by Charles King
We know rather little about the nature of ships and seafaring communities, both military and commercial, during the early Ottoman centuries. The study of Ottoman seapower in general has long been ignored by scholars, a victim of the persistent prejudice that the history of the Ottomans on the water is mainly one of inferior seamanship buttressed by state-supported brigandage. From the early modern period to the present, the standard European perception of Muslim sailors in the Mediterranean—pirates who appeared from hidden harbors, bore down on Christian seafarers, and then hauled off their innocent captives to the depravities of the seraglio—has reinforced that view. However, it was Black Sea sailors themselves, both Muslim and Christian, who provided some of the most important evidence concerning the variety of ships and the evolution of seafaring under the Ottomans.
Like travelers before and since, visitors to the Ottoman seaports felt an uncontrollable urge to leave some graphic record of their presence, and many did so by drawing graffiti in the easiest places they could find: the soft frescoes and limestone facings of churches, some of which would later become mosques. The Haghia Sophia in Trabzon, the Byzantine-era church which shares the name of its imposing sister in Istanbul, is dotted with such graffiti; but some of the most spectacular examples are located in the city of Nesebur, the ancient Greek port of Mesembria, on the Bulgarian coast. The city’s churches contain a rich collection of drawings, nearly 180 in all, some crude and schematic, others remarkably detailed, of sea vessels from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Together, they form a graphic history of seafaring through the entire Ottoman period, from the perspective of the sailors themselves.28
The evolution of ship design is easily seen in the Nesebur graffiti. The earliest ships are melon-hulled cogs, low amidships and with high platforms in the stern. The cog was introduced to the Black Sea in the 1300s by the mercantile republics of the Mediterranean, which had earlier taken the design from the merchants of the Hanseatic League. The cog was a short-run ship, uniquely suited to trade around the Baltic and the minor seas of the Mediterranean, and it proved equally suited to the Black Sea. Its fat bottom held bulk goods that could also be used for ballast, such as grain, but its single square sail meant that it was not built for speed or maneuverability. Journeys were short, from one port to another, or, at a maximum, from one end of the sea to Istanbul. Once through the Bosphorus, goods could then be loaded onto sturdier vessels for the journey across the Mediterranean. In stormy weather or in winter, cogs were unlikely to be found on the open sea; without a complex rigging system to allow a quick change of tack, an easy, favorable wind was essential.
The mercantile cog remained the dominant ship on the Black Sea in the early Ottoman period; but two other ship types also appear frequently in graffiti at Nesebur and elsewhere. One is the caravel. The caravel was, like the cog, still broad of beam, but its rigging represented a huge improvement over the square sail. The experience of the Crusades had introduced western sailors to the triangular, or “lateen,” sail and rigging of the Arabs. (The felucca boats of the Nile are premier examples of lateen rigging, with the sail hung from a long yard that shoots up at a severe angle to the mast.) In the caravel, merchants found a ship that provided both the cargo capacity of the old cog and the improved maneuverability allowed by the lateen sail; such ships could be turned into the wind rather than being forced to travel in the direction that the wind happened to be blowing.
Another type is the carrack. Carracks were, like the caravel, descendants of cogs, but their more complex rigging, including the addition of three or more masts rigged with both square and lateen sails, allowed them to move over greater distances and, especially in the growing state-controlled navies of west European powers, to carry a small crew of marines that could be disembarked aboard ships that were stopped at sea or boarded in port. They mark the beginning of the development of the idea that large sailing ships could be used both as vehicles for long-distance exploration and as maneuverable instruments of battle. It was carrack-type ships that formed the germ of the expanding navies of sixteenth-century Portugal, Spain, and England.
The cog, caravel, and carrack predominate in Black Sea graffiti, for they were the primary merchant ships that visited ports such as Nesebur. But scattered among them is another ship type—and one that reveals something important about the nature of life on the sea, particularly in the seventeenth century. The ship is the large galley (or, technically, a galeasse), a combination of sailing ship and large oared vessel, usually armed with cannon and outfitted with a company of marines. The odd sailor who happened to draw such a vessel in Nesebur may have been a member of the crew or, more likely, saw the ships from the shore. Similar galleys, with one or more banks of oars and a sail, either square or lateen, which could provide extra power in a favorable wind, would have been familiar to Roman and Byzantine sailors from centuries earlier.
Too much can be made of the supposed backwardness of the Ottomans as seafarers, but it is fair to say that the empire was a late modernizer as far as ship design was concerned. The battle of Lepanto in 1571 was the last great encounter in the Mediterranean between navies composed mainly of oared galleys, the Venetians and their allies on one side, the Ottomans on the other. But the Ottomans were still relying largely on oared ships as their primary naval vessel a century later, at a time when, in western Europe, armed sailing ships with multiple masts had long been in the ascendant. In Atlantic Europe, the coming of the age of sail depended on certain technological innovations—new rigging designs that allowed combinations of different sail types, plus elongated hulls that increased ship speed—but these design changes would never have caught on without the strategic end that they served: the need for more efficient and lowercost navies that could be funded from state budgets. With the consolidation of monarchical states, building navies became the sine qua non of military superiority, even a source of national pride. Especially for states that also had overseas ambitions, large sailing ships were critical to long-range exploration and empire maintenance. Putting ships to sea, however, depended on having men to staff them, and the costs of outfitting a galley, with its large complement of oarsmen, was astronomical compared to the costs of the much smaller crew required on a sailing ship.
The Ottomans certainly had the capacity to innovate technologically. What they lacked were the strategic and economic imperatives that drove the changes in Europe. No outside power could place ships on the Black Sea, and with a ready supply of slave labor from the north, outfitting galleys with crews was not a pressing concern. There was, in fact, very little need even to launch any warships at all on the Black Sea, so long as it remained the peaceful preserve of the Ottomans alone.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, a new naval force irrupted from an unexpected source. It was a force that was able to use light, oared ships to conduct raids on coastal cities and fortresses, to attack merchant ships at sea, and to challenge the galleys of the Ottoman imperial fleet. That group—the Cossacks—proved what an anachronism the large galleys of the Nesebur graffiti had now become, even on the once pacific Black Sea.
A Navy of Seagulls
The popular image of Cossacks is one of knout-wielding horsemen racing across the Eurasian steppe, but in the century from roughly 1550 to 1650, the Cossacks were a significant naval power as well. They were first reported in the 1530s, floating down to the mouth of the Dnepr river and attacking the Ottoman fortress of Özi (Ochakov). In time, they extended their reach to the mouth of the Danube and all along the western coast; in 1614 they launched their first attack on the south coast, at Sinop.29 Similar seaborne assaults continued until the middle of the seventeenth century. Ottoman and European sources mention their frequent raids, and the descriptions of the destruction they wrought are reminiscent of similar stories about the seafaring Goths and their attacks on Byzantium some 1,200 years earlier:
Going over the top of [Sinop’s] ramparts and walls they entered inside and desc
ended upon the center of the city and destroyed its circumference and edifices and shed the blood of several thousand men and women and struck [this] city with the broom of plunder and the fire of devastation and they left neither name nor sign of its buildings, turning it into a wilderness and a desert.30
According to Evliya Çelebi, the villagers around Sinop had given up planting gardens since they were certain their vegetables would be trampled in the frequent Cossack raids.31
Even if one allows for a certain amount of hyperbole in such accounts, it is clear that the Cossack attacks stunned the Ottomans. Before, the Black Sea had been largely free of piracy, and the arrival of Cossack raiders was treated by Ottoman officials and chroniclers as an unexpected outbreak of the same kind of troublesome seaborne banditry with which they were intimately familiar in the Mediterranean. Yet the Cossacks were far more than freebooters. Their appearance marked the growing assertiveness of a distinct society that drew its strength from the multiple cultures of the Black Sea’s northern coast.
The Cossacks were precisely the kind of society that empires most worry about: people who take advantage of living on the uncontrollable frontier—geographical, cultural, and political—at the intersection of different established powers. The word “Cossack” probably derives from qazaq, a Turkic word meaning “free man.” The Cossacks arose from the mix of Slavic peasants, Tatar nomads, former slaves, religious dissenters, mercenaries, and others who filtered into the ungoverned steppe region north of the sea, some coming from the Ottoman domains, others from Poland and Russia. Over time, they coalesced into a number of sub-groups, or hosts, distinguished by region and to a certain extent by language. The Zaporozhian Cossacks emerged along the lower Dnepr river, in the land below the dozen or so major cataracts that marked a natural barrier between the upper river and its lower course nearer the sea (a region literally za porohamy in Ukrainian, that is, beyond the rapids). Similar groups formed on other river courses, such as the Don. Cossack hosts in the east spoke a variety of Russian infused with Turkic words, especially in the military sphere; those in the west were more heavily influenced by what today would be called Polish and Ukrainian. In the sixteenth century, the various hosts crystallized around powerful chieftains and formed something like inchoate states. Their sources of livelihood were connected with life on the steppe and the coastal lowlands: raising (and raiding) cattle, sheep, and horses; serving as intermediaries in trade between the seacoast and the north; fishing; and, along with the Crimean and Nogay Tatars, providing slaves for export to Ottoman markets.
The Cossacks’ venture into raiding on the open sea was a natural extension of their economic activities in the steppe region. As inhabitants of river banks and wetlands, they had developed a water culture that was a complement to their activities on the open plains. Their light, keelless rowing boats, called chaikas (seagulls), were particularly suited to river traffic, especially if a journey necessitated portage over rapids. (That form of travel had also characterized the Rhos of the ninth and tenth centuries; in fact, Cossack vessels bore a striking resemblance to those of the Rhos and their Norse forebears.) Made slightly larger to accommodate up to seventy men and outfitted with small cannon, the boats made formidable sea vessels. They sat low in the water and therefore out of sight from the coast or from a large galley until they were already upon their prey; with buoyant bundles of marsh reeds lashed to the gunwales, they were extremely difficult to sink. In the first part of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks were able to assemble fleets of up to 300 such boats and send them to every corner of the sea.32 And with rudders at both bow and stern, they were far more maneuverable than the Ottoman war galleys that were normally sent after them.
Guillaume de Beauplan, a French military engineer in the employ of the Polish king in the 1630s and 1640s, provided a first-hand account of Cossack craft as they sailed down the Dnepr:
The boats are so close together that their oars are almost touching. The Turks are usually aware of the expedition, and they hold several galleys in readiness at the mouth of the Borysthenes to prevent the Cossacks from coming out to sea. However, the Cossacks, who have greater cunning, sneak out on a dark night close to the new moon, keeping themselves hidden in the reeds that are found for three or four leagues up the Borysthenes, where the galleys dare not venture, having suffered great damage there in the past. The Turks are content to wait at the mouth of the river, where they are always surprised [by the raiders].
However, the Cossacks cannot pass so quickly that they cannot be seen, and the alarm is then sounded throughout the whole country, even as far as Constantinople. The Great Lord [sultan] sends messengers all along the coasts … warning that the Cossacks have put to sea, so that everyone may be on his guard. All is in vain, however, since the Cossacks choose their time and season so advantageously that in 36 or 40 hours they have reached Anatolia. They land, each man carrying his firearm, leaving only two men and two boys on guard in each boat. They surprise the towns, capture them, loot and burn them, venturing sometimes as far as a league inland. Then they return immediately [to their boats] and embark with their booty, to try their luck elsewhere.
Beauplan also remarked on the ingenious military tactics of the Cossacks, who proved to be far stealthier sailors than the Ottomans:
Since Cossack boats rise only about two and one-half feet above the water, the Cossacks can always spot a ship or galley before they [themselves] can be seen [by their opponents]. They then lower the masts of their boats, and taking note of the direction in which their enemy is sailing, they try to get the evening sun behind them. Then, an hour before sunset, they row with [all their] strength toward the ship or galley, until they are about a league distant, fearing lest the prize may be lost to view. They keep this distance, and then, at about midnight (the signal being given), they row hard toward the vessels. Half of the crew is ready for combat, and waits for the moment of contact, in order to leap aboard. Those on the [enemy] vessels are greatly surprised to see themselves attacked by eighty or a hundred boats, their ships being suddenly filled with men and instantly captured. Thereupon, the Cossacks loot the ships of what they can find in the way of money, and goods that are small of bulk, and that water will not damage. As well, they remove the cast iron cannon, and everything else they may judge to be of use, before scuttling the vessel and her crew…. If they had the ingenuity to handle a ship or galley, they would take it with them as well, but they do not possess such skill.33
With expeditions such as these a frequent occurrence after the 1550s, the Black Sea was anything but a “Turkish lake.”
The high point of Cossack attacks came in 1637. In that year, a large party of Don Cossacks laid siege to the fortress of Azov, which housed a garrison of a few thousand Ottoman soldiers and Tatar recruits. There were several Ottoman attempts to retake the fortress, but each illustrated just how powerful the Cossacks had become as an organized military, not just as raiders. Evliya Çelebi was present at a major counterassault on the fortress. He reported that the Cossacks numbered 80,000 men with a flotilla of 150 boats protecting the river side of the walls. The Ottomans assembled an army from across the Black Sea region. Land forces included men supplied by the governor of Rumelia in Thrace, 40,000 Tatars from the Bujak province, 40,000 Christian soldiers from Wallachia and Moldova, and 20,000 Christians from Transylvania. On the sea, the Ottoman imperial fleet consisted of 150 galleys and more frigates and boats, in all 400 vessels with 40,000 men on board. (Evliya’s figures may be exaggerated, but the army and flotilla were clearly impressive.)
Despite this formidable array, the Ottomans had a difficult time. The Cossacks managed to hold out by digging defensive lines and to send in reinforcements by having men swim underwater through the river blockade, breathing through reed tubes and carrying their weapons in leather sacks. After two months, with winter fast approaching, the Ottomans finally gave up, leaving the fortress to the Cossacks but taking their revenge by plundering the countryside. The troops produce
d so much booty, Evliya reported, that prices sank to unbelievably low levels. A horse could be had for a piaster, a girl for five, a boy for six.34
The repeated debacles at Azov notwithstanding, the Ottoman fleet did have some success against the Cossacks. Beefed up patrols at the mouth of the Dnepr kept the largest flotillas from getting to the sea, even though smaller raiding parties, such as those described by Beauplan, were almost impossible to stop. Major Ottoman expeditions, involving hundreds of galleys and smaller craft, were launched up the Don. Over time, the Cossacks also no doubt suffered from a loss of capable men, since encounters with Ottoman galleys, however infrequent, usually ended with only a portion of the Cossack crews making it back home.35 Even Azov eventually reverted to Ottoman control. The Cossacks first offered the fortress as a gift to the Russian tsar, who refused it for fear that it would lead to a full-scale war with the sultan; they then abandoned it in 1642when they realized they had little use for a fortress, especially one that repeated sieges had nearly destroyed.
For the Ottomans, the cost of even partial success was considerable. The need to counter the Cossack threat pulled scarce naval resources away from the Mediterranean. The brisk trading relationship between the northern and southern coasts was also inevitably affected, since ship captains were keenly aware of the new danger presented by Cossack raiders. Over the longer term, the successes of a naval power with swift ships able to out-maneuver the slower galleys showed that the Ottoman military machine that had conquered all of southeastern Europe a few centuries earlier was not invincible. And with the Cossacks learning to take advantage of their position at the meeting place of rival powers—Polish, Russian, and Ottoman—they also demonstrated that the old Ottoman strategies of imperial accommodation were coming to an end.
