ABSTRACT
By A.A. Novosel’skii’s estimate about 200,000 Muscovites were captured by the Crimean Tatars and taken into slavery in the khanate and the Ottoman domains just during the first 40 years of the seventeenth century. Large numbers of Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Poles were also taken off into Turco-Tatar captivity in the early modern period; Bohdan Baranowski believes that perhaps a million subjects of the Commonwealth experienced this fate over the period 1494–1694. These numbers may be overstated (chronicle accounts tended to exaggerate, and it is unlikely that Tatar raiders could carry off Slavic prisoners more numerous than their own raiding party strengths), but there is no doubt that the threat of captivity and enslavement was far greater for Slavs settled on the edge of the Pontic steppe than for English colonists in North America, and the number of Slavs held in Crimean Tatar and Ottoman captivity at any time may have been greater than the number of Europeans held in the bagnos of the Barbary pirates. 1
