"The Tsar Liberates Us from Slavery”: Dependency and Competition for Loyalty in the Muscovite Empire and the Steppe

Loyalties in the western steppe region were contested in the early modern period as with a new northern branch of the Silk Roads, the Muscovite and Ottoman empires at this end of the grasslands turned into competitors for power, population and trade. Conflict and slave raids for much of the time took the upper hand over peaceful exchange. Competition for loyalty as an asymmetrical dependency encompassed a wide array of means such as slave raids, immigration, integration, co-optation, border fortifications, enticement to return to the regions where people were born and forced migrations. Whereas the Ottoman heirs to ancient Mediterranean slaveries continued to meliorate social conditions, the budding Muscovite market still mustered much less purchasing power. During the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, it gradually invented the policy of Europeanization as the focal point of innovation wandered from East Asia to Europe. The first steps along this line were the repositioning of the church with an anti-Tatar imaginary, while Tatars were increasingly co-opted to defend the realm. The dynasty and elite followed with an adapted Greco-Italian ideology of redeeming and liberating slaves. Forcefully propagated from the 1550s in laws, chronicles and murals, it was echoed widely in petitions of returning slaves, festivals, and saints’ lives. With a different slant, Central Asian and Tatar authors adapted biblical and qur’anic motives to emphasize social integration of foreign dependents. Enslaved dependents and translators were among the trans-imperial actors who had to represent themselves to various rulers according to their respective imperial worldviews. Some could or did not integrate into their new environments, forcing to dissimulate and hedge their bets.