Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [136]
Wolff quotes the comte de Ségur writing of Catholic Poland as a void, with vast forests punctuated by open plains, and “a poor population, enslaved; dirty villages; cottages little different from savage huts; everything makes one think one has been translated back ten centuries and that one finds oneself amid hordes of Huns, Scythians, Veneti, Slavs, and Sarmatians.” An English visitor, William Coxe, traveling in Russia and Poland, also found the sources of Eastern barbarities in the primitive peoples of the region, which could be subsumed under the broad heading of the “Tartar Yoke.” In Moscow, he encountered “an Armenian, recently arrived from Mount Caucasus.” He was the very image of a barbarian, and Coxe described him in much the same way as others portrayed the wild ghazi, akinji, bashibazouks, or dervishes in Ottoman service.
His dress consisted of a long loose robe, tied with a sash, large breeches and boots: his hair was cut, in the manner of the Tartars, in a circular form; his arms were a poignard, and a bow of buffalo’s horn strung with the sinews of the same animal … he danced a Calmuc dance, which consisted in straining every muscle, and writhing his body into various contortions without stirring from the spot; he beckoned us into the garden, took great pleasure in showing us his tent and arms … We were struck with the unartificial character of this Armenian, who seemed like a wild man just beginning to be civilised.44
This “Armenian” displayed the negative particulars—wildness and lack of control—that had been pinned to “Islam” since the early medieval period. The “backwardness” of the Slav East came from many distinct causes, but I wondered if one was the contact with the Eastern Muslim world.45 Islam had impinged on the Slav world along an extended frontier. In the fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were advancing into southern Europe, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, whose “Tartar yoke” had long overshadowed the northern Slav lands of Muscovy (Russia) and Poland, accepted Islam. In time, the rising power of Russia gradually freed itself from the suzerain power of the Golden Horde, but the Tartar horsemen merely regrouped farther east, thereafter raiding rather than ruling their former domain. In 1484, the Ottoman armies, pushing north, took the key fortified towns of Killia at the mouth of the Danube and Akkerman at the mouth of the Dniester and became a dominant force in the borderlands around the Black Sea. Crimean Tartars were allied to the Ottomans, and Tartars and Caucasian skirmishers became a valued element in the Ottoman armies, raiding on their fast ponies far beyond the Danube into Hungary and the Austrian duchies. They settled in many parts of the European Ottoman domains, and remained largely separate from the local Muslim population, who spoke a quite different language.
In Western eyes, “Tartars” and “Turks” had both collective and separate identities. The hellish witches’ brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth contained the twin elements of evil, “nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips.”46 While the phrase “the Grand Turk” embodied the grudgingly admired “imperial” qualities of the Ottomans, the Tartars epitomized the unspeakable and fearsome savagery that was their other attribute. Some said that their name meant they were the denizens of hell (from the Latin Tartarus).47 The abbé Fortis became the West’s literary cicerone for the Balkan wilderness and its inhabitants. He wrote that he “saw customs, poetry, music, clothing, and habitations as Tartar as they could be in Siberia.”48 The chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, writing on “Tartars” in 1765 in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, observed that it was “humiliating that these barbaric peoples should have subjugated almost all our hemisphere” in the age of Genghis Khan. He assured his readers that although “this vast reservoir of ignorant, strong, and bellicose men