Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe

Between 1441 and 1774, the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids throughout lands primarily controlled by Russia and Poland–Lithuania. Concentrated in Eastern Europe, but also stretching to the Caucasus and parts of Central Europe, these raids were often supported by the Ottoman Empire and involved the transportation of European men, women, and children to the Muslim world, where they were put on the market and sold as part of the Crimean slave trade and the Ottoman slave trade. The regular abductions of people over the course of numerous incursions by the Crimeans and the Nogais greatly drained Eastern Europe's human and economic resources, consequently playing an important role in the emergence of the semi-militarized Cossacks, who organized retaliatory campaigns against the raiders and their Ottoman backers.

Trading posts in Crimea had previously been established by the Genoese and the Venetians to facilitate earlier Western European slave routes. The Crimean–Nogai raids largely targeted the "Wild Fields" of the Pontic–Caspian steppe, which extends about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of the Black Sea and which now contains the majority of the combined population of southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia.

Figures for the total number of Europeans affected by the raids vary: Polish historian Bohdan Baranowski estimated that the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Belarus) lost an average of 20,000 people yearly and as many as one million people from 1474 to 1694. Ukrainian-American historian Mikhail Khodarkhovsky estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 people were abducted from Russian-controlled lands in the first half of the 17th century.

The first major raid occurred in 1468 and was directed at southeastern Poland, while the last major raid occurred in 1717 and was directed at Hungary. In 1769, Tatars conducted one last significant raid and captured 20,000 slaves during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, which ended with the Ottomans' cession of territory in what is now southern Ukraine, followed by the Crimean Khanate's annexation by the Russian Empire in 1783. That same year, Russia suppressed the Kuban Nogai uprising, bringing an end to the slave raids and commencing the colonization of Crimean and Nogai lands.