Nogais in the context of "Ak Nogai"

Between 1441 and 1774, the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids throughout lands primarily controlled by Russia and Poland–Lithuania. Concentrated in Eastern Europe, but also stretching to the Caucasus and parts of Central Europe, these raids were often supported by the Ottoman Empire and involved the transportation of European men, women, and children to the Muslim world, where they were put on the market and sold as part of the Crimean slave trade and the Ottoman slave trade. The regular abductions of people over the course of numerous incursions by the Crimeans and the Nogais greatly drained Eastern Europe's human and economic resources, consequently playing an important role in the emergence of the semi-militarized Cossacks, who organized retaliatory campaigns against the raiders and their Ottoman backers.

Trading posts in Crimea had previously been established by the Genoese and the Venetians to facilitate earlier Western European slave routes. The Crimean–Nogai raids largely targeted the "Wild Fields" of the Pontic–Caspian steppe, which extends about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of the Black Sea and which now contains the majority of the combined population of southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia.

The Nogai Horde was a confederation founded by the Nogais that occupied the Pontic–Caspian steppe from about 1500 until they were pushed west by the Kalmyks and south by the Russians in the 17th century. The Mongol tribe called the Manghuds constituted a core of the Nogai Horde.

From the 1250s to about 1300, the Golden Horde's kingmaker Nogai Khan (a direct descendant of Genghis Khan through Jochi) formed an army of the Manghits joined by numerous Turkic tribes. Around a century later in the 1390s, the Nogays were led by Edigu, a commander of Manghit paternal origin and Jochid maternal origin, who founded the Nogai dynasty.

The Naiman (/ˈnaɪmən/; Karakalpak: Nayman; Kazakh: Найман, نايمان [nɑjˈmɑn]; Kyrgyz: Найман; Mongolian: ᠨᠠᠶᠢᠮᠠᠨ [ˈnɛːmɴ̩]; Nogai: Найман; Uzbek: Nayman), meaning The Eight, was a medieval tribe originating in the territory of modern Western Mongolia (possibly during the time of the Uyghur Khaganate), and is one of the 92 tribes of Uzbeks, modern Mongols, in the middle juz of the Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Kyrgyzs and Nogais.

Nogai (/noʊˈɡaɪ/ noh-GHY; Ногай тили, Nogay tili, Ногайша, Nogayşa) also known as Noğay, Noghay, Nogay, or Nogai Tatar, is a Turkic language spoken in Southeastern European Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. It is the ancestral language of the Nogais. As a member of the Kipchak branch, it is closely related to Kazakh, Karakalpak and Crimean Tatar. In 2014, the first Nogai novel (Akşa Nenem) was published, written in the Latin alphabet.

The Karagash (or as they call themselves, Qaragashly, and Qaragash-nogailar) are one of the ethnic Nogay groups that live in the vicinity of Astrakhan, Russia. The largest Karagash settlement is the town of Rastopulovka.

The Khanate of Astrakhan was a Tatar rump state of the Golden Horde. The khanate existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in the area adjacent to the mouth of the Volga river, around the modern city of Astrakhan. Its khans claimed patrilineal descent from Toqa Temür, the thirteenth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan.

Mahmud bin Küchük established the Khanate in the 1460s. The capital was the city of Xacitarxan, also known as Astrakhan in Russian chronicles. Its territory included the Lower Volga valley and the Volga Delta, including most of what is now Astrakhan Oblast and the steppeland on the right bank of Volga in present-day Kalmykia. To the south was the Caspian Sea, to the east the Nogai Horde, and to the west Nogais who were theoretically subjects of the Crimean Khanate.