Weight o f Numbers

10 1

Siberia, which was almost empty, but again in the sixteenth century towards the southern rivers, 22 6 Volga, Don and Dniester. This expansion was also marked by widespread peasant colonization. The steppe between the Volga and the Black Sea was not densely settled but was overrun by nomad peoples - the Nogais and Tartars from the Crimea. These formidable horsemen were the vanguard of Islam and of the vast Turkish empire that supported them and occasionally threw them forward. It had even saved them from the Russians by supplying them with firearms, an asset the defenders of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan had lacked.227 They were therefore not adversaries to be scorned. Tartar raids took them to the near-by lands of Transylvania, Hungary, Poland and Muscovy, which they cruelly devastated. In 1572, one of their raids captured Moscow. The Tartars sold innumerable Slav prisoners (Russians and Poles) as slaves on the Istanbul market. It is known that Peter the Greats attempt to open a window on the Black Sea in 1696 failed; the failure was not made good until Catherine i i s reign a hundred years later. Even then the Tartars were not eliminated; they remained in occupation until the Second World War. Colonization by Russian peasants would in any case have been unthinkable without the strongholds and military marches and without the help of those outlaws the Cossacks. As horsemen, they could counter an adversary with extreme mobility; as boatmen, they went up and down the rivers, carrying their boats from one reach to another; some 800 of them came from the Tanais in about 1690 to throw their canoes into the Volga in pursuit of the Kalmyck Tartars; as sailors, they pirated the Black Sea in boats crammed with sail, from the end of the sixteenth century.228 This side of modern Russia was therefore not built on a tabula rasa - any more than the Russian advance into the Caucasus or Turkestan in the nineteenth century (which once again brought it face to face with Islam) took place effortlessly or without surprise. Other examples could support this account: the late and ephemeral coloni zation of Black Africa by the European powers in the nineteenth century or the conquest of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards. These immature civilizations, which were really cultures, collapsed in the face of a small number of men. Today these countries are once more Indian or African. A culture is a civilization that has not yet achieved maturity, its greatest potential, nor consolidated its growth. Meanwhile - and the waiting period can be protracted - adjacent civilizations exploit it in a thousand ways, which is natural if not particularly just. History is full of examples of this type of economic exploitation; the trade along the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, a familiar feature from the sixteenth century, is typical. The Kaffirs of Mozambique on the shores of the Indian Ocean claimed that if the monkeys do not talk it is because they are afraid that they will be made to work.229 But they themselves made the mistake of talking and buying cotton goods and selling gold dust. The strong always adopted the same very simple tactics: the Phoenicians and Greeks in their trading-posts and colonies; the Arab merchants on the Zanzibar coast from the