sultan and tsar. Relations between Moscow and Constantinople were so friendly that Russian ambassadors at the Sublime Porte (the palatial building in which the Sultan's chief minister, the Grand Vizier, had his offices) had always been treated with greater respect than the embassies of other powers. And the Ottoman Empire was still a dynamic force in the world. The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, had been hurled back from Vienna, and the Janissaries had retreated down the Danube, but the Sultan's empire was so vast and his army so large that Sophia was reluctant to challenge him. Before she and Golitsyn agreed to sign the treaty, they summoned General Gordon repeatedly to ask his opinion about the state of the army and the size of the military risk. Solemnly, the experienced Scottish soldier declared that he thought the time was favorable for war.
It was not the Turks whom Sophia and Golitsyn were asked to attack, but their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. Russian fear of these Moslem descendants of the Mongols was deep-rooted. Year after year, Tatar horsemen rode north out of their Crimean stronghold across the grazing lands of the Ukrainian steppe and, in small bands or large armies, swooped down on Cossack settlements or Russian towns to ravage and plunder. In 1662, Tatars captured the town of Putivl and carried off all the 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Russian slaves thronged Ottoman slave markets. Russian men were seen chained to the oars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean; young Russian boys made a welcome gift from the Crimean Khan to the Sultan. So numerous, in fact, were the Russian slaves in the East that it was asked mockingly whether any inhabitants still remained in Russia.
There seemed no way to stop these devastating Tatar raids. The frontier was too broad, the Russian defenses too scanty; the Tatars' objectives could not be known in advance, and their mobility could not be equaled. The Tsar was reduced to paying an annual sum to the Khan, protection money which the Khan called a tribute and the Russians preferred to describe as a gift. But this did not stop the raids.
Although Moscow was far away and in the capital the raids were considered as harassment rather than aggression, nevertheless they were an affront to the national honor. In carrying out the terms of the treaty with Poland, Moscow would attempt to snuff out the Tatar raids at their source. But, despite Gordon's optimism, the campaign would not be easy. Bakhchisarai, the Khan's capital in the mountains of the Crimea, was a thousand miles from Moscow. To get there, the army would have to march south across the breadth of the Ukrainian steppe, force the Perekop Isthmus at the entrance to the Crimea, then advance across the wasteland of the northern Crimea. Many of the boyars who would serve as officers in the army reacted unenthusiastically to this prospect. Some were suspicious of the treaty with Poland, preferring, if there was to be war, to fight against, rather than support, the Poles. Others feared the long, hazardous march. And many opposed the campaign simply because Golitsyn had proposed it. Prince Boris Dolgoruky and Prince Yury Shcherbatov threatened to present themselves and their retainers for military service dressed in black, as a protest against the treaty, the campaign and Golitsyn himself.
Nevertheless, through the autumn and winter, Russia mobilized an army. Recruits were mustered, special taxes collected, thousands of horses, oxen and wagons assembled, and in early spring a commander was chosen. To his own dismay, the generalissimo of this expedition was none other than Vasily Golitsyn. Golitsyn had some military experience, but essentially he considered himself a statesman rather than a military commander. He would have preferred to remain in Moscow, to keep control of the government and a close eye on his numerous enemies. But his opponents argued loudly that the minister who had made the commitment to attack the Tatars should be required to lead the expedition. Golitsyn was caught; there was nothing he could do but accept.
In May 1687, a Russian army of 100,000 men began marching southward along the road to Orel and Poltava. Golitsyn moved cautiously, afraid that the mobile Tatar cavalry would ride around his columns and strike him in the rear. On June 13, he was camped on the lower Dnieper, 150 miles above Perekop, and there was still no Tatar opposition, not even a sign of the Khan's scouts. But Golitsyn's men saw something worse: smoke along the horizon. The Tatars were burning the steppe to deny forage to the horses and oxen of the Russians. As the lines of fire advanced through the tall grass, they left behind a landscape of blackened, smoldering stubble. Sometimes, the flames approached the army itself, engulfing men and animals in smoke and threatening to burn the cumbersome baggage train. Thus afflicted, the Russian army stumbled foward until, at a point sixty miles above Perekop, Golitsyn decided to go no farther. The army began to retreat. In the heat and dust of July and August, unable to find food or forage, the army staggered homeward. In his reports to Moscow, however, Golitsyn described the campaign as a success. The Khan, he declared, had been so terrified by the advance of the Muscovite army that he had fled into hiding in the remote mountain fastnesses of the Crimea.
Golitsyn returned to Moscow late in the evening of September 14 to be hailed as a hero. The next morning, he was admitted to kiss the hands of the Regent and the two Tsars. Sophia issued a proclamation announcing a victory and heaping her favorite with praise and rewards. New estates and monies were lavished on him, and smaller gold medals bearing the likenesses of Sophia, Peter and Ivan were given to his officers. In fact Golitsyn had marched for four months, lost 45,000 men and returned to Moscow without ever sighting, much less engaging, the main Tatar army.
It did not take long for the true facts to be perceived in the capitals of Russia's allies. The reaction was disgust and anger. As it happened, that year, 1687, the Poles had had little success, but the Austrians and Venetians had been more fortunate, dislodging the Turks from important towns and fortresses in Hungary and on the Aegean. The following year, 1688, Russia mounted no campaign at all against the common enemy, and the situation worsened for her allies. Large Turkish armies concentrated to attack Poland, while, in Germany, Louis XIV of France attacked the Hapsburg empire in the rear. In the face of these new threats, both King Jan Sobieski and Emperor Leopold considered making peace with the Turks. Eventually, they agreed to continue the war only if Russia would meet its obligations and renew its attack on the Crimea.
Sophia and Golitsyn would have been happy to end the war at once, had they been allowed to keep Kiev. What they could not face was the withdrawal of Russia's allies, leaving Muscovy alone to face the whole might of the Ottoman Empire. Reluctantly, therefore, they faced the necessity of organizing another expedition to the Crimea. In the spring of 1688, the Tatar Khan provided a further stimulus to action. Launching a campaign of his own, he ravaged the Ukraine, threatening the cities of Poltava and Kiev and advancing almost to the Carpathians. When he retired to the Crimea in the autumn, 60,000 prisoners stumbled behind his horsemen.
Forced to continue the war, Golitsyn proclaimed a second campaign against the Crimea, declaring that he would make peace only when all the Black Sea coast was ceded to Russia and the Tatars were entirely removed from the Crimea and resettled on the opposite side of the Black Sea in Turkish Anatolia. This declaration, extravagant to the point of nonsense, indicated the increasingly desperate personal position of Golitsyn. By now, it was essential that he defeat the Tatars in order to repulse the domestic criticism from his political and personal enemies in Moscow. Before he left for the campaign, he was attacked by an unsuccessful assassin; on the very eve of his departure, he found a coffin left outside his door with a note warning that if this second campaign were not more successful than the first, the coffin would be his home.