Learn how this Turkic state, the last remnants of the Mongol empire, survived for nearly 350 years and its impact today
Sometimes, when you look at a map showing populations, there are groups that don’t seem to belong. The Crimean Tatars are an example of this. If the average person knows anything about them, they might link them correctly to Attila the Hun/Genghis Khan and incorrectly to Steak Tartare. This group is a proud remnant from an amazing period in world history, but it is also the victim of slanderous, sometimes murderous, fabrication. So, how did the nomadic Tatars end up in Crimea?
The Eurasian Steppe is a gigantic part of the world’s land mass. Starting on the Pacific coast of China, it stretches across all of Asia and on into Europe, embracing the Crimean Peninsula along the way and ending, some 8,000km later, at the Danube River in modern-day Hungary. It is an important grassland biome, punctuated by mountain ranges and deserts, but in essence, if you were to travel west from the Pacific to Hungary, there are no impassible cliff faces or canyons; it’s a clear route all the way. This ease of access and the plentiful supply of animal feed meant that the steppe acted as a natural path for migration as far back as the Palaeolithic Period, when early groups found ways to harness the land that led to a nomadic lifestyle where yurts, yaks and horses were the order of the day.
The horsemen of the Eurasian Steppe were virtually born in the saddle, but it was the invention of the stirrup that enabled the rider not only to stay on more easily, but also allowed him to free his hands from the reins so that he could wield a weapon or even use a bow. Using a horse as a weapon’s platform made them, at the time, the best cavalry in the world. This one, seemingly simple innovation made the old war chariot completely obsolete because a mounted archer was more effective in every measurable way. It should therefore come as no surprise that the stirrup was rapidly adopted by all horse cultures across the central and eastern Eurasian Steppe centuries before Europe knew of its existence.
Quite simply, horses were vital to steppe culture not only for travel, but also as beasts of burden, as a source of food (both meat and milk) and as weapons of war. Steppe horses were relatively small compared to most European breeds, and they had longer manes, which were useful in the bitterly cold winters but mean
