Ottomans in Crimea

I have details about this in my new book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. It was settled by Russians, not Ukrainians, and Putin’s annexation was in accord with the reality that most of the people there are Russians and have been Russians for many centuries. “Coming to Some Reality on Crimea,” by Michael Finch, American Greatness, July 16, 2018: That is the status of Crimea. It’s non negotiable for Russia. Going into this summit, it behooves everyone to understand what is at stake in terms of Crimea. First some history.

The Crimean Peninsula juts out from the bottom of Ukraine into the north shore of the Black Sea. Its critical position in the Black Sea has made it a battle ground and prized possession for Empires over three millennium. It has been colonized by Greeks, Persians, Romans, Goths, Slavs, and Steppe nomads from the Mongols and Tartars. In the mid 15th Century, Crimea became a northern outpost of the Muslim Ottoman Empire and would remain in Ottoman control for over 400 years.

The Ottomans used the Crimean Peninsula as a launch pad for raids far into Ukraine and Russia. It is estimated that well over 2 million Slavs (Ukrainians and Russians) were taken as slaves between 1500 and 1700 and sent to modern day Turkey. In fact the word “slave” traces back to the Greek word for Slav. To put some perspective on this, it is estimated that just under 400,000 black slaves were shipped from Africa to the Colonies in North America and later the independent United States. The Islamic Caliphate’s hold at the southern reaches of the Russian Empire was an existential threat, literally so for millions of Slavs.

By 1700 however, the Ottoman Empire was starting a long period of decline, while the Russian Empire, first under the reign of Peter the Great, and then under Catherine the Great, were in the ascendancy. Peter the Great in the early 18th Century had secured, through a war with Sweden, a port on the Baltic Sea, what was to become St. Petersburg. Russia however, desperately desired a warm water port. They looked South, where they had been war, on and off for centuries, against the raiding Mongol and Tartar hordes as well as the Ottoman Sultanate.

Constantinople, the great seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, from which Russian Orthodoxy had sprung, fell in 1453 to the Ottomans. It had been a dream of Christians everywhere to return Constantinople to the Christian fold and  that feeling was no more passionately held than in Russia. Moscow became the “Third Rome.” :