Polish Slaves and Captives in the Crimea in the Seventeenth Century

The Crimean Tatars often carried out predatory raids into Polish territory. Sometimes they did this together with the Ottoman army or Zaporozhian Cossacks. The Polish government paid a high annual tribute to the Tatars to prevent their raids. Despite these efforts, the early modern Crimea was full of slaves from Poland. Not all of these, however, were of Polish ethnicity: among the enslaved inhabitants of Poland were also the Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Lithuanians, Jews, and Armenians. According to the account of the Dominican friar Francesco Piscopo (the 1660s) Polish was second in importance language of the Crimea after Ottoman Turkish (Turc...