque remained standing; his imam was not persecuted; he could go on praying and fasting and having his children learn the Qur’an. Compared with what had befallen the Muslims of the Volga two centuries earlier, this was a mild occupation. And yet, and here lies the core that bears this whole theme, it was an occupation, and its gentleness was no gentleness of reverence but of calculation.

For why did the empire leave the mosques standing and take the imams onto the payroll? Not because it had come to love Islam, and not because it had repented of the cruelties of Konashevich. It left the mosques standing because a mosque that stands is governable, and a mosque that has been demolished becomes a source of hatred. It took the imams onto the payroll because an imam on a salary is an imam who is dependent on the empire, and a dependent imam is an imam who thinks twice before he preaches against the empire. What looked like reverence for Islam was in reality the discovery that one can govern Islam better by wrapping it up than by breaking it. The iron fist of Konashevich had failed; the velvet glove of Igelström would succeed.

The Melancholy of a Vanished World

Behind the sober language of manifestos and annexations there lurks a loss that the sober language does not capture, and it is good to pause over it for a moment before we go on, for a history that counts only the relations of power and does not see the world that vanishes along with them is a half history. What perished in the Crimea was not merely a state but a civilization in miniature: a language and poetry of its own, an architectural style of its own to which the palace of Bakhchisaray with its gardens and its fountain bears witness to this day, an age-old network of mosques and madrasas, a scholarly tradition ﵀ that bound the Crimea to the great schools of the Muslim world, a way of life that had carried the community through three centuries. All of that was not destroyed at a single stroke, for the mosques remained standing, but it was robbed of its heart. A mosque without the state whose house of worship it was is still a mosque, but it stands differently in the world; it is no longer the heart of a community that governs itself, but a tolerated place within the empire of another.

In the years after the annexation there began, moreover, the slow exodus that would depopulate the Crimea of many of its Tatars. For countless Muslim families life under a Christian ruler, however mild the occupation, was unbearable, and they preferred the hijra, the exodus to the land of the caliph, to remaining in a lost homeland. They crossed the sea to the Ottoman lands, and they left behind the villages and the fields where their forefathers lay buried. This silent exodus, which would stretch across generations, is the human face of what in the manifestos was called an annexation. The khanate vanished not only from the map; it vanished also from the hearts that could not bear to outlive it, and that preferred to leave everything behind rather than remain in a land that was no longer their own.

This loss is the undercurrent of this whole article, and it may not be reasoned away by the observation that the Russian occupation was milder than the campaigns of Kazan. Milder, yes. But milder is not the same as good, and a gentle hand that deprives a people of its self-rule remains a hand that takes. The melancholy of the Crimea is the melancholy of every community that loses its freedom to a power that smiles while it takes, and that assures the one it has taken from that everything stays as it was, while in reality the deepest thing has changed: who has the last word over how one lives and believes.

What the Crimea Foretold

When Igelström left the Crimea behind him, he took with him a lesson that would determine the rest of his career and that, along the long road of history, would issue into the policy that a century later, in an entirely different part of the world, would bear the name of an entirely different man. The lesson was simple and ominous in its reasonableness: one possesses a Muslim people not by destroying its faith but by organizing its faith. Let the mosque stand, but determine who preaches in it. Let the imam keep his office, but see to it that he receives his salary from your hand. Leave the prayer free, but draw the line where the prayer becomes politics, and draw that line yourself.

One cannot stress enough the slyness of this method, for it turns the logic of oppression inside out and thereby makes it invisible. The old oppression was visible: the demolished mosque, the forced baptism, the massacred village. Everyone could see what was happening, and everyone could hate it, and that hatred became the fuel of the resistance. The new mastery was invisible, for it wore the face of the benefaction. The mosque that remained standing evoked not hatred but gratitude. The imam who received his salary felt himself not persecuted but privileged. And so the fuel of the resistance disappeared, not because the grip grew looser but because the grip looked friendlier. A people rises up against a hand that strikes it; it rarely rises up against a hand that feeds it, even though it is the same hand and serves the same end. This is the deepest discovery of Russian statecraft in this century, and it is the discovery that this theme calls the false mirror: that one can bind a people more firmly with a benefaction than with a wound.

In the Crimea this method was still rough and improvised, a matter of practical incorporation without an elaborated doctrine behind it. But Igelström would be given the chance to refine it, and the chance lay ready. In that same year, 1784, on the recommendation of Prince Potemkin he was appointed by Catherine governor-general of Simbirsk and Ufa, the great governorates on the eastern frontier of the empire where the Volga passes over into the steppe and where hundreds of thousands of Tatars and Bashkirs dwelt. There, in the heart of the Muslim land that for two centuries had been the victim of coercion, he would build the instrument that would make the gentle method of the Crimea into a lasting institution.

It is this lesson, learned in the Crimea and refined in Ufa, that casts the long shadow under which this whole theme stands. For what Igelström discovered in the snow of the south is in essence the same thought that a century later, on the other side of the world, would become the doctrine that bears the name of Snouck Hurgronje: that one masters Islam best by sparing its religious core and reining in its political force, that one leaves the Muslim free in his prayer so that he shall be bound in his obedience. In Batavia that thought would be called the Islam Policy and would be underpinned with the learning of an orientalist. In St. Petersburg and Ufa it bore as yet no name and had as yet no doctrine; it was merely the practical wisdom of an administrator who had learned that the velvet glove reaches further than the iron fist. But it is the same hand, and it is the same grip, and the reader who has followed this theme from the beginning recognizes it.

The annexation of the Crimea had only enlarged the problem. Catherine now had millions of new Muslim subjects, and beyond the Crimea and beyond the Volga stretched the steppes with their nomadic peoples who still had to be bound to the empire. The question was no longer whether Islam would be governed; that question had been answered in the Crimea. The question was how, and on what scale, and with what apparatus. Before Igelström would build that apparatus, however, the empress made a gesture that laid bare the nature of her tolerance as no decree could: she had the Qur’an printed, at state expense, in her own capital. To that gesture, and to what it means when an empire prints the holy book of a faith it does not profess, the next article turns.

Sources

• Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Harvard University Press (2006)
• Alan W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars, Hoover Institution Press (1978)
• Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II”, Slavic Review 27/4 (1968)
• Adeeb Khalid, “Tolerating Islam”, London Review of Books 29/10 (2007)
• Museum-digital, biographical entry “Iosif Igelström (1737–1823)”