You are born in the autumn of 1594 under a hay cart in the woods by the Boh River, on the far edge of the Kingdom of Poland, because a man on watch saw smoke and shouted 'Tatars'. It was a haystack. At seventeen, with your wedding towels half finished, the riders come for real, and a rawhide rope drops over your head.

This is the life of a captive girl in the Crimean Khanate, told in second person: six days on foot across the steppe, the single gate at Perekop, the slave market at Kefe where captives were sold ten to a rope, a Tatar household in Karasubazar, a son, a ransom that came with one condition, and the year 1648, when the khan rode north as the Cossacks' ally.

SOURCES

- Michalo Lituanus (Michalon Litvin), De moribus Tartarorum, Lituanorum et Moscorum (written c. 1550, printed Basel 1615), fragments I and II, Russian tr. V. I. Matuzova (Moscow, 1994): the rawhide ropes, the gate at Perekop, the customs chief's question, the auction by the ten and the market at Kefe

- Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, A Description of Ukraine, in Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. 1 (London, 1704): how the raids were run

- Encyclopedia of Ukraine: "Teodosiia" (Ihor Stebelsky), "Cossack-Polish War" (Orest Subtelny) and "Islam-Girei III": Kefe, the Cossack raid of 1616 and the Tatar army of 1648

- Mikhail Kizilov, "Slaves, Money Lenders, and Prisoner Guards: The Jews and the Trade in Slaves and Captives in the Crimean Khanate", Journal of Jewish Studies 58:2 (2007), introduction

- Mikhail Kizilov, "Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea from the Perspective of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources", Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007), abstract

- Fırat Yaşa, "From a Chicken in Every Pot to a Time of Scarcity: Rethinking Slavery in the Crimean Khanate", Slavery and Abolition 44:4 (2023), abstract

- Fırat Yaşa, "Slaves Holding Slaves: Mükâtebe Contracts, Velâ and a Probate Inventory in the Seventeenth-Century Crimean Khanate" (2024), abstract

- Victor Ostapchuk and Maryna Kravets, "Cossacks as Captive-Takers in the Ottoman Black Sea Region and Unfreedom in the Northern Countries", in F. Roșu (ed.), Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900-1900 (Brill, 2022), abstract

- Turkana Allahverdiyeva, "The Blurred Boundaries of Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern Crimean Khanate", TRASIS blog (2024): converts entered in the court books as daughters of Abdullah

- Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East (2017), publisher's summary

NOTES ON PRECISION

The heroine Hanna, her family, Danylo, the dealer, Bekir's household (Emine, the old woman Ana and the son Kasim), the merchant from Lviv and Odarka are invented, and so is every line of dialogue. Hürrem, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the khan's alliance with the Cossacks in 1648 are real. Michalo Lituanus (Litvin), a Lithuanian envoy who was in the Crimea in 1543 and wrote around 1550, is the source for the rawhide rope, the auction by the ten, the dressing up of girls before sale and the customs chief's question at Perekop. He was read in a Russian translation. He and Beauplan, who describes the 1630s and 1640s, are used as a picture of how the system worked, placed in 1612. The 'about two million' figure (Dariusz Kołodziejczyk's estimate, known here through Mikhail Kizilov's citation) is disputed among historians, and other estimates run lower and higher. The 1612 raid date comes from a single secondary reference that could not be checked further. The umm walad rules (a slave woman who bears her master's acknowledged child cannot be sold and is free at his death, and the child is free) are Islamic law as practised; the 'daughter of Abdullah' entry for converts follows the Crimean court registers. Tatars and Cossacks both raided and both took captives, though the Tatar trade was far larger. The story of Hürrem is told by a dealer as a sales pitch, and nothing is claimed about her beyond the documented outline. Nothing explicit is shown: the heroine is eighteen when her master first sends for her, and that is one plain sentence.

Everyone in this video is a stick figure and the main character is invented. No likeness of any real person is depicted or implied.