This is an extract from William R. Polk's book Crusade and Jihad_THE THOUSAND-YEAR WAR BETWEEN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THEGLOBAL NORTH
CHAPTER 9
Chechen Imam Shamil Resists
Russian Imperialism
About 1330, Mongol-Turkic invaders began to use Moscow’s chief, the Velilki Knizaz (roughly,
“chief agent”) Ivan Danilovich Kalita, as their tax collector for the whole northern area. By then the
town was significant enough that the Orthodox Church established it as the seat of a metropolitan. But
the Muscovite rulers, impressed with their own importance, overplayed their hand by inflicting a
small defeat on a Mongol detachment; in retaliation, in 1382, one of Tamerlane’s generals sacked and
burned the town. Perhaps that was the beginning of the Russian fear of “encirclement” that has always
lain at the heart of Russian strategy and in our days has created a crisis over the expansion of NATO.
Ivan’s forces breached the walls of the ancient city Kazan on the Volga in 1552.
Muscovy thus acquired a relatively advanced but exotic country with its own political institutions,
social system, economic organization, and cultural values. The conquest signaled the transformation
of Muscovite Russia from a centralized national state into a multinational empire, a development of
crucial importance for subsequent Russian history. It also fixed on Russian policy toward the Muslim
city-states an attitude comparable to that of the Spanish Reconquista: whatever had motivated Ivan,
the Russian wars became a sort of crusade. As Ivan’s personal chaplain is alleged to have said, his
goal was “to convert the pagans to the Faith even if they do not deserve it.
The two emerging empires, Ivan’s Russia and Queen Elizabeth’s England, hit on one of the first
military assistance programs. In return for weapons, Ivan offered Elizabeth passage down the Volga to
the markets of Central Asia. Ivan wanted more. He even talked vaguely of marrying Elizabeth, whom
he referred to as “our loving sister,” but imperial disagreements soured the relationship before it was
even seriously considered. Ivan changed his address to Elizabeth to poshlaia dvitsa (common
wench).
Elizabeth, if she even knew of Ivan’s interest in some sort of deal, would have been right to be
cautious. Not that Russia posed any threat to England, as the English later believed it did to their
empire in India, but it was itself under powerful attack. At least in that part of Asia, the balance
between the North and the South had not yet completely shifted. Moscow and other Russian cities,
which had been ruled by the Mongols from the time of Genghis Khan, were frequently raided by the
Crimean Tatars, who were Muslim descendants of the Mongol conquerors.
The Crimean Tatars would remain the great Muslim enemy of Russia for the next two centuries.
During at least the first century of that time, the customs of the urban Russians resembled those of the
Tatars, Afghans, Iranians, Indians, and other Muslims. Women lived in purdah and customs were
minutely prescribed in a printed guide, the Domostroy. It was not differences in customs that inflamed
Russian-Turkish hostilities. It was dominion.
The Russians started to destroy, one after another, the Muslim principalities. Some were easy;
others were too powerful or too dedicated. For nearly two centuries, Crimea, the most powerful of
the heirs to the Mongol-Turkic empire, was beyond their reach. The Crimean Tatars actually struck
back: they raided Moscow in 1571 and were said to have taken perhaps 150,000 prisoners to be sold
as slaves in the Ottoman Empire. As described by the English merchant Richard Hakluyt, the
“emperour fled out of the field, and many of his people were carried away by the Crimme Tartar: to
wit, all the young people, the old they [did] not meddle with, but let them alone, and so with
exceeding much spoile and infinite prisoners, they returned home again.”
Russia lapsed into a half century of virtual anarchy. The decline of central authority allowed
experimentation with changes in custom. Among them, upper-class women began for the first time to
emerge from purdah. Moscow shed the “Orient” at home even while it continued conquering the
Orient. Both policies got a boost when, in 1632, Ukraine recognized its suzerainty. With Ukraine’s
help, the tsars began a new round of wars on the Crimean Tatars.
When Peter the Great returned from his sojourn in Western Europe in 1696 and set out to build
Russia into a modern power, he turned east from Crimea to follow the Oxus River toward the Caspian
Sea and Iran. He was looking for sources of gold, silk, and cotton to fund his modernization program,
and a member of the Georgian royal family encouraged him to think that these were available in Iran.
Peter thought he had his opportunity in 1721, when he learned of an Afghan invasion of Iran.
Suddenly filled with brotherly feelings for the beleaguered shah, he gathered a huge force, said to
have been about one hundred thousand men—but rulers always err toward the grandiose—to sail
down the Caspian from Astrakhan in July 1722. When the army had landed, about halfway to the
modern city of Baku, Peter remarked to one of his officers that he was at the first stage of a “road to
India [on which] no one can interfere with us.”
But the nearby Muslim khanate of Khiva did interfere, and devastatingly. Its little army attacked
and almost annihilated the Russian force. Peter did not give up. A few years later, he sent a much
smaller mission, about five thousand men, to conquer Khiva. But winter and disease proved as
effective against the Russians as they would later be against Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Only one in
five Russians survived the Khiva campaign. But losses did not stop the Russians. A brutal system of
conscription among the serfs gave them virtually unlimited manpower, which they would draw on to
conquer their next Muslim objective, the Caucasus.
Conquering the Caucasus became a fixed idea in Russian strategy. Despite being only one of many
endeavors, extended in every direction, the Caucasus stood out as a sort of romantic quest. To the
Russians, it had some of the aura the Great Plains and its wild Indians had for Americans, or the
Moroccan deserts and the untamed Berbers had for the French.
