Murat Yaşar, The North Caucasus Borderland Between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, 1555-1605

Abstract

Belated child of the author’s doctoral dissertation (e North Caucasus in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century: Imperial Entanglements and Shifting Loyalties, University of Toronto, 2011), this book analyses a largely overlooked and rather challenging aspect of the early modern Ottoman foreign policy: the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Muscovite State on the North Caucasus frontier. As Yaşar claims in the Introduction, the study’s motivation was to remedy the scholarly malady of exclusive approaches to the geography whereby the Turk- ish historians tended to rely heavily on Turkish archival sources, and the Western researchers (as well as the Russians) on the Russian ones. Such an approach, as the author continues, inevitably produced rather inimical historiographies in which Russian researchers were inclined to portray a duo of “slave-harvesting Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate” while the Turkish scholars painted a picture “of Russian aggression against the local peoples who strove to be under Crimean/Ottoman/Turkish rule because they were Muslims (p. 9)”.