Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe

Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe were the slave raids, for over three centuries, conducted by the military of the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde primarily in lands controlled by Russia and Poland-Lithuania as well as other territories, often under the sponsorship of the Ottoman Empire.

Their main purpose was the capture of humans and consequent enslavement, most of whom were exported to the Ottoman slave markets in Constantinople or elsewhere in the Middle East via the Black Sea slave trade. Genoese and Venetian merchants controlled the slave trade from Crimea to Western Europe. The raids were a drain on the human and economic resources of eastern Europe. They largely targeted the "Wild Fields" – the steppe and forest-steppe land which extends about five hundred or so miles north of the Black Sea and which now contains most of the population of modern-day south-eastern Ukraine and south-western Russia. The campaigns also played an important role in the development of the Cossacks.

Estimates of the number of people affected vary: Polish historian Bohdan Baranowski assumed that the 17th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Belarus) lost an average of 20,000 yearly and as many as one million in total from 1474 to 1694. Mikhail Khodarkhovsky estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 people were abducted from Russia in the first half of the 17th-century.

The first major raid occurred in 1468 and was directed into the south-eastern border of Poland. The last raid into Hungary took place in 1717. In 1769, the last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, saw the capture of 20,000 slaves.