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This article aims to reveal some aspects of relationships between former slaves and their ex-owners in light of seventeenth-century Crimean qadi court records. It elaborates on a number of terms that indicate the social and legal status of slaves in the Crimean Khanate and analyzes a former slave probate inventory. In addition, the paper also examines the phenomenon of the mükâtebe contract in the Crimean Khanate context which allowed slaves to hold slaves; it thus seeks to provide new perspectives on the exercising of the mükâtebe. The paper considers how social fluidity affected the lives of slaves, explores the question of whether manumitted slaves actually attained the same status as the freeborn, and, finally, traces the ways in which dependency relationships evolved between freed former slaves and the slaves held by these latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Ottoman and Crimean policies and their involvement in the North Caucasus in the second half of the sixteenth century as a case study, this paper sheds light on the nature of the political arrangement between the Ottoman empire and the Crimean khanate in this period. Agreeing with scholars who argue that the Crimean khanate’s relationship with the Ottoman empire cannot be classified as vassalage, the present article treats the North Caucasus as a newly emerging borderland and a ‘micro north’ to better understand the framework in which the Crimean khanate functioned as a unit within the Ottoman system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the hitherto unknown beginnings of the Ottoman-Russian imperial rivalry by focusing on the mid-16th-century encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy over the North Caucasus, where the ambitions of these two asymmetric powers--the Ottomans being an established "super power" and the Muscovites a rising power--became entangled for the first time. This first encounter, which was the harbinger of many future engagements not only in this region but also in the broader steppe frontier around the Black Sea, was more of a "cold war" rather than a military confrontation, as both the Ottomans and the Muscovites rather preferred to establish spheres of influence and eventually their hegemony over the North Caucasus through their vassals and clients. In addition to demonstrating the Tsardom of Muscovy's initial claims and policies over the North Caucasus, this study will shed light on the reasons of the Ottoman failure to transform their nominal claims over the region to a de facto hegemony similar to what they had established over Eastern European principalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]