The notion of sovereignty, especially in Europe after the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), seems to be somewhat fetishized in historiography today, and especially in political science, even though there are few truly "sovereign" countries in the contemporary world.
In the 19th century, the reproach that the Crimean Tatar Khanate was not a sovereign state was used by many Russian and even Western historians and orientalists to justify the annexation of the Khanate by the Russian Empire. Viewing the Tatars as Turkish puppets, and their state as a parasite, unable to survive and function without foreign protection, Russian imperial historiography presented the Tsars' conquest of Crimea as a beneficial act for its inhabitants and for the whole of human civilization. This conception was inherited by Soviet historiography, except during the brief period of "national revivals" in the 1920s.
In a natural reaction, Tatar historians emphasized the Khanate's sovereignty and tended to minimize Ottoman influence on its institutions and functioning.
A reading of correspondence between Ottoman sultans, Polish kings and Crimean khans from the 16th and 17th centuries shows that the question of Khanate sovereignty was hotly contested by contemporaries and modern historians alike.
