by Charles King
The appearance of an informal Cossack navy marked a major change in the relationship between the Ottomans and the Black Sea. Until the mid-sixteenth century, their strategic control of the sea and its littoral could be taken for granted. Client states were sometimes restive, and along the Caucasus in particular, command of the coastline, much less the uplands, was sometimes no more than notional; but the Ottomans could for a time describe the sea as theirs. They held the only major approaches, via the Danube and the Straits. The entire southern and western coasts were provinces of the empire. The north was protected by an allied Muslim state and the barrier of the unfriendly steppe. The Ottoman strategic view of the sea was thus primarily defensive.36 Imperial policy centered around keeping the approaches closed, the coastal fortresses strong, and the flat expanses of the Dasht, as far as possible, wild. Despite the Ottoman commitment to extending the boundaries of the sultan’s domain and the abode of Islam—the way the Ottomans came to explain to themselves in retrospect their remarkable successes of the 1300s and 1400s—the ideology of expansion was notably absent in the north. The reason was simple: In the Black Sea, the Ottomans had a very good deal.
With the coming of the Cossacks, however, all that began to change. The sea and the northern steppe now became sources of insecurity, a vast expanse of land and water that the Ottomans found demanded more energy than ever before to pacify. The Black Sea was no longer an inland sea, a waterway bounded on all sides by lands that could be counted as part of the empire. It had now become a frontier. By the late 1600s, the growing power to the north, Russia, had begun to discover that this changed situation could be to its own advantage.
NOTES
1. “Kara Deniz,” Encyclopedia of Islam, Vol. 4, pp. 575–7.
2. Halil İnalcık, “The Question of the Closing of the Black Sea Under the Ottomans,” Archeion Pontou, Vol. 35 (1979):108.
3. Quoted in Elizabeth Zachariadou, “The Ottoman World,” in Chistopher Allmand (ed.) The New Cambridge Medieval History of Europe, Vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 829.
4. “Istanbul,” Encyclopedia of Islam, Vol. 4, p. 244.
5. “Kipchak” refers to the nomadic inhabitants of the steppe, whose languages were part of a distinct Kipchak branch of Turkic languages. Turkish is a member of the Oghuz branch.
6. Victor Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape of the Ottoman Black Sea in the Face of the Cossack Naval Raids,” Oriente Moderno, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2001):28–9.
7. Quoted in Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” p. 33.
8. Halil İnalcık, with Donald Quataert (eds.) An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 271. See also Gilles Veinstein, “From the Italians to the Ottomans: The Case of the Northern Black Sea Coast in the Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 1986):221–37.
9. Orthodox Christians remained the majority in most other small cities on the northern coast. Veinstein, “From the Italians to the Ottomans,” p. 224.
10. Halil İnalcık, Sources and Studies on the Ottoman Black Sea. Vol. 1: The Customs Register of Caffa, 1487–1490 (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press, 1996).
11. Veinstein, “From the Italians to the Ottomans,” p. 223.
12. I am grateful to Felicia Roşu for her assistance in the research and writing of this section. In antiquity, the volume of slaves from the Black Sea was probably less than that coming from other centers in the Mediterranean. See David C. Braund and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, “The Export of Slaves from Colchis,” Classical Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1989):114–25. The classic article on the Black Sea slave trade under the Ottomans is Alan Fisher, “Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade,” Canadian–American Slavic Studies, Vol. 6 (1972):575–94.
13. M. I. Finley, “The Black Sea and Danubian Regions and the Slave Trade in Antiquity,” Klio, No. 40 (1972):53.
14. Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435–1439, trans. Malcolm Letts (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926), p. 133.
15. İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History, Vol. 1, p. 283.
16. İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History, Vol. 1, p. 285. Khodarkovsky estimates that 150,000–200,000 people were captured in Tatar raids on Muscovite lands in the first half of the seventeenth century alone. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 22.
17. Halil İnalcık, “Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire,” in Abraham Ascher, Tibor Halasi-Kun, and Béla K. Király (eds.) The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European Pattern (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1979), p. 34.
18. Nicolae Iorga, Studii istorice asupra Chiliei şi Cetăţii Albe (Bucharest: Institutul de Arte Grafice Carol Göbl, 1899), p. 161.
19. A supplementary source of state-held slaves was the devşirme, or child tax, system, under which children were taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam, and employed in the Ottoman state apparatus and military. Devşirme was practiced from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries and applied mainly to Slavic Orthodox populations in the south Balkans.
20. Evliya Çelebi, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Joseph von Hammer, Vol. 2 (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1834), p. 58.
21. Marie Guthrie, A Tour, Performed in the Years 1795–6, Through the Taurida, or Crimea, the Antient Kingdom of Bosphorus, the Once-Powerful Republic of Tauric Cherson, and All the Other Countries on the North Shore of the Euxine, Ceded to Russia by the Peace of Kainardgi and Jassy (London: T. Cadell, Jr., and W. Davies, 1802), p. 154.
22. August von Haxthausen, Transcaucasia: Sketches of the Nations and Races Between the Black Sea and the Caspian (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854), p. 8.
23. İnalcık and Quataert, An Economic and Social History, Vol. 1, p. 284.
24. See şerban Papacostea, “La pénétration du commerce génois en Europe Centrale: Maurocastrum (Moncastro) et la route moldave,” Il Mar Nero, Vol. 3 (1997–8): 149–58.
25. Quoted in Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” p. 28.
26. Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Sea Power and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 95–8.
27. Nikolai Ovcharov, Ships and Shipping in the Black Sea: XIV–XIX Centuries, trans. Elena Vatashka (Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 1993), pp. 19–23.
28. The major study of these drawings is Ovcharov, Ships and Shipping in the Black Sea, on which my discussion is based.
29. Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” p. 39.
30. Ahmed Hasanbegzade, Tarih-i al-i ‘Osman, quoted in Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” p. 46.
31. Evliya Çelebi, Narrative of Travels, Vol. 2, p. 39.
32. Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” pp. 41–3.
33. Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, A Description of Ukraine, trans. Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1993), pp. 67–8.
34. Evliya Çelebi, Narrative of Travels, Vol. 2, pp. 59–64.
35. Beauplan, Description of Ukraine, p. 69.
36. Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape,” p. 35.
The prince desired a little kingdom, in which he might administer justice in his own person, and see all the parts of government with his own eyes; but he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to the number of his subjects.
Samuel Johnson, 1759
She wishes, at one and the same time, to form a middle class, to admit foreign commerce, to introduce manufactures, to establish credit, to increase paper-money, to raise the exchanges, to lower the interest of money, to build cities, to create academies, to people deserts, to cover the Black Sea with numerous squadrons, to annihilate the Tartars, to invade Persia, to continue aggressive
ly her conquests from the Turks, to fetter Poland and to extend her influence over the whole of Europe.
Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, French ambassador to Russia, about Catherine the Great, 1787
Ships anchor at the foot of ravines, deep among green basins,… A gallery of ports & harbors, formed by the interchange of promontory & bay. Many parts like the Highlands of the Hudson, magnified. Porpoises sport in the blue; & large flights of pigeons overhead go through evolutions like those of armies… No wonder the Czars have always coveted the capital of the Sultans. No wonder the Russian among his firs sighs for these myrtles.
Herman Melville, on a steamer traveling up the Bosphorus, 1856
5
Chernoe More, 1700–1860
Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment’s great compendium of human knowledge, contains a brief entry on the Black Sea. The “Pont-Euxin” is described as lying “between Little Tartary and Circassia to the north, Georgia to the east, Anatolia to the south, and European Turkey to the west.” The author of the entry adds helpfully that it is not a pont in the sense that an empty-headed French courtier might understand it—that is, not a “bridge”—but rather “an Asian sea.”1
That was in the 1750s. Over the next hundred years, Diderot’s geography became obsolete. From the second half of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire extended its reach to the warm ports of Crimea, pushing back the Ottomans and unseating their client, the Tatar khan. In the west and east, the empire also began to influence the kings and princes of the Balkans and the Caucasus, casting Russia first as the protector of eastern Christendom and later as the liberator of oppressed nations from the Turkish yoke. By the midnineteenth century, the Black Sea could no longer be described as “Asian” at all. It was now divided between the waxing and waning powers of eastern Europe, the Russians and the Ottomans, a waterway on which two sets of imperial ambitions came into intimate contact—something closer, in fact, to the pont in the courtier’s sense, not Diderot’s.
The sea’s sideways slide into Europe began with the changing strategic relationship between the sea and the steppe. For the Ottomans, keeping the sea peaceful and the northern steppe wild had been the twin imperatives of security since the fall of Constantinople. So long as most foreign vessels were barred from entering the Black Sea and a stable relationship could be maintained with client states along the littoral, the Ottomans held a virtual monopoly on the sea’s wealth; and the Eurasian steppe, traversed by nomads and Tatar raiding parties, represented a natural check on the ambitions of northern powers. For the Russians, the imperatives were exactly the reverse. As the Cossack sea raids had shown, the Ottomans were vulnerable to concerted attacks from the northern shore, but to reach the sea, Russia first had to move across the inhospitable grasslands on its own southern frontier. Inhabited by a shifting array of Cossacks, peasants, and Nogay nomads—and much of it inhabited by no one at all—the steppe had long been a source of irritation. It was from this “wild field,” as both Russian and Polish writers called it, that Tatar bands descended on Christian villages and made off with plunder and people, a land of brigands and outlaws, a refuge to which dissatisfied peasants could repair when they tired of working for one or another landlord farther north.
A central feature of Russian state policy from the reigns of Ivan the Terrible (1533—84) to Peter the Great (1689—1725) was the effort to make the steppe into something definite and controllable, to make the frontier, in other words, into a boundary. That plan, however, placed the Russians in direct competition with the Tatar khans and, by extension, with the Ottoman empire. What began as a more or less defensive policy of state security developed, over the course of the eighteenth century, into an ideology of expansion. First under Peter and then under Catherine the Great (1762—96), Russia embraced the imperial idea, wrapped up in the civilizing rationalism of the Enlightenment and the desire for conquest that had long preoccupied older imperial powers in western Europe. The drive to control the steppe became a push to conquer the sea and then, in the culmination of Russian visions of itself as the successor to Rome, as a project to take the Straits and place a Russian prince on the throne of a revived Byzantium. The new empire was to be the bearer of civilization to the benighted south, reaching out across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and laying hold of the legacy of Constantine. In various permutations, that strategic aim would set the course of Russian foreign policy until the very end of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires in the tumult of the First World War.
The clash of imperial aims provided the context for developments around the sea in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nodal points in the sea’s development are the treaties that ended each in a long progression of wars, first between the Ottomans and central European powers and later between the Ottomans and Russia. In 1699 and 1700, the treaties of Karlowitz and Istanbul represented the beginning of Ottoman imperial retreat, with the loss of territories in central Europe to Austria, areas northwest of the Black Sea to Poland, and parts of the north—central and northeast littoral to Russia. The treaty of Belgrade in 1739 granted Russia control of the important fortress at Azov and allowed limited Russian trading rights on the sea. In 1774, under the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, the Ottomans at last agreed to allow Russian merchant vessels to sail the sea unimpeded, a concession that would be extended over the next several decades to include other foreign merchantmen as well. Russia’s expanding influence was codified in 1829 and 1839. In the treaties of Adrianople and Hünkâr Iskelesi, the Ottomans recognized full Russian naval rights on the sea and guaranteed free passage through the Straits; the sultan also ceded further territories along the northern coast, made effective Russian protectorates out of Wallachia and Moldova, and established a clear border in the south Caucasus.
Under Hünkâr Iskelesi, the sultan agreed to close the Dardanelles to foreign vessels at Russia’s request, a worrying sign to western powers of the tsar’s designs in the Near East. Russian aspirations, however, were curbed during the Crimean war, when Britain and France came to the aid of the embattled sultan and forced Russia to agree to a treaty that made the sea a neutral international space, barred to all warships. Russia would eventually repudiate the terms of the peace treaty and in the last major Russo-Turkish conflict, in 1877—8, rush through the Balkans, and threaten to march on Constantinople itself, an outcome averted only because of the muscular diplomacy of Britain and France. The Ottoman empire, a regional power that had once been a threat because of its strength, had now become a problem because of its relative weakness in the face of Russian encroachments. How to manage that strategic shift would form the basic conundrum of European diplomats and strategists in the Near East for the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sea and Steppe
It is difficult to overestimate the place of the insecure steppe in Russian state policy in the two centuries bracketed by the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Dealing with it was a central component of the transition from principality to empire, from Muscovy to modern Russia. The steppe was a region where two different visions of power and society came into contact: in the north, the urban, military—bureaucratic Muscovite state, built on the legacy of the tax-farming role it had been accorded by the Tatar—Mongol khans, and with a developing sense of itself as a Christian state with a claim to the legacy of Byzantium; and in the south, a fluid array of hordes and khanates, with a social system based on the kinship relations of traditional societies, mainly nomadic, notionally Islamic.2
The real source of conflict between these two systems lay not in any of these traits, however, but in the complex relationship between violence and property. For the Muscovites, organized violence was the preserve of the state, and the use of the army, assembled by the nobility for campaigns against rival powers such as Poland and Lithuania, was to protect the domains of the grand prince and the property of his subjects. By contrast, the nomads of the steppe, as well as their patrons, the Crimean
khans, gained considerable wealth from armed entrepreneurship: pillaging cities and villages to the north, enforcing tributary relations, even persuading a potential trading partner to offer privileged terms. In the seventeenth century, the Crimean khan could field an army of up to 80,000 horsemen, and even small-scale raids by nomads could include as many as 3,000 cavalrymen armed with sabers and bows.3 However, the job of the army was not to secure a state—there was, after all, nothing like a modern state to speak of but to provide the means of enrichment for individual soldiers and their leaders and, in the case of slave raiding, to secure a fungible commodity that could be traded with the preeminent power across the sea, the Ottomans.
The economic and social effects of Muscovy’s security problem were farreaching. Trade was interrupted. Tribute paid to the khans sapped the state treasury. The loss of labor was also substantial. Perhaps as many as 200,000 Slavic Christians were captured in the first half of the seventeenth century alone, and even when the captors allowed the slaves to be redeemed—which Muscovy financed by special public levies—the ransom represented a further drain on state coffers.4 The historian Michael Khodarkovsky has calculated that the amount the tsar paid to the Crimean khan in the first half of the seventeenth century in tribute, ransom, and taxes on trade was as much as six million rubles, the equivalent of the funds necessary to build some 1,200 small towns.5 If Muscovy’s rise to dominance had been built on its privileged relations with the khans of the Golden Horde, Russia’s retarded urbanization and economic backwardness in the early modern period was in no small measure a result of the depredations of the Horde’s successors in Crimea and on the steppe (even if many individual captives no doubt learned to accommodate themselves to life in Tatar or Ottoman hands).
