After the Khazars, whose fall was caused chiefly by the attacks of the Russians, and who thenceforth disappeared entirely from the records of history, the victorious Petchenegues ruled over the whole land except the southern territory of Kherson, which was incorporated with the Empire of the East. Under the sway of this other Asiatic people, the trade and commerce of the peninsula revived, its intercourse with Constantinople resumed activity, and the Tauric ports supplied the merchants of the Lower Empire with purple, fine stuffs, embroidered cloths, ermines, leopard skins, furs of all kinds, pepper, and spices, which the Petchenegues purchased in Eastern Russia, south of the Kouban, and in the Transcaucasian regions that extend to the banks of the Cyrus and the Araxes. Thus began again for this unfortunate country a new era of prosperity, unexampled for many previous centuries.
The dominion of the Petchenegues lasted 150 years, and then they themselves endured the fate they had inflicted on the Khazars. Assailed by the Comans, whom the growth of the Mongol power had expelled from their own territory, they were beaten and forced to return into Asia. The Comans, a warlike people, made Soldaya their capital; but they had scarcely consolidated their power when they were obliged to give place to other conquerors, and seek an abode in regions further west. With the expulsion of the Comans ceased all those transient invasions which dyed the soil of the Tauris with blood during ten centuries. The various hordes that have left nothing but their name in history, were succeeded by two remarkable peoples: the one, victorious over Asia, had just founded the most gigantic empire of the middle ages; the other, issuing from a trading city of Italy, was destined to make Khazaria the nucleus of all the commercial relations between Europe and Asia.
With the Mongol invasion of 1226, the empire of the tzars entered on that fatal period of servitude and oppression which has left such pernicious traces in the national character of the Muscovites. Russia, Poland, and Hungary, were successively overrun by the hordes of the celebrated grandson of Genghis Khan; Khazaria was added to their enormous conquests, and became, under the name of Little Tatary, the cradle of a potent state, which maintained its independence down to the end of the eighteenth century. Under the yoke of the Mongols the Tauris, after being oppressed at first, soon recovered; Soldaya was restored to the Christians, and soon proved that the resources of the country were not exhausted, and that nothing but peace and quiet were wanted to develop the elements of wealth with which nature had so liberally endowed it. In a few years Soldaya became the most important port of the Black Sea, and one of the great termini of the commercial lines between Europe and Asia.
The greatness of Soldaya was, however, of short duration: another people, more active, and endowed with a bolder spirit of mercantile enterprise than the Greeks, came forward about the same period, and concentrated in its own hands the whole heritage of the great epochs that had successively shed lustre on the peninsula from the day when the Milesians founded their first colonies on the Cimmerian Bosphorus. Being already possessed of important factories in Constantinople, the Genoese had long been aware of the circumstances of the Black Sea, and the immense resources it would place at the disposal of enterprising men who should there centralise for their own profit all the commercial relations of Europe with Russia, Persia, and the Indies. The rivalry which then existed between them and the Venetians, accelerated the execution of their projects, and in 1820, after having secured the territory of the ancient Theodosia, partly by fraud, partly by force, they laid the foundation of the celebrated Caffa, through which they became sure masters of the Black Sea, and sole proprietors of its commerce. With the arrival of the Genoese the Tauris saw the most brilliant epochs of its history revived. Caffa became by its greatness, its population, and its opulence, in some degree the rival of Constantinople, and its consuls, possessing themselves of Cerco, Soldaya, and Cembalo, made themselves masters of all the southern coast of the Crimea. Other equally profitable conquests were subsequently made beyond the peninsula. The galleys of the republic entered the Palus Mæotis; Tana, on the mouth of the Don, was wrested from the Tatars; a fortress was erected at the mouth of the Dniestr; several factories were established in Colchis, and on the Caucasian coast, and even the imperial town of Trebisond was forced to admit one of the most important factories of the republic on the Black Sea. The Genoese colonies thus became the general emporium of the rich productions of Russia, Asia Minor, Persia, and the Indies; they monopolised for more than two centuries all the traffic between Europe and Asia, and presented a marvellous spectacle of thriving greatness. All this glory had an end. Mahomet's standard was planted over the dome of St. Sophia in 1453, and the intercourse of the Crimea with the Mediterranean was broken off. The destruction of the Genoese settlements was then inevitable; and the republic, despairing of their preservation, assigned them over to the bank of St. George, on the 15th of November, 1453. The consequences of this cession which put an end to the political connexion of the colonies with the mother state, were of course disastrous. Despair and loss of public spirit fell upon the colonists, individual selfishness predominated in all their councils, and the consular government, before remarkable for its integrity and its virtues, instead of uniting with the Tatars, and rendering its own position with regard to the Porte less perilous, completely disgusted them by a total want of honesty, and by selling its aid for gold to all the parties that were desolating the Crimea. So many faults were followed by the natural catastrophe. Caffa was forced to surrender at discretion to the Turks on the 6th of June, 1473, and some months afterwards all the points occupied by the Genoese fell one by one into the hands of the Ottomans.
After the disaster of the Genoese colonies, the great lines of communication of the trans-Caucasian regions, the Caspian, the Volga, the Don, and the Kouban, were broken, having lost their feeders, and all the commercial relations with Central Asia were for a while suspended. The Venetians, who had obtained from the Turks the right of navigating the Black Sea, in consideration of a yearly tribute of 10,000 ducats, strove in vain to take the place their rivals had lost; they were expelled in their turn from the Black Sea, the Dardanelles were closed against all the nations of the West, and the Turks and their subjects, the Greeks of the Archipelago, alone possessed the privilege of passing through the strait. In our remarks on the Caspian we have already pointed out the new outlets which the Eastern trade procured for itself by way of Smyrna, and the great revolution which followed Vasco de Gama's discovery.
Under the reign of the first khans, who were tributary to the Porte, the Crimea lost all its commercial and agricultural importance. Continual wars, and incessant revolts, sometimes favoured, sometimes punished by the Porte, added to the still deeply-rooted habits of a nomade and vagabond existence, for many years precluded the regeneration of the country. But a rich fertile soil, and a country abundantly provided with all the resources necessary to man, triumphed over the natural indolence of the Tatars, just as they had done before by the savage hordes that successively invaded the Tauris. The hill sides and valleys became covered with villages, and all branches of native industry increased rapidly with the internal tranquillity of the country. The corn, cattle, timber, resins, fish, and salt of Little Tatary furnished freights for a multitude of vessels. The commerce of Central Asia, it is true, was lost for it beyond recovery, but the exportation of its native produce and of that which Russia sent to it by the Don and the Sea of Azof, was more than sufficient to keep its people in a very thriving, if not an opulent condition. Caffa shared in the general improvement; it rose again from its ruins, became the commercial centre of the country, as in the time of the Genoese, and its advancement was such, that the Turks bestowed on it the flattering name of Koutchouk Stamboul (Little Constantinople).
The dominion of the khans extended at this period, in Europe and Asia, from the banks of the Danube to the foot of the mountains of the Caucasus, and the indomitable mountaineers of Circassia themselves often did homage to the sovereigns of the Tauris. The Mussulman population was divided in those days into two great classes: the descendants of the first conquerors, known by the special designation of Tatars; and the Nogais, nomade tribes who, subsequently to the conquest, had come and put themselves under the protection of the illustrious Batou khan. The former, mixed up with the remains of the ancient possessors, formed the civilised part of the nation. Possessing the mountainous regions, and residing in towns and villages, they were both agriculturists and manufacturers; whilst the Nogais, who lived in a manner independently in Southern Russia, applied themselves solely to cattle rearing. They were at that time divided into five principal hordes: the Boudjiak occupied the plains of Bessarabia from the mouths of the Danube to the Dniestr; the Yedisan, the largest, which could bring into the field 80,000 horsemen, encamped between the Dniestr and the Dniepr; the Djamboiluk and Jedickhoul, the remnants of which still inhabit the territory of their ancestors, extended from the banks of the Dniepr to the western coasts of the Sea of Azof; lastly, the tribes of the Kouban, nomadised in the steppes between that river and the Don, which now form the domain of the Black Sea Cossacks. All these tribes collectively could, in case of urgent necessity, bring into the field upwards of 400,000 men. Such was the political condition of Little Tatary, when the Russian conquest of the provinces of the Sea of Azof and the Black Sea destroyed all the fruits of the great social revolution which had been effected in the habits of the Mussulmans by the new development of trade and commerce.
The first Muscovite invasion took place in 1736. A hundred thousand men, commanded by Field-marshal Munich forced the Isthmus of Perecop, entered the peninsula, and laid waste the whole country, up to the northern slope of the Tauric chain. The peace of Belgrade put an end to this first inroad, but the political existence of Little Tatary was, nevertheless, violently shaken; and from that time forth the khans were kept in continual perplexity by the secret or armed interventions of Russia, their subjects were stimulated to revolt, and they themselves were but puppets moved by the court of St. Petersburg.
In 1783, Sahem Guerai abdicated in favour of the Empress Catherine II., and the kingdom of the Tatars, exhausted by extensive emigrations and bloody insurrections, finally ceased to exist; and then perished rapidly the last elements of the prosperity of a land that had been so often ravaged, and had always emerged victoriously from its disasters. Previously to this period, in 1778, the irresistible command of Russia had determined the emigration of all the Greek and Armenian families of the peninsula, and an agricultural and trading population had been seen to quit, voluntarily as Russia pretends, fertile regions, and a favouring climate, to settle in the savage steppes of the Don and the Sea of Azof. About the same period, and under the same influence, began the emigration of the Tatars and Nogais, some of whom retired into Turkey, others joined the mountaineers of the Caucasus. The Russian occupation accelerated this disastrous movement, and on the day when the tzars extended their frontiers to the banks of the Dniestr, the celebrated horde of Yedisan disappeared entirely from the soil of the empire. The Tatars of the region between the Dniepr and the Sea of Azof did not emigrate in such numbers as the others, for the imperial government had hemmed them in, even previously to the conquest, by formidable military lines on the east and on the west. The heaviest calamities fell, of course, on the peninsula, which was covered with fixed settlements, and was the centre of the Tatar civilisation and power, and there the scenes of carnage and devastation which had marked the irruption of the barbarians from Asia were renewed in all their horrors. The peninsula lost at least nine-tenths of its population; its towns were given up to pillage, its fields laid waste; and in the space of a few months that region which had been still so nourishing under its last khan, exhibited but one vast spectacle of oppression, misery, and devastation.
Since that period there have elapsed sixty years, during which the Russian domination has never had any resistance to encounter or revolt to quell; and yet, notwithstanding the opening of the Dardanelles, the Tauris has been unable, to this day, to rise from the deep depression into which it was sunk by the political events of the close of the eighteenth century. It is true, no doubt, that very handsome villas have been erected on the southern coast, and that luxurious opulence has made that region its chosen seat; but the vital and productive forces of the peninsula have been smothered, its trade and agriculture have been destroyed; and that bootless quietude in which the dwindled population of the Tatars now vegetates, results, in fact, only from the destruction of all material resources, and the extinction of all moral and intellectual energy which have come to pass under the sway of the Russian administration.