Summary: Although it was not an Ottoman province, Crimea was politically, militarily, and economically critical to Ottoman power in Eastern Europe, and the suzerainty of the Giray dynasty that governed Crimea for over three centuries was ultimately what held off Russian expansion and made the Black Sea truly an "Ottoman sea." In this episode, Denise Klein discusses the role of the Crimean Khanate in the Ottoman world and gives us an overview of the history, society, and culture of this political space. Drawing on her own research, she also uses a comparison of Ottoman and Crimean historiography to examine how these suzerains understood their place in the Ottoman equation and how writers on opposing sides of the Black Sea interpreted and represented events in different ways.
