Restraining

ENThis chapter examines the large-scale non-state violence on the trade routes in the buffer zone between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate. Though the rulers constantly declared their will to maintain the diplomatic contacts and protect the caravan trade between these states, execution of their orders was entrusted to those who actually committed the violent attacks – the Cossacks and the local dignitaries. The violence on the steppe roads was not haphazard but well-coordinated. It was encouraged or, at least, tolerated by the local dignitaries who benefited from it and who provided the brigands with the necessary patronage. To avoid an open war with a powerful neighbouring state, these dignitaries sometimes detained and executed some perpetrators but never tackled the underlying causes of the brigandage (qazaqliq). Even the occasional imprisonment of the dignitaries themselves failed to stop brigandage since its preconditions remained in place: the frontiers were not fixed and guarded, the roads were not patrolled, the officials and servicemen were not paid or underpaid, and the rulers lacked tools to curb raiding and instead continued this hybrid war, simply shifting responsibility onto the so-called ‘nameless’ or ‘master-less men’.