The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  8

  The View through the Russian Prism,

  1760–1805

  I

  The increasing debility of the Ottoman Empire brought the Mediterranean to the attention of the Russian tsars. From the end of the seventeenth century Russian power spread southwards towards the Sea of Azov and the Caucasus. Peter the Great sliced away at the Persian empire, and the Ottomans, who ruled the Crimea, felt threatened.1 For the moment, the Russians were distracted by conflict with the Swedes for dominion over the Baltic, but Peter sought free access to the Black Sea as well. These schemes had the flavour of the old Russia Peter had sought to reform, just as much as they had the flavour of the new technocratic Russia he had sought to create. The idea that the tsar was the religious and even political heir to the Byzantine emperor – that Muscovy was the ‘Third Rome’ – had not been swept aside when Peter established his new capital on the Baltic, at St Petersburg. Equally, the Russians could now boast hundreds of vessels capable of challenging Turkish pretensions in the Black Sea, even if they were far from capable of mounting a full naval war, and the ships themselves were badly constructed, notwithstanding Peter the Great’s famous journey to inspect the shipyards of western Europe, under the alias Pyotr Mikhailovich. In sum, this was a fleet that was ‘poor in discipline, training, and morale, unskilful in manoeuvre, and badly administered and equipped’; a contemporary remarked that ‘nothing has been under worse management than the Russian navy’, for the imperial naval stores had run out of hemp, tar and nails. The Russians began to hire Scottish admirals in an attempt to create a modern command structure, and they turned to Britain for naval stores; this relationship was further bolstered by the intense trading relationship between Britain and Russia, which had continued to flourish throughout the eighteenth century while England’s Levant trade withered: in the last third of the eighteenth century a maximum of twenty-seven British ships sailed to the Levant in any one year, while as many as 700 headed for Russia.2 For the economy of the North Sea, Baltic and Atlantic had continued to grow, while the Mediterranean was becoming, relatively speaking, a backwater.

  It is therefore no surprise that it was not events in the Mediterranean, nor even in the Black Sea, that brought Russian navies into Mediterranean waters. Far away in north-eastern Europe, the Russian empress Catherine the Great intruded her own candidate on to the contested throne of Poland; raids on the opponents of the new king spilled over into Ottoman territory, and in 1768 they set off a Turkish-Russian war.3 The British had entered into a commercial treaty with Catherine in 1766, and were convinced that, handled with care, Empress Catherine could bring them many a bonus. The British government assumed that Russian maritime expansion would actually increase dependence on Britain, because expansion could be achieved only with British aid. The government also believed that French merchants would eventually break into the Black Sea if they were not checked by a successful Russian campaign against the Turks. The idea of a proxy war began to develop in the British political imagination, in which Russian fleets would clear the Mediterranean of threats to British interests. Louis XV’s minister de Broglie viewed the problem in much the same way: he argued that a Russian naval victory over the Turks would endanger French trade in the Levant.4

  Still, the chances of the Russians achieving anything in the Mediterranean appeared slim. The Black Sea fleet would not be able to brave the passage of the Bosphorus past the Ottoman capital, so the Russians decided to send five squadrons from the Baltic into the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar. It was thus imperative, both within the North Sea and the Mediterranean, that the Russians could make use of the naval facilities of a friendly power – some of their ships were, frankly, not in a fit state to spend many months at sea (as soon as they arrived at the English port of Hull, two large vessels had to undergo major repairs, and one of them then ran aground off the southern English coast). The British were anxious to protect their supposed neutrality, but the Admiralty issued orders that Russian ships could buy what they needed in Gibraltar and Minorca. In January 1770 four Russian battleships were being made ready at Mahón, and the Russians appointed a Greek businessman as their consul there.5

  While the Turks grumbled at British aid to the Russian fleet, the Russians advanced eastwards, engaging the Turkish navy on 6 July 1770 off Çesme, tucked behind Chios. At the start of the battle the Russians found themselves in difficulty: one of their ships exploded when the blazing mast of a Turkish vessel fell on to its deck. In the end, the Russians were simply lucky: a strong west wind favoured their use of fireships within the straits between Chios and the Turkish mainland, and many Turkish ships were burned in the water. The Austrian emperor was impressed and worried: ‘all Europe will be needed to contain those people, the Turks are nothing compared to them’.6 Although they had scored a victory, and in a sense had won command of the sea, the Russians had no idea what to do next; however, they established some supply-stations, and for several years skirmishes and raids took place within the Aegean and as far south as Damietta, where they captured the governor of Damascus. But, as the British had discovered with Minorca, what was really valuable was the possession of a substantial, strategically placed, harbour, and this the Russians lacked.

  Even so, there was a sense that the balance of power in the Mediterranean had shifted in unpredictable ways. The decline of Ottoman power, along with the increasing debility of Venice, had left a vacuum, and, as will be seen, not just the Russians but the Danes, the Swedes and eventually the Americans intruded themselves into the Mediterranean, even if their primary interests lay elsewhere. That, indeed, was part of the problem: everyone, except the Venetians and the Ragusans, who were old-timers, saw the Mediterranean as one among many political and commercial spheres in which they had to operate – even the Barbary pirates raided Atlantic waters with impunity. French inactivity in the face of British counter-threats gave the Russians a free hand in the eastern Mediterranean.7 Indeed, by 1774 there was little fighting, because the Russians had, against the odds, gained effective control of Levantine waters. They had, though, failed to capture the major islands of the Aegean, such as Lemnos and Imbros, which controlled access to the Dardanelles, and it was hard to see how they could maintain a permanent presence in the Mediterranean if they could enter only by way of Gibraltar.8 The Russians still had to work out what advantages they could draw from their presence in the Mediterranean: control of the eastern Mediterranean was not an end in itself, as was shown when the Russians made peace with the Turks in 1774. Under the terms of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca the Turks recognized for the first time Russian control of part of the Black Sea coast; Russia also secured the right to send merchant ships through the Bosphorus into the Mediterranean, and this raised the prospect of a revival of the ancient trade routes linking the northern shores of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Catherine II now began to consider the duty of Orthodox Russia to the Christian peoples of eastern Europe, especially the Greeks. The Russians fomented a serious but futile Greek rebellion in the Morea during 1770. The ideal of helping the oppressed Orthodox of Ottoman-ruled Greece formed part of a grander ideal: the recovery of Constantinople for Orthodox Christendom, the ‘Great Idea’ which the Russian tsars would ponder for a long while.9

  II

  A few years of success in the Aegean whetted the appetite of the Russian court for further Mediterranean adventures. A consistent feature of these projects was the way they originated beyond the Mediterranean. In 1780 the British government was embroiled in its war with the rebellious American colonies, rendered more dangerous by the support the French and Spanish gave the United States. From 1779 to 1783, Gibraltar once again faced Spanish blockades, and, finally, relentless bombardment, through all of which it was stoutly defended by Governor Eliott.10 With Britain under such pressure, it was important to find allies, preferably allies with ships, and Russia emerged as the obvious friend. Still, friendship would have to be bought. The British minister Stormont tried to l
ure Catherine into a joint attack on Majorca, arguing that ‘the advantage to Russia of such a port so situated is too obvious to be dwelt upon’. He insisted that ‘Peter the Great would at once have caught at the idea’ and that the British government would feel nothing but joy at the Russian acquisition of Majorca. Stormont was worried by rumours that Britain’s enemies had been trying to tempt Russia into their camp with offers of Puerto Rico or Trinidad. The British understood that the Mediterranean was the sea that mysteriously attracted Russia. The Russians were scathing about offers of islands in the Caribbean, whether they were made by Spain or Britain. Catherine II’s minister Potyomkin looked down from his great height and told Sir James Harris, the British envoy to St Petersburg: ‘You would ruin us if you give us distant colonies. You see our ships can scarce get out of the Baltick, how would you then have them cross the Atlantick?’ Sir James was left with the clear impression ‘that the only cession which would induce the Empress to become our ally, was that of Minorca’; it would become ‘a column of the empress’s glory’. Potyomkin’s vision was not calculated to win the support of the Minorcans: they were all to be expelled, and the island was to be settled with Greeks. Minorca would become a bastion of Orthodoxy in the western Mediterranean, an advance post in the Russian struggle against the Ottomans.

  Harris’s problem was that this was simply a proposal in which Potyomkin and his own government had expressed interest; the British government had not actually authorized an explicit offer, and the Russians were greatly enjoying the opportunity to act as power brokers in a divided Europe. On the one hand Catherine genuinely coveted Minorca, but on the other she realized that Britain expected something very substantial in return, Russian naval support. She knew, too, that Minorca would be hard to defend from Spanish and French incursions. For once she commented, ‘I will not be led into temptation.’ She decided that her mission was to make peace between the warring parties, rather than to exacerbate the conflict in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Her practical common sense had triumphed, and her judgement was vindicated within a year, since the Spaniards were now turning their attention to Minorca, and wrenched the island from British control in February 1782.11 A terse commentary on these approaches to the tsarina was provided by an anonymous writer, possibly Edmund Burke:

  England had had full leisure to ruminate upon, and sufficient cause to reprobate, that absurd and blind policy, under the influence of which she had drawn an uncertain ally, and an ever-to-be-suspected friend, from the bottom of the Bothnic Gulf to establish a new naval empire in the Mediterranean and the Archipelago.12

  This was written a few years later, when the British government was beginning to rue its past support for Russia. Now, in 1788, the British government was wondering whether Louis XVI would be interested in a joint blockade of the English Channel, to prevent the Russians from reaching the Mediterranean.13

  Despite Catherine’s rejection of the offer of Minorca, these negotiations, and the eventual cooling of British affection for the Russians, demonstrate that Russia had won for itself a significant role in Mediterranean war and diplomacy, which it would try to retain ever after. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 and the further extension of Russian authority along the Black Sea coast (leading to the foundation of Odessa) furthered Russian ambitions in the Mediterranean, since the tsarina now possessed a base for commercial and naval ventures towards the Dardanelles. Much would depend on relations with the Turks; in 1789, while Catherine was at war with the Sublime Porte, Greek corsairs licensed by the Russians harried Turkish shipping in the Adriatic and Aegean. They had the willing support of Venice, engaged in its final acts of defiance as an independent republic: a Greek captain, Katzones, was permitted to use Venetian Corfu as his base, prompting the Russians to think of the island as a possible vantage point in the Mediterranean. Katzones made life difficult for the Turks: he captured the castle at Herceg Novi in the Bay of Kotor and raided as far away as Cyprus. By 1789 three ‘undisciplined, largely unorganised, and semi-piratical squadrons’ under the Russian flag were proving a real irritant to the Ottomans.14 Their predations made plain the instability of the Mediterranean.

  The way to bring stability was obvious: at least in the short term, peace treaties resolved grievances over territories and gave merchant shipping safe passage. So, once peace was signed with the Turks in 1792, Russian trade in the Mediterranean began to expand, partly because Odessa was so well situated – it was largely free from ice and had good access to the open spaces of the Ukraine and southern Poland. In the year of its official foundation, 1796, Odessa already acted as host to forty-nine Turkish ships, thirty-four Russian ships and three Austrian ones, and it attracted settlers from Greece, Albania and the southern Slav lands. Merchants arrived from Corfu, Naples, Genoa and Tripoli. Looking to the future, by 1802–3 Odessa was importing massive amounts of olive oil, wine, dried fruit and wool from Greece, Italy and Spain, mainly on Greek and Italian vessels flying Turkish, Russian and Austrian flags of convenience; meanwhile, the Russian Black Sea ports exported grain worth nearly twice as much as the imports (indeed, in 1805 grain exports were worth a staggering 5,700,000 roubles).15 All this commercial success was impossible without free passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, which could be guaranteed only by a Turkish treaty with Russia, or, more ominously, by a Russian victory over the Ottomans that would wrest Constantinople from the Turks and return it to Orthodox masters.

  In the year of the foundation of Odessa, Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, whose ambitions easily outstripped those of his mother, for she had been clever enough to know the limits of Russian power. He had already travelled to the Mediterranean in 1782, notionally incognito as ‘the count of the North’, on a grand tour that encompassed Naples, Venice and Genoa, and his experiences aroused his interest in establishing a Russian foothold in the region.16 In his short five-year reign he once more propelled Russia into the heart of the Mediterranean. The Russians still sought an island base in the Mediterranean; but Tsar Paul’s attention wandered eastwards from Minorca, and focused instead on Malta. Yet, as before, it was circumstances far from the Mediterranean that prompted Russian intervention, and Paul’s initial interest lay not in the island but in its Knights. Links between the Knights of Malta and Russia went back many years. Peter the Great had sent his general Boris Cheremetov to the island in 1697, to propose a joint campaign against the Ottomans. Russian ships would engage the Turkish navy in the Black Sea, while the small but potent Maltese fleet would attack the Turks in the Aegean. The Grand Master was not willing to throw in his lot with the still little-known Russian empire, which remained, after all, the bastion of Orthodox Christianity. Still, Cheremetov greatly impressed the Knights by his tearful devotion to the relic of the arm of St John the Baptist, brought into the magnificent Conventual Church in Valletta during the service for Pentecost, which was attended, to the great fascination of the Knights, by this visitor from another Christian world.17

  Under Catherine, too, there were matters arising between the Knights and the Russian court. These turned on a complex legacy by a Polish nobleman which resulted in the establishment of a Hospitaller priory in Russian-controlled areas of Poland.18 Catherine imagined that she could use the Knights against her opponents in Poland, and welcomed an old acquaintance, Michele Sagromoso, an Italian Knight of Malta, to her court in 1769, aware that he brought messages from the Grand Master and from the pope, who, naturally, was keen to set up Catholic institutions in the Russian empire. Religious questions intruded, however, when Catherine sent a dubious Italian protégé, the burlesque marquis of Cavalcabó, to Malta as her agent. Things did not start well: the Knights objected to the presence of a chargé d’affaires appointed by a non-Catholic power, and Cavalcabó was an untrustworthy figure who was suspected of conspiring with the strong pro-French party among the Knights. For many of the Knights were French, and the Order of Malta held vast estates in France.19 Cavalcabó’s aim was to gain access to Malta for the Russian flee
t, which at this stage was still wandering the eastern Mediterranean. By 1775 the frustrated imperial agent was scheming with the ancient Maltese nobility, who had long been pushed to the margins by the Knights, in the vain hope that they would lead an uprising against their tyrannical masters and confer their island on Empress Catherine. The Knights became increasingly irritated at the bizarre behaviour of Catherine’s agent. They raided his house in Floriana, the suburb of Valletta, only to find it full of arms. Cavalcabó was kicked out, and he spent his last days in disgrace, living in France in fear of arrest for fraud.20

  Tsar Paul’s approaches to the Knights of Malta were not, then, a total surprise.21 Paul had studied the history of the Knights as a young man, and he romantically saw the Order as a potential bulwark against revolution: here were noblemen of pure blood, united by common Christian zeal, transcending the petty differences between the European states of his day. He was unworried by its Catholic identity, and never had any doubt that he, as the greatest Orthodox prince, could work closely with the Order.22 He imagined that the Knights of Malta would be able to support him on two fronts: a Polish-Russian priory would contribute money and manpower to the fight against the Turks in mainland eastern Europe, while the Knights based in Malta, working together with Russian squadrons, would squeeze the Turks in the Mediterranean. Before long, Orthodox rule would be restored in the old Byzantine lands. There was one insuperable obstacle to this grand dream. The name of this obstacle was Napoleon Bonaparte.