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.

[2][3][4][5] 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.

Additionally, the decentralized and fractious powers that Russia encountered on its eastern and southern borders were organized for war, leaving East Slavic lands in a constant state of warfare with numerous potential invaders.

Armed mainly with spears, bows, and sabres, raiders could travel for hundreds of miles across an open steppe landscape with no natural impediment like mountain ranges, attack villages with little warning, and then leave with captives.

Even in the mid-18th century, with greater security at the southern frontier, Russian peasants there continued to farm their lands fully armed, often superficially indistinguishable from Cossacks.

[20] At the beginning of this period, almost 700 miles of sparsely populated grassland -- the so-called Wild Fields -- separated the Crimean Khanate from the Duchy of Moscow.

The Oka River, 40 miles south of Moscow, was the city's the principal and northernmost line of defense, guarded by the Beregovaya Sluzhba ("river-bank service").

The slave dealers were Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, and both the Crimean khan and the Turkish pasha taxed them in exchange for that right.

Sigismund von Herberstein, who was a Habsburg diplomat and the Holy Roman Empire's ambassador to Muscovy, wrote that "old and infirmed men, who will not fetch much at a sale, are given up to the Tatar youths, either to be stoned, or to be thrown into the sea, or to be killed by any sort of death they might please.

"[22] A Lithuanian in 1630 wrote:[23] Among these unfortunates [Slavic slaves] there are many strong ones; if they [Tatars] have not castrated them yet, they cut off their ears and nostrils, burned cheeks and foreheads with the burning iron and forced them to work with their chains and shackles during the daylight, and sit in the prisons during the night; they are sustained by the meager food consisting of the dead animals’ meat, rotten, full of worms, which even a dog would not eat.

Since on many occasions the Tatar raiding party feared reprisals or, in the seventeenth century, attempts by Cossack bands to free the captives, the marches were hurried.

An Ottoman traveler in the mid-sixteenth century who witnessed one such march of captives from Galicia marveled that any would reach their destination—the slave markets of Kefe.

A Polish proverb stated: “Oh how much better to lie on one's bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tartary.”According to Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, "from 1450 to 1586, eighty-six raids were recorded, and from 1600 to 1647, seventy.

Although estimates of the number of captives taken in a single raid reached as high as 30,000, the average figure was closer to 3000...In Podilia alone, about one-third of all the villages were devastated or abandoned between 1578 and 1583.

[27][page needed] During the second half of the 17th century, these regions saw numerous wars with Tatar participation, suggesting an extremely high number of captured yasyr during this period.