Russia annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783
Hacı I Giray founded a Crimean Tatar khanate in 1441 that Europeans once mapped as Little Tartary. At its sixteenth-century peak it stretched from Bessarabia to the North Caucasus before Catherine's empire seized it in 1783, brushing aside the 1774 treaty that had promised non-interference.
Turkic peoples first reached Crimea with the Göktürk conquest of the sixth century, and Cumans, or Kipchaks, followed in the eleventh. From 1239 the Golden Horde ran the peninsula as a province from the town of Qırım, now Staryi Krym, whose name spread to the whole peninsula. Horde rule was harsh; in 1299 Nogai's punitive campaign wrecked several towns. In 1303 the Codex Cumanicus was compiled there, the oldest surviving text in what became the Crimean Tatar language.
Local clans eventually wanted their own state and invited Hacı Giray, a descendant of Genghis Khan living in exile in Lithuania, to lead them. Lithuania's grand duke Vytautas had earlier sheltered many Tatars and Karaites, whose descendants still live in Lithuania and Belarus. Hacı Giray fought the Horde from 1420 to 1441, beat off internal rivals, took the throne in 1449 and moved his capital to Qırq Yer beside today's Bahçeseray. Genoa kept the southern coastal ports. Later sources credit Canike, daughter of Tokhtamysh, with backing his rise.
The khans presented themselves as the Golden Horde's legal heirs, and their formal title claimed the Great Horde, the Crimean throne, the Nogai, the mountain Circassians and all the Tatars. Mehmed Giray went further, calling himself great khan of all the Mongols, winning recognition from Moscow's Vasili III and briefly uniting the Crimean, Kazan and Astrakhan khanates. At its height the state reached from the Danube-Dnieper lands to the Azov coast and much of today's Krasnodar region, though Cossack raids kept its frontiers shifting.
Subjects simply called it Qırım yurtu, the Crimean country, while English writers spoke of Crim and Kuban Tartary. When Russia swallowed it in 1783, France alone among European powers protested openly, loyal to its old Ottoman alliance.
Source: Crimean Khanate
