Of the forty or so Giray dynasty Khans who ruled the Crimea from the 1440s to the 1780s, at least a dozen acquired a reputation as poets, to match their fearsome fame as warriors. The Crimean Khanate was not just a community of slave traders and ‘devils on horseback’ whose deadly arrows led the Ottoman army into battle: it was for long periods a prosperous constitutional monarchy, admired for its courts, its religious tolerance, its literacy and culture.

Much of that culture has been obliterated. The Russian invasions of the 1730s burnt down archives, libraries, medreses. A decree by Tsar Nicolas in 1833 ordered ‘in the interest of the law’ the destruction of any document written in Crimean Tatar language. Very little has survived of nearly 400 years of Crimean written heritage in Chaghatai, Crimean and Karaim Tatar, Ottoman Turkish, Mongolian or Farsi: the printing press came very late to the Ottoman world, and (whatever Bulgakov said) manuscripts do burn. What has survived includes the civil and criminal court registers for a century or two, and poetry that was copied in manuscript anthologies by exiles and by Turks in Anatolia and Thrace.

Khan Ğazı II Giray (1554–1607) was exceptional: his fame as a warrior and musician, as well as poet, meant that his work circulated in Istanbul and has been better preserved than any other Khan’s. He was a son of Devlet I Giray, the Khan who burnt down Moscow in 1571 and humiliated Ivan the Terrible ...