The Black Sea

by Charles King

  The Marseilles system rested on five basic principles: isolation of all inbound ships for preliminary examination at a distance from the port; a determination of the health conditions in the port of embarkation; an assessment of the susceptibility of infection in the original port or en route; the strict segregation of newly arrived goods and passengers from the general population; and the further segregation of passengers already infected from those deemed to be in good health.63 All ships coming from the Levant or other suspect ports were required to anchor in the gulf of Marseilles well outside the harbor. Through a speaking trumpet, a local official would solicit information on the port of departure, the name of the ship and its captain, the cargo, and the ship’s health certificate. The certificate was a document issued by the French consul in the port of embarkation, attesting on pain of death to the condition of the ship upon departure: both ship and port free of plague (patente nette); ship appeared free but the port suspect (patente touchee); plague raging in the port and the ship suspect (patente soupconee); or both port and ship known to be infected (patente brute). Ships with the first two types of certificate were directed to the outer harbor, where a further conversation at a distance would be conducted with the captain and a determination made about whether any period of quarantine should be imposed. Ships with certificates soupconee and brute were directed immediately to the quarantine house, or lazaretto (a term derived from the biblical Lazarus).

  The length of time in quarantine depended on several factors beyond the health certificate. Goods deemed particularly susceptible as plague carriers (such as wool, cotton, and other fibers, along with fur and skins) were enough to send a ship to quarantine. The port of embarkation also mattered. Ships coming from Morocco and Egypt were thought to have minimal probability of infection, but those from Istanbul and the Black Sea ports were required to complete forty days’ quarantine plus three weeks of open airing of all cargo, regardless of the type of certificate or the nature of the goods on board.

  Once ordered into quarantine, the ship would be anchored off the lazaretto, located on an island away from the main Marseilles harbor. Two guard boats prevented unauthorized communication with the shore. Food would be supplied to those on board by means of long poles, and the crew were required to report daily on any signs of illness. Passengers could choose to remain on the ship or be removed to the lazaretto, which was surrounded by a high fence and a moat. The passenger, with his luggage, would be fumigated, interrogated, and then directed either to the section for those infected or the one for those deemed healthy. The rooms were comfortable but spare, outfitted with iron bedsteads and fireplaces. Visitors were prohibited inside the buildings, but friends and relatives of those effecting the quarantine were allowed to yell across the moat. A person already infected with the plague was required to stay in confinement for twelve weeks, a period long enough for him to die. Afterwards, the body would be removed from the room with long iron hooks and buried in a lime-laced grave. The room would then be fumigated, whitewashed, and aired out for a month.

  The authorities in Marseilles were well aware of the scope for corruption in this complex system, and they took great pains to guard against it. The superintendent of the lazaretto was usually a wealthy merchant well-versed in trade with the Near East. He was to be unmarried or a widower and was paid a handsome salary, as were his lieutenants and the soldiers on duty—not only because of the personal danger associated with their jobs, but also to make less appealing the petty bribes that might be offered by captains or passengers to avoid the strictures of the system.

  The Marseilles lazaretto was widely considered to be the finest in Europe. As it traveled east, however, the model underwent certain mutations. The British writer Edmund Spencer, traveling in 1836, gave an account of the quarantine at Galaţi, a Moldovan river port on the lower Danube, then under the control of the Russian empire:

  My passport having been demanded—a regulation altogether novel in this government—was produced, and transferred to a pair of tongs several yards in length, the officer entertaining a deep and, it must be confessed, not unfounded horror of everything appertaining to a man who had just arrived from the city of the plague [Istanbul]. That important document being found perfectly correct, we were conducted under the escort of a general to the lazaretto, where any article of my luggage underwent a thorough fumigation; and when the medical officer had examined the state of our health, we were sentenced to fourteen days’ quarantine, which I suppose was mitigated from twenty-one by the application to his conscience of a ducat.64

  As Spencer discovered, the system did not always work as it was intended. Ships would be met in harbor by a sanitary officer, who would communicate with the passengers and crew by means of a long pole or tongs. But since there was no system for determining the situation in the port of embarkation (the Russians and Ottomans had separate quarantine systems and no consuls charged with issuing health certificates, as in the French system), the only document requested was a passport or other identification papers. Sometimes, indifferent officials would require no further evidence than a verbal oath—on a New Testament, an Old Testament or a Koran—that the traveler was free of the plague.65 Ships from Ottoman ports were regularly subject to quarantine, but the period was in practice determined at the whim of the chief medical officer, not according to any preestablished regulations.

  Once in the lazaretto, things were not nearly as Spartan as in Marseilles. Wealthy travelers could pay for suitable accommodation. In Odessa, there were cafes, restaurants, and even a billiard hall to relieve travelers of their boredom (and their cash), all staffed by workers who freely came in and out of the lazaretto each day.66 Important travelers, such as diplomats or friends of local officials, would be taken out for cruises around the harbor.67 For those willing to pay an extra “tax” to the officials, the quarantine could be reduced or effected somewhere besides the lazaretto. Visitors were even permitted inside the quarantine area. All of that, of course, undercut the rationale for the entire system.

  Still, having the institution of a lazaretto was considered an advantage for any port. Without one, a port withered; with one, it could become a major business destination, the first stop for inbound ships required to perform quarantine before unloading or proceeding to lesser ports. In fact, the decline of Nikolaev and Kherson as trading centers in the early nineteenth century was due in part to the Russian government’s decision to place a quarantine facility in Odessa.68

  The presence of a quarantine house also provided substantial opportunities for personal enrichment. For many individuals, the fear of disease, especially one that tended to break out only every fifteen years or so, was far less powerful than the promise of profiting from the state-imposed system of regulation. In some instances, sanitary officers even had an incentive to produce an imaginary plague of their own. For example, one of the medical inspectors in Odessa was also the owner of a prominent theater. When ticket receipts were low, he would announce the discovery of a dire infectious disease among newly arrived passengers and order them quarantined, as usual, at their own cost. The mark-up on the expenses at the lazaretto would then be used to hire a major performer for the theater.69 The severity of the “plague” was usually a good predictor of the quality of the upcoming opera season.

  Despite the obvious occasions for graft, Edmund Spencer wrote, the sanitary officer was one of “the stars which herald in the dawn of European civilization” in the Russian ports.70 The Russian quarantine system, combined with greater attention to the plague in the Ottoman ports, did lead to a decrease in outbreaks. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, it had all but disappeared; the last major occurrences were in Bulgaria in 1840 and in central and eastern Anatolia in 1842, and from then on occasional outbreaks were mainly local and with diminished mortality.71 Other major infectious diseases were still a concern—malarial fever along the swampy northern coast and cholera across the entire region—but, as for the plague, even an imperfect syst
em turned out to be an improvement on no system at all.

  A Consul in Trabzon

  Most visitors to the northern and western coasts were impressed with the mere existence of quarantine facilities, inadequate as they might have been, for they represented at least a version of the European systems with which travelers were most familiar. Western Europeans who expected to find in New Russia “all sorts of Russo-Greco-Scythico-Tartaric churches and buildings,” as a Scottish traveler wrote, instead encountered well-planned streets, stone buildings, and shops that reminded them of home.72 Especially if a visitor arrived by sea rather than overland—where travel along rutted roads in bone-rattling wooden carts could be a trial—the scene that awaited him could be very pleasant: the sleepy Danube river ports, the bustling harbor of Odessa, the shipyards of Nikolaev, the ancient Crimean port towns, all connected by a string of well-maintained lighthouses said to rival those of Britain.73 Even areas along the western coast and cities farther inland such as Bucharest and Iasi, the capitals of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova, were quickly changing. The British traveler James Henry Skene was surprised to find that one of his hosts, Prince Barbu Şirbei of Wallachia, was able to serve up a meal that was surprisingly civilized:

  truffles from Paris, oysters from Constantinople, and a pheasant from Vienna, all brought fresh by special couriers: and wines in perfection; hock of Prince Metternich’s best vintage, claret warmed, and champagne not over iced; in short, everything was quite as it should be.74

  The surroundings of the ports, river towns, and inland cities in the north and west were often so much “as they should be,” in fact, that travelers were thrilled when they were actually able to find something genuinely Oriental. Anatole de Demidoff, a Russian geologist and one of the most famous travelers in south Russia in the early nineteenth century, recorded his impressions on entering the former Crimean khan’s palace at Bakhchisarai:

  We were now not in Vienna, the gay capital, nor Pesth [Budapest], the proud queen of young Hungary; nor on the Danube, with its inundated shores, its foaming eddies bearing down tranquil steam-boats: no, nor Bukharest or Yassy [Iaşi], cities discoloured by the pallid institutions of the east. We were in a perfect eastern Saraï [seraglio], a palace of the Arabian nights; we were on thoroughly Asiatic ground.75

  Bakhchisarai was interesting precisely because it was so unusual, a museum of a way of life that had long since disappeared on the northern shore. Most of the urban centers of the north and west were new creations, cities such as Odessa that sprang up from the steppe, planned by foreign engineers, with streets that intersected at right angles and buildings that incorporated the latest architectural styles from central Europe. Even cities located near ancient sites, such as those in Crimea, had been thoroughly rebuilt, with new, planned suburbs located outside the former citadels. The contrast with the ports in the south and east was palpable. There, cities had grown up organically on top of ancient settlements, a jumble of streets and buildings of stone and wood pouring beyond the Byzantine-era battlements; the most modern buildings were often those that had been erected under the Genoese and Venetians. Communication systems in the northwest and southeast were also strikingly different. By the middle of the century, telegraph lines connected Varna on the Bulgarian coast with Balaklava and Sevastopol in Crimea; another line ran all the way from Simferopol around to Galaţi on the Danube, and spurs from both these lines led off to St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Istanbul. Across the sea, however, not a single telegraph line connected Sinop and Trabzon with each other or with the Ottoman capital.76

  The evident differences between the coasts were, in large part, the result of the contrasting visions and abilities of the Russian and Ottoman governments. The transformation of the northern littoral was the outcome of a strategic dream that had motivated Russian leaders from Peter the Great forward: to remove military threats on Russia’s southern border, to gain access to the sea, perhaps eventually even to unseat the Ottomans and take control of the Straits. With the demand for grains and other products in western Europe, the New Russian lands found a ready market for exports and a business community eager to establish ties with the burgeoning cities. In the southeast, the picture was rather different. At the same time that the Russian state was expanding its imperial boundaries, the ability of the Ottoman central government to control local affairs in Anatolia was diminishing.

  From the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth, much of Anatolia, including many of the major ports along the Black Sea coast, were under the control of hereditary, semi-feudal derebeys who managed their own affairs with little regard for one another or, least of all, for the sultan in Istanbul. Some were benevolent despots who looked after the interests of their own populations, but they had little incentive to improve port facilities or to explore trade relations beyond their restricted domains. Geography was also not in their favor. Like the Crimean ports, the cities in the south and east were naturally linked with the lands across the sea; travel overland into Anatolia was difficult, especially if it necessitated passing through the lands of an unfriendly derebey. With the reorientation of the northern ports after 1774—toward the coasting trade with one another and toward the export market of the Mediterranean and beyond—the Anatolian cities lost the natural cross-sea partnerships that had sustained them. There was also a simpler explanation for the insularity of the Anatolian ports: The Ottomans had agreed to open the sea to Russian ships under the Kiicuk Kaynarca treaty, but they were under no obligation to open their ports to them. It was not until 1829, in fact, that the sultan finally agreed to regular and unimpeded access of foreign ships to the Ottoman Black Sea ports themselves.

  The changes in the northern reaches of the sea were initially greeted in western Europe as the advance of civilization against barbarism, the movement of a rising European empire into lands that had long suffered under the misrule of the Turk and his vassals. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Russian ambitions came to be perceived rather differently, as the rapacity of an overzealous empire, grown confident from conquest and now threatening the interests of other European states.

  Under Catherine, the acquisition of New Russia and Crimea had been cloaked in the language of enlightenment and the civilizing mission of a Christian sovereign; the downtrodden subjects of the sultan were to be freed from the yoke of Muslim despotism and introduced to the rationalizing policies of a European empire. That essential justification remained in place after Catherine, but the civilizing mission now took second place to the strategic aim of controlling the sea itself. Russia took the Christian kingdom of eastern Georgia under its protection in 1801. A little later, the empire assumed a protective right over Romanian-speaking Christians in the Danubian lands and soon began to exert a more powerful influence among Christian populations all over the Balkans and the Near East. The growth in Russian power directly affected the interests of the other major empire with strategic and commercial aims in the region: Britain.

  Britain had long depended on a privileged relationship with the Ottoman sultan to secure trading rights in the Levant. Russian moves into the Black Sea zone were thus of some concern, not least because they coincided with Russian machinations even farther to the east, in central Asia and India, where British interests were manifold. A Russian war with Persia from 1826 to 1828 had ended with the tsar’s gaining the right to exclusive navigation on the Caspian Sea. The fear in London was that a similar claim would be made on the Black Sea if Russia ever soundly defeated the Ottomans.77 That would mean, of course, that the tsar could fully dictate the terms of trade with the ports in the north and west, where Britain enjoyed a volume of commerce second only to that of the Austrians. But it would also mean that Russia could control access to the Ottoman ports as well, such as Odessa’s counterpart almost directly across the sea along the southeast coast, the old port at Trabzon.

  Trabzon had fallen on hard times after the decline of the cross-sea trade connection with Crimea. It
could still be a visually impressive city; travelers commented on the picturesque Byzantine walls and the Greek-speaking communities in the valleys beyond the coast, who seemed a remnant of the lost empire of Trebizond. But apart from alum and copper brought in from mines in the mountainous interior and the agricultural produce of the lush valleys, Trabzon had little to recommend it. Like Odessa a few decades earlier, Trabzon was a point of interest to the Russians, British, and other European powers not because of any natural endowments, but because of where it was situated: at the head of the ancient overland route to Persia.

  The Trabzon—Erzurum—Tabriz route had been active in the Middle Ages, but after the fifteenth century it was largely abandoned. The Ottoman closure of the sea to foreign commerce effectively ended the importance of Trabzon as a transit center; but the opening of the sea in 1774, and of all the Ottoman ports some time later, allowed for the possibility of a revival of the route to Persia, a trading partner eagerly courted by the British, French, and Russians alike. The transit trade with Persia via the Black Sea had been ongoing for some time before the 1820s, but the route was a circuitous one. Ships had to unload at Caucasus ports (either those controlled by Russia or by local notables), then pack the goods overland through Georgia to Tiflis and then on across Armenia to Tabriz.78 The Trabzon route was much preferable. It was some 300 km shorter, which translated into ten days’ difference in travel time.79 Moreover, as political tensions between Britain and Russia began to rise—over economic relations with Persia and, most problematically, over central Asia—Britain had an incentive to find a route to the east that did not involve travel through the Russian-controlled Caucasus.