The phrase in the title, ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’, was uttered not by Stalin, who ordered the deportation of some 190,000 Crimean Tatars in May 1944 as a collective punishment for alleged collusion with the Nazi invaders, or by Peter I, who won and lost battles against the Tatars (and who wrote in his youth, ‘Let’s put all the Tatars, like chickens, into a sack, and eat them’), or by Sahan Giray, a puppet khan of Catherine II, who referred to his subjects as ‘a devious people’ while they were being slaughtered and deported by Russian troops. It was written in the memoirs of Ahmed Resmi-efendi, a senior Ottoman diplomat, after his country’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, which he in part blamed on the sultan’s Crimean Tatar allies. They had ‘become weak and lazy, addicted to tea, coffee and opium’, and their rulers had ‘brought upon themselves a whole world of sufferings’. In short, he claimed, the ‘Crimean Tatars have since ancient times been a burden to the Porte’.

Donald Rayfield presents a very different picture of the Crimean Tatars while nevertheless fully acknowledging that the history of the peninsula cannot be seen in isolation from the actions and attitudes of its neighbours. He describes the settlement of Crimea in ancient times, the creation of the Crimean khanate in the mid-15th century under the Giray dynasty of khans, and the nature of this state, which not only survived for some 350 years but, in his words, ‘flourished’ until weakened by Russian domination. He then recounts the tragic history of the Crimean Tatars under Russian and Soviet rule, including the trauma of collectivisation in the 1930s and mass deportation in the 1940s, and ends with the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.

A study of such a long-lasting state is in itself valuable, of course. The history of the Crimean Tatars is also of fundamental importance for understanding several historical and contemporary issues: the relations between the major powers in eastern and southeastern Europe; the ways in which the Russian Empire and