How the peninsula was annexed to the Russian Empire under Catherine II
"Like a Crimean tsar will come to our land …"
The first raid of the Crimean Tatars for slaves on the lands of Muscovite Rus took place in 1507. Prior to that, the lands of Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate divided the Russian and Ukrainian territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, so Muscovites and Krymchaks even sometimes united against the Litvinians, who dominated the entire 15th century in Eastern Europe.
In 1511-1512, the "Crimeans", as the Russian chronicles called them, twice ravaged the Ryazan land, and the next year the Bryansk one. Two years later, there were two new devastations of the environs of Kasimov and Ryazan, with a massive withdrawal of the population into slavery. In 1517 - a raid on Tula, and in 1521 - the first Tatars raid on Moscow, devastating the surrounding area and taking many thousands into slavery. Six years later - the next big foray into Moscow. The crown of the Crimean raids on Russia was in 1571, when Khan Girey burned Moscow, plundered more than 30 Russian cities and took about 60 thousand people into slavery.
As one of the Russian chroniclers wrote: "Vesi, father, this very misfortune is upon us, as the Crimean tsar came to our land, to the river Oka on the bank, many hordes with themselves are mingled." In the summer of 1572, 50 kilometers south of Moscow, a fierce battle at Molody went on for four days - one of the largest battles in the history of Moscow Russia, when the Russian army with great difficulty defeated the army of Crimea.
During the Time of Troubles, the Crimeans made major raids on the Russian lands almost every year, they continued throughout the 17th century. For example, in 1659 Crimean Tatars near Yelets, Kursk, Voronezh and Tula burned 4,674 houses and drove 25,448 people into slavery.
By the end of the 17th century, the confrontation was shifting to the south of Ukraine, closer to the Crimea. For the first time, Russian armies are trying to attack directly the peninsula itself, which for almost two centuries, since the time of the Lithuanian raids on the Crimea, did not know foreign invasions and was a reliable refuge for slave traders. However, the 18th century is not complete without the raids of the Tatars. For example, in 1713, the Crimeans robbed the Kazan and Voronezh provinces, and the next year the neighborhood of Tsaritsyn. A year later - Tambov.
It is significant that the last raid with the mass withdrawal of people into slavery took place just fourteen years before the annexation of Crimea to Russia - the Crimean Tatar "horde" in 1769 devastated the Slavic settlements between modern Kirovograd and Kherson.
The Tatar population of Crimea actually lived by subsistence agriculture, professed Islam and was not taxed. The economy of the Crimean Khanate for several centuries consisted of taxes collected from the non-Tatar population of the peninsula - the trade and handicraft population of the Khanate consisted exclusively of Greeks, Armenians and Karaites. But the main source of super profits for the Crimean nobility was the "raid economy" - the capture of slaves in Eastern Europe and their resale to the Mediterranean regions. As a Turkish official explained to a Russian diplomat in the middle of the 18th century: “There are more than a hundred thousand Tatars who have neither agriculture nor trade: if they do not make raids, then what will they live on?”
Tatar Kafa - modern Feodosia - was one of the largest slave markets of that time. For four centuries, from several thousand to - after the most "successful" raids - several tens of thousands of people were sold here annually as a living commodity.
Crimean Tatars will never be useful subjects
Russia launched a counteroffensive at the end of the 17th century, when the first Crimean campaigns of Prince Golitsyn followed. The archers with the Cossacks reached the Crimea on the second attempt, but did not overcome Perekop. For the first time, the Russians took revenge for the burning of Moscow only in 1736, when the troops of Field Marshal Minich broke through Perekop and captured Bakhchisarai. But then the Russians could not stay in Crimea due to epidemics and opposition from Turkey.
“A notch line. Southern frontier Maximilian Presnyakov.
By the beginning of the reign of Catherine II, the Crimean Khanate posed no military threat, but remained a problematic neighbor as an autonomous part of the powerful Ottoman Empire. It is no coincidence that the first report on Crimea issues for Catherine was prepared exactly one week after she ascended the throne as a result of a successful coup.
On July 6, 1762, Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov presented a report “On Little Tartary”. The following was said about the Crimean Tatars: "They are very prone to kidnapping and atrocities … they attacked Russia with sensitive harm and insults with frequent raids, capturing many thousands of residents, driving away livestock and robbery." And the key importance of Crimea was emphasized: “The peninsula is so important by its location that it can really be considered the key of Russian and Turkish possessions; as long as he remains in Turkish citizenship, he will always be terrible for Russia."
Discussion of the Crimean issue continued at the height of the Russian-Turkish war of 1768-1774. Then the de facto government of the Russian Empire was the so-called Council at the highest court. On March 15, 1770, at a meeting of the Council, the issue of the annexation of the Crimea was considered. Companions of Empress Catherine judged that "the Crimean Tatars, by their property and position, will never be useful subjects", moreover, "no decent taxes can be collected from them."
But the Council ultimately made the cautious decision not to annex Crimea to Russia, but to try to isolate it from Turkey. "By such an immediate citizenship, Russia will incite against itself a general and not unfounded envy and suspicion of the unlimited intention of multiplying its regions," the Council's decision on a possible international reaction said.
The main ally of Turkey was France - it was her actions that were feared in St. Petersburg.
In her letter to General Pyotr Panin on April 2, 1770, Empress Catherine summed up: “There is absolutely no intention of having this peninsula and the Tatar hordes belonging to it in our citizenship, but it is desirable only that they be torn away from Turkish citizenship and remain forever independent … Tatars will never be useful to our empire."
In addition to the independence of Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, Catherine's government planned to get the Crimean Khan to agree to grant Russia the right to have military bases in Crimea. At the same time, the government of Catherine II took into account such a subtlety that all the main fortresses and the best harbors on the southern coast of the Crimea belonged not to the Tatars, but to the Turks - and in which case the Tatars were not too sorry to give the Turkish possessions to the Russians.
For a year, Russian diplomats tried to convince the Crimean Khan and his divan (government) to declare independence from Istanbul. During the negotiations, the Tatars tried not to say yes or no. As a result, at a meeting on November 11, 1770, the Imperial Council in St. Petersburg made a decision "to impose strong pressure on the Crimea, if the Tatars living on this peninsula still remain stubborn and do not stick to those who had already deposited from the Ottoman Port".
Fulfilling this decision of St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1771, troops under the command of Prince Dolgorukov entered the Crimea and inflicted two defeats on the troops of Khan Selim III.
Regarding the occupation of Kafa (Feodosia) and the termination of the largest slave market in Europe, Catherine II wrote to Voltaire in Paris on July 22, 1771: "If we took Kafa, the costs of the war are covered." Regarding the policy of the French government, which actively supported the Turks and Polish rebels who fought with Russia, Catherine in a letter to Voltaire deigned to joke all over Europe: “Constantinople grieves very much about the loss of Crimea. We ought to send them a comic opera to dispel their sadness, and a puppet comedy to the Polish rebels; it would be more useful to them than the large number of officers that France sends to them."
"The most amiable Tatar"
In these conditions, the nobility of the Crimean Tatars preferred to temporarily forget about the Turkish patrons and quickly make peace with the Russians. On June 25, 1771, a meeting of the beys, local officials and clergy signed a preliminary act on the obligation to declare the khanate independent from Turkey, as well as to enter into an alliance with Russia, electing the descendants of Genghis Khan, loyal to Russia, as the khan and kalga (khan's heir-deputy), loyal to Russia. Gireya and Shagin-Gireya. The former khan fled to Turkey.
In the summer of 1772, peace negotiations began with the Ottomans, at which Russia demanded to recognize the independence of the Crimean Khanate. As an objection, the Turkish representatives spoke in the spirit that, having gained independence, the Tatars would start "doing stupid things."
"View of Sevastopol from the side of the northern forts" Carlo Bossoli
The Tatar government in Bakhchisarai tried to evade signing an agreement with Russia, awaiting the outcome of the negotiations between the Russians and the Turks. At this time, an embassy headed by Kalga Shagin-Girey arrived in St. Petersburg from the Crimea.
The young prince was born in Turkey, but managed to travel around Europe, knew Italian and Greek. The Empress liked the representative of the Khan's Crimea. Catherine II described him in a very feminine way in a letter to one of her friends: “We have here the Kalga Sultan, a clan of the Crimean Dauphin. This, I think, is the most amiable Tatar one can find: he is handsome, intelligent, more educated than these people generally are; writes poems; he is only 25 years old; he wants to see and know everything; everyone loved him."
In St. Petersburg, a descendant of Genghis Khan continued and deepened his passion for contemporary European art and theater, but this did not strengthen his popularity among the Crimean Tatars.
By the fall of 1772, the Russians managed to crush Bakhchisarai, and on November 1, an agreement was signed between the Russian Empire and the Crimean Khanate. It recognized the independence of the Crimean Khan, his election without any participation of third countries, and also assigned to Russia the cities of Kerch and Yenikale with their harbors and adjacent lands.
However, the Imperial Council in St. Petersburg experienced some confusion when Vice-Admiral Aleksey Senyavin, who successfully commanded the Azov and Black Sea fleets, arrived at its meeting. He explained that neither Kerch nor Yenikale are convenient bases for the fleet and new ships cannot be built there. The best place for the base of the Russian fleet, according to Senyavin, was Akhtiarskaya harbor, now we know it as the harbor of Sevastopol.
Although the agreement with the Crimea had already been concluded, but fortunately for St. Petersburg, the main agreement with the Turks had yet to be signed. And Russian diplomats hastened to include new requirements for new ports in Crimea.
As a result, some concessions had to be made to the Turks, and in the text of the Kucuk-Kaynardzhi peace treaty of 1774, in the clause on the independence of the Tatars, the provision on the religious supremacy of Istanbul over the Crimea was nevertheless fixed - a demand that was persistently put forward by the Turkish side.
For the still medieval society of the Crimean Tatars, religious supremacy was weakly separated from the administrative one. The Turks considered this clause of the treaty as a convenient tool for keeping Crimea in the orbit of their policy. Under these conditions, Catherine II seriously thought about the elevation of the pro-Russian-minded Kalga Shagin-Girey to the Crimean throne.
However, the Imperial Council preferred to be careful and decided that "by this change we could violate our agreements with the Tatars and give the Turks an excuse to take them back to their side." Khan remained Sahib-Girey, the elder brother of Shagin-Girey, who was ready to alternately hesitate between Russia and Turkey, depending on the circumstances.
At that moment, the Turks were brewing a war with Austria, and in Istanbul they rushed not only to ratify the peace treaty with Russia, but also, in accordance with his demands, to recognize the Crimean Khan elected under pressure from the Russian troops.
As provided by the Kuchuk-Kainardzhi treaty, the sultan sent his caliph blessing to Sahib-Girey. However, the arrival of the Turkish delegation, the purpose of which was to hand over to the khan the Sultan's "firman", confirmation of his rule, produced the opposite effect in the Crimean society. The Tatars took the arrival of the Turkish ambassadors for another attempt by Istanbul to return Crimea to its usual rule. As a result, the Tatar nobility forced Sahib-Girey to resign and quickly elected a new Khan Davlet-Girey, who never concealed his pro-Turkish orientation.
Petersburg was unpleasantly surprised by the coup and decided to stake on Shagin-Giray.
The Turks, meanwhile, suspended the withdrawal of their troops from Crimea, provided for by the peace treaty (their garrisons still remained in several mountain fortresses) and began to hint to Russian diplomats in Istanbul about the impossibility of an independent existence of the peninsula. In St. Petersburg, they realized that diplomatic pressure and indirect actions alone could not solve the problem.
After waiting for the beginning of winter, when the transfer of troops across the Black Sea was difficult and in Bakhchisarai they could not count on an ambulance from the Turks, the Russian troops concentrated at Perekop. Here they waited for the news of the election of the Nogai Tatars Shagin-Girey as khan. In January 1777, the corps of Prince Prozorovsky entered the Crimea, accompanying Shagin-Girey, the legitimate ruler of the Nogai Tatars.
The pro-Turkish Khan Davlet-Girey was not going to surrender, he gathered a 40,000-strong militia and set out from Bakhchisarai to meet the Russians. Here he tried to deceive Prozorovsky - he began negotiations with him and, in their midst, unexpectedly attacked the Russian troops. But the actual military leader of Prozorovsky's expedition was Alexander Suvorov. The future generalissimo repulsed the unexpected attack of the Tatars and defeated their militia.
Khan Davlet-Girey.
Davlet-Giray fled under the protection of the Ottoman garrison to Kafu, from where he sailed to Istanbul in the spring. Russian troops easily occupied Bakhchisarai, and on March 28, 1777, the Crimean sofa recognized Shagin-Girey as khan.
The Turkish sultan, as the head of Muslims around the world, did not recognize Shagin as the Crimean khan. But the young ruler enjoyed the full support of Petersburg. Under the agreement with Shagin-Girey, Russia received the revenues of the Crimean treasury from salt lakes, all taxes collected from local Christians, as well as the harbors in Balaklava and Gezlev (now Evpatoria) as compensation for its costs. In fact, the entire Crimean economy came under Russian control.
Crimean Peter I
Having spent most of his life in Europe and Russia, where he received an excellent education, modern for those years, Shagin-Girey was very different from the entire upper class of his native country. Court flatterers in Bakhchisarai even began to call him "the Crimean Peter I".
Khan Shagin began by creating a regular army. Before that, in the Crimea, there was only a militia, which gathered in case of danger, or in preparation for the next raid for slaves. The role of a permanent army was played by the Turkish garrisons, but they were evacuated to Turkey after the conclusion of the Kuchuk-Kainardzhi peace treaty. Shagin-Girey conducted a population census and decided to take one soldier from every five Tatar houses, and these houses were supposed to supply the soldier with weapons, a horse and everything he needed. Such a costly measure for the population caused strong discontent and the new khan did not succeed in creating a large army, although he did have a relatively combat-ready khan guard.
Shagin is trying to move the capital of the state to the seaside Kafa (Feodosia), where the construction of a large palace begins. He introduces a new system of bureaucracy - following the example of Russia, a hierarchical service with a fixed salary issued from the khan's treasury is being created, local officials are deprived of the old right to take levies directly from the population.
The wider the reform activities of the "Crimean Peter I" developed, the more the discontent of the aristocracy and the entire Tatar population with the new khan grew. At the same time, the Europeanized Khan Shagin-Girey executed those suspected of disloyalty in a completely Asian way.
The young khan was no stranger to both Asian splendor and a penchant for European luxury - he subscribed to expensive pieces of art from Europe, invited fashionable artists from Italy. Such tastes shocked the Crimean Muslims. Rumors spread among the Tatars that Khan Shagin "sleeps on the bed, sits on a chair and does not do the prayers that are due according to the law."
Dissatisfaction with the reforms of "Crimean Peter I" and the growing influence of St. Petersburg led to a massive uprising in the Crimea, which broke out in October 1777.
The revolt, which began among the newly recruited army, instantly engulfed the entire Crimea. The Tatars, having gathered a militia, managed to destroy a large detachment of Russian light cavalry in the region of Bakhchisarai. The Khan's Guard went over to the side of the rebels. The uprising was led by the brothers Shagin-Giray. One of them, the former leader of the Abkhaz and Adygs, was elected by the rebels as the new khan of Crimea.
We must think about the appropriation of this peninsula
The Russians reacted quickly and harshly. Field Marshal Rumyantsev insisted on the most drastic measures against the insurgent Tatars, in order to "feel the full weight of Russian weapons, and bring them to the point of repentance." Among the measures to suppress the uprising were the actual concentration camps of the 18th century, when the Tatar population (mainly rebel families) was herded into the blocked mountain valleys and held there without food supplies.
A Turkish fleet appeared off the coast of Crimea. Frigates entered Akhtiarskaya harbor, delivering troops and a note of protest against the actions of Russian troops in the Crimea. The Sultan, in accordance with the Kuchuk-Kainardzhiyskiy peace treaty, demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from the independent Crimea. Neither the Russians nor the Turks were ready for a big war, but formally Turkish troops could be present in the Crimea, since there were Russian units there. Therefore, the Turks tried to land on the Crimean coast without using weapons, and the Russians also tried to prevent them from doing this without firing shots.
Here Suvorov's troops were helped by chance. A plague epidemic broke out in Istanbul and, under the pretext of quarantine, the Russians announced that they could not let the Turks ashore. In the words of Suvorov himself, they were "refused with complete affection." The Turks were forced to leave back to the Bosphorus. So the Tatar rebels were left without the support of the Ottoman patrons.
After that, Shagin-Girey and the Russian units managed to quickly cope with the rioters. The defeat of the uprising was also facilitated by the immediately begun showdown between the Tatar clans and the pretenders to the khan throne.
It was then in St. Petersburg that they seriously thought about the complete annexation of Crimea to Russia. A curious document appears in the office of Prince Potemkin - the anonymous "Reasoning of a Russian Patriot about the wars with the Tatars, and about the methods that serve to end them forever." In fact, this is an analytical report and a detailed plan of accession from 11 points. Many of them have been put into practice in the coming decades. So, for example, in the third article "Reasoning" it is said about the need to provoke civil strife among various Tatar clans. Indeed, since the mid-70s of the 18th century, riots and strife have not stopped in the Crimea and in the nomadic hordes around it with the help of Russian agents. The fifth article talks about the desirability of evicting unreliable Tatars from Crimea. And after the annexation of Crimea, the tsarist government actually encouraged the movement of "muhajirs" - agitators for the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars to Turkey.
Potemkin's plans to populate the peninsula with Christian peoples (Article 9 "Reasoning") were very actively implemented in the near future: Bulgarians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians were invited, Russian peasants moved from the inner regions of the empire. Found application in practice and paragraph 10, which was supposed to return the cities of the Crimea to their ancient Greek names. In Crimea, the existing settlements were renamed (Kafa-Feodosia, Gezlev-Evpatoria, etc.); and all newly formed cities received Greek names.
In fact, the annexation of Crimea went according to the plan, which has been preserved to this day in the archives.
Shortly after the suppression of the Tatar rebellion, Catherine wrote a letter to Field Marshal Rumyantsev, in which she agreed with his proposals: "The independence of the Tatars in Crimea is unreliable for us, and we must think about appropriating this peninsula."
Field Marshal Peter Alexandrovich Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky.
For a start, measures were taken to completely eliminate the economic independence of the khanate. By September 1778, more than 30 thousand local Christians, guarded by Russian troops, left the Crimea for resettlement on the northern shore of the Azov Sea. The main purpose of this action was to weaken the economy of the khanate. As compensation for the loss of the most hard-working subjects, the Russian treasury paid the Crimean Khan 50 thousand rubles.
The ordinary Tatar population of Crimea lived by subsistence agriculture and cattle breeding - the Tatar lower classes were a source of the militia, but not a source of taxes. Almost all crafts, trade and art developed in the Crimea thanks to the Jews, Armenians and Greeks, who constituted the tax base of the khanate. There was a kind of "division of labor": the Armenians were engaged in construction, the Greeks traditionally succeeded in gardening and viticulture, beekeeping and jewelry were entrenched in the Karaites. The trade environment was dominated by Armenians and Karaites.
During the recent anti-Russian revolt of 1777, the Christian communities of the Greeks and Armenians supported the Russian troops, after which they were subjected to pogroms by the Tatars. Therefore, St. Petersburg arranged the withdrawal of most of the urban population of Crimea as a humanitarian action to save ethnic minorities.
Having deprived the Tatar nobility of all sources of income (raids for slaves were no longer possible, and here taxes from local Christians also disappeared), in Petersburg they pushed the Crimean aristocracy to a simple choice: either to emigrate to Turkey, or to go for a salary in the service of the Russian monarchy. Both decisions were quite satisfactory for St. Petersburg.
Crimea is yours and there is no longer this wart on the nose
On March 10, 1779 in Istanbul, Turkey and Russia signed a convention that reaffirmed the independence of the Crimean Khanate. Simultaneously with its signing, the sultan finally recognized the pro-Russian Shagin-Girey as the legitimate khan.
Here, Russian diplomats beat the Turks, recognizing once again the independence of the khanate and the legitimacy of the current khan, Istanbul thereby recognized their sovereign right to any decision, including the abolition of the khanate and its annexation to Russia.
Two years later, another symbolic step followed - in 1781, Khan Shagin-Girey was admitted to the rank of captain for the Russian military service. This further aggravated relations in the Crimean Tatar society, since most Tatars did not understand how an independent Islamic monarch could be in the service of the “infidels”.
Discontent led to another mass riot in the Crimea in May 1782, once again led by the many brothers of the khan. Shagin-Girey fled from Bakhchisarai to Kafa, and from there to Kerch under the protection of the Russian garrison.
Turkey tried to help, but in the summer Istanbul was almost destroyed by a terrible fire, and its population was on the verge of a starvation riot. In such conditions, the Turkish government could not actively intervene in the affairs of the Crimean Khanate.
On September 10, 1782, Prince Potemkin wrote a note "About Crimea" to Catherine. It directly says about the annexation of the peninsula: "Crimea by its position is tearing our borders … Just now that Crimea is yours and that there is no longer this wart on the nose."
The mutiny against Shagin-Girey became a convenient pretext for a new entry of the Russian army on the peninsula. Catherine's soldiers defeated the Tatar militia near Chongar, occupied Bakhchisarai and captured most of the Tatar nobility.
Shagin-Girey began to chop off the heads of his brothers and other rebels. The Russians demonstratively restrained the khan's anger and even took out part of his relatives doomed to execution under guard to Kherson.
The young khan's nerves could not stand it, and in February 1783 he did what His Serene Highness Prince Potemkin, the autocratic monarch of the Crimea, a descendant of Genghis Khan Shagin-Girey, gently but persistently pushed him to, abdicated the throne. It is known that Potemkin paid very generously to the delegation of the Crimean Tatar nobility, which voiced a proposal to Shagin-Giray to abdicate and annex Crimea to Russia. Tatar beys also received significant cash payments, who agreed to agitate the local population for joining the empire.
The manifesto of Catherine II of April 8, 1783 announced the entry of the Crimean Peninsula, Taman and Kuban into the Russian Empire.
They are not worth this land
A year after the liquidation of the Crimean Khanate, on February 2, 1784, an imperial decree "On the formation of the Tauride region" appeared - the administration and territorial division of the former Crimean Khanate was unified with the rest of Russia. The Crimean Zemstvo government of ten people was formed, headed by a representative of the most influential Tatar clan, Bey Shirinsky, whose family dates back to the military leaders of the heyday of the Golden Horde, and one of the ancestors burned Moscow in 1571.
However, the Crimean zemstvo government did not make independent decisions, especially without the consent of the Russian administration, and the peninsula was really ruled by Prince Potemkin's protege, the head of the "main military apartment" located in Karasubazar, Vasily Kakhovsky.
Potemkin himself spoke sharply about the population of the former khanate: “This peninsula will be better in everything if we get rid of the Tatars. By God, they are not worth this land. In order to tie the peninsula to Russia, Prince Potemkin began a mass resettlement of Greek Christians from Turkey to Crimea; to attract settlers, they were given the right to duty-free trade.
Four years after the liquidation of the khanate, representatives of the Tatar nobility in the Russian service - the collegiate councilor Magmet-aga and the court councilor Batyr-aga - received an order from Potemkin and Kakhovsky to evict all the Crimean Tatars from the southern coast of Crimea. Tatar officials zealously set to work and within one year cleared the best, most fertile shores of the Crimea from their relatives, resettling them to the inner regions of the peninsula. In place of the evicted Tatars, the tsarist government imported Greeks and Bulgarians.
Along with the oppression, the Crimean Tatars, at the suggestion of the same "Most Serene Prince", received a number of privileges: by a decree of February 2, 1784, the upper classes of the Crimean Tatar society - the beys and the Murzas - were granted all the rights of the Russian nobility, ordinary Tatars were not subject to recruitment and Moreover, the Crimean Tatar peasants were ranked among the state ones, they were not subject to serfdom. Having banned the slave trade, the tsarist government left all their slaves in the ownership of the Tatars, freeing only Russians and Ukrainians from Tatar slavery.
The only indigenous community of the former Crimean Khanate, which was not at all touched by the transformations of St. Petersburg, were the Jews-Karaites. They were even given some tax breaks.
Potemkin had an idea to resettle English convicts to the Crimea, buying from the British government those sentenced to exile in Australia. However, Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador to London, opposed this. He sent a letter to the Empress in St. Petersburg with the following content: “What can be the use of our vast empire, acquiring annually 90-100 villains, monsters, one might say, of the human race, who are incapable of farming or handicraft, being almost full of all diseases, koi usually follow their vile life? They will be a burden to the government and to the harm of other inhabitants; in vain the treasury will spend its dependency on dwellings and on feeding these new haidamaks”. Ambassador Vorontsov managed to convince Ekaterina.
But since 1802, immigrants from various German monarchies began to arrive in the Crimea. Colonists from Württemberg, Baden and the Zurich canton of Switzerland founded colonies in Sudak, and immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine created a volost near Feodosia. Not far from Dzhankoy, the Germans from Bavaria created the Neizatskaya volost. By 1805, these colonies had become quite large settlements.
The last Crimean khan, the failed reformer Shagin-Girey, accompanied by a harem and a retinue of two thousand people, lived for several years in Voronezh and Kaluga, but soon wished to leave Russia. The queen did not restrain him, the former khan arrived in Istanbul, where he was very kindly met by the Turkish sultan Abul-Hamid and sent the descendant of Genghis Khan, tired of the Russian winter, to the sunny island of Rhodes. When the next Russian-Turkish war began in 1787, Shagin-Girey was strangled by the order of the Sultan, just in case.
After the manifesto of Catherine II on the annexation of Crimea to Russia, there were no actions of open resistance of the Crimean Tatars for more than half a century, until the appearance of the Anglo-French landing on the territory of the peninsula in 1854.
