The wars and relationship between the Ottoman and Russian Empires have shaped the history of the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Historians who ask when and where the rivalry between these two empires began have turned their gaze to the Balkans or other Slavic-speaking parts of Eastern Europe to find an answer. While the more significant wars and conflicts between these two major empires took place in the area between modern-day Ukraine and Turkey, its origin lies further east in the North Caucasus, which, in the mid-sixteenth century, turned into a borderland between the two imperial powers. Similarly, while historians of the Ottoman Empire have examined the Ottoman borderlands, frontiers, vassals and strategies in Eastern and Central Europe in many volumes, its eastern borderlands have only recently gained traction and became a subject of academic research.

This book presents a history and an analysis of the first encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy in the second half of the sixteenth century in the North Caucasus, a region until then bypassed by the surrounding imperial powers. The North Caucasus became the first borderland in Eurasia between the Ottomans and the Muscovites, which resulted in its local social and political structures undergoing major alterations and marked its peoples’ long-lasting struggle for freedom. The chapters in this book detail the process of borderlandisation of the North Caucasus between the two rival imperial powers that encroached on the region with their own imperial ideologies and objectives.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Porte implemented in the North Caucasus strategies that were devised as a part of its northern policy, whose main objective was maintaining exclusive Ottoman control of the Black Sea. The Ottoman sultans and Crimean khans were content with a nominal claim of sovereignty over the North Caucasus before the rise of Muscovy as a rival imperial power. While the Ottomans recognised the Crimean Khanate's control over the region, they still preferred to establish their rule of law in the territories on the coastal strip of the Taman Peninsula and govern them within the framework of their provincial administration through centrally appointed governors in Azak and Kefe. Perhaps as early as 1552, and undoubtedly following the Muscovite annexation of Astrakhan in 1556, the North Caucasus transformed into a disputed borderland between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy.